Rachel's Precaution Reporter #20
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
From: Rachel's Precaution Reporter #20 ...................[This story printer-friendly]
January 11, 2006
THE PRECAUTION ACADEMY: PRACTICAL TRAINING FOR PRECAUTIONARY ACTION
First Precaution Academy Mar. 31-Apr. 2 in New Brunswick, New Jersey Practical Training for Precautionary Action
[Rachel's introduction: If a precautionary approach is worth thinking about for your community, why not attend The Precaution Academy in New Brunswick, N.J. Mar. 31-Apr. 2? Three other sessions of the Academy are set for other locations in the U.S. later this year, too.]
The Science and Environmental Health Network (www.sehn.org) and Environmental Research Foundation (www.rachel.org and www.precaution.org) have created The Precaution Academy to offer an intensive weekend of training to prepare participants to apply precautionary thinking to a wide range of issues in their communities and workplaces. The Academy is intended to serve the needs of citizen activists, government officials, public health specialists, small business owners, journalists, educators, and the engaged public.
Presenters and discussion leaders include Carolyn Raffensperger, Nancy Myers, Ted Schettler, Katie Silberman and Peter Montague.*
The cost of the Precaution Academy in New Brunswick, N.J. is $350, which includes hotel for 2 nights, plus six meals, and all instructional materials.
Participation is limited to 15 people. You may want to check with Sherri Seidmon (sherri@sehn.org) to learn whether space is available. Send your check to Science and Environmental Health Network, P.O. Box 50733, Eugene, OR 97405
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Scholarships Available
We have three full scholarships available for the New Jersey session Mar. 31-Apr. 2. To apply for a scholarship, please tell us what organization you are affiliated with, what constituencies you represent, what you hope to get out of the experience, and your organization's total budget. Preference will be given to people who represent groups with financial need. Please also estimate your travel costs if you will be applying for a travel stipend as part of your scholarship. Send your scholarship request to:
Science and Environmental Health Network Sherri Seidmon (sherri@sehn.org) P.O. Box 50733 Eugene, OR 97405
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At least two weeks prior to the date of the Academy, participants will receive a copy of the new book, Precautionary Tools for Reshaping Environmental Policy (MIT Press, 2006; ISBN 0-262-63323-X), supplemented by a short workbook of articles. Academy participants are urged to read selected portions of these materials before the session begins on Friday evening.
All day Saturday and half a day Sunday, presenters will lead discussions of the precautionary approach to problem-solving (and problem prevention), with emphasis on real-world applications of precautionary thinking.
The purpose of the Precaution Academy is
** to prepare participants to apply precautionary thinking and action to problems in their home communities and workplaces;
** to familiarize participants with the history of the regulatory system, quantitative risk assessment, and the development of precautionary thinking. What is different about the world today that makes a precautionary approach necessary and appropriate?
** to clarify the different kinds of uncertainty involved in contemporary problems and the role of precaution in addressing uncertainty;
** to prepare participants to respond to criticisms of the precautionary approach;
** to help participants recast and rethink familiar problems and issues within a precautionary framework, and to explore how a prevention philosophy differs from a problem-management philosophy;
** to familiarize participants with some of the many ways that precaution is being applied in the U.S., Canada and abroad so that you can considering trying these approaches at home.
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Other Precaution Academy Sessions planned for 2006 (Prices for these sessions will vary according to costs.)
May 19-21 in Chicago June 23-25 location to be announced Sept 8-10 location to be announced
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The Mechanics
Participants will arrive at the Academy site on Friday afternoon. New Brunswick, N.J. is readily accessible by train and automobile from the New York and Philadelphia metropolitan areas. A train connects New Brunswick with Newark Airport. After an evening meal, we will meet for two hours to begin discussing the need for precautionary thinking in the contemporary world, and how the precautionary principle developed during the past 30 years.
Saturday
We will meet from 9:00 to noon, take a 90-minute break for lunch, then meet from 1:30 to 5:30. At 7:00 we will have dinner together. After dinner, we will meet informally for a free-ranging discussion.
Goals for Saturday
** to prepare participants to put the precautionary principle to work in their own areas of interest;
** to prepare participants to respond to criticisms of the precautionary approach;
** to clarify the different kinds of uncertainty involved in contemporary problems and the role of precaution in the face of uncertainty;
** to familiarize participants with a variety of ways that precaution is being applied in the U.S. and elsewhere;
During this session we will discuss in detail the five elements of a precautionary approach.
Sunday
Goals for Sunday:
** to give participants experience recasting typical issues into a precautionary framework;
** to make sure participants take home an understanding of the many ways that precaution is being used in communities all across the U.S., Canada, and abroad.
We will meet from 9:00 to noon, gaining experience in reframing issues from a precautionary perspective.
We will have lunch together, then go our separate ways so we can "try this at home."
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* Carolyn Raffensperger is executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN) in Ames, Iowa. Nancy Myers is communications director of SEHN; Ted Schettler is SEHN's science director and Katie Silberman is SEHN's administrative director. Peter Montague is director of Environmental Research Foundation in New Brunswick, N.J., and an editor of Rachel's Precaution Reporter and of Rachel's Democracy & Health News.
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From: ABC and BBC .........................................[This story printer-friendly]
January 8, 2006
A WORLD WITHOUT WASTE -- A RADIO SERIES
[Rachel's introduction: From holes in the ground to smoking mountains, hi-tech incinerators -- and a certain haze in the air. This is a series about trying to make a world without waste. A world that's clean -- truly clean.]
[This is part 1 of 4 parts. You can download all 4 parts here.]
A world without waste
* About this series * USA: From Garbage to Greenbacks * The Philippines: Surviving Smokey Mountain * Japan: Incineration Nation -- Burn or Bust * China: The Race to Renew
USA: From Garbage to Greenbacks
The state of California is leading the way in waste management and recycling in the USA. San Francisco is out in front, with an ambitious target of zero waste by 2020. Already the city diverts more than 65 per cent of all rubbish away from landfill and into recycling and reuse.
The city has strict environmental legislation, which helps both consumers and businesses to recycle and save money. Waste is seen first and foremost as resource, with the city selling on its recycled products to countries all over the world. Even food scraps from over 3000 restaurants are collected each day, composted and then sold to farms and many of the state's 8000 vineyards.
San Francisco has state of the art recycling facilities and has even banned the sale of disposable batteries and leaded paint, to ensure they're not dumped. But trouble is brewing even in this eco-state. Incineration -- banned in California -- might soon be making a comeback under a new guise, which the community is vigorously fighting on all fronts.
Story Transcript
Lynne Malcolm: Hello, I'm Lynne Malcolm and this is the start of a journey exploring the possibility of 'A World without Waste'. Right now governments, scientists and communities are struggling to find solutions for the endless mountains of rubbish created each day from what we consume and what we throw away. Sometimes we burn it, sometimes we recycle it but all too often we dump it in open waste sites like this one here in Manila--where people have to make a living out of scavenging off the rubbish.
Over the next four programs in this Radio National series I'll return to the Philippines and also visit Japan, China and the United States. We'll discover how these countries are managing their waste problem as they strive for a balance between economic prosperity and ecological harmony.
It's a concept with a long tradition in the state of California, where our story begins:
Customer: These are all this year's crop, it probably just came in?
Stall-holder: Yep.
Customer: Okay, I'll go for the green ones.
A typical farmers' market in San Francisco, where choosy customers pick over the best fruits and veggies that local producers have to offer. As we'll hear later on, these markets play an important role in the city's drive towards a concept called Zero Waste. It's about a major commitment to reducing waste and increasing recycling. San Francisco has entrusted this task to a newly created department of the environment. Its director is Jared Blumenfeld:
Jared Blumenfeld: San Francisco has adopted the goal of getting to zero waste by 2020, and to get to 75% by 2010. So at the moment, of all the waste we produce, which is about 1.8 million tons per year, or two Golden Gate Bridges (if you weigh the Golden Gate Bridge) of waste is what we produce. 67% of that waste does not end up in landfill, so it's either recycled or reused. It's a pretty ambitious, controversial goal. We decided we needed to set a goal so we could actually get that. When Kennedy set the goal of getting to the moon, no one believed that it was possible--how could we land a man on the moon?-- but it happened. We think just having the goal stirs a debate about what is zero waste and how we actually can plan to get that. So it's definitely ambitious, some would say audacious, we believe it's necessary and we're really looking at how we can get that.
Lynne Malcolm: The department is looking at a whole range of measures to reach this goal of zero waste, including making recycling a legal requirement, banning the sale of toxic materials that can't be recycled and giving consumers financial incentives to buy environmentally friendly products. It's this all-round approach which captures the essence of what zero waste really means. Anne Leonard is one of the area's leading environmental campaigners and a spokesperson for GAIA, the Global Anti-Incinerator Alliance.
Anne Leonard: We use a term called 'zero waste' which refers to a collection of practices and policies to reduce waste at source and then to safely recycle and compost the waste that is produced. On a practical level, zero waste refers to these policies and practices, but on a deeper level zero waste refers to a real paradigm shift in how we deal with materials. Conventional waste management has just assumed that ever-increasing amounts of waste are inevitable, and have really been stuck in this sort of 'bury or burn' trap. Are you going to burn it or are you going to bury it? It's this 'it's got to go somewhere' mentality, or what are we going to do with it? And zero waste really turns this conventional thinking on its head, it takes a step back and says; are there ways that we can reduce this waste? Can we design waste out of this system? Can we make products longer- lasting? Can we address the root causes of over-consumption in a lot of countries? Can we reduce the use of toxics so that the materials that we are using are safer to keep in circulation in society? It really looks at avoiding as much waste as possible from the start.
Lynne Malcolm: San Francisco is the world leader when it comes to zero waste--two-thirds of the 1.8 million tons the city produces is recycled or reused in some way. To achieve this they've developed a unique relationship with the company that handles most of their waste; Norcal. Garbage is a cut-throat business in the United States with vast profits at stake. But Norcal, unlike many other companies, makes its money not from what it dumps but from what it diverts, recycles and sells for profit. Mike Sangiacomo is Norcal's CEO.
Mike Sangiacomo: If you have companies that control major quantities of landfill capacity and they're publicly held, their goal is to fill those landfills. Well, we're not in that position. We compete with those companies, we have to find ways of doing things that are different so we have a competitive edge. It helps that we have the environmental bent. We are way ahead of other cities in this country in terms of the types of materials we recycle...certainly collecting any paper, bottles, containers, whether they're glass, plastic or metal and finding reuses for them. We take food scraps and we turn those scraps into a pretty high-value compost. We're selling that product to over 50 California vineyards, we're selling it to organic farmers, we're selling it to golf courses and landscapers. We're looking, as well, at other uses for organic materials; things like the production of liquid and solid fertilisers. We're looking at energy production, whether it's taking organics and digesting them, capturing the gases, and we're looking at things like ethanol production. If that can be done in a way where more energy is produced in the ethanol process than is consumed in making ethanol, we think there might be a value in doing that kind of thing. And we take construction waste and, rather than just throwing that in a landfill, find materials there that can be used for other purposes. We're looking at everything in the waste stream and trying to find something to do with it.
Lynne Malcolm: If you live in San Francisco, then outside your house you'll have three dustbins or carts--a green one for food and yard waste, a black bin for general rubbish and a blue one for recyclables like paper, glass and plastic bottles. Norcal has built a state-of- the-art recycling facility to process the contents of the blue cart which has been the key to making recycling popular across the state. Norcal's Robert Reed explains why:
Robert Reed: A growing trend in California is to allow people to put all bottles, cans and paper together in one cart. In San Francisco it's a blue cart, and we've distributed them throughout the city. We then come along and collect the contents of the blue cart and we take it to a recycling plant we built specifically to process bottles, cans and paper. That plant is full of modern conveyer systems and things called 'spinning disc screens' that temporarily suspend gravity so the lighter materials float over the top. The paper goes upstream, the heavier materials--the bottles and cans--they tumble downstream. Some of these things can be separated mechanically. Unfortunately the plastic bottles will not react to a magnet and so they must be hand- sorted, and unfortunately there are too many different kinds of plastic bottles in the waste stream--this is a problem--so we have hand-sorters that separate and put the clear bottles in this location and the coloured bottles in another location and the opaque bottle in a third. But when we distributed the blue carts, recycling immediately increased 25% because it made it very easy and efficient for the customer to put all the bottles, cans and paper in the one container and then go on about their business. It made recycling very fast, and people like that. So this is a trend that is very popular in California.
Lynne Malcolm: It was time to get my hands dirty and find out how all of this waste is dealt with. I followed the trail of the green and black rubbish carts to a vast industrial complex on the edge of San Francisco. It's where hundreds of tons of organic matter and general household rubbish arrive each day. It's also home to the city's construction waste, nearly all of which is sorted and recycled.
Plant manager is Kenny Stewart:
Kenny Stewart: This is our transfer station here. We currently have around 2,000, 2,300 tons of trash that actually comes into this facility on a daily basis. In San Francisco we have a three-cart system; the black can is just household garbage, the green can is food scraps and yard waste, and the blue can is recyclables. All the recyclables will go to our other facility at Pier 96. The black can, that's what you see there represented, that actually can't be recycled and it goes off to a landfill, and the green can (I'll show you when we go in the building) we currently see about 300 tons a day of food waste, yard waste, and that's taken off to our other facility for processing for compost.
Lynne Malcolm: We've just entered another building--what a sight! An industrial nightmare; a riot of dumper trucks, mountains of rubbish, and a complex network of conveyor belts and walkways. And what a smell! Still, the seagulls seem to be enjoying it. Strangely though, the place has a kind of order about it--everything seems to know where it's going. So this is what a city's waste looks like.
Kenny Stewart: This is where all the debris boxes, construction debris, comes from the city and county of San Francisco. From here it goes on this conveyer up onto a shaker screen, and we pull wood, cardboard, metal, plastic...the wood is put off to the other side. We actually grind that up and it's sent off for fuel which is burned for alternative energy. The plastic goes overseas for a plastic market which is a new market that we're just embarking on right now. The metal is also sent overseas. The sheetrock is sent up to our composting facility and actually blended in for compost, and the cardboard is baled and shipped overseas as well.
Lynne Malcolm: Further along is the penultimate resting place for what goes off to the landfill as well as the composting centre. A huge pit filled with two enormous mountains of rubbish.
Kenny Stewart: This is actually the size of a football field. This pit that we're looking at is actually 16 feet deep, I believe it's 100 feet long. I've got ten stalls on each side. Right now, where you see here, you're seeing around somewhere between 1,700 and 2,000 tons currently in this bit, and basically this is where everything comes from San Francisco. This is not recycled, except for the yard waste and the food waste. Now, our next level will be what you see here. Ten years ago you saw wood, you saw metal, you saw plastics in this pit; you don't see that anymore. What you see is a lot of plastic bags, a lot of paper still. Because we're relying on the customer to do that, we're going to have to take it a step further.
Vox pop 1: San Franciscans see recycling as a religion. It's unbelievable. People take this very, very seriously, and so the ethic around the importance of recycling is very high. People feel ashamed if they haven't recycled properly. People will go to the ends of the world to recycle Styrofoam; they'll drive 30, 40 miles. We get hundreds of calls here a week, 'How do we recycle Styrofoam?' There's one place down in San Jose that does it and people drive there.
Vox pop 2: I live on a piece of property with one other cottage and I notice they don't take the labels off their cans or the tops off their bottles, so I end up doing that a lot before...but almost every little piece of paper that ever goes out of my house, unless it's soaked in cat pee or something like that, goes into the recycling.
Vox pop 3: People tend to put something in a recycling bin and feel good about themselves and then forget all about what's happening to that item afterwards, and in the meantime new things are still being produced out of the Earth's natural resources.
Vox pop 4: Yeah, recycling is great. Why not use as much as you can without creating more...you know, try to get as much use out of something that you can; that's a good idea.
Vox pop 5: A lot of my recycling goes to a local person that comes and collects it in the neighbourhood, and they sell it and that's how they support their family.
Lynne Malcolm: San Francisco's combination of legislation and technology has given it a degree of success in the war on waste, but across the bay, in the city of Berkeley, famous for its laid-back approach to life, the recycling revolution is a little more low-tech but it still gets the job done.
Shift workers get to grips with the day's waste at the Berkeley recycling yard. I talked to Martin Bourque of the Ecology Centre, an organisation that's managed the city's not-for-profit recycling program for 30 years.
Martin Bourque: We have a manual sorting line. All this stuff goes up over this conveyer belt, and as it goes across the conveyer belt there's six staff people sorting by hand. First they pull out anything that's not recyclable. The next person on line is going to be pulling out the two kinds of plastic bottles. Then there's a magnet that pulls off the tin. The next couple of people are sorting glass into three different colours. If you don't sort your glass into three colours then it's likely to become some sort of aggregate, either for asphalt or may be put back on the landfill to cover it at the end of the day. So people think they're recycling but it's actually being put back in the landfill; we think that's atrocious, so we sort our glass into three colours to make sure it gets turned back into bottles again. We do collection from the kerb-side from about 36,000 residences, and we also have a drop-off site here where people can come and drop off materials that include scrap metal, cans, bottles, newspapers, cell phones, PDAs, pagers, books, clothing--all kinds of materials. Then we also have a buy back program, so if somebody comes in here with 200 cans then we pay them four cents for each one of those cans, plus the scrap value of the material.
Lynne Malcolm: Berkeley and its big sister, San Francisco, seem on the face of it to be working towards the same goal; increasing diversion rates to get closer to zero waste. But they differ on how to achieve that. In particular, the increasingly popular practice of throwing all recyclables into a single bin--co-mingled recycling--is one that worries Martin Bourque.
Martin Bourque: There are a lot of people in this industry who want to make recycling as easy as possible for the consumer, and that is important; the easier it is, the more tons you get, et cetera. But you can't make ease for the customer outweigh the quality of the output of the product, and we believe that it's significantly impacting the wellbeing and health of the recycling industry. Many paper mills now are beginning to not take recycled content, and it's really because of the quality; they're getting a lot of glass in with their paper and the glass turns back into sand and grinds through their mill and wears out the machinery and costs them lots of money. They end up throwing away a lot of material that they'd purchased. So everyone was really excited about this highly automated...we'll get lots more volume, we'll collect more tons, we'll save money on collections. But I think what people are really finding when they really dig in is that most programs, unless they're extremely well managed and have really good equipment and somebody's really on top of it, making sure that the quality is really good, most of these programs are collecting more, recycling less and passing the cost upstream.
Lynne Malcolm: Back in the big city, quality is also something that occupies the minds of shoppers and producers at one of the weekly farmers' markets.
Much of the food here was grown using compost made from organic waste collected in the green bins. Robert Reed from Norcal:
Robert Reed: We collect food scraps in the form of kitchen trimmings and plate scrapings from businesses and from people's homes. We collect 300 tons a day in San Francisco alone. We take this material to a modern compost facility that we own and operate and we compost it, and the result is a very nutrient-rich compost; it's rich in nitrogen and potassium and potash or organic matter. The finished compost is called Four Course Compost. It goes to vineyards and to organics farms--it's approved for use on organic soils--and it improves the soil structure on those farms, it allows the roots of the plants to go deeper into the soil and reach more nutrients. You get a microbial action; micro-organisms come and eat the food that's in the compost, and that process makes these nutrients directly available to the roots of the plants.
Vox pop 6: I'd like to try and close the loop in the earth, so using organic compost as a way of sustainably farming, and so that's very important to me. I also like the fact that I get to meet the local people who actually grow the food rather than just have a corporation deliver it to a store and not really have a face associated or a farmer associated with the food.
Vox pop 7: I try and keep things as long as I can, and then if they're going to go bad I make sure they are going to be compostable. I don't buy too much quantity so I don't have a lot of waste, so just preventing it so you don't even have to get to that point.
Vox pop 8: I keep a pile of garbage in my backyard that I intend to compost one day but I haven't composted yet.
Vox pop 9: The produce--the fruits, the vegetables, the wines--come back to San Francisco. In many cases they're served in the very restaurants that generated the food scraps to begin with. So what you end up with is a local closed-loop recycling program. There's very few examples of that anywhere in the country, and it's been very embraced by the restaurants and is working very well.
Lynne Malcolm: One of the first restaurants to take part in the food scraps scheme was The Slanted Door run by celebrity chef Charles Phan. His reputation and enthusiasm helped to kick-start the movement amongst the city's eateries.
Charles Phan: Starting here, we have a blue colour bin, so you try and get everything colour-coded. You can tell that paper, chicken...we have here our broken glasses, our plastic, that gets all recycled. We recycle our frying oil. Here is a little mistake; that paper shouldn't be in there. It's a small mistake but I make a big deal out of it.
Growing up in Vietnam where we pretty much recycle everything, it was really second nature to not throw everything away...we started out composting just vegetables. Maybe a year into it they switched and they say you can put meat, paper, all that product. It just literally reduced out waste by 75%, and we're hearing these great stories that they can sell the stuff and everybody likes it. I think being a chef, in general you just don't want to waste, period. So by knowing that you can put, let's say, the end pieces of a broccoli go to some good use, you really just feel a lot better. When I come into the restaurant in the morning, not only do I check my food and what it tastes like, if they've prepared it properly, I have to check the garbage. It just becomes second nature. Every morning I walk by, I look at what they cut and I look inside the garbage can.
Lynne Malcolm: Another major Californian industry to reap the benefits of the zero waste approach is winemaking. The state has around 1,100 wineries that together produce more than 500 million gallons of wine each year. One of the most environmentally innovative is Fetzer. They sell almost all their waste--cardboard, glass, paper and metal-- reducing what they take to the landfill by a staggering 95%. And they've made big savings on water and energy use too. It's all part of a drive towards sustainability which Fetzer's Ann Thrupp is now teaching to other winemakers.
Ann Thrupp: There's a lot of interest in the California wine industry in overall sustainable winegrowing practices. There's a state-wide program that I'm also very much involved in; I'm the managing director of the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance. And what that's all about is providing information to people to improve the sustainability or their practices, and people can do their own self- assessment using this very extensive work book, on many parameters--on energy, on materials, recycling, on human resource issues--so it's the full range of sustainable practices, meaning environmentally sound, economically viable and socially responsible.
Lynne Malcolm: On the way to the main Fetzer winery, two hours drive north of San Francisco, you could easily think you were in Italy, with its rolling green hills and endless vineyards. Patrick Healy showed me some of the advances they've made, both on water and energy use, starting with the bottling plant.
Patrick Healy: So the cases of empty glass come in from the outside, goes down on this conveyer, the glass is dumped, and the boxes go off to another area to meet the wine. The empty bottles come down here to the filler room here where the bottles are filled...I think it's 320 bottles a minute can be filled here, and then into the corker. Then it proceeds down the line and gets the caps all put on, and then runs to the labeller and gets the labels put on. Then they get dumped into the box, and then they go to the palletiser where they are all put on a pallet and then someone comes along with a forklift, takes them and puts them in the warehouse and stores them for shipment.
Water is really important to us here. We have our own wells. There's not enough water in the local water district to support us. You can see what a rural area this is. So we challenged quality control and bottling to see if they could reduce the amount of hot water to sterilise the filler bowls. That ultimately saved a million and a half gallons of water a year.
Lynne Malcolm: This has helped reduce their water consumption by 30%. They also have clever ways of saving energy, too, like covering some of their buildings in earth to help insulate them, both from the heat and the cold.
Patrick Healy: We're coming up on the red barrel room and the white barrel room. The red barrel room, as you can see, has an earth berm around it. We had an engineer do a study showing that we would save about 40% of the energy used in that building, so we got a $60,000 rebate from Pacific Gas and Electric for undertaking that earth berm. There's very little energy usage in that building; earth is a great insulator.
Ann Thrupp: Many of these innovations actually can save you money. It can go hand in hand that the economic bottom line in fact is enhanced by environmental and social investments.
Lynne Malcolm: It's good news that wineries, and many other industries, are turning rubbish into a resource. But what about engineering the waste out of products in the first place, during the design and manufacturing stages? Jared Blumenfeld feels there's still a long way to go--just take plastics for example:
Jared Blumenfeld: If you look on the bottom of any plastic, for instance...just plastic, it goes one through seven, and it has a recycling symbol. Just the number of plastic polymers is 249 plastic polymers that go into those seven numbers. Only about six of those 249 can be recycled. So people are making products that cannot be recycled and putting a recycled logo on the side. So there's lots that could potentially be recycled but they aren't being. The most complicated things to recycle will be appliances, computers, things that are made out of multiple components that are very difficult to take apart. When you think about a refrigerator, it's a relatively difficult job to take that to pieces and make sure that every component part is recycled properly. So the first thing is to work with designers to make sure that products can be recycled.
Lynne Malcolm: The waste story in California seems like an optimistic one, a place where garbage is increasingly being viewed as a resource; something of value, rather than something to bury or burn. San Francisco is definitely a role model for how a city could work towards zero waste. But there's a bigger issue at stake than just rubbish, and it has to do with turning back the tide of consumerism, something still so central to the American way of life. So for Martin Bourque, Ann Leonard and Jared Blumenfeld, there's still a lot of work to be done.
Martin Bourque: There are lots of new programs out there and we are reaching new diversion goals and there is gained awareness in the society at large. At the same time, we see new totally ridiculous disposable products coming on line that are just obscene. You know, why do you need a disposable toilet brush head that you can clean your toilet and then flush it down the toilet? It's got one use. It's an obscenity.
Anne Leonard: The amount of consumption that we have in the United States is absolutely off the scale of sustainability, and I think that we could definitely learn from other countries about how to meet our basic needs in a more sustainable manner.
Jared Blumenfeld: All those discussions items around zero waste really impact every other aspect of our life and our environment. So if you can solve and get to zero waste, you're really setting up models for solving all the issues around climate change, all the issues around toxic releases that are facing our planet, and environmental health.
Lynne Malcolm: Jared Blumenfeld. Today's program was produced by Rami Tzabar, with sound engineers Steven Tilley and Louis Mitchell. I'm Lynne Malcolm.
The next program in our Radio National series 'A World without Waste', offers a stark contrast to the situation in the United States. I'll be in the Philippines where, in the recent past, poor waste management has cost hundreds of lives, forcing local communities to take a stand in order to protect their health and livelihoods.
Related Information:
Global Anti Incinerator Alliance
San Francisco Dep't of the Environment
Zero Waste Alliance
Norcal -- The company that handles most of San Francisco's waste
California Integrated Waste Management Board
Berkeley Ecology Centre
Fetzer -- One of California's environmentally friendly wineries. The company has reduced the amount of rubbish it sends to landfill by 95%.
Copyright 2005 ABC"
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From: Zero Waste International Alliance ..................[This story printer-friendly]
November 29, 2004
ZERO WASTE DEFINITION AND BUSINESS PRINCIPLES
[Rachel's introduction: The Zero Waste International Alliance has defined "zero waste" and has adopted "zero waste principles" to help businesses and governments set their own zero waste goals.]
The Planning Group of the Zero Waste International Alliance adopted the following definition of Zero Waste on November 29, 2004. This is intended to assist businesses and communities in defining their own goals for Zero Waste.
Zero Waste Definition
"Zero Waste is a goal that is both pragmatic and visionary, to guide people to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are resources for others to use. Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to reduce the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them. Implementing Zero Waste will eliminate all discharges to land, water or air that may be a threat to planetary, human, animal or plant health."
This definition is intended to be a living document. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please email gary@garyliss.com with any comments or suggestions.
Zero Waste Business Principles
The Planning Group of the Zero Waste International Alliance adopted the following Principles on April 5, 2005 to guide and evaluate current and future Zero Waste policies and programs established by businesses. These Zero Waste Business Principles will be the basis for evaluating the commitment of companies to achieve Zero Waste. These Principles will also enable workers, investors, customers, suppliers, policymakers and the public in general to better evaluate the resource efficiency of companies.
1. Commitment to the triple bottom line -- We ensure that social, environmental and economic performance standards are met together. We maintain clear accounting and reporting systems and operate with the highest ethical standards for our investors and our customers. We produce annual environmental or sustainability reports that document how we implement these policies. We inform workers, customers and the community about Life Cycle environmental impacts of our production, products or services.
2. Use Precautionary Principle -- We apply the precautionary principle before introducing new products and processes, to avoid products and practices that are wasteful or toxic.
3. Zero Waste to landfill or incineration -- We divert more than 90% of the solid wastes we generate from Landfill from all of our facilities. No more than 10% of our discards are landfilled. No solid wastes are processed in facilities that operate above ambient biological temperatures (more than 200 degrees F.) to recover energy or materials.
4. Responsibility: Takeback products & packaging -- We take financial and/or physical responsibility for all the products and packaging we produce and/or market under our brand(s), and require our suppliers to do so as well. We support and work with existing reuse, recycling and composting operators to productively use our products and packaging, or arrange for new systems to bring those back to our manufacturing facilities. We include the reuse, repairability, sustainable recycling or composting of our products as a design criteria for all new products.
5. Buy reused, recycled & composted -- We use recycled content and compost products in all aspects of our operations, including production facilities, offices and in the construction of new facilities. We use LEED-certified [1] or equivalent architects to design new and remodeled facilities as Green Buildings. We buy reused products where they are available, and make our excess inventory of equipment and products available for reuse by others. We label our products and packaging with the amount of post-consumer recycled content and for papers, we label if chlorine-free and forest-friendly materials are used. Labels are printed with non-toxic inks -- no heavy metals are used.
6. Prevent pollution and reduce waste -- We redesign our supply, production and distribution systems to reduce the use of natural resources and eliminate waste. We prevent pollution and the waste of materials by continual assessment of our systems and revising procedures, policies and payment policies. To the extent our products contain materials with known or suspected adverse human health or negative environmental impacts, we notify consumers of their content and how to safely manage the products at the end of their useful life according to the takeback systems we have established, and shall endeavour to design them out of the process.
7. Highest and best use -- We continuously evaluate our markets and direct our discarded products and packaging to recover the highest value according to the following hierarchy: reuse of the product for its original purpose; reuse of the product for an alternate purpose; reuse of its parts; reuse of the materials; sustainable recycling of inorganic materials in closed loop systems; sustainable recycling of inorganic materials in single-use applications; composting of organic materials to sustain soils and avoid use of chemical fertilizers; and composting or mulching of organic materials to reduce erosion and litter and retain moisture.
8. Use economic incentives for customers, workers and suppliers -- We encourage our customers, workers and suppliers to eliminate waste and maximize the reuse, recycling and composting of discarded materials through economic incentives and a holistic systems analysis. We lease our products to customers and provide bonuses or other rewards to workers, suppliers and other stakeholders that eliminate waste. We use financial incentives to encourage our suppliers to adhere to Zero Waste principles. We evaluate our discards to determine how to develop other productive business opportunities from these assets, or to design them out of the process in the event they cannot be sustainably re-manufactured.
9. Products or services sold are not wasteful or toxic -- We evaluate our products and services regularly to determine if they are wasteful or toxic and develop alternatives to eliminate those products which we find are wasteful or toxic. We do not use products with persistent organic pollutants (POPs), PVC or polystyrene. We evaluate all our products and offer them as services if we can do so by our own company. We design products to be easily disassembled to encourage reuse and repair. We design our products to be durable, to last as long as the technology is in practice. We phase out the use of unsustainable materials, and develop the technology to do so. Our products can easily be re-made into the original product.
10. Use non-toxic production, reuse and recycling processes -- We eliminate the use of hazardous materials in our production, reuse and recycling processes, particularly persistent bioaccumulative toxics. We eliminate the environmental, health and safety risks to our employees and the communities in which we operate. Any materials exported to other countries with lower environmental standards are managed according to the Best International Practice as recommended by ZWIA.
These Zero Waste Business Principles are intended to be a living document. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please email gary@garyliss.com with any comments or suggestions.
[1] LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program of the U.S. Green Building Council
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From: Washington Post ....................................[This story printer-friendly]
January 6, 2006
A GOP KEY TO UNLOCKING NEPA
Party Links Environmental Law to Delay, Paperwork, Lawsuits
[Rachel's introduction: While our attention is focused on the Iraq war, Congressional scandals and global warming, Republicans are busy rewriting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the basic U.S. environmental law that requires the federal government to consider consequences, and alternatives, before spending our money. Can this be good?]
By Juliet Eilperin
House Republicans are hoping to rewrite one of the nation's most sweeping environmental laws --in a way that could change how the government gauges the impact of its actions on the land, sea and air.
For 36 years the government has relied on the National Environmental Policy Act to serve as a check on federal activities that have a "significant impact" on the environment. The law requires federal officials to determine whether such things as highway construction and flood-control projects will alter the surrounding landscape. And it allows citizens to challenge the government's conclusions. Its scope is so broad, the government conducts 50,000 "environmental assessments" a year.
"There's a reason they call it the Magna Carta of environmental law," said Rep. Tom Udall (N.M.), who served as the top Democrat on the House task force that examined the law. "NEPA is the most important environmental statute, because it involves the public."
But Republicans such as Rep. Cathy McMorris (Wash.), who chaired the 20-member task force, said the law had led to "delays, excessive paperwork and lawsuits" even as it helped guide the government. Late last month her staff released a 30-page report, which is subject to public comment for 45 days, suggesting possible fixes.
"I'm hoping we can find some common ground and move forward," McMorris said in an interview, adding that the report should serve "as a beginning point for discussion."
The GOP staff report, which was based on seven public hearings lawmakers held across the country, proposes setting mandatory deadlines for completing environmental assessments, giving greater weight to comments by local interests, seeing if federal efforts duplicate state evaluations of government activities, and defining more precisely what constitutes a "major federal action" under the law.
"After carefully reviewing the testimony and comments, it is clear [NEPA] is a valid and functional law in many respects," the staff wrote. "However there are elements... that are causing enough uncertainty to warrant modest improvements and modifications to both the statute and its regulations. To do nothing would be a disservice to all stakeholders who participate in the NEPA process."
Several environmentalists questioned the conclusions, noting that of the 50,000 annual government environmental reviews, only 0.2 percent led to lawsuits. They noted that the Clinton and Bush administrations had assessed how the law was working, and both concluded the problems stemmed from inadequate implementation, not the act itself.
Deborah K. Sease, legislative director for the Sierra Club, said the language in the report was so "vague, you open the door to undermining the principles of NEPA."
Each side can point to the law's virtues and faults.
Environmentalists note that scientists last year announced the rediscovery of the presumed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker along the Cache River, which the Army Corps of Engineers planned to dredge until citizens challenged the Corps' environmental analysis and blocked the flood-control project.
Mike Leahy, a staff attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, said the existing law relies on a "look before you leap" principle that forces the government to consider alternatives to environmentally damaging actions.
But some timber companies say they have not been able to salvage trees felled by forest fires in time because of the government's elaborate regulations under NEPA.
McMorris said the report, if written into law, would not amount to a radical overhaul of the existing rules. "It's building upon what has already been written into law," she said. "After 35 years, I think it's very appropriate to look at how the act is working and ask the question 'Can the process be improved?'"
Copyright 2006 The Washington Post Company
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Rachel's Precaution Reporter offers news, views and practical examples of the Precautionary Principle, or Foresight Principle, in action. The Precautionary Principle is a modern way of making decisions, to minimize harm. Rachel's Precaution Reporter tries to answer such questions as, Why do we need the precautionary principle? Who is using precaution? Who is opposing precaution?
We often include attacks on the precautionary principle because we believe it is essential for advocates of precaution to know what their adversaries are saying, just as abolitionists in 1830 needed to know the arguments used by slaveholders.
Rachel's Precaution Reporter is published as often as necessary to provide readers with up-to-date coverage of the subject.
As you come across stories that illustrate the precautionary principle -- or the need for the precautionary principle -- please Email them to us at rpr@rachel.org.
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Tim Montague - tim@rachel.org
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