Category — Recycling
Back before my knees began to ache, I ran in my neighborhood park, a 585-acre swath of meadows streaked through and bounded by mostly deciduous forest. Unlike most urban runners, I avoided the paved ring road and stuck to the interior, seeking out sketchy paths and abandoned viaducts, crumbling stone staircases and piney glades. I was looking for soft footing, and I was looking for that experience of exploration, of seeing-for-the-first-time, that every devoted woodland visitor wants. I chose my routes by impulse, never deciding which way to turn until a decision, like a fallen branch, rose up to smack me in the face. In this manner, I became familiar with parts of the park that most visitors never see.
Now that my running days are over, I shuffle through a tract of the park’s interior, called the Midwood, with eyes cast down, mostly oblivious to the solitary men who stroll past with backpacks slung casually over one shoulder. This is a special area, dimly lit and damp. It contains the park’s oldest trees—mostly tulips and oaks—and its highest canopy. In the summer, white flowering goutweed, a showy invasive, brightens the forest floor. In the fall, it’s blue wood asters. Birders come through during the migratory season in search of flycatchers and other transients, but my quarry is more prosaic.
In my right hand is a yellow-shafted grabbing tool and in my left a large plastic bag, which I slowly but steadily fill with things that aren’t supposed to be in the woods: malt liquor bottles, crack baggies, chip wrappers. But those items are ancillary to my main target, the specialized detritus of sexual congress: lube tubes, soiled tissues, amyl nitrate poppers, and, of course, used condoms. I had often seen men—young and middle-aged, white, brown, and black—loitering on these forest paths, some of which are paved in mulch and some of which are informal, like deer trails. In my running days, I assumed that the men, who held cell phones and carried small bags, were selling drugs. Only later did I realize their business was almost exclusively sexual; the drug sellers stuck closer to the ring road. …
This coming week (December 7 – 14), just in time for you know what, Sandra Goldmark and Michael Banta are reopening their Pop Up Repair shop. (See my post below on its first iteration.) This time the shop will materialize at the UpstART Gallery, at 93 Cooper Street, between Isham and 207th Street in waaaay upper Manhattan. Besides fixing your broken lamps and jewelry and tchotchkes, and replacing the batteries in phones branded with a bitten apple, Banta and Goldmark are offering one of the coolest I-will-not-participate-in-escalating-techno-fashion-madness services ever: stitching conductive material onto your perfectly good pre-existing gloves, thus converting them into touch-sensitive distal thermoregulators. No need to buy new gloves simply because you want to make a phone call in cold weather. (Yes, you can do this yourself with just a few stitches of conductive thread, but Sandra, Michael and the repair team are great folk to visit, and you probably have other stuff in need of repair, right?)
The shop will also be selling repair kits for jewelry and lamps, which were among the most common items brought in during the Pop Up Shop’s first incarnation. For more information about the shop, which plans to open in other locations soonish, go to www.popuprepair.com.
December 5, 2013 No Comments
Beginning next summer, landfill-bound garbage trucks in Massachusetts might smell a little less putrid than usual, thanks to a new regulation that would prohibit any generator of more than a ton of food scraps per week from hauling those scraps to the dump. As the state finally gets serious about diverting food waste, it expects to be sending much of it elsewhere: to hungry people, animal-feed producers, commercial composters, and the high-tech contraptions known as anaerobic digesters, which convert waste to energy and fertilizer.
The AD process starts when organic material is dumped into an enclosed tank and seeded with hungry bacteria. As microbes devour this nutrient-rich material, they produce sugars, fatty acids, and amino acids. Successive waves of bacteria then convert these products into carbon dioxide, hydrogen, ammonia, organic acids, and methane. The biogases generated by the process can be captured and used to produce fuel, electricity, and heat; left behind are crumbly dregs known as digestate, which has some value as fertilizer.
Across the United States, nearly 200 farms and a handful of industrial food-service operators already use small AD systems to turn slurries of animal waste or food scraps into power. Wastewater treatment plants, of course, have long enlisted microbes to digest the organic solids in human sewage, but increasingly they have been using AD technology to generate their own energy and offset electricity costs. To further boost power production, plants with excess digester capacity are starting to chase food scraps—which generate 10 to 35 times more gas than does animal or human waste.
Some worry that government subsidies could create an oversize AD industry with an insatiable appetite for food. Already there is concern in the European Union, where subsidies are a powerful incentive, about the possibility that crops will be grown solely for AD purposes. Others caution that centralized industrial digestion could undermine community composting operations, which not only produce valuable fertilizer for local gardeners and landscapers but also “foster community engagement and commitment to sustainable practices,” according to David Buckel, a New York–based community composting consultant. “We need both scales. But we should do as much local composting as possible.”
However the options shake out, it’s clear that the days of long-hauling massive amounts of methane-generating organics to landfills are numbered. Let the food fight—over the energy and nutrients stored in peanut shells and potato peels—begin.
As you dutifully deliver your recyclable soda bottles and soup cans to the curb each week, you’re probably not thinking they’ll soon be embarking on an intercontinental voyage. But there’s a good chance that they are. The United States ships 50 to 75 percent of the material collected from curbside recycling programs to China each year, along with such scrapyard staples as junked cars, wire cables, broken motors, and other industrial and commercial castoffs. Add it all up, and that’s 46 million metric tons—enough to fill 4.6 million garbage trucks—of scrap metal, paper, rubber, and plastic, valued at roughly $11 billion.
In 2012, scrap was the nation’s No. 2 export to China, right after soybeans.
Without China as a market for our recycling and scrap, U.S. landfills would fill up a lot more quickly, and this country’s recycling industry would lose a key source of revenue as hauling companies instead routed our bottles, cans, and newspapers to dumps and incinerators. The U.S. actually got a taste of what that would be like earlier this year, when China began rejecting scrap material at its ports.
What’s wrong with our waste? America and other nations have been exporting scrap to China for more than a decade. After laborers sort and clean the material, processors sell it to manufacturers (most of which are located overseas) who use it to make new appliances, packaging, computer clamshells, stop signs, engine parts, and other durable goods. But in recent years, the amount of unrecyclable material—stuff like food, concrete blocks, poop, and medical debris—cocktailed in with legitimate scrap has been creeping ever upward.
For years, importers were lenient, tolerating as much as 40 percent contamination per bale. But last February, the Chinese government—under increasing public pressure to clean up its air and water pollution—cracked down. All of that extraneous or poorly sorted material was proving costly to Chinese buyers. Anything they couldn’t use, they would burn or bury, fouling China’s environment.
Under the new directive, called Operation Green Fence, Chinese port inspectors allow no more than 1.5 percent contamination per bale of scrap. By September, China had suspended nearly 250 companies’ import licenses and rejected thousands of scrap containers. Some of them were delivered to more permissive ports in Vietnam and Malaysia, which also covet raw materials for manufacturing. Other ships headed for Hong Kong, where workers cleaned the loads of contaminants, re-baled them, and sent them back to China. Still other containers never left the U.S.: vast tonnages of plastics and paper went straight from materials recycling facilities (known as MRFs, pronounced “murf”)—which sort and bale metals, plastics, and paper collected through curbside recycling programs—to landfills and incinerators in this country.
But what sounds like a disaster for community recycling programs, and for landfills running out of space, may ultimately prove to have many benefits.
* * *
China first started importing scrap in large quantities after 2001, when it joined the World Trade Organization. Almost immediately, importers began to pay more for scrap than some U.S. industries were offering. It was also cheaper, much of the time, for American sellers to ship their material to Asian buyers than to send it overland to U.S. manufacturing or processing plants, thanks to discounted rates on ships that would otherwise be sailing for China empty. In 2012, for example, shipping a container from Los Angeles to China cost around $600, while sending the same container to Chicago via rail cost four times as much.
There are other reasons that U.S. scrap migrated overseas: Chinese labor is far cheaper than American, and Chinese handwork—unwinding copper wires from motors, for example, or extracting steel screws from aluminum chair frames—wrings more value from scrap material than our automated systems can. And then there’s supply and demand, the single most important driver of recycling. The United States, which manufactures comparatively little, generates far more recyclable material than it can incorporate into new products.
Now, with Operation Green Fence reducing the demand for U.S. scrap and recycling, prices for those materials have dropped. Before the Green Fence went up, reports Adam Clark, of the Northeast Resource Recovery Association, a bale of mixed plastics in his region could fetch upwards of eight cents per pound; after, it brought 2 cents, or less, per pound. Paper, pre-fence, netted $80 to $90 per ton; post-fence, it dropped to between $40 and $50. That’s not so great for MRFs, but it’s good for domestic mills and processors eager to manufacture new goods from old. (Until now, with all of the scrap going to China, processors haven’t been operating at full capacity because they couldn’t get enough material.) Now it’s a buyer’s market.
Even better, tighter Chinese inspections and the threat of severely limited markets have forced some U.S. MRFs to clean up their acts, hiring extra labor, slowing down their sorting belts, or buying optical sorters, which use lights, lenses, and cameras to differentiate among different types of plastic, and then air guns to blast them into separate chutes. The result is cleaner bales of material that can make it through the Green Fence. Domestic processing facilities, which buy material from MRFs, also have more, and better, material to choose from, says Jerry Powell, publisher of Resource Recycling magazine.
* * *
To be sure, China still wants the world’s scrap. Clean scrap is the feedstock for many of those shiny new goods that China manufactures and exports to the rest of the world. It’s also the feedstock for China’s own rapid industrialization: you can’t build cities and the systems that run them without an abundance of metals and plastics.
Operation Green Fence has temporarily altered the scrap landscape in China, but it’s been a game changer for the U.S. recycling industry, which relies on exports for profit and had grown sloppy over the years. If its central lesson holds—“Don’t send us garbage”—everyone will be better off.
Yes, improving bales of recyclable material will cost more time and money, but there’s a great deal riding on the integrity of the process. Not only will the Chinese villages that break open and sort these bales be cleaner, but more metals will remain unmined; more oil will stay in the ground; and more Americans will believe that the system that keeps these materials cycling actually does some good.
Kristin Murphy spent two years listening to a portable radio that, thanks to a broken antenna, delivered only AM broadcasts. A Columbia University PhD student and a self-professed news junky, she refused to buy a new one, but she lacked the tools to fix the old. So when she learned this past spring that a pop-up repair shop would be opening in her northern Manhattan neighborhood, she was thrilled. “I thought the idea was brilliant,” she says. “I began collecting broken things in my head.”
When the store opened in June, sandwiched between a hair salon and a pizza joint in a former pharmacy, a line of customers stretched out the door. Soon the storefront, which started with the clean and organized look of an Apple Genius Bar, resembled a theater workshop on opening night. Spools of thread and wire, boxes of nuts and screws, glue guns, paint brushes, screwdrivers, vice grips, and clamps littered the counters. Customers milled around work benches and the sewing machine, eagerly sharing stories about their broken stuff, all under the gaze of a patron saint of handiness: MacGyver.
The first item Murphy dropped off was that radio: within days she was enjoying FM stations again. Next, she delivered a backpack with a torn seam, a broken window blind, an iPod that wouldn’t turn on, a broken headlamp, and a second radio. Each was handily fixed, for a total cost of less than $75, by Sandra Goldmark and Michael Banta, veteran professionals who teach and produce theater at Barnard College and between them can handle carpentry, electrical work, rigging, welding, drafting, painting, sewing, and model making.
For Goldmark and Banta, the Pop-Up Repair Shop was equal parts performance art, sustainability initiative, research project, and social activism. “We were fed up with buying things and throwing them away, both in the theater and at home, and we wanted to see if others felt the same way,” Goldmark told me. Would people bring in their broken household goods? If so, why, and how much did they value such repairs? With a grant from Barnard, they conducted detailed surveys of their customers, tracking both the level of demand for, and the response to, a community repair shop.
Nationwide, repair businesses—except for those that handle computers—have been in decline for decades. Before World War II, for example, the country had more than 100,000 shoe repair shops; now there are roughly 7,000. The Bureau of Labor Statistics includes small-appliance repair on its list of disappearing jobs. “And I see no trend in them coming back,” says Neil Seldman, president of the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a nonprofit that advocates for environmentally sound and equitable community development. “Manufacturers make products unrepairable. They don’t sell parts because they don’t want people to repair their products.” They want them to buy new stuff.
Although it’s not part of the well-known triad, “repair” partners with “reuse” in the reduce, reuse, recycle hierarchy—and it’s a better option than recycle when it comes to the environment. Why? Because when we repair, we don’t buy new stuff. No matter how “green” it claims to be, manufacturing new stuff almost always requires more energy and materials, and has a greater impact on the environment, than continuing to use something that already exists. Repair also generates less air and water pollution than recycling, leaves behind less hazardous waste, and creates an affordable supply of high-quality goods for those unable to afford new things.
Still, communities trying to shrink the amount of garbage they pile up in landfills routinely give reuse and repair short shrift. They do far less public education on reuse and repair, a retail message, than on recycling, which addresses discards in a wholesale manner.
Consciously or not, Goldmark and Banta were joining thousands of others in urban pockets around the world who, empowered by repair cafes and collectives and downloadable fixer manuals, were reclaiming their stuff, jumping off the break-it-and-buy-it treadmill, and taking a quiet stand for the environment. “The number one thing we’re up against is the cheap price of new goods,” Goldmark told me. “They’re artificially cheap because they don’t include the environmental costs—air and water pollution, for example—of extracting raw materials, manufacturing, or distribution.”
Low wages in developing nations also keep prices low, as do government subsidies for extracting resources like wood, oil, and gas. People would be far less likely to buy new products if the price tags of those goods reflected their true cost. Consumers would also demand more from manufacturers whose products prematurely fail, and they might be more willing to pay repair people a living wage.
Over the course of four weeks, Goldmark and her colleagues were pleasantly surprised to serve roughly 200 people and repair more than 450 objects. The largest category was lamps, but the staff also worked its magic on vacuum cleaners, coffee makers, fans, jewelry, textiles, telephones, trophies, furniture, stuffed animals, and a cracked two-and-a-half-foot-long plastic ladle—a tchotchke nonpareil that Goldmark handily repaired with a small metal plate and a bolt. The couple’s only failures? A mini-fridge and some remote-controlled cars.
The shop—which charged between $20 and $40 for most jobs—lost money because Goldmark and Banta kept prices artificially low to lure in customers. They wanted to get across an idea, not make a profit. In fact, they were experimenting with pricing, asking the first 25 customers to pay what they thought was right. If Kristin Murphy had come in toward the end of the shop’s tenure, she likely would have paid $40 to have her blinds repaired and more than $15 for the radio.
“If we did this again,” Goldmark said, “we’d trim our staff and charge more, but not too much. We still want to keep it affordable.” She would also ask customers to take another crucial step: “I’d give them a piece of paper so they can write to the manufacturer of the broken coffee pot” to express their dissatisfaction. After all, if we don’t let companies know we’re unhappy—and unlikely to buy their products in the future—we can’t blame them for continuing to turn out crap.
Perhaps the most valuable—if subversive—lesson of the pop-up shop is that we, as consumers, have options: when something breaks, we don’t have to throw it away. By this measure alone, the shop was hugely successful. It kept more than a ton of stuff out of the landfill, and it encouraged customers to get involved not only with repair, but with other like-minded people.
Some of those folks hung around for hours—Goldmark told me with admiration in her voice—learning new skills and gaining the confidence to try them out. Then, under the spell of MacGyver, they went home and tackled their own repairs.
I recently ordered a grilled cheese in an airport restaurant, but along with the sandwich came a napkin, wrapped and taped around a plastic fork and knife that I didn’t want or need. The sandwich was deliciously greasy, so I ended up using the napkin, but I felt bad about the accompanying utensils that are now headed for a landfill. (Sure, I could have kept them for later use, but that would merely delay their trip to the dump.)
It was a tiny moment of garbage guilt, out of many, but I remembered it when I read about the efforts of ten-year-old Milo Cress of Burlington, Vermont, who last year persuaded a local restaurant to hand out straws only upon request. Milo’s Be Straw Free campaign has since spread the practice to scores of other restaurants nationwide, including some chains. Establishments that quit giving straws as the default have found their straw use (and straw spending) cut by up to 90 percent. (Americans go through more than 500 million plastic straws a day, according to Simply Straws, which makes — you guessed it — narrow glass cylinders designed for sucking liquids from containers.)
Thanks to Milo’s efforts, the National Restaurant Association now recognizes “offer-first” as a best practice. Just goes to show: if you don’t ask, you don’t receive. And if you don’t offer single-use disposable plastics in the first place, some people might not even miss them.
Q: What did we use for straws before the days of cheap plastic, paper, or glass?
A: Actual straw: a single stalk of grain.
August 1, 2012 2 Comments
Rumblings of progress on the single-use packaging front: Time magazine recently ran an article about a Danish burger chain called Max Burgers that — poof! — eliminated cardboard packaging from its kids’ meals at the request of a customer who “only wanted the fries and toys … and was annoyed at having to throw the boxes straight into the recycling bin.” Who among us hasn’t felt exactly the same way?
In the U.S., we’re barely at the stage of recycling that packaging, let alone handing burgers to customers without disposable hygienic wrap. Did customers balk at the Danish chain’s primitivism? Hardly: sales of kids’ meals actually increased. (Studies show green initiatives can boost customer loyalty.)
But there is some good news stateside. In a pilot project, McDonald’s is replacing polystyrene cups with double-walled paper cups at about 2,000 West Coast restaurants. Why get rid of the polystyrene? The National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program calls it a possible carcinogen, and studies have shown that styrene can leach from containers into their heated contents (think instant noodles). On the post-consumer end, polystyrene isn’t frequently recycled, partly because the recycled products are lightweight and sold by weight, thus generating little revenue relative to hauling costs; and partly because food often contaminates the end product. Polystyrene also breaks into tiny pieces that contaminate beaches and water bodies.
Dunkin’ Donuts is also considering a switch from polystyrene, and Starbucks is developing a coated paper cup that can be readily recycled. (That is, if it makes it into a recycling bin in a community that recycles paper cups.) Some of these changes have come about through shareholder initiatives, and some through the work of groups like the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and Global Green. Alas, top-down change comes excruciatingly slow: maybe U.S. chains need to hear more often, and more loudly, from customers who — like that parent in Denmark — really, really didn’t want the packaging along with the food.
Image: Dan Century/Flickr
(This post originally appeared at OnEarth.org/theroytestuff.)
April 26, 2012 No Comments
The question has dogged social movements that go by names like The Compact, Buy Nothing, and Small Is Beautiful: will reducing consumption cripple the economy? Bill McKibben, in his 2007 book Deep Economy, argues that less growth has its virtues, and that there are plenty of cleaner, greener jobs out there (such as restoring local watersheds, fixing our infrastructure, designing goods that are made to last and cycle back, at their end of life, into new products or the earth).
But a recent story in the New York Times spurred another consideration: will less consumption hurt the vast world of informal waste workers, the millions who pick through urban dumps in developing nations recovering metal, textiles, plastics, paper, and other materials for repair, reuse, or recycling? It’s not a well-paid or safe living, but it’s useful work, and for the most part, human hands do a better job at recovering valuable materials from the waste stream than do machines.
Interestingly, a candidate for the presidency of Mexico told the Timesthat Mexico’s recycling market cannot absorb more than 20 percent of the country’s waste. “There isn’t the infrastructure, nor the markets, nor the prices, nor the regulations for this to work,” he said. Surely it makes more sense to develop those markets and regulations today than to bury these materials for a few decades and then mine them when we can no longer afford to extract virgin materials.
Throughout history, garbage has exerted an evolutionary force as communities respond to its social, economic, and environmental challenges. In the developing world, the management of garbage — an underappreciated but crucial service — has started to empower trash pickers to organize politically and to educate their children so they can rise above their parents’ constraints. When and if large garbage haulers enter these markets, they should turn first to the experienced waste workers, who have intimate knowledge of local conditions and know best how to wring value from discards.
Even in a less consumer-driven world, there will still be plenty to recover.