Underpaid Genius

Edward Humes was interviewed by Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics blog, as a result of Humes new book, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash. I have garbage-picked some juicy factoids:

• American communities spend more on waste management than on fire protection, parks and recreation, libraries, or schoolbooks.
• The single largest component of trash going into landfills today is packaging and containers — instant trash that could be recycled, but isn’t.
• Making energy out of trash is a far less wasteful alternative — which is why Germany, for example, recycles 66 percent of its trash, makes energy out of the rest, and landfills virtually none. By contrast, America sends 69 percent to landfills,  25 percent to recycling, and the little left over to energy plants.
• The average American is making twice as much trash today as in 1960.
• Wal-Mart has cut its landfilling 80 percent, and between recycling, composting, and systematic reduction in packaging, the company has turned trash into revenue stream instead of a cost.
• They [plastic grocery bags] are 100 percent recyclable with the right equipment, but the cost of doing so exceeds the price anyone is willing to pay for the reclaimed polymers; only about 5 percent actually get recycled.
• Right now, 85 billion pieces of taxpayer-subsidized junk mail are clogging our mailboxes every year — representing one out of every 100 pounds of trash Americans send to the landfill.
• The amount of disposable plastics that find their way into the world’s oceans is approximately 4 million tons every year.
• California has the most robust container deposit law in the country. It also has the highest recycling rate.

[via A New Recycling Strategy Is Catching On by Leslie Kaufman]

“Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.

The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.

Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.”

[via A Scrap of Decency by Bharati Chaturvedi]

“In Delhi, some 80 percent of families in the informal recycling business surveyed by my organization said they had cut back on “luxury foods,” which they defined as fruit, milk and meat. About 41 percent had stopped buying milk for their children. By this summer, most of these children, already malnourished, hadn’t had a glass of milk in nine months. Many of these children have also cut down on hours spent in school to work alongside their parents.

Families have liquidated their most valuable assets — primarily copper from electrical wires — and have stopped sending remittances back to their rural villages. Many have also sold their emergency stores of grain. Their misery is not as familiar as that of the laid-off workers of imploding corporations, but it is often more tragic.

Few countries have adopted emergency measures to help trash pickers. Brazil, for one, is providing recyclers, or “catadores,” with cheaper food, both through arrangements with local farmers and by offering food subsidies. Other countries, with the support of nongovernmental organizations and donor agencies, should follow Brazil’s example. Unfortunately, most trash pickers operate outside official notice and end up falling through the cracks of programs like these.

A more efficient temporary solution would be for governments to buoy the buying price of scrap. To do this, they’d have to pay a small subsidy to waste dealers so they could purchase scrap from trash pickers at about 20 percent above the current price. This increase, if well advertised and broadly utilized, would bring recyclers back from the brink.

In the long run, though, these invisible workers will remain especially vulnerable to economic slowdowns unless they are integrated into the formal business sector, where they can have insurance and reliable wages.

This is not hard to accomplish. Informal junk shops should have to apply for licenses, and governments should create or expand doorstep waste collection programs to employ trash pickers. Instead of sorting through haphazard trash heaps and landfills, the pickers would have access to the cleaner scrap that comes straight from households and often brings a higher price. Employing the trash pickers at this step would ensure that recyclables wouldn’t have to be lugged to landfills in the first place.

Experienced trash pickers, once incorporated into the formal economy, would recycle as efficiently as they always have, but they’d gain access to information on global scrap prices and would be better able to bargain for fair compensation. Governments should charge households a service fee, which would also supplement the trash pickers’ income, and provide them with an extra measure of insurance against future crises.

Their labor makes our cities healthier and more livable. We all stand to gain by making sure that the work of recycling remains sustainable for years to come.”

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Recycling is the wrong way to manage waste — we need to build systems that produce much less, tending toward zero — but in the meantime we should work to help these folks.

We have a major economic downturn, production of goods slows, and what happens: manufacturers don’t want to purchase recyclable materials, so recyclers dump it in the landfill.

[from Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up by Matt Richtl and Kate Gilbraith]

The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

Here’s one proof that decoupling the costs of reusing the ‘recyclables’ from the cost of goods is bogus: manufacturers can avoid the headaches of dealing with the trash they engineer into their products.

It’s like mortgage derivatives: they separate the downside of their business from the upside, and claim that making a market in the resale of the downside (recyclables, high risk derivatives) will solve the problem. Except when the market tanks, and then the population as a whole has to deal with the mess. One one hand, bailing out the financial world who are left holding all the crappy debt instruments, or on the other, the municipalities who are going to have to figure out how to make room in their landfills for all the paper, cardboard, glass, plastic water bottles, bubble wrap, and aluminum cans.

Obama’s recovery plan should include a program to compel industry to restructure their design, packaging, and logistics so that products are really designed in a sustainable way:

1. Packaging should either be completely biodegradable — which really means compostable — like potato starch-based plastic surrogates, real popcorn, or returnable, so that the point of sale has to accept the return of the container, and reuse it.
2. Food manufacturers should be compelled by law to move to true reuse, like glass or ceramic returnable bottles, glass and aluminum ‘cans’, or other materials — that the producers and food stores must accept for return.
3. Producers of durable goods — furniture, electronics, bicycles, sneakers — would have to accept the return of their products at the end of their lives, and decompose them in a way that is sustainable. If my TV dies, I will cart it back to Best Buy and get back the $25 deposit I made on it.
4. This means the producers incur costs of cleaning, sorting, and decomposing when product or containers wear out or break, which makes being efficient at reuse and reverse logistics (gathering the materials back through the distribution system) a competitive advantage as opposed to meaningless.
5. Note that reverse logistics also levels the playing field on globalism, since a TV factory in Korea or a beer bottling plant in Canada will have to figure out how to deal with the packaging and returns of their products from the US, not just how to get it here in the first place. This is a really strong boost for localism, note, since shorter distribution is likely to favor local players.
6. Use of non-returnable or non-compostible packaging should be made illegal.

The alternative is that the headway we think we have made with recycling — while not producing anything like the benefits its advocates claim — will be lost. In particular, the sensitivity and willingness of the population to segregate different sorts of refuse, is a big step toward returnables and compostibles.

People can start by asking their markets to stop beverages and foods in returnable or compostable containers. It will take legislation to get manufacturers of durable good to accept the return of packaging and worn out products. Perhaps Schwartznegger is up for that.

Link: Recycling is Bullshit; Make Nov. 15 Zero Waste Day, not America Recycles Day : TreeHugger.

Lets call recycling what it is- a fraud, a sham, a scam perpetrated by big business on the citizens and municipalities of America. Look who sponsors the National Recycling Coalition: behind America Recycles Day: Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Owens-Illinois, International Bottled Water Association, the same people who brought you that other fraud, Keep America Beautiful.

Recycling is simply the transfer of producer responsibility for what they produce to the taxpayer who has to pick it up and take it away.

I had coffee with Kevin Jones (Good Capital, Social Capital Markets) just to get to know each other, and catch up on places where we intersect.

In passing, Kevin mentioned that his son-in-law, Aaron Maret, has started a really interesting company called Treecyclers in Asheville NC:

[from Asheville Treecyclers]

Our Mission

The Asheville Treecyclers mission is to cooperatively and sustainably utilize our downed urban trees; to provide locally grown and manufactured sustainable wood products; and to work cooperatively to further the awareness and practice of sustainable urban forestry in our community.

Intro

The Asheville Treecyclers is a full circle urban wood re-utilization program which connects Asheville area downed, urban trees to sawyers to kiln operations to planer processing to woodworkers/artists finally to retail outlets including the planned Treecyclers Gallery in downtown Asheville. The Asheville Treecyclers is founded upon sustainable principals of cooperatively utilizing a currently wasted resource and creating 100% Treecycled furniture, products and art as an end result. Most of these large, old growth and highly figured urban trees would be doomed to be ground into mulch otherwise.

Keeping it local

The Asheville Treecyclers is dedicated to using only local, downed urban trees, local tree service companies, local sawyers and processors, local woodworkers and artists. Our coop member woodworkers and artists are supported by conscientious customers and buyers seeking a more sustainable and responsible wood product.

This is clearly a great service — saving a fallen oak or maple from the municipal chipper — and one that has real value to artisans seeking to use local materials. Treecycling is something that should pop up in every locality.

Once this idea catches on, the verb “treecycle” will no longer mean turning christmas trees into chips, but instead turning a fallen tree into furniture, or shelving, or a statue.

Resources

organization: Asheville Treecyclers, Asheville NC, treecyclers.org
contact: Aaron Maret, Asheville Treecyclers
organization: Good Capital, www.goodcap.net
contact: Kevin Jones, Good Capital