GreenYes Digest V97 #288

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Fri, 22 Jan 1999 17:03:35 -0500


GreenYes Digest Fri, 28 Nov 97 Volume 97 : Issue 288

Today's Topics:
Looking for reference information
Pallets
This is a story about recycling
This is a story about recycling of which many of us are ignorant ..I was.

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Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 20:10:07 -0500
From: CMPBS@greenbuilder.com (CMPBS)
Subject: Looking for reference information

I believe that Neil Seldman, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has written an
historical perspective on recycling. Gail Vittori

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Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 11:54:35 -0500 From: Michele Raymond <michele@raymond.com> Subject: Pallets

Dear Greenyes folks:

I am interested in your discussions on pallets. I have a report on transport packaging & Environment that sold well this year and I hope to update sometime next year.

I am always interested in

A. case histories on improving transport pkg

B. informaton on issues that have not been addressed;

if you have information on a problem in your area or solution please e-Mail me with details; phone contacts -- I'd appreciate!!

Thanks

Michele Raymond

STATE RECYCLING LAWS UPDATE

301/345-4237

Fax 345-4768

http://www.raymond.com/recycle

Michele Raymond

Publisher

<bold>Recycling Laws International/ State Recycling Laws Update

</bold>6429 Auburn Ave. Riverdale MD 20737-1614

301/345-4237 Fax 345-4768

http://www.raymond.com/recycle

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Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 00:02:54 -0600 From: Susan Snow <sksnow@1stnet.com> Subject: This is a story about recycling

Recycling is not so green to its neighbors, but is it greener than the alternatives. Maybe, we should be clearer what is recycling. Obviously, cleaning up soil by thermal oxidation is not recycling --it's incineration. Nor is cleaning up soil via composting --it is spreading toxics around. People are becoming ill and dying near muncicipal solid waste composting plants.

I suggest that the best way to protect all persons is to PREVENT waste by reducing consumption. http://www.igc.org/envjustice/communique/recycle.html

Susan Snow ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recycling - Not So Green to its Neighbors By David Bacon

**HUNTINGTON PARK, CA (7/28/97) - Recycling has an environmentally-friendly image, especially in Los Angeles, where commodity consumption is a secular form of worship. Any vision of a sustainable future here at least mandates the reuse of the basic materials of everyday life. That makes recycling the city's big growth industry.

Twenty years ago, when LA drew up its master plan, the industry hardly existed at all. Today big industrial facilities are mushrooming, collecting and processing glass, metal and concrete. The most recently-opened plant recycles dirt, burning it to rid it of its petroleum residues.

But low-income people living in southeast Los Angeles have a hard time seeing recycling's green image. Their problem? They live near the plants.

"There's always glass in the air here," complains Mercedes Arambula.

Arambula's home is catty-corner from the huge Container Recycling facility on Leota Street in Walnut Park. Huge mounds of broken glass rise to twice the height of an adult in the Container Recycling yard. Skip loaders constantly fill open truck trailers with it. From their huge scoops glass pours down in a dusty stream.

"I've lived here 18 years," she says. "My kids have asthma now, and my littlest one, who's 1 1/2, is always sick. I won't even let them play in the yard anymore. The trees around my house have all died anyway."

A neighbor, Ana Cano, wipes her finger across the windshield of a parked van in front of her house, coated with a thick layer of dust. Rubbing it between her fingers, it sparkles and feels grainy. "Little by little, we're breathing this in," she says. "I feel like my lungs are filling up with glass."

A little further down Alameda Street, the main corridor of the city's industrial heartland, Alameda Street Metal Recycling crushes used cars, trucks and metal appliances. These hunks of used metal travel to Long Beach, and then on container ships to the other side of the Pacific, fueling a global economy of trash.

The driveways and walls of the homes of Epifania Oliveria and Thelma Diaz are cracking as the earth shakes from the bone-jarring thump of the metal crusher. A thin film of oil coats their yards, and little metal granules push up through the skin rashes of neighborhood children. When the women brought their complaints to city authorities, they were defeated by the most local laws of all - zoning regulations.

In balkanized southeast LA, divided into many small cities, they discovered that the plant was located in Lynwood, and zoned industrial, while their homes and the elementary school across the street were in Los Angeles, and zoned residential.

"The city's message to us was that we live in the wrong place. In their eyes, we just shouldn't be there," Diaz says. Ana Cano got the same message when State Senator Gloria Molina came out to look at the impact of the glass dust on their homes. "We have to expect this, she told us, because we live in an industrial neighborhood," Cano recalls.

These neighbors are working-class people. They don't want factories shut down or industry to disappear.

That's where many of them have jobs. "We understand we all need to work," Diaz says. "But these places have to respect the people in the community which surrounds them. The bottom line is that our community is poor. Everyone in our neighborhood is Black or brown. Many like me are immigrants. And you only find these kinds of companies in poor neighborhoods. Can you imagine a metal recycler in Santa Monica or Hollywood? They just know we can't go anywhere else."

Carlos Porras, Southern California Director of Communities for a Better Environment, points out that recycling is exempted from most regulation, because it's viewed as an environmentally-positive industry. "Public policy has allowed recycling plants to crop up without oversight," he says. "This is environmental injustice. Regulations are simply not applied to potentially harmful businesses which are located in low-income communities of color, particularly in southeast Los Angeles."

But the burgeoning recycling industry is about to be challenged. Southeast LA neighborhoods are discovering that they are helpless in the face of environmental injustice if they don't get organized.

One concrete recycler in Huntington Park has faced an organized campaign of neighborhood opposition for 4 years. Although residents of Cottage Street started out simply trying to control the plant's operations, the company's hardball defiance hardened neighborhood attitudes. They stopped the operation completely, and made support of its owner the political kiss-of-death at city hall.

"The council thought Sam Chew's concrete recycling business would be the first of many such clean and green facilities," says Dean Hickman, who's fought against the concrete mountain from the beginning. "But we not only organized our own neighborhood in response, now we're going to the neighborhoods around other plants, and helping them get organized as well."

Maybe the greenest thing produced by the burgeoning recycling industry will be a new movement for environmental justice. **

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 27 Nov 1997 23:59:57 -0600 From: Susan Snow <sksnow@1stnet.com> Subject: This is a story about recycling of which many of us are ignorant ..I was.

Recycling is not so green to its neighbors, but is it greener than the alternatives. Maybe, we should be clearer what is recycling. Obviously, cleaning up soil by thermal oxidation is not recycling --it's incineration. Nor is cleaning up soil via composting --it is spreading toxics around. People are becoming ill and dying near muncicipal solid waste composting plants.

I suggest that the best way to protect all persons is to PREVENT waste by reducing consumption. http://www.igc.org/envjustice/communique/recycle.html

Susan Snow ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Recycling - Not So Green to its Neighbors By David Bacon

**HUNTINGTON PARK, CA (7/28/97) - Recycling has an environmentally-friendly image, especially in Los Angeles, where commodity consumption is a secular form of worship. Any vision of a sustainable future here at least mandates the reuse of the basic materials of everyday life. That makes recycling the city's big growth industry.

Twenty years ago, when LA drew up its master plan, the industry hardly existed at all. Today big industrial facilities are mushrooming, collecting and processing glass, metal and concrete. The most recently-opened plant recycles dirt, burning it to rid it of its petroleum residues.

But low-income people living in southeast Los Angeles have a hard time seeing recycling's green image. Their problem? They live near the plants.

"There's always glass in the air here," complains Mercedes Arambula.

Arambula's home is catty-corner from the huge Container Recycling facility on Leota Street in Walnut Park. Huge mounds of broken glass rise to twice the height of an adult in the Container Recycling yard. Skip loaders constantly fill open truck trailers with it. From their huge scoops glass pours down in a dusty stream.

"I've lived here 18 years," she says. "My kids have asthma now, and my littlest one, who's 1 1/2, is always sick. I won't even let them play in the yard anymore. The trees around my house have all died anyway."

A neighbor, Ana Cano, wipes her finger across the windshield of a parked van in front of her house, coated with a thick layer of dust. Rubbing it between her fingers, it sparkles and feels grainy. "Little by little, we're breathing this in," she says. "I feel like my lungs are filling up with glass."

A little further down Alameda Street, the main corridor of the city's industrial heartland, Alameda Street Metal Recycling crushes used cars, trucks and metal appliances. These hunks of used metal travel to Long Beach, and then on container ships to the other side of the Pacific, fueling a global economy of trash.

The driveways and walls of the homes of Epifania Oliveria and Thelma Diaz are cracking as the earth shakes from the bone-jarring thump of the metal crusher. A thin film of oil coats their yards, and little metal granules push up through the skin rashes of neighborhood children. When the women brought their complaints to city authorities, they were defeated by the most local laws of all - zoning regulations.

In balkanized southeast LA, divided into many small cities, they discovered that the plant was located in Lynwood, and zoned industrial, while their homes and the elementary school across the street were in Los Angeles, and zoned residential.

"The city's message to us was that we live in the wrong place. In their eyes, we just shouldn't be there," Diaz says. Ana Cano got the same message when State Senator Gloria Molina came out to look at the impact of the glass dust on their homes. "We have to expect this, she told us, because we live in an industrial neighborhood," Cano recalls.

These neighbors are working-class people. They don't want factories shut down or industry to disappear.

That's where many of them have jobs. "We understand we all need to work," Diaz says. "But these places have to respect the people in the community which surrounds them. The bottom line is that our community is poor. Everyone in our neighborhood is Black or brown. Many like me are immigrants. And you only find these kinds of companies in poor neighborhoods. Can you imagine a metal recycler in Santa Monica or Hollywood? They just know we can't go anywhere else."

Carlos Porras, Southern California Director of Communities for a Better Environment, points out that recycling is exempted from most regulation, because it's viewed as an environmentally-positive industry. "Public policy has allowed recycling plants to crop up without oversight," he says. "This is environmental injustice. Regulations are simply not applied to potentially harmful businesses which are located in low-income communities of color, particularly in southeast Los Angeles."

But the burgeoning recycling industry is about to be challenged. Southeast LA neighborhoods are discovering that they are helpless in the face of environmental injustice if they don't get organized.

One concrete recycler in Huntington Park has faced an organized campaign of neighborhood opposition for 4 years. Although residents of Cottage Street started out simply trying to control the plant's operations, the company's hardball defiance hardened neighborhood attitudes. They stopped the operation completely, and made support of its owner the political kiss-of-death at city hall.

"The council thought Sam Chew's concrete recycling business would be the first of many such clean and green facilities," says Dean Hickman, who's fought against the concrete mountain from the beginning. "But we not only organized our own neighborhood in response, now we're going to the neighborhoods around other plants, and helping them get organized as well."

Maybe the greenest thing produced by the burgeoning recycling industry will be a new movement for environmental justice. **

------------------------------

End of GreenYes Digest V97 #288 ******************************