It's great that Dan is out there scooping up valuable construction
materials that would otherwise go to waste.
I remember during the 1980s and 1990s here in Vancouver, when
opportunistic developers anticipated the transfer of assets from Hong
Kong to Canada (aided and abetted by federal government policy here) and
many hundreds of sound little houses were demolished in our city, only to
be replace with hastily built "monster houses" (called that by
locals because they were big and ostentatious as they were
ugly).
A small portion of the total destroyed housing stock was salvaged through
"Demo Sales" that were held the weekend before the demolition
crews came in. Often it was immigrant small business people of modest
means who made a deal with the developer to sell off oak and fir
flooring, windows, doors, and other building materials that the buyers
would remove with their own crowbars. Sort of a U-pick Urban Ore
operation...
Most of the waste that eluded the Demo Sale shoppers ended up not in
municipal waste landfills and incinerators, but in local dumps permitted
to take "inert" materials. Several of these facilities caught
fire during the 90s. Some of the demo waste ended up in our municipal
landfill, and it caught fire there too, burning out of control for three
weeks in one instance.
Even though construction waste is a huge problem. The short-sighted
demolition of sound buildings, as well as the sloppiness of construction
crews driven by avaricious developers for whom time is money, is a
travesty. EPR is not the right tool to prevent wasting in the
construction industry. Here we are exploring municipal instruments like
development and occupancy permits.
On the other hand, the buildings that are being constructed now should be
subject to some sort of EPR. The junky building materials will have no
salvage value for Urban Ore or informal "Demo Sale"
proprietors.
Helen.
At 01:45 PM 12/12/2008, Dan Knapp wrote:
As perhaps the original zero waster
(I called it "total recycling" in 1986 when I first presented
the no-waste theory at a Governor's Conference in West Virginia) I wish I
could agree with my colleagues at ILSR, GAIA, and Eco-Cycle on their
overall numbers for wasting and recycling, but I cannot.
Mr. Montague says the 170 million tons wasted is "two-thirds of
everything we make", which might lead one to believe that what is
wasted is the same tonnage as that which all of our manufacturers and
farms made in any given year. This is false. Instead, what is
actually being wasted each year is drawn from the already-built landscape
of our cities, towns, and farms, and includes giant quantities of things
that are grown as well as a diminishing percentage of everything made
each and every year since Europeans settled this continent and displaced
the native Americans who already lived here. Most of this
will never be subject to EPR because it is already made and aging slowly
toward inevitable discard at whatever kind of facilities we will have
invented and built to receive it when it reaches the end of its useful
life.
That fact is one reason why the overblown rhetoric of the EPR people (the
most notorious being the formula EPR + composting = Zero Waste) is a
grossly inadequate guide to what must be done to actually get to zero
waste to landfill or incineration.
What must actually be done is to build a vast new network of zero waste
transfer facilities featuring pay-as-you-throw financing for twelve major
commodity categories into which all of what is now called "solid
waste" (we zero wasters increasingly call it the "discard
supply") can profitably be sorted. The opportunity to do this
has never been better, because most of the first-generation materials
recovery facilities are old and in dire need of replacement and
rebuilding, and because the current market collapse for commodities like
paper has exposed the weakness of a business model that relies on mixing
unlike things first and trying to separate them after they have been
hopelessly contaminated. Another reason is the change in political
leadership due to the recent election, which is why it is so important to
get a real understanding of the way the disposal marketplace actually
works instead of a fantasy put forward by people who spend too much time
in front of a computer screen, and not enough at the actual places where
the discard supply goes to be dumped.
A further problem with these numbers is that they do not accurately
measure, and in fact reduce by an unknown but vast amount, the
actual reuse, recycling, and composting numbers that are occurring.
I have first-hand experience with this phenomenon, and believe it is
widespread. My company, Urban Ore, is one of countless thousands
who recycle every day and the bulk of whose contribution to conserving
materials for beneficial reuse is never measured at all. In Urban
Ore's case, we actually divert 7,000 to 8,000 tons per year from
landfill, but only about 800 of those tons actually get reported to the
state agency that oversees these things, because the only thing the state
is interested in counting is what shows up at the city's regional
transfer station. We pull 800 tons per year from these tons, but
ten times that much comes to us at our facility located a mile and a half
from the City's transfer station complex. We actually compete with
the transfer station for the same materials as they waste; our gain is
their loss, which is why the National Recycling Coalition with its model
of recyclers working with the wasters to get higher recycling numbers
does not represent reality as we who are on the front lines of the
competition actually experience it.
Thanks for the post.
Daniel Knapp, Ph.D., CEO
Urban Ore, Inc. a reuse and recycling company in Berkeley, California
since 1980
On Dec 12, 2008, at 8:01 AM, David Ciplet wrote:
From:
Rachel's Democracy & Health News #989, Dec. 11, 2008
[Printer-friendly
version]
ZERO WASTE ACTIVISM TAKES ON
GLOBAL WARMING
By Tim Montague
The the Big Three automakers are licking
their chops over the
$14
to
$34
billion in tax-payer bailouts they hope to find in their Christmas
stocking. Meanwhile, community based environment, health, jobs and
justice activists are planning an important
Zero
Waste Communities
conference in the Motor City February 6-9, 2009.
The conference will bring together
community-based activists from the U.S. and Canada aiming to create jobs
by phasing out dumps and incinerators. Unlike the auto executives who
have resisted innovation and the manufacture of cleaner cars, these
activists will be organizing, sharing ideas, and swapping business plans
to create real economic opportunity for communities of color and/or low
income.
The
Zero
Waste Communities conference is part of a broad trend that is
changing the environmental movement in the U.S. Grassroots activists are
increasingly committed to solving serious environmental and health
problems by creating sustainable green jobs, and using global warming as
a multi-issue rallying cry for justice and sustainable
prosperity.
The "Zero Waste" conference, hosted by the
Coalition
for a New
Business
Model for Detroit Solid Waste, is part of the global fight to stop
landfills and incinerators from wreaking havoc on low-income people,
indigenous communities, people of color, and the fabric of life on the
entire planet.
The conference comes on the heels of a new
report,
Stop
Trashing the
Climate.[1] The
70-page report by Eco-Cycle, the
Institute for
Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), and
the Global Alliance for Incinerator
Alternatives (GAIA) (who have
also produced a 7 page companion statement
Zero Waste for
Zero Warming and
a video) --
convincingly argues that governments can adopt
zero waste
strategies to greatly reduce their need for landfills and
incinerators and combat climate change.
Dave Ciplet, an organizer with GAIA and one of the report's authors, says
that the
aim
of Zero Waste is investing, "in the workforce,
infrastructure and local strategies needed to reduce what we trash in
incinerators and landfills to zero by a given year. It means stopping
even another dime of taxpayer money from subsidizing waste disposal
projects that contaminate environments and the people who live
there."
As Rachel's readers know, there are many good
reasons to find safer alternatives to burying and burning trash.
Landfills and incinerators are major sources of toxic pollution that harm
the environment and human health.[2] The report makes it alarmingly clear
that dumps and incinerators are also major sources of greenhouse gases
(GHG), speeding us towards a world too hot for human habitation.
According to
the
new report, we bury or burn nearly
170 million tons of
stuff
every year in the U.S. This is two-thirds of everything we make.(p.14)
Only one-third gets recycled, re-used or composted.
Typical
household trash is comprised of
59% organic matter -- an amount that equals 100 million tons (200 billion
pounds) of wood, paper, food, and yard trimmings thrown away annually,
according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). After you
bury trash, bacteria convert the organic matter into methane and CO2.
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is up to 72 times more powerful
at trapping heat than CO2.[3] Landfills are the largest producers of
methane and consequently their gasses pose a threat to climate
stability.(p. 14)
Burning garbage is a
messy
but profitable business. It takes
useful material (wood, paper, metal, plastic, food scraps and lawn
clippings)
and converts it to heat and C02 (plus creating a brand new set of nasty
chemicals like dioxins and furans). Then someone has to create
all that stuff again. For every piece of paper that is burned or buried,
a new piece of paper has to be manufactured -- starting with cutting down
a tree somewhere, transporting it, chemically processing it, and so
on.
The waste industry ignores the replacement
cost of items that are burned or buried. They "greenwash"
so-called "waste-to-energy" projects (aka, incinerators),
proposing them as a 'solution' to the climate crisis, because they make
something 'good' (electricity) from otherwise 'bad' stuff, like methane
from landfills; or garbage that would otherwise take up precious landfill
space.
Altogether, the report authors estimate that
landfills and incinerators are directly responsible for 7% of our
greenhouse gas emissions -- 5% from landfills and 2% from incinerators.
What is important here, is that the 7% of greenhouse gas emissions
produced by our garbage actually accounts for 37% of emissions if you
take into account all the mining, logging, milling, oil drilling,
transporting and manufacturing required to produce new stuff.(p.24)
The report advocates serious recycling of the
raw materials present in discarded items, rather than burning or burying
them. We could divert all the reusables, recyclables and compostables
from the waste stream, capturing 90% of the material and reducing the
nation's total greenhouse gas emissions in the process by at least 7%;
today, in contrast, we capture only about 30% for reuse. This 7%
reduction in greenhouse has emissions would be equal to shutting down 83
(one fifth) of the nation's 417 coal-burning power plants forever.(p.
15)
But this could be considered an interim goal
-- on our way to a zero-waste manufacturing society. Among the
12
principles of green
engineering,
principle #6 is to retain complexity when reusing or recycling materials.
In other words, a bottle has been manufactured for a particular purpose.
Its shape, its size, the varying thickness of its base and neck -- are
all essential to its purpose. Those design features should be retained,
rather than just crushing the bottle back
to glass shards and remelting them
into a new bottle. As Paul Palmer of the
Zero
Waste Institute points out,
bottles should be marked with a special machine-readable code so that a
sorting machine can process garbage and extract bottles into proper
categories. Then the bottles could be re-filled, re sealed and re-used
many times -- just as bottles used to be re-used in this country before
about 1960.
Electronic circuit boards -- the guts of our
computers and cell phones -- should be manufactured in modules with the
circuit diagrams published online so that they could be re-used in new
products rather than being simply crushed and discarded. Their inherent
complexity should be viewed as an investment that we should not throw
away.
For every ton of trash that we landfill or
incinerate in the U.S., another 71 tons of waste are produced during the
mining, drilling, logging, processing, transporting, and manufacturing of
those products.(p. 19) Burning or burying our municipal discards entails
great replacement costs.
Since 1970, we have consumed one-third of the
world's available natural resources -- forests, minable metals, fossil
fuels, and so on.[4] This enormous waste is the main reason why, if
everyone in the world tried to live as we live in the U.S.,
we
would need six planet
Earths
to provide the raw materials and places to throw stuff away. Our U.S.
throw-away lifestyle is threatening the planet with
ecological
overshoot and collapse, while producing
massive
profits
for
certain industries.
Reusing, recycling and composting are threats
to those major industries that profit from our single-use society. If we
were reusing the 170 million tons of municipal discards that are
currently going into landfills and incinerators, then we would
effectively be reducing 12 billion tons (71 tons of waste times 170
million tons of stuff) of industrial waste. This is the kind of savings
that could put us on the path towards real sustainability. We might
actually be able to
envision a no-growth,
steady-state
economy (gasp). (More on a
steady-state economy
here.)
Although zero-waste manufacturing is not on
the national agenda (yet) for many municipal governments, diverting
usable stuff from landfills and incinerators is an idea whose time has
come, and dozens of cities around the world are taking it seriously. As
part of the
Urban
Environmental
Accords, cities like Oakland, Portland and Seattle have agreed to
meet the goal of zero waste by 2040.(p.49) San Francisco (which already
recycles close to 70% of its trash) has committed to increasing that
proportion to 90% by 2020 -- and they are demonstrating that this can be
done using today's technology with
curbside recycling and composting
programs.
Zero-waste manufacturing -- designing for
reuse -- is going to get us beyond 90% recycling -- which slows our rate
of raw material consumption but doesn't stop it -- to 99%. Some of the
incentives for society to make that transition will include
extended
producer
responsibility
(EPR), which makes it industry's responsibility to design non-toxic,
reusable, recyclable or compostable products. With EPR, the manufacturers
of an item (such as a TV) retains legal
liability for the item at the end of
its useful life -- creating an incentive to manufacture with something in
mind besides a landfill or incinerator, both of which endanger the
environment and public health. (In the U.S., California is leading the
way with a
Product
Stewardship Council with a very
broad membership. The Product
Policy Institute in
Athens, Ga. has been instrumental in this important development; see
their video, Cradle
to Cradle.)
The good news here is that we can now see
unequivocally that we must change and that zero waste -- meaning both
recycling and zero- waste manufacturing -- must be part of the
solution if we are to get on the path towards sustainability. On our
present course, the garbage stream will grow steadily from 250 million
tons per year in 2006 to over 300 million tons by 2030 (an increase of
20%). With zero waste firmly in our decision-making toolkit, we can
envision a world without a waste stream that poisons both future
generations and ourselves.
Imagine if Congress had the creative insight
and the guts to say no to the Big Three auto makers and yes to millions
of green jobs and thousands of community-based economic engines (public
works projects) based on the principles of resource conservation,
clean
production and
zero
waste manufacturing. That would be a bailout worth fighting for, and
one that would certainly help us step back from the brink of climate
chaos.
[1] Brenda Platt, David Ciplet, Kate Bailey
and Eric Lombardi,
Stop
Trashing the
Climate (June 2008).
www.stoptrashingtheclimate.org
[2] See for example, Michelle Allsopp, Pat
Costner, and Paul Johnson,
Incineration
& Public Health: State of
Knowledge of the Impacts of
Waste Incineration on Human Health (Greenpeace, Exeter, UK: March 2001).
And, also: Cormier, S. A., Lomnicki, S., Backes, W., and
Dellinger, B. (June 2006). "Origin and Health Impacts of Emissions
of Toxic By-Products and Fine Particles from Combustion and Thermal
Treatment of Hazardous Wastes and Materials." Environmental Health
Perspectives, 114(6): 810-817.
[3] Over a twenty year period, methane is 72
times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2; over a 100-year period,
methane's potency drops
to 25 times that of CO2 because some of the methane decomposes over time
(it has a half-life of seven years in the atmosphere). The report
authors use the twenty-year time period -- potency of 72 -- because of
the urgency of the climate catastrophe and because of the potential
benefits of reducing methane emissions in the short term. Dr. Ed J.
Dlugokencky, Global Methane Expert at NOAA says, "Scientifically
speaking, using the 20-year time horizon to assess methane emissions is
as equally valid as using the 100-year time horizon."(p. 7)
[4] Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter
Lovins, Natural Capitalism, Little Brown and Company, (1999), p. 4.
Return
to Table of Contents
David Ciplet
GAIA
www.no-burn.org
(510)883-9490 ext. 102
dave@no.address
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