Category Archives: Natural Resources

I Used to Love Flying

Leave a reply

And maybe I can again. This starts out non-EcoOptimistically, but it doesn’t end that way.

I like seeing cities. I like seeing museums. I like seeing ancient ruins. I like seeing family members who live on the other side of the continent. Sometimes I need to go sit on a remote beach. (I admit, I’m not a hiking, canoeing, snorkeling kind of guy. I can see you wagging your finger: “you call yourself an environmentalist?”)

But you gotta fly to do a lot of that.

Now, I love flying. Just not the kind of flying we have to endure these days to do any of those things I like. In fact, I used to be a pilot – not 787s; just the kind with one propeller on the nose and two seats behind me. I found it fun (if intense) and beautiful, and I still love to watch planes landing. I even co-write a book back then on learning how to fly.

The problem is the commercial version isn’t fun anymore and, maybe more problematically, it’s one of the nastiest unsustainable things anyone – especially an environmentalist who doesn’t want to be a hypocrite – can do.

First, the not-fun part. You’ve been there. Crammed in a noisy metal cylinder, with a stranger six inches away and your knees practically in your lap. The food’s no longer bad because there isn’t any. Lines to get to the gate; lines at the gate; rushing to see if there’s an overhead compartment left; more lines to get out. Fly the friendly skies? It’s no wonder United Airlines had to retire that slogan.

And, then there’s the eco-pessimistic side. Some stats from the BBC:
“Around 2.4% of global CO2 emissions come from aviation. Together with other gases and the water vapour trails produced by aircraft, the industry is responsible for around 5% of global warming.”

The vast majority (90%) of people don’t ever fly*, but for those who fly frequently it can easily become the largest part of their carbon footprint. “One round-trip flight between New York and San Francisco generates two to three tons of carbon dioxide emissions per passenger, more than 10 percent of the annual carbon footprint of the typical American.” I often ask my students to calculate their ecofootprint using an online calculator, and then to redo it with less flying. Since many of them come from overseas, flying to and from New York a few times a year is a major part of their footprint. But what can they do? Not fly back home during breaks? That knowledge can instill “carbon guilt” and leave them with despair, since they don’t really have an alternative.

And what’s an environmentalist to do? How can I justify flying to the Galapagos to ‘see nature?’ Or fly to a conference on sustainability?

There’s even a term for the movement to have people fly less: “flight shame” or flygskam – the original Swedish term.

* Within that remaining 10%, there’s an increasing subset that, as noted by Lloyd Alter in Treehugger, flies in private jets. The carbon footprint of those is many-fold the already high footprint of flying commercial.

And here’s another, less talked about, factor. What about all those natural resources? Think about the aluminum, carbon fiber, copper, plastic and synthetic fabrics that all those huge containers are made of, and what happens to them when the plane is retired after 15 or 20 years. Most of those massive A380s, those double-decked 600-seat behemoths, have ended up in aircraft “boneyards,” some after less than ten years of use, alongside thousands of their grounded brethren.

Aerial view of the Tucson, AZ aircraft boneyard

That’s a lot of not only materials, but also embodied (sometimes called upfront) carbon: the energy it took to make those materials. It may be trivial compared to the fuel those planes gobbled up in their short lifetimes, but the combination of that embodied energy and the “stranded,” essentially landfilled, materials is not insignificant.

Some of the parts in those planes can be salvaged, often for use in other planes. And there are designers who have been creative with what they’ve found in the boneyards, making cool furniture and even buildings.

Motoart’s “Albatross Elevator Desk”

“747 Wing House,” by David Hertz Architect

Hotel Costa Verde in Costa Rica

Recycled aluminum tiles made from aircraft hulls

Not actually part of an airplane, this was, I was told, part of a modular system used to make temporary runways on beaches in WWII. It came from a boneyard, and I explored using them to screen a carport on a project.

There is an ecooptimistic side or two. First, we don’t have to fly as much, at least for business, courtesy of our digital world; we’ve all learned how to zoom. I do almost all my meetings that way, even when I could have subway’d there. (Luckily, I live somewhere that I don’t need a car.) And one of the few positive things to arise from Covid is that I’ve discovered I can have guest speakers in my classes who are anywhere in the world.

It doesn’t mean I can do everything without flying; I can just do a lot more without it.

And there are a couple of other causes for hope on the near horizon. (Yep, that’s an intentional pun.)

  • Biofuels (Sustainable Aviation Fuels or SAFs) are getting extensive testing and are on the verge of becoming legally accepted for jet fuel. Several airlines are trialing them. But SAFs are not without controversy. Though they have several advantages – their net carbon emissions are less than fossil fuels and they emit fewer particulates and no sulfur dioxide – they are still mixed with kerosene jet fuel, and there are other associated emissions. 
  • And beyond biofuels might be this… (I love it, btw, when my interest in flying overlaps with my sustainability side – this is from a site I follow for completely non-eco reasons.)
    “Long Haul Flights Could Be Powered By Fuel Made From Thin Air”
  • And a formerly pie-in-the-(almost literal)-sky EcoOptimist part is the near-reality of electric planes. They’re only slightly behind the curve from electric vehicles. They’ll still require energy in the form of electricity, but at least they won’t be spewing greenhouse gasses into the upper atmosphere. And more and more of the electricity is going to be from renewables.

The “Wright Spirit” uses an existing airframe and transforms it with electric engines. It’s supposed to start service in 2026. https://www.weflywright.com/

United Airlines is buying 100 of these 19 passenger electric planes. (And Mesa Airlines, which is affiliated with United, is buying an additional 100.) They’re also supposed to start service in 2026.

This NASA experimental design is what the industry calls ‘clean sheet,’ meaning it’s designed from scratch, not a variation on an existing plane. (NASA.gov)

Artist rendering of Zunum Aero aircraft flying over Seattle
Source: Zunum Aero

And then there are dirigibles. Put aside those horrific images of the Hindenburg. It was filled with highly flammable hydrogen. Dirigibles since then are filled with helium, which has supply issues, but is much safer.

Otto dirigible

This 6-passenger one will get around 10x the mpg of a jet while costing, they claim, less than 1/6th of the operating costs. It will go 460 mph, more than 2/3rds the speed of a passenger jet. It will be faster than most turboprops and have a much longer range. And it’ll be a lot more comfortable. https://ottoaviation.com/celera-500l

Hybrid Air Vehicles says, “from 2026 Airlander will transport up to 100 passengers on short haul journeys, with 90% fewer emissions.” Slower than conventional airplanes (but much safer than that dirigible that everyone thinks of), it will probably be more like taking a boat.
The bigger market for dirigibles will probably be for freight, with a huge savings over the cost and environmental impact of conventional air freight.

So, while I’m sure the tin cans will still be cheek by jowl with unmasked people coughing and kneeing me, I’ll feel a little less hypocritical flying to the occasional conference to gather with other environmentalists or spending a holiday now and then with my nieces.

I wouldn’t exactly call that full-fledge EcoOptimism, but perhaps it’s closer to eco-neutral.

The Hills are Alive (Again. Maybe.)

Leave a reply

image of mountaintop removal mining

Image: mountainroadshow.com via WMKY.org

I’ve always been highly skeptical of the coal industry’s claims that the ecosystems of the mountains they blow up – because it’s a cheaper way to get to the coal veins – will be restored when they’re finished. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

This would seem to be at least partially the case in the example of this former mountaintop removal mining site in Kentucky, as profiled in The New York Times. In the images, it doesn’t exactly look like the verdant rolling forested hills that the mines decimated, but it is green and planted.

Back in 2010, a study by the NRDC supported my skepticism. But a 2017 post by the Yale School of the Environment’s blog profiled a more optimistic outlook in a program by Green Forest Work, who have planted nearly 4 million trees across more than 6,000 acres. That, though, is a non-profit project made necessary by the inaction of the coal mining industry in fulfilling their reclamation promises.

screengrab: Appalachian Mountain Advocates

What’s perhaps more significant at the Kentucky project is the plan to build a solar farm on top of it. In true EcoOptimistic win-win-win fashion, this somewhat restores and gives a purpose back to this landscape, creates new jobs in an area with a declining industrial base – thus helping to show that eliminating coal-generated electricity is not an economy killer – and continues the path to convince remaining skeptics that renewable energy is a realistic alternative to fossil fuels.

It also reinforces my daydream of being able to somehow sit down with DINO and dinosaur Joe Manchin to show him the error of his ways, his misplaced view that he is protecting his coal miner constituents, or more likely his coal mining industry backers. As many others have questioned, is it really a misinformed altruism on behalf of hard-working voters or is it a result of his financial backing? In other words, is it people or fossil fuel interests that he thinks he is defending?

If it’s the latter – which is probable since, according to The Times again, “Manchin has received more campaign donations from the oil, coal and gas industries than any other senator in the current election cycle” –  well, that daydream of mine is rather more of a pipe dream. No logical argument will sway him away from the money. That’s despite the fact that those industries are a dying economic sector that no amount of climate denial and legal maneuvering will protect in the long run, and that he’d be doing those industries a favor by helping them redirect into renewable energy.

Then there’s Manchin’s recent statement that “the climate thing” is something “we probably can come to agreement much easier than anything else.” Whatever that means.

The question here is whether the replanting of destroyed mountaintops, accompanied by solar farms, legitimizes mountaintop removal mining. Does it pave the way to allowing more decimating of Appalachian ecosystems? It’s great to find locations for solar farms without displacing other uses or existing ecosystems. But it shouldn’t be used as the justification for more mining.

solar panels on rolling hills

Solar panels on French hillside. Image credit

It’s more than a bit of a stretch, but if we imagine pitched roofs as a kind of artificial rolling geography, we can find another piece of win-win-win news in the continuing development of solar roof shingles. Tesla has been at this for a while, but there are horror stories of complications and unexpected costs. A roofing company (which Tesla isn’t) just announced its new product (also here), which it claims will obviate these issues.

GAF Energy solar roof

Image: GAF Energy

The idea of solar roof shingles is great. Why create a second layer on top of a roof when the solar panels can BE the roof? Adding conventional panels means paying for both the roof and the panels as well as adding weight and creating potential maintenance headaches. So combining them reduces costs and makes for an easier installation either when building a new roof or replacing an existing one. It also gets rid of those ugly panels. (That’s the third part, in this case, of the EcoOptimist win-win-win scenario.)

As with the solar panels on former coal mines, roofs are a logical choice for harvesting solar energy. (Airports and big box stores are, too.) The difference is that, with solar roof shingles, ecosystems aren’t being destroyed first.

Plastic Free July, with some updates to my list of bans

Leave a reply

This having been Plastic Free July (it’s not too late to make your Plastic Free commitments!), I’ve updated the EcoOptimism list of Plastic Bans Worldwide.

screen shot of Plastics Bans webpage from EcoOptimism

screen shot from EcoOptimism’s Plastic Bans Worldwide

Australia has a fragmented policy that, for instance, stresses reducing plastics at beaches. On a more advanced level, they are attempting to ban microbeads. However, the phaseout is voluntary. But the most interesting part is that they are including bioplastics in the plastic phase out plans, acknowledging that bioplastics are not the great solution most people think they are. While it’s nice that they aren’t petroleum-based, their compostability is misleading. Despite being (mostly) plant based, they don’t break down in standard compost facilities, instead requiring higher heat and sunlight. Furthermore, they muck up recycling streams when they get included with other plastics and it may be impossible to tell them from other plastics because they are included in the catchall number 7 “other” plastics category.

New York State is banning (by Jan 1, 2024) those little bottles of toiletries used in hotel rooms. (But they were so cute!)

There are many bans in effect or going into effect in European countries, but the EU as a whole is taking on some measures including a target for recycling of 90% of plastic bottles by 2029 and 50% of plastic packaging by 2025.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence (I doubt it) that Mattel announced earlier this month the “Barbie Loves the Ocean” line. In their writeup, Inhabitat says it’s made from 90% recycled ocean-bound plastic parts sourced within 50 kilometers of waterways in areas that are lacking formal waste collection systems. But like Lego’s announcement a couple of years ago that it would make parts from recycled plastic, this is somewhat misleading in that it is only a small part of their production. (To be fair, according to Mattel, “The launch is in line with Mattel’s goal to achieve 100% recycled, recyclable or bio-based plastic materials across all its products and packaging by 2030.”)

image of Barbie Loves the Ocean

Image from Mattel website

Perhaps more significantly, they also announced a takeback program called PlayBack. Though less press-worthy at first glance (which, after all, is what gets press – and therefore notice), it’s their start of what’s called Extended Producer Responsibility, a concept that’s becoming less conceptual in which manufacturers take responsibility for their products throughout the product’s lifetime, including the end of life, so that fewer things end up in landfills.

While Plastic-free July is well and good, the idea of a plastic-free month strikes me as similar to meatless Mondays. Why only one month of no single-use plastics or only one day a week of no meat?

This UN banner from back in May gets it right: “No More Single-use Plastic.” Period.

photo of UN single-use plastic banner

Photo credit: David Bergman

The Return of Bioplastics

1 Reply

What’s old is new again

Was there a time when plastics were not made from petroleum? You wouldn’t know it from the plastics we’ve used – and unsuccessfully discarded in mass quantities – since the 1950s. But the origins of plastics were from plants. Indeed, one of the first plastics, cellophane, invented in 1900 (or 1908), was named for the plant fibers, cellulose, that it was made from. Henry Ford famously wanted to make a bioplastic car (made from hemp or soybeans, depending on who you ask) and even prototyped one. It would have been lighter and, he said, safer than metal cars and would have addressed a metal shortage during World War II.

Scotch tape made from cellulose/cellophane

Scotch tape was – and is – made from cellulose fibers. “Made of Cellophane” image: Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0

This month is Plastic Free July. There are many posts out there about what you can do. Just a few: Greenpeace, EcoWatch, MSN, Treehugger,  

But then the success of petroleum-based or synthetic plastics pushed bioplastics aside. Synthetic plastics became ubiquitous due to their affordability and unique properties. One of those properties is its durability, and the durability is both a positive and negative characteristic. The problem lies in its contemporary, perverse use for things that we’d rather not be durable. Most specifically, for single-use plastics: take-out containers, plastic bags, bottled water, six-pack rings. You get the idea. Why use a material that lasts for hundreds of years for something that is used for five minutes?

EcoOptimism has discussed the issue of single-use plastics for a while (here, here, and here) and, in fact, maintains a list of all the bans and fees on them in a database.

Which brings us to the return of bioplastics because, in addition to being made from renewable resources, many of them can decompose quickly. The issue – and the reason for the success of synthetic plastics – is that they are relatively expensive.

Bioplastics, we have to note, are not without controversy and some may not be the savior they are thought to be (and also here). Their claims about biodegradability may be suspect, and they don’t play nicely with other plastics if they get into the recycling stream.

That problem, along with the problem of cost, though, may be on the way out because newer ways to make it, going beyond the corn and potato starch methods, are being rapidly developed. Soooo… here is an accumulated synopsis of the most recent efforts. The fact that it’s so lengthy is testament to the vast potential.

It should be noted that in this era of shrinking demand for petroleum-based fuels, due to diminished travel in the pandemic among other factors, fossil fuel companies are gearing up to expand their production of plastics. The need for inexpensive plant-based plastic is more crucial than ever.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, as I’ve written about,  exacerbated the single-use plastic problem. Latex gloves, for example, can be found trashed everywhere. And just as plastic bags were being banned in many places, they’ve come back because they are perceived as more hygienic. But a recent statement signed by 125 health experts in 18 countries says that reusable bags are safe. No surprise that the Plastics Industry Association says single-use plastics are the only way to go.

The good news is that there’s a lot going on out there. The bad news is that it makes for a long post. But it’s worth it.

From The Guardian:
May 16, 2020
“The end of plastic? New plant-based bottles will degrade in a year Alternatives to Plastics”

EcoOptimism’s take: I’m starting off with this one because, first, it addresses one of the biggest sources of plastics pollution: soda bottles. Second, the materials they are sourcing from are the “usual suspects”: wheat and corn and some other foods such as beets.  The problem, as I note several times below, is that in many cases, these are food, so using them to make bioplastics can impact food supplies.

From EcoWatch:
May 6, 2020
“5 Sustainable Alternatives to Plastics”

EcoOptimism’s take: Olive pits, sunflower hulls, fish waste and algae, plant sugars, and mushrooms. It’s all good.

Bioplastics made from olive pits

Bioplastics made from olive pits. Source: Material Connexion

From Australian Geographic:
Nov 1, 2019
“Teen Invents Biodegradable “Plastic” That Decomposes In 33 Days Using Prawn Shells And Silk Cocoon Protein”

EcoOptimism’s take: A Sydney high school student invented this a science project after deciding to not use cornstarch because it would take away from food. “I was at the fish and chip shop getting prawns for dinner and noticed that the prawn shells looked like plastic. I went back to the lab and thought about what exactly made them look like that.”
Note: the original post that I saw this in, with the catchier headline above, seems to have disappeared, but this is the source.

High School student who made bioplastic from prawn shells

Image credit: Louise Kennerley via Australian Geographic

From Smithsonian Magazine:
Nov 14, 2019
“This Bioplastic Made From Fish Scales Just Won the James Dyson Award”

EcoOptimism’s take: More fish. Organic fish waste, to be exact. The inventor was, at the time, a 24-year old graduate student in England and won the prestigious James Dyson Award.

From CNN:
January 17, 2017
“Plastic you can drink: A solution for pollution?

EcoOptimism’s take: “The resulting “100% bio-based” material was biodegradable and compostable, breaking down over a period of months on land or at sea, or instantly in hot water. “I wanted to show this bioplastic would be so harmless to sea animals that a human could drink it,” he says. “I wasn’t nervous because it passed an oral toxicity test.”

“The entrepreneur launched a company in 2014 selling cassava-plastic ponchos. Today, Avani Eco produces four tons of material a day [with a capacity five times that] that is used for products including plastic bags, food packaging, and covers for hospital beds.”

From Labiotech:
Nov 20, 2019
“Spanish Researchers Produce Straws Made of Bacterial Bioplastic”

EcoOptimism’s take: Bacteria – the good kind

From Food Manufacture:
June 11, 2020
“EU-funded bioplastic developed”

EcoOptimism’s take: The cool part is that it’s “produced from industry by-products: cheese whey and micro-cellulose from almond shells,” and supposedly fully degrades within 90 days.

From FreshFruitPortal:
March 26, 2020
“New bioplastic developed from fruit residue in Chile”

EcoOptimism’s take: The important thing here is that it’s made from residue not the consumable food part of the plants, unlike this bioplastic made from rice.

From Bio Market Insights:
Feb 22, 2018
“Four years after launching, Tetra Pak’s bio-based packaging hits the half a billion unit mark”

EcoOptimism’s take: These Tetra Pak containers are made from 23% plastic, so on the one hand, converting that to a biopolymer made from sugar cane (which presumably is the edible part) makes sense. But on the other hand, they are still a multilayer composite that can’t be readily recycled – what McDonough and Braungart call a monstrous hybrid.

TetraPak container layers

image source: https://biomarketinsights.com/

Also from Bio Market Insights:
Dec 3, 2019
“Researchers develop banana waste-based bioplastic.”

EcoOptimism’s take: The fruit of the banana tree makes up just 12% of the plant and the rest is waste – or maybe now a byproduct to be made into a bioplastic. One has to cynically wonder, though, what happens if banana blight ruins the Cavendish banana crop.

From PlasticStar Material News:
Aug 22, 2019
“Bioplastic derived from cactus leaves

Photo: Sandra Pascoe Ortiz

And juice from the cactus as well:

From Fast Company:
June 20, 2019
“This new biodegradable plastic is made from cactus”

EcoOptimism’s take: While it’s fun to picture cactus farms, this plastic, unlike some others mentioned here, does use the edible (drinkable, that is) part of the cactus. That BBC video, by the way can be found here.

From New Atlas:
April 7, 2020
“Another possible use for coffee grounds: Biodegradable plastic’

EcoOptimism’s take: I know there’s a pun in there somewhere, but I’m not caffeinated enough to think of one.

The path from coffee grounds to plastic.

The path from coffee grounds to plastic. Image Credit: Yokohama National University.

From Vice:
July 30, 2019
“A Filipino Scientist Made Bioplastic Out Of Mango And Seaweed”

EcoOptimism’s take: Somehow, this article starts out by talking about tardigrades, which immediately caught my attention even though they seem to have nothing to do with the topic.

From Intelligent Living:
June 5, 2019
“Here’s A Truly Biodegradable Algae-based Bioplastic You Can Make At Home!no Scientist Made Bioplastic Out Of Mango And Seaweed”

EcoOptimism’s take: DO try this at home. And the hues come from fruits and vegetables.

Most plastics contain a polymer plasticizer (usually made from petroleum, often toxic) and a dye (usually synthetic). This one’s polymer is algae, the plasticizer is water and the dyes come from fruits and vegetables.

Cool translucent disks made from algae.

Cool translucent disks made from algae. Image source: Intelligent Living

From Fast Company:
Feb 10, 2020
“This biodegradable bioplastic sucks carbon from the air”

EcoOptimism’s take: This one takes us past the category of just avoiding petroleum-based plastics and into the topic of regenerative design: designs that not only “do less harm” but repair the damage the same time.

Plastic that detects spoilage

Plastic that detects food spoilage. Photo: Primitives

From Good News Network:
Feb 16, 2020
“Forget the ‘Best By’ Date; This Compostable Bioplastic Packaging Changes Color When the Food Goes Bad”

EcoOptimism’s take: Also in the category of bioplastics that go beyond just being more environmentally preferable than conventional plastics, this one can help with the major issue of food waste – alerting us when that stuff in the far reaches of the refrigerator needs to be consumed – or thrown out.

Believe it or not, there are bioplastics that didn’t make the cut here. But did you really want me to make this post even longer?

New York Joins the Ranks of the War on Single-Use Plastics

Leave a reply

plastic bag sign

Today marks the day that the New York State ban on plastic bags takes effect (as well as New York City’s $.05 fee for paper bags). I haven’t yet been to any stores to check on compliance. I hope someone who’s more intrepid on a cold Sunday morning than I am is taking up that task. But as of yesterday, shoppers I saw in a supermarket and a drug store were being offered and were taking plastic bags. I guess they were feeling they didn’t need any practice, despite the signs that have been there for the last couple of weeks. And cashiers were still surprised when I refused them.

And there is the predictable backlash. In the New York Post, one shopper was quoted: “Not good for old people, for disabled people. Where do you put your groceries if they’re not in a bag? So it sucks.”

Seniors have been a factor. The city tried to impose a fee on plastic bags in 2017, but it was defeated by the state legislature. When I called my state senator’s office to complain about him voting against the small fee, his office told me that his vote had been based on extensive complaints by seniors that they couldn’t afford the $.05. I’m willing to bet that the plastic bag lobby sent staffers to senior facilities where they could persuade people en masse to call their legislators. (He was voted out of office at the next election. I’d like to think his opposition to the fee was the cause of his defeat, though I’m sure it wasn’t.)

Perhaps it was for the best as the state’s outright ban is better than a fee by the city.

So, New York is now added to my database of plastic bans and fees worldwide. In fact, just two months into 2020, I’ve added several entries. Some are just bans on plastic bags while others are more extensive bans on single-use plastics: China (plastic bags by the end of 2020 and other single-use plastics to follow), Thailand, Jamaica, Belize, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas.

A bill in the US Congress, sponsored by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), would address the issue of single-use plastics nationwide. One groundbreaking part of the bill, according to EcoWatch, “requires plastic producers to take responsibility for their waste. The bill would shift the burden of waste collection and management from local governments and taxpayers to the manufacturers of items like packaging, containers, food service products and paper, who would be charged with designing and funding recycling systems.”

That’s a good thing because bans are only as effective as the compliance with them. As long as recycling places the onus on the public, this will be a problem. And it’s not always because of our laziness. It’s often just plain difficult. Even after researching it (and how many people do that?), I’m still uncertain what types of plastic can be recycled here in NYC. (Cardboard milk cartons, according to the posters, get recycled with plastics, not paper. Go figure.) The city says all hard plastics – not the flimsy stuff – can go in the recycling bin. But Beyond Plastics and Greenpeace say that much of that can’t actually be recycled, even if a company’s label sometimes says it can be. The city is just trying to make it simpler for us. Sort of.

That Greenpeace report found that:

  1. Only some PET #1 and HDPE #2 plastic bottles and jugs can be legitimately labeled as recyclable in the U.S. today.
  2. Common plastic pollution items, including single use plastic food service and convenience products, cannot be legitimately claimed as recyclable in the U.S.
  3. Plastics #3-7 have negligible-to-negative value and are effectively a category of products that municipal recycling programs may collect, but do not actually recycle. Plastic #3-7 waste collected in municipal systems across the country is being sent to landfills or incinerated.
  4. Many full body shrink sleeves on PET #1 and HDPE #2 bottles and jugs make them non-recyclable.

Remedying this would require something called “extended producer responsibility,” the concept that a manufacturer’s responsibility doesn’t end when the product goes out their door. That’s what that US congressional bill would address.

EPR could go beyond simple plastic recycling. Imagine if Dell or Apple had to take their laptops back at the end of their useful lives. Or if Whirlpool had to pick up your dead refrigerator or washing machine. Not only would it simplify recycling, it would also mean companies would want to design their products keeping in mind that they were going to have to deal with them later on. That’d be incentive to incorporate something call “design for disassembly” in order to make recycling easier.

That would be a breakthrough. It would reverse that shift of responsibility. A more direct approach in the meantime is a good old-fashioned lawsuit. Gizmodo’s environmental arm, Earther, reports that the Earth Island Institute is suing “ten companies—including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle, and Procter and Gamble—on Wednesday, alleging that the companies pollute waterways, coasts, and oceans with the millions of tons of plastic packaging they produce. A 2018 report found that globally, Coke, Pepsi, and Nestle account for 14 percent of plastic pollution.”

Ideally, we stop the scourge of single-use plastics. But that’s going to take a while and, meanwhile, we already have an unfathomable amount of plastics ending up in landfills or the oceans. While it’s better, I always tell my sustainable design students, to prevent a problem from occurring in the first place rather than have to deal with it afterward, we have to do both in the case of plastics. There are companies like Terracycle and Smile Plastics that are making things from that stream of detritus. An Israeli startup is working on taking all sorts of garbage – plastics, dirty paper and food waste – and making into a kind of plastic pellet that can then be made into other products. It would solve a multitude of problems including diminishing the amount of methane, a greenhouse gas, produced by landfills.

As great as that could be, it still addresses the problem after the fact. Single-use plastics are a perverse use of an otherwise wondrous material. Because plastics last such a long time, let’s use them for products that last a long time. Not flimsy bags and soda bottles and packaging.

For New Years Day, giving credit where credit – the good and the bad – is due

Leave a reply

I source and update the information for my Status of Plastic Bans Worldwide from many places. (Just last week I added an entry about UK schools being strongly “encouraged” to stop using single-use plastics.) But one of the most useful sites for my updates is EcoWatch and, for their end of the year wrap up, they posted “2018: A Year of Fighting Plastic Waste.” In my own end of the year post last week, “EcoOptimistic News for the End of an Environmentally Crappy Year,” I included single-use plastics as one of the leading topics, so obviously I agree with them.

Embed from Getty Images

There was plenty of news on other environmental fronts, as I wrote in that post. Most notably, climate change took a beating under our rogue president, but that beating, as I’ve been noting in several posts (here and here), has engendered a backlash in which other institutions (local governments, NGOs, businesses and even the military) have been taking up the mantle.

Similarly, the rapidly increasing awareness of the scale of our plastics problem has resulted in a correspondingly rapid escalation of attempts to address the problem. Hence my continuing tabulation of the bans and taxes worldwide on single-use plastics – and my desire to acknowledge EcoWatch for their reporting.

On the flip side, George Monbiot writes in The Guardian: “We won’t save the Earth with a better kind of disposable coffee cup.” In it, he touches on two points. The first is one that I try to make in all my classes and involves taking a step back to see if you are asking the right question. Regarding disposable coffee cups, he writes:

[S]ome people asked me, “So what should we use instead?” The right question is, “How should we live?” But systemic thinking is an endangered species.

The version of this I usually pose in my classes asks: if you were tasked with challenging the plastic waste generated by toothbrushes, what would you do? The usual answers are to make it of recycled plastic or biodegradable plastic or design it with replaceable heads, etc. But the “right” question to ask, instead, is: is there a better way to clean our teeth? This opens up a different realm of possibilities in which, maybe, we don’t need toothbrushes at all.

The second point Monbiot makes is a “structural” one. In the case of plastics and many other materials, the solution to waste, we’re told, is to recycle. But as I and others have written, this puts the responsibility in the wrong hands, purposely shifting it from corporations to consumers, i.e. us.

Writing this weekend in The Guardian “The plastic backlash: what’s behind our sudden rage – and will it make a difference?,” Stephen Buryani goes into some depth about the origins of this:

Following the failure of legislation loose alliance of oil and chemical companies, along with drinks and packaging manufacturers, pursued a two-part strategy that would successfully defuse anti-plastic sentiment for a generation. The first part of the strategy was to shift responsibility for litter and waste from companies to consumers. Rather than blaming the companies that had promoted disposable packaging and made millions along the way, these same companies argued that irresponsible individuals were the real problem. This argument was epitomised by a 1965 editorial in a US packaging trade journal headlined “Guns Don’t Kill People”, which blamed “the litterbugs who abuse our countryside” rather than the manufacturers themselves.

This was memorialized in the famous “Crying Indian” television commercial in which the supposed Indian (he was actually Italian) sheds a tear about littering, saying “People start pollution; people can stop it.”  Corporations may be considered people, but that’s obviously not whom the makers of the commercial were referring to.

Monbiot continues his point:

This represents the mistaken belief that a better form of consumerism will save the planet. The problems we face are structural: a political system captured by commercial interests, and an economic system that seeks endless growth. Of course we should try to minimise our own impacts, but we cannot confront these forces merely by “taking responsibility” for what we consume.

He casts a much wider, more foundational outlook:

One-planet living means not only seeking to reduce our own consumption, but also mobilising against the system that promotes the great tide of junk. This means fighting corporate power, changing political outcomes and challenging the growth-based, world-consuming system we call capitalism.

Disposable coffee cups made from new materials are not just a non-solution: they are a perpetuation of the problem. Defending the planet means changing the world.

While this would appear to negate much of what we are doing, the more profound questioning leads to EcoOptimistic responses that look at how to not simply address a problem in short-term, limited ways, but instead to change things – concepts, systems, thinking (i.e. systems thinking) – to get to the core and truly address causes.

Putting the cost of recycling onto manufacturers is a response to this. In England, there’s a proposal to force retailers to pay the cost of collecting and recycling packaging materials. Germany has had a version of this since 1991, and it’s getting expanded. (The EPA had a webpage about packaging regulations employed by other countries but – no surprise – it’s been removed. You can find some of it preserved by the Internet archive Wayback Machine.)

You could look at this as a New Year’s resolution for us: challenge ourselves to challenge the others who create problems by selfishly shifting responsibility. Many of us make resolutions to go the gym more often. The problem is that, aside from rapidly letting the well-intended resolution fall by the wayside, it doesn’t really address the causes of the problem such as fast food (which is largely a creation of big business) and sedentary lifestyles, which are in part of product of suburban sprawl (sitting in cars) and in-home entertainment. You could make an argument that cars, television and single-use plastics are a result of consumer demand, but what created and then encouraged that demand?

We Need to Dispose of the Word Disposable

1 Reply

I’ve often written here [1, 2, 3, 4] about how word choices can affect how we see things. Problematic connotations can sometimes arise by stigma and sometimes by subtle associations. A classic environmental example is how we refer to global warming. In the 90s, the Republican strategist Frank Luntz encouraged rebranding it as climate change because it seemed less frightening and would therefore make it less of an issue. (The irony is that it’s actually a more accurate term. But because it minimizes perception of the problem, as Luntz desired, many of us prefer to call it something more emphatic like climate disruption.)

In a similar vein, years ago, before the advent of LED lights, when improved fluorescent lights were the most energy-efficient technology, I wrote in a guest column in a lighting industry magazine that the word “fluorescent” had too many negative associations with its older, uglier versions. So, to get people to come around to the newer, more pleasing fluorescent bulbs, I wrote that they needed to be renamed.

The impetus for this current thought about words that can have misleading connotations occurred as I was sitting in a waiting room that had a coffee station. In need of caffeine – I had forgotten my coffee travel mug – I grabbed a cup. As I finished making my fix, I looked at the counter and saw the disposable Styrofoam cup, the disposable “K-cup” coffee pod and the tiny – you guessed it, disposable – milk container. My “garbage guilt” set in.

Those little ketchup squeeze tubes are another pet peeve. My order of fries inevitable needs a half dozen or more of them. They make a messy pile of garbage that can be neither recycled or composted. Plus they get all over your hands. They’re a rare example of something both disposable and inconvenient.

The litter atop that coffee station caused me to ponder the word “disposable.” For many people, disposability connotes convenience (finger-coating Ketchup pouches aside). You don’t have to bring stuff – containers, utensils, plastic bags – with you and you don’t have to worry about cleaning or taking care of them. Just toss it. No problem. Disposability is seen as a positive thing, reinforced by the “able” suffix.

The word makes the use of disposable things and the resulting garbage seem OK. They’re meant to be guiltlessly thrown away because that’s how they’re designed and perceived.

When I advocated for renaming fluorescent bulbs, I couldn’t come up with a replacement term. I’d like to do better here, especially as single-use plastics are being increasingly recognized as a major problem. (The issue is being addressed in part by bans and fees – see my “Status of Plastic Bans” list – but even then, there’s pushback by both users and producers.)

So, how can we retitle disposability? My first thought was an obvious one. Just call it what it is: “landfill.” But that doesn’t work as an adjective in front of “cups” or “bags” (or with the current fixation on straws).

Next, I attempted to channel Stephen Colbert’s coining of “truthiness” with “disposiness.” But I’m not as clever as Colbert and it didn’t feel like it solved the problem.  There was, though, some, er, truth to it as the garbage never really gets disposed of. It’s still here, just relocated. When we throw things away, there is, as Bill McDonough is fond of saying, no “away.”

I’ve concluded that our new term needs to have that suffix “able” in it, but with a prefix that drives the point home. Garbagable? Trashable? Wastable? They still imply, though, that because something has the ability to be thrown out – e.g. it’s trashable – it’s OK. The word needs to communicate that single-use stuff that doesn’t decompose or effectively recycle is NOT okay. It’s wasteful and it’s a problem so it needs to be discouraged. But I don’t usually advocate for guilting people into environmental action. That’s been repeatedly shown to not work. Better to play upon self-interest and desire. “Wasteful” (I rejected “wastable” even though I like creating new words) heads in the right direction – who wants to be wasteful? – but still doesn’t quite get us there.

We need to somehow say you really don’t want to do this. Not an admonishment that you shouldn’t do it.  And it needs to be “sticky,” meaning the word will attach itself to the item the way disposable does.

I’m reluctantly left for the moment with “garbagy.” But it still doesn’t fully meet my criteria. Plus, the English language being what it is, you wouldn’t be sure how to spell or pronounce it.

Maybe I should ask Colbert.

How green is my lawn

Leave a reply

Or, what exactly is it we’re trying to do?

I recently moved from a semi-tiny apartment to a house (don’t ask). Included in the package is a relatively small lawn. Despite its smallness, it bothers me for at least two reasons. The first is personal; I grew up in a pretty large and definitely suburban house with a typically large lawn. It was before the days of lawn services, so it fell to my teenage self to mow the acre of really hilly and only sometimes green expanse. That, by the way, is one of the (many) reasons I vowed to never become a dweller in the supposedly idyllic ‘burbs.

I know many will disagree with this aversion, but let me have my rant.

My second distaste for lawns came about as I became increasingly (and I hope not obnoxiously) a proselytizing environmentalist.

In my classes, as I describe the goals of sustainability, starting from the 3Rs through the triple bottom line and beyond, I use lawn mowing and lawns as an example. I first show a picture of a lawn mower and ask the class how, if they were tasked with making it greener, they would go about it. I get the obvious answers regarding fuel efficiency and recycled materials.

But then I push them further and, usually with some prodding, get them to think about lawns themselves rather than lawn mowers. I do this by asking them to take a step back and question what it is we’re really trying to do. A pedagogical goal of  mine is getting my students to question assumptions and thereby arrive at more sustainable solutions. So, the answer, in this case, is that we are trying to create landscapes around our buildings. But, I ask them, are lawns the only or best way to go about this?

Because we take lawns for granted, they often seem to be the only approach. That means it takes a conceptual leap to get past traditional lawns.

So the question becomes not how to make a more environmental lawnmower, but how to landscape more environmentally. Lawns are nice for picnics, Frisbees and dogs (or dogs catching Frisbees while devouring our picnics). But that doesn’t justify surrounding our houses or, even more egregiously, suburban office buildings with innumerable acres of non-indigenous (virtually all lawn grasses are not native to North America), unnecessary and – here’s the big point – resource intensive artificial carpets.

This whole topic came to mind the other day when the blog Earther posted “Lawns Are an Ecological Disaster.” The article provided supporting data for what I’d been saying for years:

  • There are 40 million acres of lawn in the US, nearly half the total acreage of our major crops
  • We collectively spend more money on landscaping – primarily on lawns – than on foreign aid (roughly $50 billion dollars)
  • We use 580 million gallons of gas each year for lawn mowers.
  • We apply 67 million pounds of pesticides – many carcinogenic or untested – to lawns each year.
  • 30% – 60% of municipal drinking water is used for lawn watering

Image credit: David Bergman

Nor is this new news. Elizabeth Kolbert, among others, wrote about it in depth in the New Yorker back in 2008.

There are yet more issues with lawns, but, hey, this blog is about EcoOptimism. In the class discussion, we eventually get around to the alternative of indigenous planting, though it usually takes, as mentioned above, some prodding. I show them landscapes of wildflowers, xeriscaping and edible lawns.

An edible lawn. Image credit.

An office surrounded by wildflowers and indigenous grasses. Image credit: David Bergman

I also startle them a bit with images of goats, rather than lawnmowers, keeping grass to acceptable height.

Nature’s lawn mower. Available, of course, from Amazon. Image credit

This alternative to lawns can take some getting used to. When I recently tried to convince some clients to plant wildflowers in their small urban front yard, they said the pictures I showed them looked like weeds in the Southwest. (They also wanted paving instead of a lawn because it was easier to maintain.)

Many of us think of lawns as being part of nature and therefore something desirable. But unlike forests, lawns are carbon positive. (This is an unfortunate term and unintuitively means that something – grass in this case – emits more carbon into the atmosphere than is removed.) They are also “monocultures.” Forests and other ecosystems are diverse, with their many plants and animals creating self-sufficient, resilient regions. Lawns, on the other hand, can’t exist without being created and maintained – at great natural and financial expense – by humans.

Looked at this way, getting rid of lawns is, as we like to point out here, win-win-win: ecologically, economically and, harking back to my childhood lawn mowing nemesis, a time-saver.

 

The Distillery: February 2, 2018

Leave a reply

We can all use some positive news these days, especially on the environmental front in which science is considered evil, denial is an alternative fact and the EPA is now what I’m calling the Environmental Destruction Agency. And while I don’t want to gloss over the issues – there isn’t enough paint in the world to do that – I offer here The Distillery, a weekly (or thereabouts) selection of posts to help offset the PTSD of our current nightmare.

The posts I pick will be “real” in the sense that they aren’t pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, as fun as those can be, but are evidence of EcoOptimism.

The theme here: good news disguised as bad news

From ThinkProgress:
January 4, 2018

2017’s costly climate change-fueled disasters are the ‘new normal,’ warns major reinsurer

and from The New York Times:
January 4, 2018

2017 Set a Record for Losses from Natural Disasters. It Could Get Worse

And the “Bomb Cyclone” wasn’t even in 2017, so we’re off to an inauspicious start. But there’s optimism here ….

Photo: U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Ben Bloker

EcoOptimism’s take: On the face of it, this doesn’t sound like an EcoOptimistic post, but it in fact emphasizes the economic incentive to mitigating and adapting to climate change. Insurance companies – especially reinsurers, the ones who insure the insurance companies – have been concerned with this for a while. The Times article references Munich Re, but Swiss Re has also studied the potential costs of covering insurance losses due to climate change and has been ringing alarm bells.

Arguably, since politicians (American, that is) aren’t onboard, it may be the business world that spurs, finally, US action. Ironically, politicians cling to the belief that environmental action is bad for business.

And if the business case for climate action doesn’t work, maybe the military case can…

From Ecowatch:
February 2, 2018

Climate Impacts Nearly Half of U.S. Military Bases

Photo: Michael Lavender / U.S. Navy / Flickr

EcoOptimism’s take: The US military is a surprisingly staunch advocate for adaptation to climate change. Though Trump ridiculed Obama for saying so, climate change is a national security threat that could both create or exacerbate geopolitical and affect military readiness. This post, though, emphasizes the potential direct cost of climate change. As a military policy, it might even have Trump’s ear and bring him to his senses. But maybe that’s my EcoOptimism speaking.

China is going to stop accepting plastic for recycling, so…

From Ecowatch:
January 15, 2018

America Needs a Plastics Intervention. Now’s the Time.

photo source: Scrap Monster

EcoOptimism’s take: So China’s going to stop taking the world’s plastic waste for recycling. That problem, though, creates the impetus for better recycling, plastics that are more recyclable, and/or plastics bans here and elsewhere. And, of course, to stop shipping our problems elsewhere.

A new twist to “Read My Lips” and taxes…

From Evolution News:
January 27, 2018

Would a Beef Tax Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Photo source: Evolution News

EcoOptimism’s take: : Taxes are bad, right? Not if they discourage consumption of things that aren’t good for us or the environment – and meat is both. Think about, for instance, taxes on cigarettes or alcohol. Or sugary drinks, as is catching on in some places. (Though NYC’s proposed tax didn’t survive a lawsuit. On the other hand, the city’s proposal for congestion pricing which, arguably, is a tax, is getting some traction after a false start.)

Now if we can only institute carbon taxes. Or if not that, maybe at least an increase in the decades old gasoline tax, which has been 18.4 cents since 1993. That means it’s actually decreased significantly due to inflation.

But taxes are bad, right?

 

The Distillery: January 6, 2018

Leave a reply

We can all use some positive news these days, especially on the environmental front in which science is considered evil, denial is an alternative fact and the EPA is now what I’m calling the Environmental Destruction Agency. And while I don’t want to gloss over the issues – there isn’t enough paint in the world to do that – I offer here The Distillery, a weekly (or thereabouts) selection of posts to help offset the PTSD of our current nightmare.

The posts I pick will be “real” in the sense that they aren’t pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, as fun as those can be, but are evidence of EcoOptimism.

For the new year, let’s celebrate some renewal – in the form of reforestation. You probably knew that trees are one of the best methods of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (Other than not putting it there in the first place.) Though it’s not all good news, here are some posts illustrating just how effective they can be.

From Yale Environment 360:
October 17, 2017

“Regreening the Planet Could Account for One-Third of Climate Mitigation”

photo: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 CIFOR

EcoOptimism’s take: A Treehugger.com post on the same report put a different spin on it “Restoring nature is climate equivalent of stopping burning oil.”


But just to make sure our EcoOptimism is not blind to reality….

From Earther:
September 19, 2017

“But… Tropical Forests Now Have a Serious Carbon Footprint Problem”

EcoOptimism’s take: All this tells us is that it’s even more important to maintain or, better yet, increase the size of forests and rain forests in particular.