Notes on waste, water, whatever

After finishing my coffee at a New York City Pret a Manger restaurant recently, I lingered near the trash bin, which was divided into separate sections with uniquely shaped openings — not unlike a toddler’s shape-sorting block toy. In my hands: a napkin, a paperboard coffee cup, a cardboard sleeve, a plastic lid. It took me, something of a garbage geek, nearly a minute to figure out what I was supposed to do with each discard.

Did the napkin go with the paper, or did the napkin go with the food waste, which was bound for a composting operation beyond the city limits? (After all, paper is compostable, though experts say ‘tis a far better thing to make new paper from old, in places where recovery systems can handle potentially soiled paper, rather than to make compost from paper.)

Did the plastic lid go with the plastic recycling or into the compartment labeled “trash?” At home, the lid would have gone into the trash, as New York City’s Department of Sanitation, like many others, accepts only narrow-necked plastic bottles for curbside recycling. But businesses in New York hire private carters and so march to a different drummer. Pret a Manger uses Action Carting, a progressive company that collects food waste for composting and, I happened to know, a wider range of plastics for recycling.

I did, eventually, study the educational illustrations above the waste bins, which should have set me straight. But still I had trouble identifying the cup lid among so many different shapes. Maybe I need to go back to kindergarten and the block sorter. Or maybe the illustrations could be a little clearer. (Or perhaps the bins could have a built-in object recognition device: I hold before an electric eye my lid, empty fruit cup, or sandwich box, and a quiet, friendly voice tells me where to put it. I’d prefer a more parsimonious — that is, less technological and less expensive — fix, but what can I say? People do love their apps.)

I can’t offer enough props to Pret for lightening its environnmental impact and nudging customers in the same direction. But my interlude at the waste bins tells me that we’ve got a ways to go down the path toward sustainable packaging (an ideal that ought to include no packaging). According to the EPA, packaging makes up nearly one third of municipal solid waste; between 1990 and 2007, containers and packaging have increased by nearly 14 million tons.

Pret a Manger, which works with environmental groups (like Global Green), packaging designers, waste haulers, paper mills, and composters to blunt the impact of its single-use packaging, and is still experimenting with the perfect receptacle, is leading the way. But peering inside the bins, where cups were mixed willy-nilly with “trash” and bottles were mixed with napkins, I wondered if the public really had the stomach to follow.

Photograph by Scott Dodd

Last month we learned that, in an attempt to cut down on litter, the supervisor of Grand Canyon National Park was set to ban sales of bottled water within the park, starting in January of 2011. (Dasani is the brand sold by concessionaires.) But two weeks before the ban was due to go into effect, the head of the national park system balked. Dasani water would stay, out of “concern for public safety in a desert park.” (Never mind that Utah’s Zion National Park had enacted a similar ban, to great acclaim, in 2008.) Soon the relationship between Coca-Cola, which produces Dasani from tap water, and our national parks was revealed: over a period of years, the corporation has given $13 million to the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that generates private donations for the park system.

Environmentalists are up in arms — about the continued (and continuously promoted) use of disposable plastic water bottles, of course, but more importantly about the heavy influence of corporations in public spaces and debate. There are some angry comments on blogs about the issue, and many people erroneously seem to believe that park visitors would be stripped of any water bottles they carried into the park. Not true. Nor was it likely that the death toll from dehydration would rise. The parks and concessionaries had spent $300,000 developing “filling stations” in preparation for the ban; it’s hard to escape pro-hydration messages in the park (they’re everywhere), and it’s easy to buy reusable bottles on park grounds if you don’t already have them.

For readers who can’t remember what personal hydrological conditions were like 30 years ago, suffice it to say that single-serve plastic bottles of water were not ubiquitous. And yet millions still hiked and camped, carried water, filtered water where they found it, and sometimes waited until they reached their destination (!) to slake their thirst from a fountain or sink.

I hiked and camped in the Grand Canyon in the Pre-Perrier Period. I learned, on a day that I hauled my heavy backpack more than twenty miles across the Tonto Platform and up the South Canyon rim, that thirst can be a great motivator. Our multiple water bottles had long run dry, and we were reduced to eating dry oatmeal in our desperation for calories, with five miles yet to go. All I could focus on was the ice-cold elixir that flowed at trail’s end from a fountain in the dimly lit lobby of the Bright Angel Hotel. (Reader: I survived. I hope this water fountain has, too.)

The Coca-Cola-National Parks fracas seems to be taking on a life of its own, to both groups’ detriment. Dozens of media outlets have picked up on the story, and already more than 94,000 people have signed a pro-ban petition at Change.org. Here’s hoping that the will of the environmentally minded, rather than a corporation representing the interests of its shareholders, will prevail.

Image: Sebastian Toncu/Wikimedia Commons

Rose George, author of 2008’s shockingly forthright and shockingly entertaining The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, has a bone to pick with hydro-philanthropists, whether species Hollywood (Matt Damon excepted) or species Rotary Club. They’ll raise money to dig wells for thirsty Africans, but they’re loath to address the dire need for adequate toilets (or their culturally appropriate equivalent).

And yet: two thirds of the world’s population has no toilet or latrine, and diarrhea kills more children annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. (If that’s too abstract a number, picture a jumbo jet full of children crashing every two hours, every day.) Feces are indeed, as George notes, “a weapon of mass destruction.”

In “Shit: A Survival Guide,” the monothematic fall issue of Colors magazine, George introduces readers to sanitation evangelists and to the brave folks who clean our sewer pipes and alleyways. She also considers the roles of fear and shame in toilet use and looks at the wide world of alternatives to a porcelain throne (meet the flying toilet).

More than a cultural tour of toileting and its discontents, the magazine explores a smorgasbord of dichotomies: shit kills and it saves lives; it pollutes water and promotes plant growth; it stinks and it can be used to cook food. A graphically hip précis of Big Necessity, the Survival Guide goes well beyond the usual lamentations for decent toileting facilities to question some basic assumptions about where, when, and how we go. It’s become common in urban green circles to question the wisdom of using expensively treated drinking water — especially in water-short places — to flush away human excrement, but George forces us to question the morality of flushing away such a valuable fertilizer. There’s phosphorous and nitrogen in them thar feces.

To buy a copy or preview parts of the quarterly, go to the Colors Magazine website.

(November 19 was World Toilet Day, which is meant to draw attention to the importance of sanitation around the world. Check out Matt Damon “talking sh*t” [or typing, via twitter and facebook] for an entire week at http://toiletday.org/md-diarrhea/?s=water_email20111109. Meanwhile, WaterAid and Amnesty International have launched Give A Crap About Human Rights, highlighting the rights to water and sanitation in the context of housing and women’s rights.  Learn more about the day that dare not speak its name at http://www.worldtoilet.org/WTD.

After two and a half years of steady pressure from the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the American Nurses Association, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, Johnson & Johnson has agreed to phase out its use of a formaldehyde-releasing preservative, listed as quaternium-15, in its baby products. (You can read the company’s statement here.) Formaldehyde is classified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a known human carcinogen at high levels of exposure. J&J had been selling formaldehyde-free baby shampoo in other nations but had, to date, resisted CSC pressure (in the form of a massive letter-writing campaign and a series of sit-down powwows with J&J honchos) to change its formulations in the U.S., where the FDA permits its use.

Formaldehyde levels in Johnson & Johnson’s shampoo were relatively low, but remember that babies and children are, pound for pound, exposed to many more chemicals than we larger folk, and they’re exposed to them at a vulnerable time in their development. Children also tend to put stuff in their mouths and crawl around on floors and rugs, where they’re exposed to both the residue of cleaning products and dust, where contaminants like flame retardants abide. And so their body burden grows.

Retooling formulas and getting them into production will be costly for J&J, but a consumer boycott may have been worse — both for the company’s finances and its reputation, especially once the mommy bloggers (who effectively removed BPA from baby bottles in the absence of federal leadership) fully sunk their teeth into this. Of course, if the feds banned the use of formaldehyde in such products altogether — taking a systemic rather than a piecemeal approach to this problem (the aim of the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011) — the playing field for all U.S. shampoo makers would be leveled; this two-and-a-half-year exercise could have been avoided; and people who buy baby shampoo wouldn’t be left squinting at tiny labels in the health and beauty aisle of their supermarkets. Congratulations, and thank you, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, et alia! (Now, let’s hope that Johnson & Johnson is clear about the properties of the preservative that will take quaternium-15′s place.)

Photo by Kyle Flood via Wikimedia Commons

A new survey commissioned by SC Johnson on American attitudes and behaviors with respect to the environment reveals that individuals feel as if they know more about the environment today than they did 20 years ago (yay). But they also feel less powerful to do anything to improve the environment (boo). Still, influencing behavior is possible (yay). How? It turns out that financial incentives and penalties are the dominant motivators (deposits on beverage bottles are an example of this phenomenon). Coming in second is the influence of friends and family members. Sadly -- considering all the effort and expense --only 12 percent of respondents said they took action prompted by a nonprofit organization. The only weaker force, influencing 7 percent of respondents, was “A celebrity I respect encourages me to take action.” (Sorry, Ms. Diaz, Mr. Damon, Ms. Hannah.)

I don’t put a lot of stock in this survey -- it was small, and most people overestimate the depth of their greenness –- but it did help explain why Recyclebank continues to grow. Recyclebank is a program that rewards people who recycle with discounts on consumer goods. Your participating waste hauler weighs your household's recyclables at the curb, and Recyclebank mails you the coupons, up to $40 worth a month. When I checked its website, the “featured rewards” included energy bars and single-serve smoothies in nonrecyclable packaging and carbon-offset coupons that support landfill-gas-to-energy projects. (Note the synergy: the smoothie packaging ends up in a landfill, where it generates methane that the landfill vacuums up and sells. I almost forgot to mention: Waste Management, Inc. -- which makes money off hauling waste, tipping in landfills, selling landfill gas, and recycling -- recently made a strategic investment in Recyclebank.)

Recyclebank operates in more than 300 U.S. cities and in London, where, in collaboration with Transport for London, it plans to roll out a program, at year’s end, that encourages people to walk or bike instead of drive. Monitored by a smartphone app, the self-propelled will get offers and discounts from companies like Marks & Spencer. (How will the company know if a trip on foot or bike is replacing a car trip? Unclear.) My biggest gripe with this attempt to modify behavior, besides the fact that it will invite even more advertising into one's life, is that it rewards “green” actions with opportunities to buy more stuff, which no one visiting this website needs to be told generally has a negative impact on the environment.

Still, if the Johnson study is correct, and people act greener when it helps their bottom line (certainly most of my green actions save me money), how about rewarding the virtuous walkers and recyclers exclusively with experiences and services rather than consumptive pleasures? Tickets to concerts or museums, for example. Downloads of music or books, gym passes, coupons for testing tap water, home energy audits, vasectomies! Or how about an app, leading to nonconsumptive awards, that notes every time you seriously consider buying something but then decide ... not to.

(Note: Buy Nothing Day for 2011 is November 25)

Buy Nothing Day poster by Vector Graphic on http://dryicons.com

After reading the following news items, I’m thinking that investing in companies that make top-notch and easy-to-maintain water filtration equipment might be a good idea.

Last week,  Environmental Health News reported on widespread contamination of private wells with naturally occurring elements like arsenic and manganese. In its first-ever effort to track two dozen elements, the U.S. Geological Society discovered that “13 percent of untreated drinking water contains at least one element at a concentration that exceeds federal health regulations or guidelines. That rate far outpaces other contaminants in well water, including industrial chemicals and pesticides.” For public water systems, the presence of these elements is less concerning, since utilities test for and remove those for which the feds have set standards. But the 60 million Americans who rely on private wells are on their own: a good reason to expand the list of contaminants you ask your local lab to test for — annually. Read the USGS report and peruse its element maps here. Contact your state drinking-water program to find a state or EPA-certified lab to test your well water (and then buy the appropriate filter if the results don’t please you).

On the other side of the world, the island groups of Tuvalu and Tokelau have declared water emergencies. La Nina weather patterns have reduced rainfall, and what groundwater remains has turned brackish from rising sea levels. (Tuvalu, you may recall, was the first nation to formulate a climate-change evacuation plan.) Citizens are rationing water, says the Washington Post, crops are wilting, and fruit trees, a major food source, are suffering. Portable desalination plants have been ordered. Meanwhile, residents are drinking bottled water.

In California, water managers desperate for new sources of supply are contemplating… Superfund sites! According to the Whittier Daily News, the Walnut Valley Water District is considering buying water pumped and treated from polluted areas of the San Gabriel Basin. “Parts of the basin have been polluted with perchlorate and other contaminants leaked by the aerospace and defense industries that used to dominate the region, resulting in one of the nation’s biggest Superfund sites.” Other U.S. cities are already purifying sewage effluent and the brackish water that occurs thousands of feet below freshwater aquifers. How do they clean the water? With ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis, which removes the vast majority of things that should worry us. (Filtration plus reverse osmosis is the method used by Aquafina, Dasani, Nestle Pure Life, and other major bottled-water brands to further “purify” tap water that already meets federal drinking-water standards.)

Unfortunately, reverse osmosis is expensive, it uses a great deal of energy, and it produces a lot of unusable waste in the form of brine (and probably worse, in the case of that California Superfund site). It’s all well and good to agitate for better watershed protection and tighter controls of discharges to surface and groundwater, but faced with naturally occurring, harmful elements, and saltwater intrusion, and limited quantities of fresh water for growing populations, I’m afraid that filtering will be a big part of our future.

Photo via Irving Rusinow/National Archives

Patagonia has long been near the Alpine pinnacle of green-leaning businesses. The outdoor clothing company leads the way with eco-friendly offices, conscientious sourcing of materials, environmental campaigns, and its 1% for the Planet program. Patagonia has also exhaustively researched the environmental footprint of its gear — both where its material comes from and how products are made, as well as the impact once they’re sold, which includes laundering and ironing clothes, as as well as their eventual disposal to landfills and incinerators.

After all that research, the company last week launched its Common Threads Initiative, which asks potential customers to pledge to cut consumption of the stuff they don’t really need — a message both radical and conservative. Then, after pondering your heart’s desire, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard seems to be saying, go ahead and buy our stuff, because it will last a long time and does less environmental (and social) harm in its manufacture than similar products made by other companies.

The initiative also asks customers to fix their Patagonia products before buying new ones (Patagonia repairs goods under warranty and offers free advice for fixing things such as waders, in the field, on the cheap), then reuse or resell unwanted Patagucci through the company’s new partnership with E-Bay. Surely this is the first time a major retailer has actively encouraged its customers to seek used products instead of slapping down cash for new ones. (Apple goes in the opposite direction, actively thwarting repair and upgrade of some items with nonstandard screws.)

Recycling, of course, is at the bottom of the three-R hierarchy, and Patagonia years ago began accepting old and presumably unmarketable Capilene undies (through the mail or hand delivered to their stores, preferably by bike), then shipping them to Japan, where they’re washed, deconstructed, and remanufactured into fluffy new Capilene baselayers. (It doesn’t seem like this has been a crashing success: in five years, the company says it has taken back 45 tons of clothing for recycling and made 34 tons of that into new clothes. No word on how many tons of Capilene it stories annually sell.)

I’m a firm believer that one of the most important things an individual can do to cut his or her environmental footprint is to buy less stuff, because mining, milling, manufacturing, packaging, and transporting new consumer goods generates far more pollution and waste than the tiny fraction we actually see on the curb come garbage day. We all need to rethink what we actually need; buy used; repair the old; borrow; rent. E-bay is a big help here (three cheers for its reusable packaging program); so are Craigslist and Freecycle.

But I’m not sure I’d buy used fleece anywhere. One of the textile’s most visceral attractions is its primordial purity and softness. I wouldn’t wish my old Pattagonia fleeces on anyone: they’re stained, stiff, their cushy loft worn away by more than a decade of hard and happy use. I can see how the Common Threads model might work if garments are in great shape, but otherwise it seems like a bit of a fig leaf — not quite greenwashing (because of its solid educational component) but still managing to evoke in me a longing for something shiny and new. (Don’t get me started on the wanderlust inspired by Patagonia’s catalogs, website, and even its E-Bay site, the quest for peak adventures in pristine locales, and their attendant carbon footprint …)

I applaud Patagonia for focusing on these issues. I think Chouinard, who has grappled for years with the meaning of “sustainable” business, has his heart in the right place. But I can’t get over the duality of a clothing company banging its eco drum and also continuously changing its styles. Sure, technologies and designs improve, but change for change’s sake is the fundamental driver of the fashion industry. If colors and shapes, hyped by the fashion media, didn’t go in and out of style, surely we’d desire considerably fewer clothes. Style obsolescence, invented with mass production technologies in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was a key driver of consumption and its attendant waste.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Patagonia, as their clothing holds up exceptionally well: that’s why we’re willing to pay more for their products. (One of the most important ways the fashion industry could help the planet — and garment workers — is to do away with cheap, disposable fashion.) But the company persists — damn them! — in enticing me with fresh colors and intriguing shapes.

So far, I resist: I’m still wearing my Patagonia Stand Up shorts twenty years down the road. The Velcro on the back pockets is shot, but otherwise they’re doing fine. And yet: I may have aged out of their mid-thigh length. Does anyone want to make an offer?

Almost every place scientists have looked for the residue of pharmaceuticals in our waterways, they’ve found them: in wastewater, in drinking water, in high-elevation mountain streams, and in rivers at the bottoms of watersheds.

The drugs come from people, who ingest and then excrete them; from the dumping of unused drugs down toilets; from leaking septic tanks; and from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which regularly treat their chickens, cows, and pigs with antibiotics and hormones that then leach into soil and water. Many of the drugs have been shown to harm aquatic life, causing premature spawning in shellfish and feminizing male fin fish.

Over the last few years, studies in India and in New York state have revealed another source of drugs: waste water discharged from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants. A new study, reported in Nature News this week, shows the same thing happening in France, where one would think the discharge of pollutants would be more tightly regulated.

One would be wrong. Neither wastewater treatment plants nor drug manufacturers, in the US or the EU, are required to monitor or limit their discharge of pharmaceuticals. It’s clearly time for that to change, as levels of drugs near manufacturing plants were far higher than levels near treatment plant outfalls. (According to Nature News: “Downstream from the [French] factory, the researchers found that on average 60%, and in one case 80%, of the fish had both male and female sexual characteristics. Upstream of the effluent discharge, such intersex fish made up just 5 percent of the populations.”)

While reporting on drugs in our waterways for OnEarth in 2006, I was told by a spokesperson from the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association that redesigning drugs to break down more readily into less harmful components would be difficult: “There’s a trade-off in terms of having molecules break down readily versus having a stable molecule that does its work as a medicine and has a reasonable shelf life.”

If the drugs can’t change, how about better pre-treatment before discharging waste? The European Commission is considering tighter regulations on such discharges; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, never keen on the precautionary approach, is continuing to study the fate of scores of different drugs and their metabolites in our waterways.

At a recent panel on extended producer responsibility at the National Conference of State Legislatures, a representative from PhRMA — perhaps anxious about assuming liability for drugs’ unintended downstream impacts — maintained that the levels of these compounds in waterways was barely detectable. That may be true, but scientists are detecting scores of different drugs using sophisticated lab equipment, and fish —  especially the wild gudgeon (Gobio gobio), the focus of the French study — are detecting them all on their own and reacting to them in ways likely to hinder their reproductive success. In short, our unwillingness to take swift action may soon drive these creatures locally extinct.

UPDATE: To learn more about improvements to prescribing and dispensing practices, with an aim to reducing the entry of drugs into the environment, check out “Green pharmacy and pharmEcoVigilance: Prescribing and the Planet,” by Christian D. Daughton and Ilene S. Ruhoy. The paper appears in Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, 2011, 4(2):211-232.

Image: John Morris/Flickr