Category — Waste

That’s a question I’ll probably answer another day. For now, I present yet another mockumentary on low-density polyethylene containers,  “The Majestic Plastic Bag,” narrated without irony by Jeremy Irons and presented by Heal the Bay.  (“Over the course of its miraculous migration…”) Best watched in conjunction with Ramin Bahrani’s short, “Plastic Bag” (about which I posted on March 26, 2010), voiced by the inimitable Werner Herzog.

The Telegraph reports that — surprise! — we humans are consuming our natural capital  (food, fuel, and other resources) faster than the earth can either replenish them or absorb our wastes. Last year, we began eating into our capital on September 23; this year’s Overshoot Day will fall on August 21 (according to the New Economic Foundation, humanity first went into global ecological debt on December 19, 1987). For a fuller explanation of this grim metric, read here.

Here is someone seriously tone deaf to the growing backlash, in the U.S. and Canada, among other places, against bottled water. Michael Gerbitz has just introduced Genesis: Living Waters of Israel – bottled in Israel and shipped to the Americas, with a portion of profits benefiting Israeli “victims of terror.”

“Americans drink lots of bottled water – especially in the summer,” Gerbitz is quoted in a news release that I was hoping is a hoax intended to embarrass easily provoked bloggers. “Why not buy water from Israel and help Israel economically, socially and politically at the same time?” Let me ask: is it really in Israel’s interest to export a totally unnecessary product in bottles derived from a resource—oil—that likely comes from Israel’s enemies, and then send them around the planet using even more of that oil? (And yes, reader, I know that I buy and burn my own share of Middle East oil, and I realize the amount of oil consumed by bottles and their associated production and transport is minuscule in the larger scheme of things, but still: we’re talking about a totally unnecessary product!)

The Genesis website offers a rationale for the business:  “In the Book of Jeremiah, the Creator is called the Source of Living Waters. Just as water continuously flows, the Creator showers us with endless streams of kindness and blessing. We gratefully acknowledge the Creator as the ultimate Source of life’s blessings and believe it is our role to emulate His kind ways by giving to others and sharing life’s blessings.” Leave aside the fact that Gerbitz is selling this water, not giving it away (it wouldn’t be the first time blessings are sold), and let’s ask if the Creator would really want all those bottles winging their way around the world and ending up… oh, just about anywhere. (The vast majority of water bottles in the U.S. are not recycled.)

Around the world, religious leaders are working to apply biblical principles of stewardship to the environment– in a movement known as Creation Care — and many communities of faith have pledged to eliminate or reduce consumption of bottled water. Mr. Gerbitz: you might want to rethink your business plan.

Australia sends a lot of ships, laden with iron ore, to Japan. Then the ships head back to Australia, carrying seawater as ballast. Australia is a dry country, in dire need of fresh water. Japan currently discharges almost all of its treated sewage, which started as fresh water, into the sea. Do you see where we’re going here? Read this article in Asahi Shimbun, which describes how and why Japan may soon be selling its treated sewage to Australia, for use in those iron-ore operations (and replacing the use of fresh water expensively derived from sea water).

This is a pilot project, and I’m sure there will be some kinks to work out, but I believe we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this water reuse and recycling in the future. (Transporting water, which is heavy, ain’t cheap: but in this case waste water is replacing sea water on a ship that’s got to get back to Australia anyway.) Fresh water is a precious and finite resource. Yes, it recycles and cleans itself as it moves from one physical state to another, but with more and more people on the planet, polluting water faster than we or Mom Earth can clean it, there’s less of the stuff to go around. Why discharge expensively treated wastewater into the ocean when it can be used yet again in industry or — depending on its level of treatment — for agriculture or human consumption? (For that matter, why use expensively treated drinking water merely to flush away human waste?) To see how Orange County, California, cleans its waste water to a level fit for drinking, check out my article in the New York Times Magazine.)

Yesterday, New York’s Department of Environmental Protection announced it would be rotating ten portable water fountains around the city this summer, to high-traffic areas like parks, green markets, and special events.  (Here’s a schedule of where the fountains will be, in case you’re planning your day around low-cost, healthful hydration. )

I’m all for fountains, as anyone who’s read my blog, my books, or my other babblings well knows. And I applaud this experiment: who wouldn’t want more places to drink cold, clean water for free? The fountains have spigots for sipping and spigots for refilling bottles and even a spigot for watering pets. Bravo. But why bother placing them in parks, which already have fountains? I’d argue that we need fountains most in our vast deserts of concrete (there will be one in Times Square now and then — that’s a perfect place to leave a fountain in place year-round). And we need exponentially more of them. The DEP’s “water on the go” fountains are hooked up to fire hydrants, which are already fixtures on our streets, plumbed and nearly ready to burble. Why not make the fountains — with a smaller footprint, handicapped accessible, and frost resistant — permanent as well?

I realize the installation and maintenance of fountains costs money, but WotG has many partners, and surely there are many more organizations willing to buy some naming rights to become associated in the public imagination with the city’s greatest natural resource, with health, a generosity of spirit (have a drink!) and a smaller environmental footprint (less bottle waste, fewer water trucks on the road).

I’m thrilled by this advance, don’t get me wrong. But I wonder, also, if these fountains are a pilot project, an experiment to measure how many people will actually drink tap water from a public fountain. The city’s past reluctance to embrace a more widespread fountain program — installing thousands of fountains throughout the boroughs– has long made me wonder: does the mayor know something about our water that we don’t? (Read my book Bottlemania for the straight dope on the city’s water quality report, plus some obscure B sides that go above and beyond. I concluded the water’s fine. Mike Bloomberg: anything else I should know?)

If you’re in the city this summer, I urge you to drink up and get counted. Let the fountains go forth and multiply.

Yes it seems incongruous (“Denim! How to Get It Right” rubbing shoulders with political activist Leonard describing how to get off the work-watch-spend treadmill), but my brave editor, and her brave boss, assigned this profile to yours truly. I’m happy to be reaching beyond the ecorazzi:  we’re running out of time to make some fundamental changes, and Leonard has the potential to reach tens of millions of people with her message of hope and how-to.  Here’s the link to my story; you may also want to buy or borrow from the library her new based-on-the-video book, The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health — and a Vision for Change.

If you live in or near New York City, you may want to check out a show opening April 22 at the Gallery RIVAA on Roosevelt Island, entitled Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities. (The show runs through May 23, and there’s a symposium on “Comparative Garbage Collection Strategy and Urban Planning” at NYU on May 6.) The show asks:

“What if we radically changed the way we move garbage through the city?

Fast Trash explores this question through the lens of a novel approach to garbage collection that has served Roosevelt Island since 1975. Part infrastructure portrait, part urban history, the exhibition draws on archival materials, original maps, photographs, drawings, diagrams and video interviews to bring an invisible system to the surface, and asks what a community built around progressive policies and technologies can teach us about how we choose our infrastructure.”

I ask: Is whisking trash away through pneumatic tubes a good idea? Certainly it removes garbage trucks from the streets, but I wonder if it makes waste disposal a little too easy. I’m just playing an annoying devil’s advocate here, but sometimes I wonder if getting a glimpse of the enormity of our wastefulness, and listening to the voices of those who deal with that waste (along its path to a landfill or incinerator, or downwind from those facilities), might help us to slow our pace of consumption — an approach that will pay far more dividends, environmentally, than techno fixes on the back end.

For more information on the show and the symposium, contact info@trashtrash.org.

I recently had a nice chat with KCRW’s Evan Kleiman, host of “Good Food,” about water recycling in Orange County (CA). Take a listen here (I’m up second, followed by pieces on vertical farming, climate-friendly meat, and more).

At first I thought the narrator of this lovely 2009 film, entitled Plastic Bag –  directed, written, and edited by Ramin Bahrani — was parodying Werner Herzog — his navel-gazing cadence, his aggrieved tone.  But no, it’s Herzog himself! He plays a bag adrift, musing mournfully on life, love, and loss as he heads for an oceanic garbage vortex. (Pacific? Atlantic? There are now five gyres to choose from.) The bag expects to join others in the gyre, to be happy, “free.” Alas (spoiler alert), happiness isn’t in the bag’s cards. To his long-gone “maker” (the woman who gave him life by first opening him), he drones, “I wish you had created me so I could die.” Plastic is forever, Bahrani seems to be saying. Better yet, from a nihilist’s perspective, would have been, “I wish I’d never been born.”

Britain’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has a lengthy report out on the environmental impacts of oxodegradable plastics, which are made of polyethylene along with additives that cause it to degrade by a process initiated by light and/or heat. It concludes: “the incorporation of additives into petroleum-based plastics that cause those plastics to undergo accelerated degradation does not improve their environmental impact and potentially gives rise to certain negative effects.” Read the full report, or check out this take from Plastics News.