Category — Waste

OnEarth recently published my article on the Amish in western Pennsylvania, some of whom have leased their subsurface mineral rights to companies that will drill and hydraulically fracture their farms. Are they happy about this? Yes and no. The money, of course, makes things easier (many Amish families live below the poverty level), but drilling is a loud and ugly process, and the new wealth, some say, is corrupting a community that’s historically separated itself from worldly matters.

That’s the question I explore in the current issue of The Nation, which can be read online here. (And here’s a clip of me talking about the article on the Heritage Radio Network.) Thanks to support from the Food and Environment Reporting Network, I was able to spend a fair amount of time looking into the illnesses and deaths of livestock that live (and eat and breathe) in close proximity to shale-gas wells, which rely on secret combinations of hundreds of different chemicals, many of which are considered toxic, carcinogenic, teratogenic, or mutagenic. I spoke with ranchers whose animals died suddenly of asphyxiation or pulmonary edema, gave birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, lost between 60 and 80 pounds a week, quit producing milk for calves, lost half their tails, developed lesions and infections, and died of massive organ failure. The story raises many questions: are drilling and fracking operations sickening livestock? Can people who eat those animals get sick? Unfortunately, we don’t yet have the answers because:

a) these studies haven’t been funded

b) industry doesn’t reveal all the chemicals it uses to drill and frack

c) complete pre-drilling information on water, air and soil quality is rarely available

d) livestock owners are often reticent, or outright forbidden by nondisclosure agreements, to speak to investigators

My hope for the story is that government will respond to the concerns of ranchers, veterinarians, and scientists; require full disclosure of chemicals and compounds used in oil-and-gas operations; and allocate funds to conduct these much-needed studies.

Photo of cow that lost part of its tail — one of many ailments found in cattle following hydrofracturing of the Bakken Shale in North Dakota — courtesy of Jacki Schilke.

My story, “Fresh Food for All: Local farmers could revolutionize how millions of New Yorkers eat,” appears in the fall issue of OnEarth magazine. Emphasis: could — there are a lot of good reasons city folk don’t eat more regionally grown fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and meat. Locally brewed beer, on the other hand, is plentiful, and I count myself lucky to live in the Sixpoint Brewery beershed.

Reporting the story brought me to several farms in the Catskills, as well as to the Hunts Point market in the South Bronx. You can read all about it, and see Rob Howard’s wonderful photos, here.

I recently ordered a grilled cheese in an airport restaurant, but along with the sandwich came a napkin, wrapped and taped around a plastic fork and knife that I didn’t want or need. The sandwich was deliciously greasy, so I ended up using the napkin, but I felt bad about the accompanying utensils that are now headed for a landfill. (Sure, I could have kept them for later use, but that would merely delay their trip to the dump.)

It was a tiny moment of garbage guilt, out of many, but I remembered it when I read about the efforts of ten-year-old Milo Cress of Burlington, Vermont, who last year persuaded a local restaurant to hand out straws only upon request. Milo’s Be Straw Free campaign has since spread the practice to scores of other restaurants nationwide, including some chains. Establishments that quit giving straws as the default have found their straw use (and straw spending) cut by up to 90 percent. (Americans go through more than 500 million plastic straws a day, according to Simply Straws, which makes — you guessed it — narrow glass cylinders designed for sucking liquids from containers.)

Thanks to Milo’s efforts, the National Restaurant Association now recognizes “offer-first” as a best practice. Just goes to show: if you don’t ask, you don’t receive. And if you don’t offer single-use disposable plastics in the first place, some people might not even miss them.

*Bonus pedantry!
Q: What did we use for straws before the days of cheap plastic, paper, or glass?
A: Actual straw: a single stalk of grain.

Image: Duane Romanell

This post originally appeared at www.onearth.org/theroytestuff

Environmentalists in the United States have long pushed to keep compostable organics — yard waste, food scraps, paper and the like — out of landfills. Diverting this material conserves landfill space; it avoids the generation of methane, which occurs when organic material breaks down in the absence of oxygen; and it allows these compostables to be put to beneficial use. (Learn more about these efforts at www.cool2012.com, a project of the Grassroots Recycling Network.)

Out in front of the U.S. on this particular issue is the European Union, which has issued a directive obliging its member states to reduce the organic content of waste in their landfills — although it doesn’t specify just how these organics should be composted: in the traditional manner, through anaerobic digestion (a process by which microorganisms break down waste in an enclosed vessel), or in some other way. Earlier this month, the British think tank CentreForum recommended banning food waste from U.K. landfills by the end of the decade, ahead of the EU directive, in order to boost the stream of organics that can be converted through anaerobic digestion into heat and energy. (The study, it should be noted, was funded by the anaerobic digestion industry.)

Anaerobic digestion is popular in Europe, and several large A.D. plants are in the planning stages or already in construction in North America. But these systems are expensive to build and have had problems with feedstock purity, maintaining proper pH, odors, and the quality of the digestate — the material that comes out on the back end, which can be used as a soil amendment but lacks the nutrients of traditional compost.

Composting aerobically (outdoors, in windrows) is cheaper and technically simpler: it doesn’t generate methane, and it produces higher-quality material that can boost soil health and increase drought resistance. But composting this way has run into its own problems with quality control and odors. (Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t produce energy.)

The quality issues aren’t just limited to the occasional twisty tie, fruit sticker, or bread-bag clip that ends up in your potting soil. A few weeks back, the Chittendon (Vermont) Solid Waste District discovered that its bagged and bulk compost contained traces of banned pesticides, most likely “carry-over” from illegal lawn applications. The levels weren’t harmful to human health, but the chemicals did burn many gardeners’ vegetables and flowers. In another case, in Maine, Picloram, an herbicide used by horse farms to control thistles and milkweed in their pastures, poisoned tomato seedlings fertilized with manure from horses who grazed those fields. (Happily, the seedlings recovered in less than three weeks after being transplanted into clean garden soil by an astute gardener who happens to run a compost test lab.)

In an era in which more people are growing their own food, and in which more people — with the best of intentions — are composting organic material, these episodes are an important reminder of two tenets of ecology: everything has to go somewhere and everything is connected. Fertilize your lawn, and your community-composted lawn clippings can nuke your neighbor’s Napa cabbage. The same stuff happens in a landfill, of course, but there the input (persistent organic pollutants) and the output (contaminated soil and water) can be separated by decades and many miles. It’s yet another argument for both localism and transparency. When inputs and outputs are local, what goes around — whether it’s good or bad — is bound to come around more quickly.

Image: Phil Shaw/flickr

This post originally appeared at OnEarth.org/theroytestuff

 

Did you know?

The Prospect Park Alliance is now responsible for two-thirds of the cost of caring for the Park. And with 585 acres, that’s a big job. But you can help!

“I pledge to put my trash in its proper place.”

• Dispose of trash and cold barbecue coals in appropriate garbage cans and dumpsters.
• Dispose of hot barbecue coals in designated hot coal bins.
• If receptacles are full, leave closed trash bags next to garbage cans and dumpsters.
  (Consider bringing an extra bag to your picnic or barbecue.)
• Place used condoms, wrappers, and other associated detritus in trash cans.

Leave your name and comment below to let everyone know that you care about Prospect Park and that you are willing to do your part to help keep the Park clean.

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Okay, I’ve doctored the preceding announcement (you can see the original – -and sign the pledge– here).  I’m posting it because Marie Viljoen, who started the Prospect Park Litter Mob  just a bit over a year ago (and about whom I’ve previously blogged), has thrown in the towel, and the latex glove and the grabber. Why? She was feeling hopeless,  an emotion familiar to anyone who goes around picking up after people who don’t get it. (Or maybe the people who leave their condoms and used tissues in the Midwood think the litter mob doesn’t get it:  “these woodlands are mine, to be used for my pleasure: now scram!” ) Condoms as text: I leave it to the anthropologists and semioticians to decode their meaning.

I too was weary of plucking condoms, though the side projects the litter mob worked on (fencing, transplanting, cribbing) were a lot of fun. Marie was angry that the Parks Department and the Prospect Park Alliance, a private entity, didn’t–or couldn’t–devote more resources to patrolling and cleaning this area. You can read her explanation for her actions, and her delightful botanical notes,  at her Litter Mob blog.

In other recent news, Prospect Park hosted an enormous foodie festival this past weekend, and the entire Nethermead, plus ancillary routes to this greensward, were fenced off and restricted for nearly a week. How much money did the park make on this venture? (I can’t bring myself to type its name, but you can read about the bacchanal–and film critic Tony Scott’s amusing comments about it–here).

I was vexed to see public space restricted for private gain (entering the festival was free, but the scores of high-end vendors paid the promoter to participate). I suppose it was a great advertisement for the park, luring tens of thousands of folks who’d never visited this jewel of Brooklyn. I don’t know whether the festival will  descend upon us once again, but a condition of return could be money directed toward Midwood patrolling and restoration.  We could, in other words, make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, whether dipped in house made, gluten-free batter or pickled.

May 24 update: Gothamist reports that the Prospect Park Alliance will likely receive about $100,000 from the promotion company behind the food festival. Enough to protect the Midwood for a couple years?

Do-gooders can always be counted on for beach clean-ups, but Oregon’s Seaside Visitors Bureau has taken this impulse to a new level, trying to lure visitors to its shore to scavenge for Japanese debris linked with last year’s tsunami. (Don’t worry: it’s unlikely to be radioactive, say researchers, as the household goods and other materials were miles away from Fukushima by the time nuclear reactors malfunctioned.) Worried about navigational hazards, NOAA is tracking the debris. Its first wave — some 1 million to 2 million tons of trash– is due to hit U.S. territory (northwestern Hawaii, to be specific) within days.  What doesn’t wash ashore there will continue to slowly drift and float, joining up with the “dismal abundance of discarded plastic” already congregating and circling in the North Pacific garbage patch, which now sprawls over at least 270,000 square miles. Sorry, Oregon, your disaster tourists may have to wait until 2013 to start their scavenging engines. But Hawaiians will get another whack at it when the debris field circles back around in years to come.

Photo: Getty Images