Rumblings of progress on the single-use packaging front: Time magazine recently ran an article about a Danish burger chain called Max Burgers that — poof! — eliminated cardboard packaging from its kids’ meals at the request of a customer who “only wanted the fries and toys … and was annoyed at having to throw the boxes straight into the recycling bin.” Who among us hasn’t felt exactly the same way?

In the U.S., we’re barely at the stage of recycling that packaging, let alone handing burgers to customers without disposable hygienic wrap. Did customers balk at the Danish chain’s primitivism? Hardly: sales of kids’ meals actually increased. (Studies show green initiatives can boost customer loyalty.)

But there is some good news stateside. In a pilot project, McDonald’s is replacing polystyrene cups with double-walled paper cups at about 2,000 West Coast restaurants. Why get rid of the polystyrene? The National Institutes of Health’s National Toxicology Program calls it a possible carcinogen, and studies have shown that styrene can leach from containers into their heated contents (think instant noodles). On the post-consumer end, polystyrene isn’t frequently recycled, partly because the recycled products are lightweight and sold by weight, thus generating little revenue relative to hauling costs; and partly because food often contaminates the end product. Polystyrene also breaks into tiny pieces that contaminate beaches and water bodies.

Dunkin’ Donuts is also considering a switch from polystyrene, and Starbucks is developing a coated paper cup that can be readily recycled. (That is, if it makes it into a recycling bin in a community that recycles paper cups.) Some of these changes have come about through shareholder initiatives, and some through the work of groups like the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and Global Green. Alas, top-down change comes excruciatingly slow: maybe U.S. chains need to hear more often, and more loudly, from customers who — like that parent in Denmark — really, really didn’t want the packaging along with the food.

Image: Dan Century/Flickr

(This post originally appeared at OnEarth.org/theroytestuff.)

Even if I wasn’t a proud “outreach advisor” to the Plastic Pollution Coalition, I would have been charmed by, and urged you to check out, this new video by the group  about you-know-what in our oceans. It’s short, sweet, and intoxicating.

I like the film’s simple message, which is aimed at individuals concerned with a massive, seemingly intractable problem: “refuse disposable plastic.” I think it’s doable.

(A version of this post originally appeared at OnEarth.org/theroytestuff)

In honor of World Water Day, let’s celebrate an action recently taken by a national park that should properly be interpreted as a boon to environmentally friendly water consumption.

Proponents of the right to buy whatever single-serve packaged beverage they damn well please have long argued that eliminating bottled water from vending machines will force the public to instead buy high-calorie drinks, which have a bigger environmental footprint than does bottled water. (This shift in buying behavior hasn’t yet been proven; but yes, for the record, bottled water does have a lower carbon footprint than bottled sodas, juices, or teas.)

But Saguaro National Park, just east of Tucson, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater: officials there have announced that the park will quit selling not only bottled water, but sodas as well – a decision that should eliminate up to 40 percent of the park’s recyclable waste stream. (Remember: recycling, good; reducing consumption, even better.)

Take that, Grand Canyon National Park (which recently banned the sale of bottled water — but not sodas — after a huge kerfuffle with Coca-Cola, maker of Dasani water and a $13-million donor to the National Park Foundation). Like that park and Zion National Park, in Utah, Saguaro will be installing hydration stations — those contraptions formerly known as “water fountains” — for filling reusable bottles.

If parks in some of the hottest, driest areas of the nation can take this step without fear of losing visitors to either disenchantment or dehydration, what’s stopping all the others?

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Nancy Stoner, formerly of the NRDC and now the Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Water, blogged recently about drinking-water fountains. Lamenting the disappearance of fountains in public places over the last several decades, she notes that when we lose fountains, we also lose “public knowledge about the importance of investing in drinking water systems, which provide dependable, affordable and clean water.”

In cities with tasty, healthful water, I’m all for more fountains. Drinking from a fountain is cheaper than buying bottled water; fountains take water-delivery trucks off streets, so there’s less traffic and fewer diesel emissions; they keep empty bottles out of trash cans, gutters, and waterways; tap water is healthier than other packaged beverages; and fountains remind us of the fundamental connection between the natural world and our own well-being.

But as the comments to Stoner’s piece show, there are still people who are afraid of getting sick from fountains, although microbiologists say the odds of contracting a disease this way are extremely low. (Granted, good fountain design and adequate water pressure help.) And then there are those concerned about low levels of contaminants in tap water. To this second point, I would note that large cities, where this fountain renaissance is beginning to take shape, usually have the best tap water. Why? Because they have enough paying customers, staffing, oversight, and expertise to run their systems properly: they protect their watersheds, enforce anti-pollution laws, upgrade filtration equipment, and repair infrastructure (though we all know that municipalities need many millions more to do all of this better).

Yes, we continue to find contaminants in our drinking water, but that’s partly because we have the technology to detect contaminants at parts-per-billion, or even parts-per-trillion, levels. Can these low levels harm us? That’s the gazillion-dollar question: so far, the jury is out on pharmaceuticals in our waterways. Meanwhile, the EPA is investigating the regulation of hexavalent chromium, tightening the regs on atrazine, and screening an array of suspected endocrine disruptors that could end up in our drinking water. The studies are expensive, they take a lot of time, and the consequences of increased regulation are mind-boggling. (To remove hexavalent chromium from drinking water in parts of California’s Coachella Valley, for example, would cost more than $275 million and necessitate a water rate increase of 74 percent.)

Yes, we can remove anything from water if we run it through enough money. But millions of Americans drink from residential wells and can’t afford to test their own water, let alone treat it with special filters. (Read about nitrate-contaminated water as an environmental justice issue in “Not a Drop to Drink,” by moi, in the spring issue of OnEarth.)

Water contamination is an almost overwhelmingly complicated issue. But the situation isn’t hopeless: we can stop polluters, clean up contaminated aquifers, and filter harmful contaminants either at municipal plants or at our kitchen and bathroom faucets — a far less costly solution, considering that we don’t drink the vast majority of the water piped to our homes. And we can continue to promote fountains — both as a public service for the thirsty, and as a reminder that safe water is a resource upon which we’re absolutely dependent, and that we all hold in common.

Image: Mugley/Flickr

This post first appeared at OnEarth.org.

The question has dogged social movements that go by names like The Compact, Buy Nothing, and Small Is Beautiful: will reducing consumption cripple the economy? Bill McKibben, in his 2007 book Deep Economy, argues that less growth has its virtues, and that there are plenty of cleaner, greener jobs out there (such as restoring local watersheds, fixing our infrastructure, designing goods that are made to last and cycle back, at their end of life, into new products or the earth).

But a recent story in the New York Times spurred another consideration: will less consumption hurt the vast world of informal waste workers, the millions who pick through urban dumps in developing nations recovering metal, textiles, plastics, paper, and other materials for repair, reuse, or recycling? It’s not a well-paid or safe living, but it’s useful work, and for the most part, human hands do a better job at recovering valuable materials from the waste stream than do machines.

Around the developing world, though, multinational waste haulers are starting to horn in on the informal sector (see Mai Iskader’s Garbage Dreams to learn about this struggle in Cairo or the website of Chintan Environmental Action and Research Group to read about the issues in India.) Mexico City claims to have cut its waste stream from 12,600 tons per day to 4,000, in part by instituting a composting program and ramping up curbside recycling (awesome, if it’s true). But that means there’s less stuff for the city’s quarter million pepenadors to claim.

Interestingly, a candidate for the presidency of Mexico told the Timesthat Mexico’s recycling market cannot absorb more than 20 percent of the country’s waste. “There isn’t the infrastructure, nor the markets, nor the prices, nor the regulations for this to work,” he said. Surely it makes more sense to develop those markets and regulations today than to bury these materials for a few decades and then mine them when we can no longer afford to extract virgin materials.

Throughout history, garbage has exerted an evolutionary force as communities respond to its social, economic, and environmental challenges. In the developing world, the management of garbage — an underappreciated but crucial service — has started to empower trash pickers to organize politically and to educate their children so they can rise above their parents’ constraints. When and if large garbage haulers enter these markets, they should turn first to the experienced waste workers, who have intimate knowledge of local conditions and know best how to wring value from discards.

Even in a less consumer-driven world, there will still be plenty to recover.

Image: World Bank/Flickr

(This post originally appeared at OnEarth.org)

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

Much ink has been spilled on the deplorable state of the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure -- and the terrifying sums ($390 billion according to the sometimes-hyperbolic American Society of Civil Engineers) it will take to remedy the situation. The EPA estimates $188 billion is necessary to manage stormwater and preserve water quality nationwide.

Yes, it's a lot of money, but there are some positives attached to that pricetag: it's not only going to bring us cleaner, safer drinking water, says a new Green for All report called Water Works. Spread over five years, that investment would also generate $266 billion in economic activity and create close to 1.9 million jobs.

Water Works functions as a primer on our infrastructure woes (from cracked pipes to sinkholes to combined sewer overflows), focusing on green infrastructure as a major part of the solution. The good news -- if you're a glass-half-full type -- is that there has never been a better time to tackle these problems: borrowing money is cheap, construction costs are down (because of increased competition for jobs), and unemployment is high.

But where will we get the money? From municipal bonds, state revolving loan funds, higher rates for consumers, and other (nonspecified) “fee-based approaches,” says Water Works. (The report shies away from the polluter fees proposed in Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s Clean Water Trust Fund.) Government spending will add to the national debt, but it will doubtless pay off in the long term with healthier people, a cleaner environment, and the avoided costs of filtering ever-dirtier water.

At any rate: do we have a choice?

Age and neglect have caught up to our water systems, some of which date back to the end of the 19^th century. Climate change wreaks havoc even with relatively youthful infrastructure: extreme heat, drought, and deluge all cause pipes to shift and crack. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave both the nation’s drinking-water infrastructure and its wastewater in­frastructure a D-minus in its 2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure.

Across the country, more than 700 pipes fail every day. Breaks cause major inconvenience: water mains are shut off, basements flood, roads are closed, and neighborhoods sprint for the supermarket to buy bottled water. Leaking pipes also waste a lot of expensively cleaned water: 6 billion gallons of a year, according to the U.S. Geological Society -- enough to provide the daily water needs of our ten largest cities.

Sometimes, failing pipes exact a harsher price: this past January, a Russian mother and her toddler fell 12 feet into the earth when a sidewalk over a ruptured drainpipe suddenly collapsed. Although the woman was rescued from the sinkhole, it took divers and emergency workers more than a day to find the body of her son, who had been swept by rushing waters through subterranean pipes to a sewage collector.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called on Congress to pass legislation to repair the nation’s infrastructure. He proposed footing the bill with half the money we’ll save from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that’s about $440 billion dollars between 2012 and 2021. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start.

Image: Chris Upson/Wikimedia Commons

This post first appeared at OnEarth.org/TheRoyteStuff

Just before the holidays, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson went on the Dr. Oz show to talk about drinking-water safety. She concluded with her one wish for a cleaner, greener earth. To my surprise, she wished for more recycling.

Not that again, I groaned. Does anyone really listen to pro-recycling arguments these days? The subject is so 20^th century, so fraught with disappointment and misunderstanding.

But what Jackson said was actually quite bold, and it certainly needed saying:

If we could increase our recycling rate from about 39 percent to 80 or 90 percent, Jackson said, “we would do a bunch of things. Certainly, we would have a cleaner environment. We would save a tremendous amount of water and energy. We would create millions of jobs, because recycling, in and of itself, would become a supply chain in our country—a very domestic one. . . . Think of [recycling] as a homegrown jobs program and an environmental program and an energy program and a water program all in one.”

It sounds like magical thinking, but groups like the Institute for Local Self Reliance have been talking about the jobs angle for decades, and groups such as NRDC have harped on the energy and water benefits for even longer. (See “More Jobs, Less Pollution” — a report released last November by NRDC along with the BlueGreen Alliance, the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, Recycling Works! and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives — for data that support Jackson’s claims.)

All we need to do is expand access to recycling programs for residents and businesses, to increase the number of recycling bins in public places, to broaden the range of materials accepted by processors (think textiles, electronics, construction and demolition debris, and agricultural and industrial waste), to limit the use of packaging and other materials that can’t be recycled or composted, to shorten the supply lines between generators of scrap materials and their end users, to develop composting programs that handle food as well as yard and garden waste, and to educate everyone about all these changes. (Oh yeah, and end subsidies that encourage burying and burning waste.)

Jackson’s comment reminded me of a Simpsons episode called “Lisa the Vegetarian.”

Homer: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa, honey, are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa:        No.
Homer:  Ham?
Lisa:        No.
Homer:  Pork chops?
Lisa:        Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer:  [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

Could recycling be that wonderful, magical animal (and pay for itself, too)? One can always dream.

Image: Simpsons Wiki

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