Notes on waste, water, whatever

Interesting piece at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “The Drum Unleashed” website on water privatization. Author Ian Douglas is largely against it.

We tried to make it a little bit more exciting.” That’s David Belt, developer and art entrepreneur, speaking about his latest project, Glassphemy!, in the New York Times today. Visitors to Glassphemy (by invitation only), on a lot near the Gowanus Canal, will stand on low and high platforms at either end of a 20 foot by 30 foot box made of bulletproof glass. (That’s a bird’s eye view, above. Photo by Piotr Redlinski.) Folks on the high end get to peg beer bottles, donated by nearby bars, into the pit or at visitors on the low end. The vibration and noise set off flashing lights.

It sounds like great fun: who doesn’t love smashing glass? But there’s another dimension to this installation. ReadyMade magazine is sponsoring a contest, asking readers to submit their best ideas for recycling the glass, and Belt’s company, Macro Sea, will produce the design. According to the Times article, the reuse will help “counter the widespread suspicion that recyclables are just thrown out anyway.” I hate to say it, but in New York City, which no longer mixes glass with asphalt in paving, our glass is pulverized for use as cover (a legal requirement) at landfills. If Belt can come up with a higher and local use (local is important: glass is too heavy to haul very far) for the city’s constant stream of broken, mixed-color glass, I’d love to see it. Until then, I remain reluctant to spend too much time and water cleaning out my peanut butter jars for “recycling.” Blasphemy? Maybe.

Of course, those beer bottles he’s using are exactly the sort of material we don’t want smashed up: beer bottles can be refilled with beer, or broken down to make new beer bottles (an energy saver). That’s why we have a bottle bill in New York State: it helps gets this relatively clean, homogeneous stream back into production. If Belt invites me in to smash (please, sir?), I’d love to bring my own projectiles — the mixed up glass containers not covered by the bottle bill, the stuff that’s otherwise headed to the dump. Lord knows, there’s plenty of it, and it keeps on coming.

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).

I was going to post a comment in my comment section in response to Tom Lauria’s comment on my post of yesterday but decided to answer him here instead. (Tom is vice president of communications for the International Bottled Water Association.)

Tom, I admire your vigilance and your stubbornness! The International Bottled Water Association is really getting its money’s worth out of you.  First: Yes, reuse takes precedence over recycling (and this isn’t exactly new), but reducing (whether it’s the number of refillable or recyclable bottles produced or the number of delivery trucks they ride around on) comes even higher in the 3R hierarchy.

A question: how old are you? Do you remember when “low cost,” convenient, single-use containers of water didn’t exist? I do. (Yes, there were five-gallon reusable jugs here and there, but they were hardly common in public places.) And yet I wasn’t dehydrated. Were you? There’s no medical basis for this idea that we must drink 64 oz of water a day.  If “bottled water is only for hydration,” as you state, and we’re adequately hydrated through other media (tap water, other liquids, and foods that contain water), there goes one of your rationales.

I do think people should have a choice of tap or bottled water, but the playing field is hardly level if water fountains continue to disappear and citizens mistakenly believe their local water supply is tainted.  (Sure there are some problems with tap water, but the vast majority of Americans has decent water. Those that don’t need to know exactly what’s wrong, then work on solutions to the problem.) I think people should know the facts about bottled water and tap water, then make an informed choice, a choice that doesn’t depend on ignorance.

Btw: I don’t consider myself a bottled-water activist. Have you actually read my water book (or my garbage book or my rainforest book) or heard one of my college lectures on drinking water? (Sorry folks, I just thought I’d make a shameless plug for the entity that financially supports me: me.)

There was a piece in the NY Times yesterday about U. C. campuses in San Francisco and Berkeley spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on bottled water (Nestle’s Arrowhead brand in five-gallon bottles) despite the system’s budget cuts and budget threats. The reporter, Scott James, asked some smart, commonsensical questions, like “So what’s actually wrong with the water supply in these places?” (A: nothing)  “Are there contaminants of concern in the local pipes?” (A: Actually, the person who ordered the water hadn’t even read any test reports) “Don’t these buildings already have sinks with faucets?” (A: I’m not even going to answer that one.)

To me, the piece says Let’s not drink bottled water for bad reasons. Do a little research. Read your utility’s consumer confidence report (they come out annually; you can find yours online); do further testing at the tap (send a sample to an independent, state-certified lab. You can find one through this EPA website). Problems with your water? Work with others on solving them (replacing aging pipes, cleaning up pollution). I know, it’s not as easy as grabbing a plastic bottle from the store shelf. But what choice do we have in the long run? For reasons economic, environmental, and social, we can’t all rely on bottled water all the time.

(The piece quotes the ever excellent Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, whose new book, Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, is now on sale. Check it out.)

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.”

What do you think of when you hear the words “water slavery”? Do you imagine women or girls spending hours a day fetching water for their families? We’ve all seen the pictures – women with jerry cans, lined up at the village well. We know these treks to distant sources are physically grueling and so time consumptive that they rule out any possibility of getting an education or of furthering any other sort of personal development.

But you won’t know how bad water slavery can be until you read Tina Rosenberg’s piece in the April National Geographic, a special issue devoted to fresh water. Rosenberg describes the life of Aylito Binayo, who leaves the southern Ethiopian village of Foro every morning before dawn (she leaves her two youngest children in the care of her four-year-old), clambers nearly an hour down a steep and treacherous mountain path to a manure-dappled puddle along a filthy river. She laboriously fills two jerry cans with unsafe water, ties one to her back with coarse rope, and hauls this fifty-pound load uphill on her back. (At one point in the story, she carries both cans of water – a hundred pounds.) Binayo, who lives on less than three gallons of water a day and washes her clothes once a year, spends the rest of her day cooking, cleaning, looking after her three children, tending the family vegetable plot, gathering grass for her goats, drying grain and carrying it to the mill for grinding — and making two more round trips for water. Some women in her village make five trips a day: two of them devoted to procuring water to make beer for their husbands.

I read this piece three times, flabbergasted. (And yes, flashing on a Monty Python sketch: “We used to have to get up at 7:00 at night, half an hour before we went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work 280 hours down mill, and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife and dance upon our graves singing ‘Alleluia.’”)

Is it not 2010? Do we not live in a world with hundreds of celebrity-endorsed water charities and NGOs working on a problem universally recognized as dire, deplorable, and solvable? And it’s not as if the solutions are prohibitively expensive: in the documentary Flow, the Pacific Institute‘s Peter Gleick says, “The World Bank knows how to spend a billion dollars in one place. They don’t know how to spend a thousand dollars in a million places….Yet in many places what we need [has] a thousand-dollar answer.”

As Rosenberg reports, about half of water schemes fall into disrepair soon after their sponsors move on. “Sometimes technology is used that can’t be repaired locally, or spare parts are available only in the capital.” A 2007 survey of Binayo’s district, Konso, found that only 9 of 35 built water projects were functioning. (The group WaterAid is currently reviving some of those projects.) I could go on and on. But read Rosenberg’s piece, and spread the link around.

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.