Tidal Wave of Recycling

Here's a fun holiday picture to make up for the gloom and doom:

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The Cove

Well, I was amused to spot one of the people in the film wearing a Sharkwater tshirt, having shown that film at the college a few years back.

They’re very similar films, Sharkwater and The Cove, except The Cove is (sorry Sharkwater guys, we love you) overall a little more coherent and compelling. Part of that is the underlying narrative which gives the film its name: a group of concerned activists discover a place on the coast of Japan where thousands of dolphins are annually driven in to shore, where they are rounded up and captured to be sold in the live dolphin trade. The dolphins that aren’t taken, including infants, are herded into a nearby secret cove where they are slaughtered for their meat, which is packaged as whale meat in Japan since the Japanese do not traditionally eat dolphin. The group of activists decide they must infiltrate this cove and film the slaughter process to get the word out to people the world over.

The film definitely had me on the edge of my seat, as it combines real life activism with a kind of Ocean’s 11 crack team operation suspense (they make the reference themselves in the film, but I found it to be fairly accurate). They obviously get the footage, and by the time you finally get around to the slaughter part your brain feels like it’s about to explode. Well, mine did. I was so angry that things like this constantly continue to go on that it was a miracle I didn’t run from my house screaming. It wasn’t simply the slaughter- it was the capture and trade of live dolphins, it was the fact that they were hiding that they sold the meat, which is highly contaminated with mercury, it was that children were dying of mercury poisoning because someone was trying to make money- it was the Japanese representative to the IWC blaming the decline in global fisheries on whales, who, according to him, eat too many fish- and backing it up with "scientific" evidence.

None of this is actually surprising. If you’re still surprised that stuff like this goes on, you’re living in a naïve fantasy world. And maybe I’m bitter and cynical, but stuff like this is going to CONTINUE to go on. Endlessly, maybe. Because no matter how many movies you make about this stuff, it doesn’t stop. Making movies does not stop people from slaughtering whales. Nor does writing letters, the suggestion given by the website of The Cove. Yes, write letters. Go for it. To whom? Who are you going to write a letter to who’s actually going to stop these people? It’s great to raise awareness, for people to know what’s going on. But everyone in the world being aware that dolphins are being slaughtered is not going to stop them from being slaughtered. Stopping people from slaughtering them is going to stop them.

Oddly enough the better depiction of how to stop people killing whales is to be found on South Park- given, they do a bang up job of making fun of everyone in the process, but that’s what the point of the show is. But as always, decide for yourself. Watch the movie, get angry, and decide for yourself if “letter writing” is the appropriate response to that slaughter- to the man who believes whales eating too much are responsible for the catastrophic decline in global fisheries- to the slaughter of millions of sharks- to all the rest of it.

Oh. And happy holiday.

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Compost Testing Yields Good Results

Since the start of this semester, it has been my goal to put some science behind the composting that goes on at Washington College, and yes, we do compost by the way. Mid-September, I met with Dr. Sherman, associate professor of chemistry at Washington College who specializes in soil chemistry. She agreed to guide me through the testing and soon I was on my way to determining the quality of our compost.


The procedures were taken from the manual Test Methods for the Examination of Composting and Compost (TMECC), developed by the U.S. Composting Council. The purpose of following these procedures rather than our own is to have the ability to analyze our compost according to widely used standards. Also, in the future we may want to market our compost to the public, and following the TMECC procedures will allow us to put a Seal of Testing Assurance on our compost.

So far, three tests have been performed on the compost from last year, which finished decomposing over the summer. It has been tested for pH, conductivity (soluble salt concentration), and moisture. It is still in the process of being tested for organic matter, which will tell us the percentage of carbon-based materials in the compost. This does not, however, tell us the carbon to nitrogen ratio which is most important during the process of composting, determining the ability for the pile to decompose aerobically and at the correct temperature. This test is quite complicated, so we must send samples to select labs with the proper equipment.

These are the results:

pH: 7.43
Conductivity: 10.83 dS/m
Percent Moisture: 42.8%

Analysis of the results:

A pH within the range of 6.0 and 7.5 is optimum for compost according to the TMECC. In this range, necessary nutrients are available for microbes and the compost can decompose readily. If the pH were below or above this range, necessary biological processes would not occur. A pH within this range indicates that nutrients necessary for plant growth are available. The presence of toxic metals is also an important factor in compost quality. Toxic metals are indicated by a pH less than 5, so we do not need to be concerned about toxic metals in our compost.

Electrical conductivity measures the soluble salt concentration in a sample. Salts are important factors in compost quality because high concentrations can damage seedlings, prevent or delay germination, and decrease nutrient availability. Low concentrations may indicate low fertility levels. Typical compost samples have a conductivity of 1.0 to 10.0 dS/m, and although our reading was slightly higher, it is not excessively high and will not likely damage plants when mixed in with soil.

The percent moisture measures the amount of water in the sample. Percent moisture does not really affect its quality, but rather its ease of handling and transportation. A preferred moisture range is 40-50%, so our compost should be easy to handle.

By the end of the semester we should have results for the organic matter tests as well as results from a sample being sent to a soil analysis lab to determine carbon/nitrogen ratio.

You may be wondering about the actual application of the compost on campus. Some of the compost from last year’s pile has just been applied in front of Daly Hall. Now with these data we can rest assured that the plants are growing in quality compost. Look for signs in front of Daly indicating the use of the compost and be on the lookout for more signs in other areas in the future!

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The Cutest Little Trash Collector

That would be me, apparently. At least that’s what I was called, while collecting the recycling the other morning.

The funny thing is, I basically am a trash collector. Some people like to make a big fuss and insist that we’re collecting recycling, as if this makes the act of collecting it inherently different from collecting trash. The end use is different, certainly. The recycling gets, you know, recycled. But when it comes down to actually going through every building and pulling out bags of bottles and cans and hauling them all over campus, it feels a lot like trash collection to me, except the trash goes straight in the compacter. We have to sort the recycling. By hand.

It’s the sorting that really gets to you, after a while. It would be one thing if you grabbed a bag of recycling, and it was full of clean bottles and cans that had been rinsed and emptied. But chances are someone threw a full cup of coffee in the recycling, and neither the cup nor the coffee are recyclable. Most of our bins around campus sport prominent labels that read “BOTTLES AND CANS ONLY”, but somehow we consistently end up with objects which are neither bottles or cans. Paper coffee cups are a popular addition, as are those greenware cups from the dining hall. Hate to break it to you, campus, but just because it says “greenware,” they do not suddenly become recyclable. They are made out of corn. Technically they could be composted if we had a way to collect them and a much bigger composting system. But they can not go in with the petroleum based plastic bottles.

The thing that really gets me is how, even when we put a big giant label on something that says “NO CUPS,” you will lift the lid and, surprise, there are cups.

This has me a bit worried. Is our campus illiterate? This idea was suggested to me by another staff member who was astonished by the amount of trash I displayed in one bag of recycling I had pulled. “But why would people but trash in the recycling?” he asked, perplexed. Possibly they can’t read the signs.

But we decided to start asking students, and see if there was another answer. It seems unlikely that students were able to get accepted to the college if they were unable to read simple words like “NO” and “CUPS.” The common answer seems to be that there aren’t enough trash cans. It is far more convenient to put your trash in one of the many, many recycling bins on campus than to hunt down a trash can.

Now wait a minute- I thought we didn’t have enough bins? This is what I hear all the time, when people are trying to tell me that we don’t collect enough recycling, that recycling isn’t convenient enough, that I need to buy more bins. But, as it turns out, we have too many bins. And not enough trash cans.

Unfortunately that’s not something I’m allowed to put in my budget. Any ideas, dear readers, on how to keep the trash out of the recycling bins, in lieu of buying appropriate trash receptacles? Because the cutest little trash collector is getting a little tired of getting covered in coffee every morning.

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One Day Only, Hazardous Waste and Recycling Drop Off

MIDSHORE HOUSEHOLD HAZARDOUS WASTE COLLECTION

MERCURY THERMOMETER COLLECTION

"eCycle" - CONSUMER ELECTRONICS RECYCLING

SATURDAY, NOV. 7 - 8 am to 2 pm - DENTON, MD - Free !

Click below for the full announcement.


Household HAZ Waste & eCycling events on Saturday, Nov. 7 - (One Day Only)

Rain or Shine, 8 am to 2 pm

Caroline County Public Works, Denton, MD

For your information – SEE DETAILS BELOW or visit www.midshorerecycling.org regarding specifics about:

* A one day collection of old fuels, solvents, lawn & garden pesticides, oil-based painting products and many more items, including Mercury Thermometers.

* A Recycling event for electronics such as computers, computer peripherals, TV's and many other electronic items.

DIRECTIONS:
From West:
Take Route 404 East to Denton (stay on 404 East, don't take Business 404)
Cross Choptank River
Right at Denton / Greensboro Exit (McDonalds, Pizza Hut)
Right onto Route 619 South (6th Street)
Right on Wilmuth.
For GPS & Mapping programs, the street address is 520 Wilmuth St, Denton, MD 21629


Future Events:
* Spring 2010 - Queen Anne's County, Date & Location TBA
* Fall 2010 - Talbot County, Date & Location TBA
* Spring 2011 - Kent County, Date & Location TBA
* Fall 2011 - Caroline County, Date & Location TBA


Who May Participate:
* Residents of Caroline, Kent, Queen Anne's & Talbot Counties
* NO Business, Industrial or Commercial Farm Waste
* Residency and Household Status Verification will be requested

What Will Be Accepted:
* Gasoline, Gas/oil Mixes, Fuels
* Acids
* Cleaners
* Solvents
* Automotive Fluids
* Bleach
* Ammonia
* Pool Chemicals
* Dark Room Chemicals
* Household and Lawn & Garden Pesticides
* Insecticides & Herbicides
* Painting Products: Oil Based Paints, Paint Thinner, Turpentine, Wood Preservatives, Wood Strippers, etc.
* Dispose of solidified LATEX paint with trash - to solidify, add dirt, mulch, kitty litter, etc.

Pre-arrange large loads. Empty fuel containers returned upon request. Stall will unload vehicles.

What Will NOT be accepted:
* Explosives
* Ammunition (contact Fire Marshall at (410) 822-7609)
* Medical Waste
* Radioactive Materials
* Picric Acid (Don't transport - call MDE at (866) 633-4686 or HazMat Co.)
* Compressed Gas Cylinders (propane, refrigerant, etc.)
* Asbestos
* Smoke Detectors
* Materials from BUSINESS, INDUSTRIAL, OR COMMERCIAL FARM SOURCES

Suggestions:
* Buy quantities that match the task
* Try to use materials up
* Find a use or reuse for materials
* Follow label instructions
* Label all items & store in proper containers
* Choose safer products & substitutes
* Keep out of reach of children
* Put dirty empty cans in trash
* Recycle clean & empty metal cans
* Recycle lead acid vehicle & marine batteries at retailer
* Recycle motor oil, antifreeze and tires at existing transfer stations during normal operating hours
* Motor Oil & Anti-Freeze Dropoff Locations
* Recycle Rechargeable (Ni-Cad, etc.) batteries at Radio Shack, True Value and other location see www.rbrc.org
* Don't bring latex paint
* Solidify & dispose of latex paint with trash

Project Partners:

Midshore Region - (410) 758-6605
Caroline County - (410) 479-4040 or (410) 479-0520
Kent County - (410) 778-7448
Queen Anne's County - (410) 758-2697
Talbot County - (410) 770-8170
Midshore Landfill (MES) - (410) 820-8383
MD Dept of the Environment - (800) 633-6101

Funded by Midshore Counties (Caroline, Kent, Queen Anne's, Talbot) & available grants.

__________________________________________________________________
Mercury Thermometer Collection

Turn in old mercury thermometers:

* Weekdays at either the Kent or Queen Anne's County Health Departments
o Kent County Health Dept (410) 778-1350
o Queen Anne's County Health Dept (410) 758-0720

* At the Fall 2009 HHW Collection Event
o Where & When:
+ Saturday, November 7, 2009
+ 8:00am to 2:00pm
+ Caroline County Dept of Public Works - Denton, MD
+ See Directions Above

Visit the Maryland Department of the Environment's Mercury Website

__________________________________________________________________
Consumer Electronics Recycling


Where & When: (also see new drop-off sites below)
* Saturday, November 7, 2009
* 8:00am to 2:00pm
* Caroline County Dept of Public Works - Denton, MD
* See Directions Above

What will be accepted:

Computers:
* CPUs, Keyboards, Monitors*, Mice, Printers, Cables, Modems
* Computer Speakers, Scanners, External Disc Drives, most other peripherals
* Note - for computer equipment only, see the list of new county drop-off locations below.

Other Electronics:
* Televisions*, Remote Controls, VCRs, CD Players, DVD Players
* Calculators, Cell Phones, Telephones, Radios, CB Radios, Stereos^
* Facsimile Machines, Answering Machines, Copiers

Pre-arrange Large Loads
*Recycling fees for TVs and Monitors will be waived for the November 7, 2009 collection event.

Please assist with unloading, if able.

What will be NOT be accepted:
* Large or small appliances, power tools, household items, manuals, diskettes, packaging
^Wooden-cased TVs, stereos or speakers

General E-Cycling Information:
* Typical monitors & televisions have 4 pounds of lead
* Lead & other toxic and valuable metals can be recovered and reused
* These bulky items with toxic materials can be kept out of the landfill
* This event is a pilot program with the Maryland Department of the Environment, Midshore Regional Recycling Program and eCycling partners.


New - Computer recycling drop-off sites were recently set up in each Midshore County for computers & computer peripherals;

*
Kent County - Nicholson Drop-Off Center near Chestertown;
*
Queen Anne’s County - Grasonville Transfer Station in (8-5 daily - except Thursdays & Sundays);
*
Caroline County - Hobbs Transfer Station near Denton (Tues, Wed, Fri 11-6; and Sat. 8-4 ) ;
*
Talbot County - Chesapeake Center at 713 Dover Road in Easton, by appointment on weekdays with Lisa Korrell at 410-822-4122, for details, there is $10 fee for monitors (TV's also accepted: $15 fee) .

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Chickening Out, Pt 2

The reason the whole chicken thing is so significant (aside from the fact that I broke a nearly ten year hiatus on meat), is what it implies. When I was standing there watching the chickens have their throats slit with one of my neighbors, she asked why I had decided that I needed to watch the chickens die. She wasn’t the only one- a lot of people have been asking why I couldn’t just decide to start eating meat, why I had to be there to witness the blood (there’s less than you’d think) and guts and gore (which is mostly fat).

And I told her that my biggest problem with our food system is that it allows you to look away. A live, feathered chicken looks absolutely nothing like the chicken you buy in the grocery store, and it’s amazing how quickly after death they cease to look like animals and more like hunks of meat. And that’s fine- you wouldn’t want to eat it with all the feathers on- but people in our culture have the luxury of not having the faintest clue where their food comes from. And when you don’t know where your food comes from- especially when it comes in a bright and shiny package in the store- you divorce yourself not only from the knowledge of what went into the process of bringing that food to your table, but from the responsibility of choosing foods that are not only going to nurture your body, but are thoughtful, humane, and environmentally friendly choices.

In direct contrast to my afternoon standing outside in the sunshine butchering chickens, last night the college showed a PBS Frontline feature called “Poisoned Waters.” In it, journalist Hedrick Smith explores the causes of the vast amounts of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, pollution that never seems to abate regardless of how much money we pour into the problem. And he traces that pollution, unsurprisingly, back to CAFOs- Confined (or Concentrated) Animal Feeding Operations, a term more commonly used to apply to cattle, but which can also refer to chickens. The audience around me gasped at images of vast chicken sheds- often holding as many as four hundred thousand chickens in one long building. Chickens live in close, cramped quarters, usually in darkness, frightened and falling all over one another. They end their lives by being unceremoniously dumped into a truck, driven down the highway to one of the plants (plenty of ‘em down around Salisbury), and butchered on an assembly line. Stainless steel belts filled the screen- workers in gloves and hairnets and masks each making one cut, each only doing one part of the process, as fast as possible- and certainly not talking to each other. I had to lean over to the person next to me and point out the difference- our slaughter was a community event- people came to see their chickens before picking them up, they brought their kids, they talked and caught up and brought snacks. Not so in the poultry industry.

Smith interviews Jim Perdue, Chairman of Perdue Farms, one of the biggest poultry growers on the shore. Perdue argues that to succeed in business you need efficiency- and “efficiency is often size. Things had to become bigger to keep costs lower.” And this does indeed keep prices down. But chickens on the Delmarva, in addition to providing cheap chicken, produce about 1.5 billion pounds of manure. A year. And there’s not a whole lot you can do with 1.5 billion pounds of chicken s***.

Instead, a lot of the nutrients are washed into the bay. At one site where manure tainted water was running off into the bay, E. coli counts were found to be 48,392 colonies. The standard for clean water is 126. Arsenic was found at 9 times the standard levels- not to mention the high doses of nitrogen and phosphorus, which cause the algae blooms that suck the oxygen from the bay and cause massive fish kills every year.

This was no surprise to me. After all, there was a reason I was only going to eat chicken from a farm where the chickens are raised on grass, and where the manure is just tramped down into the soil, where new grass grows up out of it. You can only do so many chickens this way, and chances are it is a far more expensive process. It is nowhere near efficient. Efficiency doesn’t even begin to account for expenses like pausing in cleaning a chicken to explain to a child why we saved out all the livers (for fishing) and what that green stuff was (accidentally slicing into a gall bladder). Not to mention that most of us had never butchered a chicken before, and kept pausing to compare techniques and debate over whether or not we’d gotten the lungs out (they are tricky little things).

The one problem I had with the film was its’ sideways attack on farmers. No, it’s not right that farmers allow so many nutrients to wash away from their chicken operations that the bay is barely functional. But the farmers are not the only culprit. The film spent a long time attacking the poultry industry- the CEOs who could very easily assist their farmers in upgrading their farms to manage wastewater and to prevent those nutrients from escaping into the bay- but who will not do so because of the cost. They certainly share a far greater portion of the blame than many of the farmers, who aren’t given a whole lot of options if they want to keep their land.

But there is one other place where the blame can squarely fall. After all, would Perdue produce millions and millions of chickens if no one was eating them?

What if the millions of people who eat chicken EVERY DAY demanded that chicken operations prevented those pollutants from running off into the water? What if millions of people actually visited the chickens they were eating, and then watched them being slaughtered, and took a turn at helping with the butchering?

Do you think we’d still have the system we do?

You can watch the full PBS special here: Poisoned Waters

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Chickening Out

So yesterday I butchered a chicken.

Actually, I cleaned a few chickens- I didn’t do any killing because it requires a firm hand and a steady stroke, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get all the way through the jugular quickly enough to prevent the chicken from too much pain.

Are you grossed out yet? I hope not.

I’ve been a vegetarian for about 9 years. And this week I ate a piece of chicken. It’s been an ongoing internal debate for months now- or possibly years- ever since I started spending time with people who raise chickens. And with chickens. And then started thinking to myself- well, why not, really? If my primary reason for not eating meat is that I disagree with the conventional method of raising and slaughtering animals, and here I have found a community of people who raise chickens in a sustainable, humane way, what are my reasons for not eating meat?

I really didn’t have any. I’ve never been much for the “its cute, so you can’t eat it,” sort of argument, because while animals are very cute and deserve to live long happy lives, there’s a line in there somewhere. Lions certainly aren’t contemplating whether or not the zebras are too cute to eat.

But clearly part of what makes us human is our ability to reason about things, sometimes endlessly. And so I decided that if I was going to eat a chicken, I wanted to meet the chicken. And I wanted to witness every aspect of its life, from birth to death, and let the chicken tell me if it was really ok. I spent hours with these chickens- held them, pet them, watched them run around in their outdoor pen, eating bugs and watermelons and grains. I found that chickens aren’t very talkative creatures.

When the time came to watch the chickens die, I was afraid I’d be grossed out. I was afraid I would throw up or something- and I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. But my friend told me something very wise: no one has to be good at everything. And that includes killing. I’m very good at making clothes. He is not. He’s very good at raising and killing chickens. I’d probably be ok with the raising- but there is no reason for me to be ashamed that when it came down to it I didn’t actually cut their throats.

I did, however, clean the carcasses, pulling out guts with my bare hands, plucking the last few feathers, cutting off the feet and the head- oh yeah, I did all that. And all while standing around chit chatting with neighbors and friends from my co-op and their kids, who were fascinated by watching us pull out perfect little hearts and lungs and livers, and wanted to pick them up and feel them and see how they worked. At first it was weird- but within a few minutes we were comparing techniques and laughing and joking, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to stand there yanking on chicken guts.

However, when it finally came to eating a piece of chicken, I still hesitated- I was kind of afraid I just wouldn’t like it, and all of this would be for nothing. My friends roasted a chicken, and I sat down with four adults and two children. Having sat down at the “kids” end of the table, the adults sort of forgot that I was having a significant moment, and left me to my thoughts while I stared at the piece of chicken on my fork, wondering if it was the chicken I had sat and held for a good half hour a few weeks ago. The six year old next to me finally asked what I was doing. “I’m thinking about this chicken, and how it lived, and whether it had a good life, and thanking it for giving its life so I could eat it,” I said.

“Of course it had a good life,” she said, “I got to pet it.” She then proceeded to devour an entire chicken wing.

And so I ate the chicken. I like the dark meat better, by the way.

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Film Review: Not Evil Just Wrong

I had the opportunity to attend a world premier public screening of Not Evil Just Wrong, a documentary about "global warming hysteria" hosted by the Republican Club at Washington College. The movie targets the belief that our planet is heating up, focusing on Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It posits that Gore is the leader of an environmentalist movement intending to fulfill its doomsday prophecies by destroying the fossil fuel industry, subverting the global economy, killing millions of Africans, and shattering the American dream.

Co-directors Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney recollect exaggerated human risk scenarios such as Y2K and "mad cow" disease. They show the morbid fascination of schoolchildren who are affected by Gore's film and emphasize that An Inconvenient Truth has nine inaccuracies or distortions. They present intermittent misconceptions about global warming: we are living in an ice age and extra heat would be pleasant, the melted ice shelves are regenerating, polar bear populations are rising, and coal power plants are exhausting no pollutants.

Detour to Africa, where human populations have plummeted since environmentalists helped to ban DDT, resulting in increased vectors of malarial infection. McAleer and McElhinney explain this is the result of Rachel Carson's seminal ecological work Silent Spring, which Gore continues to champion. Cut to Vevay, Indiana, the heartland of America, where residents share their conviction that their way of life would deteriorate if the local coal power plant were to close. Environmentalists agree: the rapid transition to a non-fossil fuel energy infrastructure will be painful.

Now we can balance the liberal cadences of An Inconvenient Truth with a conservative rebuttal: the agenda among environmentalists to save the planet at the expense of humans—depriving nations of DDT to control population; scaring children with apocalyptic visions; attacking coal production in the spirit of bad science.

The selective scholarship can be dismantled as quickly as it was cobbled together.

Read Silent Spring to clarify that Carson advocated the use of DDT for insect control. Watch Everything's Cool for an alternative stance on global warming. Screen Kilowatt Ours to learn more about our relation to coal as an energy source. Peruse The Weather Makers to illuminate modern climate science. Watch I.O.U.S.A. to see the cost of taking more than we have; imagine more with what we have in Cradle to Cradle.

The film aims for an audience that sympathizes with its message. It does not invoke challenges to the thesis that we can continue living on non-renewable energy, which it shrouds in a fog of DDT and heartland pathos. It presupposes that its viewers will not ponder the agenda behind a film that promotes endless fossil fuel consumption.

Ultimately, Not Evil Just Wrong hopes to perpetuate a culture besotted with cheap fuel, and to that end, it's added more coal to the fire.

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The Fun Theory

Somebody should totally do this as a candid camera thing on the recycling bins at WC.




Any takers? I kind of want it to make ghoul noises or laugh evilly or possibly just make crunching noises whenever someone throws something in.

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Now that's what I call RECYCLING

Ok seriously. I spend every day of my work week collecting bottles and cans, and even though I know they are being trucked away to Delaware to be recycled and turned into who knows what, there is a big difference between watching them disappear and end up who knows where, and knowing exactly what they are being used for- and that it saves energy to boot.

Check this out:




The problem with conventional solar panels is that they are expensive to produce, and require the use of a lot of virgin materials, none of which are particularly green. And despite government efforts to provide tax breaks and things of that nature, they are still inaccessible. From what I can tell from these videos (watch some of the related videos as well), you could make this at home, if you were handy and had some knowledge of how to install the ductwork. You'd just need some kind of fan system and a decent hole drill.

Its DIY solar power! Combining all the best aspects of "green" into one! Recycling, reusing (or is that the same in this case?) and renewable energy...!

If anyone notices some of the ridiculous quantities of aluminum cans recycled every weekend on campus disappearing, you'll know why.

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So what exactly is composting all about?

I spend my afternoons knee-deep in rotting fruits and vegetables. I’m quite friendly with maggots, worms, and other creepy-crawlies that you’ve probably never even heard of. I chase off swarms of flies reminiscent of the Amityville Horror. It’s not that bad; I’d even go so far as to say that I have fun doing it.

…No, really.

I’m half of Washington College’s formidable composting duo. Every weekday afternoon, Donna and I head out to Buildings and Grounds to work on the compost pile. When we get there, there are two or three trash cans waiting for us in front of the compost pile. The bins are filled with food waste from the dining hall. We drag them over and dump them on top of the heap. Then, we use our shovels to break the food into smaller pieces so it will decompose faster. Doing this also helps mix the new waste into the compost. When we’re finished, we cover the pile with dead leaves and woodchips and rinse out the trash cans.

I’ve heard that a lot of students on campus aren’t even aware of the composting program. I’m going to give you updates on our progress about once a week so you can stay informed about the environmental efforts on campus. But first of all, what is compost, and why is it important?



Compost, once it is complete, is an excellent natural fertilizer. It’s brown, crumbly, and doesn’t seem all that different from fertile soil. Compost is easy to make at home. It’s largely food waste, with dry materials, such as leaves, added to improve the chemical ratio. It needs moisture and air to decompose properly. All kinds of creatures find compost piles to be lovely places to live. If you were to dig into our pile here, you would find maggots, worms, and all kinds of other bugs that help decompose the food and make the compost more fertile. The process eventually concludes with mature compost- the familiar soil-like substance you might use to fertilize your houseplants.

But why compost in the first place? Why deal with all the rotting food and bugs? Is it really worth it? The answer is yes. First of all, compost saves space in landfills. America is quickly running out of space for landfills, and with the amount of trash we produce, this is a pretty serious problem. While food is biodegradable, landfills are terrible places for decomposition. The conditions aren’t survivable for all the friendly critters that live in a backyard compost pile. Oxygen can’t get to the trash that sits in landfills. The minimal decomposition that does take place in landfills actually creates explosive methane gas- something that is far more undesirable than a few maggots.

A compost pile has access to oxygen and water, making it an ideal environment for the bugs that aid in decomposition. Mature compost is nutrient-rich and chemically balanced, making it an excellent fertilizer. Some scientists even believe that the heat produced by a compost pile could even one day be used to heat homes!

While it is clear that a compost pile is far superior to a landfill, don’t just throw all trash into a compost pile. There are very specific guidelines about what belongs in a compost pile and what doesn’t. Of course, anything that is non-biodegradable is out. No matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to turn a plastic bag into compost. Food waste and paper, however, make excellent additions to a compost pile. Avoid composting animal products, such as meat, eggs, and dairy, because they will attract rats and smell really bad. Also avoid things that have been treated with pesticides because they will harm the bugs in the compost pile, and eventually the plants that receive the compost as fertilizer.

Now that you know the basics of composting, you might be interested to learn more about the program here at Washington College. Check back for weekly progress updates!

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Food Inc

I love this town.

No, I really do. Whenever there is a need, the entire town comes together to support that need. And the need last night was to support Colchester Farm, CSA, the place where so many of us get our food from June to October. The evening started with a cocktail hour, featuring delicious local foods (I went back for the roasted pepper ravioli several times), most of it made by local chefs, including Kent County High School, and several of the Colchester Farm board members. This was followed by a showing of Food, Inc., which, if you haven’t seen yet, you should. Soon.

I wanted to start by praising our town though- we’ve kind of taken food on as our issue, for whatever reason. Possibly its just because we have access to so many wonderful local foods, grown by so many wonderful people who are such a part of the community. We’re proud of our food, proud of the fact that we’re a town in the so called middle of nowhere, which in reality is the middle of a cornucopia of delicious things to eat. And so fortunately we don’t constantly have to look the full brunt of the realities of the industrial food system right in the eye. We at least have other options.

So in some ways Food, Inc. didn’t have much to do with Chestertown. But in others, it hit a point very close to home. Most of the farming done on the Eastern Shore is in commodity crops- corn, grain, soybeans- and most of it goes to feed chickens down on the lower shore. Actually, there are plenty of chickens up this way too. If you sit out on 213 late, late at night you can watch the empty trucks go north toward Galena, and if you wait long enough, you can watch them come back again, full of chickens on their way to the slaughterhouse.

The movie isn’t for the faint of heart. If you don’t want to see the inside of a chicken house (and I have to say, this was a pretty decent chicken house, as far as they go- there were no cages and it actually had windows), don’t watch this movie. If you want to continue to eat industrial food completely unawares of what you’re putting in your body, of the horrors you’re supporting by eating that cheap chicken, don’t watch this movie. But if you’re interested in what plagues our food system- what plagues us, right here, on the Eastern Shore, then watch this movie.

I’ve talked so much about what’s wrong with the food system on this blog that I don’t currently feel the need to reiterate. The movie didn’t reveal anything to me that I didn’t know- but I’ve also made it my life’s work to take on the industrial food system, so I’d be curious to hear the reaction of someone who actually (for some reason?) still eats fast food. But the movie made a good point- not only do most people not know what’s going on behind the scenes in the places their food comes from, they’re not allowed to know.

If you want to trace your food back to the source, good luck to you. I hope you have a lot of time and a lot of money. We aren’t allowed to see inside those chicken houses- we definitely aren’t allowed to see inside the slaughterhouses. If we were- as sustainable farmer Joel Salatin says in the movie- our food system would be something rather different. That’s why he slaughters his chickens in an open sided shed, and invites all the people who buy food from his farm to come and watch and participate.

There was also a strong theme of better regulations for food in the movie. But at the same time, a lot of us are struggling locally to be able to get access to local meats and dairy because of the overbearing regulations of the state of MD. The contradiction came up during the Q&A, but I personally don’t think it’s a contradiction at all. I believe they even said, in the movie, that when you’re selling to a place like WalMart you need those regulations, you need to have had your food inspected and carefully labeled and have the assurance that it doesn’t contain E. coli, because the consumer has no other way of knowing. The shopper at WalMart can’t go out to the farm and meet the farmer and take a look around, because likely the farm is on the other side of the world- and likely the process that food item took to get from that farm to the WalMart would be more than enough to stop the consumer buying the item, anyway.

But in the case of local foods, you have the option of seeing what you’re buying produced first hand. Not everyone wants to watch their chickens get slaughtered- but when I talked to the guy who I plan to get chicken from last night, he invited me right on out to the farm to meet the chickens, allowing me to feel a little bit better about consuming meat. Locally, it really is a case of buyer beware- if you choose to buy locally, you are responsible for checking out the person you are buying from, not USDA. A farmer last night pointed out that this is a big risk for farmers- they could easily get sued- but I’ve heard a great suggestion that would solve that problem all around. What if we were allowed to opt out of the conventional food system? What if, as we do in so many other areas of our life, we were allowed to sign a waiver that said, we don’t want to participate in the conventional food system, thanks so much, and we hereby take responsibility for our food choices upon ourselves, swearing never to sue our local farmers, because we’re part of a community, and its our responsibility as well as theirs to double check on the process and make sure our food is safe?

Can you imagine what WalMart would say to that?

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The End of the Long Summer

So last night the environmental author Dianne Dumanoski gave a talk at the college. If you missed it, and I bet you did, then you missed quite a discussion. You can read all about her book, The End of the Long Summer, over at her website, www.diannedumanoski.com.

Dumanoski started by pointing out a fundamental flaw of the environmental movement, and one I’ve pointed out several times on this blog. We aren’t particularly honest with ourselves when we discuss our goals, if we discuss them at all. We talk about saving the planet, but this is an act of pure hubris- the planet will get on just fine if there’s climate change. There has been climate change many times in the past, and species have died back and rebounded in new and astounding ways.

What we’re really doing is saving the planet so we can still live on it. We can talk about saving whales and trees and rare species of butterfly, but let’s face it, we’re really talking about saving ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing immoral about wanting to preserve your own species so your potential grandchildren can keep on trucking. Well, metaphorically- trucks may be extinct by then. But you get the idea.

In her book, and in her talk, she attempts to look beyond the symptoms of “planetary distress” to the actual cause. It was a refreshing talk in that she didn’t just ramble on about climate change- a frequent topic, among lecturers, and one she certainly brought up- but addressed the likelihood that we are in fact actually past the point of no return. Climate change, according to most research, is now inevitable. There’s no going back. We can mitigate the effects of climate change, certainly, and so there’s no reason to throw our hands up in despair and stop pursuing cleaner energy sources and things of that nature. But we also have to think beyond those mitigating efforts. If climate change is indeed upon (and it seems that it is- it is only the when and where and to what extent that are up for debate), our planning should be for how we handle the changes that will occur.

This isn’t a momentous idea. Most people, with only a cursory knowledge of human history, will agree that things change. Things aren’t the same now as they were 100 years ago. And yet we tend to act as if things are never going to change. Our economy is based on this notion of exponential growth, without taking into account that at some point there will be no more possibility of growth- we live in a limited environment (presuming we don’t expand into space, and the very thought makes me roll my eyes). Our food system is based on fossil fuels. Our communications (and most of our economy) are all based on a very fragile system that could fall apart with a few well placed keystrokes. And our heating and cooling is all based on electricity, as is our access to water. If these things are taken away- if something were to happen to disrupt public water systems, for example- would any of us know what to do?

These things are rarely taken into account. Dumanoski argues that we’re asking the wrong questions. We’re trying to “green the status quo”, a phrase that I love, because it so accurately describes efforts to find a technological fix for everything. On one of the green blogs I subscribe to, I am daily barraged with tips on “greening” everything from hair dryers to toothpicks to vacations to gym memberships. But there the question of whether we should continue to pursue all these avenues is never, not a once, brought into light.

The common law among environmentalists is that we can never, EVER, mention the dirty words “maybe we should just give that up.” No, we cannot question consumption. We can never, god forbid, question the mandate of constant economic growth, or the desire of people to own private jets. People will never subscribe to environmentalism if we’re so negative.

But Dumanoski’s call to action is not for us all to go around crying that the sky is falling. Rather, she simply suggests we be honest with ourselves, that we in fact must be honest with ourselves, if we hope to survive as a species. If we don’t prepare for climate change, how can we possibly face it? Wouldn’t the worst catastrophe be if climate change occurred, and very abruptly as scientists are predicting, and we all just stood there with a big “oh [insert four letter word here]” sketched on our faces?

She pointed out that the answers are in fact just in front of our faces. The planet organizes things in such a way as to be resilient to catastrophe. There are multiple species doing the same job, or similar, so that if one is killed off there are others to take their place. The college does this as an emergency planning measure- if one person is out, we are all required to have a second and third person trained to do our jobs so things don’t come to a grinding halt. Ecosystems are also modular- connected, somewhat, but not to the point where if one collapsed there would necessarily be a chain reaction wiping out all the others. But we in our global society are all very specialized- and all very connected- so that if oil reserves run out, for example, pretty much all of us are screwed. But that’s a topic I intend to write more about later.

During the Q&A the topic of hope came up- what is there to give us hope that we can face the momentous task of preparing for climate change, when we neither know when it’s going to occur or what form it’s going to take? Dumanoski responded that we can’t have hope unless it’s honest- unless we are willing to face the facts about what lies ahead, and realize that the “long summer” we’ve enjoyed will not and cannot last forever. She suggests large scale social reorganization as one of the only ways of becoming more adaptable to change- which is of course one of the things our society is most resistant to. She also pointed out that we’re currently educating for a future that doesn’t exist, and this is key. Even here at the college we’re still educating under the assumption that things will be more or less the same down the line when our students are facing the real world.

I think she’s partially right about the honesty- we absolutely have to be honest about what’s ahead. There is far too much unfounded optimism running around where “saving the environment” is concerned- and far too much despair. But I think we have something to be optimistic about. From what I’ve seen, when faced with the honest truth, most humans are able to step up to the challenge. When given a problem and asked to solve it, we have the creative capacity to find solutions- if only we are taught that we do have that capacity within ourselves, if only we are educated to approach problems with enthusiasm and an eye for the experimental, the untried path, the unconventional- and that it doesn’t take experts to save the planet for people, but people with the passion and dedication to be entirely honest with themselves and each other, and jump off that ledge into an unknown future armed with just their wits and one another.

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Local Food Week!

In ye old Dining Barn. Oops, I mean, the Dining Pavilion.

This week Dining Services does a toast to local foods, so many of the things on the menu will be brought to you straight from Kent County farms. At the moment the dining hall doesn't seem to be labeling the things that are local to distinguish them from those that are not, but trust me, they are there.

Have you noticed the quality of the food seems to be going up, as well? There were actually three things I could eat when I popped in for lunch last week and they were all delicious. The Dining Hall has not had a good history in making food for vegetarians, but that was a pleasant surprise. Today we were back to slightly above normal, however.

In other news, we are now over on facebook as well, so if you are a mysterious reader of George Goes Green and are somehow not friends with me on facebook, get yourself on over there and become a fan.

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Linkage

Some links to tide you over until the wave of busy-ness ends and I can write proper posts again.

Verizon Sponsors Anti-Energy Bill Event

Man Builds Beautiful Houses Out of Trash

France Introduces Carbon Tax

iPhone Apps that help you save the environment

Top Ten Eco-Friendly Things to Bring to College

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Random Random

Found out this fact today. Doesn't help me because I flat out refuse to buy grocery store vegetables (I'd have to be starving, I think), but for those of the world who aren't so fortunate to be blessed with a CSA and farmer's market, here's a tip on identifying genetically modified veggies at the store:

Look for the PLU codes on the labels stuck on your fruits and veggies.

* A four-digit number means it's conventionally grown.
* A five-digit number beginning with 9 means it's organic.
* A five-digit number beginning with 8 means it's genetically modified.

Who knew! Tip from idealbite.com.

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And Another Head's Up

There are some new recycling bins on campus. They look something like this:


Except slighter prettier I think.

Point being, starting next week the residence halls on the north half of campus will begin to be serviced by the dedicated recycling staff. Previously, they had to rely on the county service. Which works rather well except that it required students to remember to put their recycling bins on the curb. And, sad to say, students are not always so great about remembering to put their recycling bins on the curb.

Now, no one will have to remember to pick up the recycling! Except us, but that's our job, so its not so hard to remember. We will be picking up recycling from all of the Western Shore dorms, Harford, Chester, and Sassafras. Bottles and cans go in the pretty blue containers like that one (look up). Paper and cardboard go in the old green county bins. So long as they are DRY and NOT mixed with bottles and cans. Or food. Please refer to www.georgegoesgreen.com for further info.

As another head's up, in case you didn't know, you can also recycle things other than bottles and cans and paper on campus. Such as batteries, and some electronics. You can take these to the help desk in the basement of Wm Smith.

Keep checking back for more updates as the year progresses. This year we plan to make WC a recycling powerhouse.

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Just a Head's Up

So, the summer is winding down. There are students again on campus. (Hello, students!)

I just added up the summer recycling. I'm missing some of the county numbers- they weigh our cardboard when they take it away, and tell me how much it was at the end of the month- but aside from that, the total is in.

It's 13,933.5 lbs. Which translates to about 7 tons. I'd also like to point out that aside from occasional help from my roommate/coworker (thanks!!!!!) I collected all that by my lonesome.


I don't ever want to hear anyone say girls can't do heavy lifting. Take that, recycling. Take that.

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How to Flatten a Cardboard Box

Sorry for the extended absense, followers. We've been prepping for the return of the students, which means buying lots of shiny new recycling bins and getting them into place. To tide you over in the meantime, here is an amusing video a family member sent me when I complained that some people don't seem to understand the "please flatten your cardboard boxes" concept. You would think this would be fairly self explanatory, but for anyone unsure of how a cardboard box should be flattened for potential use as a doormat, here's how.



When you're done check out the video of the woman who survived two days in her recycling bin. Let's please never have this happen on campus.

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Just a thought…

A new 1/3-ounce, 18-karat gold ring creates about 20 tons of mine waste.
Source: IdealBite.com

So, just to do some quick math… there’s 32,000 ounces in a ton, and a ring is only 1/3 of an ounce… that’s about 1,920,000 times more waste than there is metal in the ring. Yes, about TWO MILLION TIMES more waste than metal in the ring.

Short story, buy vintage or recycled jewelry. Seriously. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how much better for the environment it is not to ever, ever, buy new jewelry- not to mention all the social atrocities associated with the mining industry. Just an estimate- and this is from a friend who’s visited and seen a mine in Africa, won’t mention which one, first hand- is that mining workers have a ten year lifespan, once they enter work at the mine.

If you think about it, we have to have enough metal above the ground- MORE than enough, considering how long we’ve been mining, to have more than enough to make jewelry for every person on earth. Not to mention the vast number of metal objects that make it into the trash (landfills)- aluminum and tin cans, pots and pans, even the little metal bits on pens that get thrown away. What I’d like to see is all the current manufacturers of all those products that use metal declare they will no longer use virgin (new) materials- but that they’re going to find ways to recycle all the millions of tons of metal that have already been mined. I’m sure if they started mining landfills they’d hit paydirt.

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Kipple

Having just moved (again), I find myself facing the same dilemma that faces me on a fairly regular basis. I have way too much junk.

Most of us don’t realize this until we go to move it- then suddenly it springs from unexpected corners- shoes we thought we lost years ago, miscellaneous boxes of papers and unwanted holiday gifts and things we put away thinking there would be need for them one day. And usually, because we’re rather in a hurry to move, we don’t take the time to sort through all these things, but just throw them all in a box and stash them in the closet at the next location.

This is what Philip K. Dick calls kipple. Well, he’s not specifically referring to the stuff that appears when you move, but the general accumulation of completely useless things. It seems to multiply. It seems to slowly creep ever onward until every last bit of space has been occupied by something.

So why do we have so much stuff? It is a question I ask myself on a regular basis. How did I end up with such a vast collection of candle holders, for example? What is all the stuff in my junk drawer? And is it possible that tupperware can actually breed (but not the lids)? I would blame a lot of this on obligatory gifting (the fact that people who barely even know you, including relatives who are only vaguely associated with your family) feel the need to buy you something for Christmas, but that doesn’t explain how so many random gadgets I never use and am not sure of the purpose of ended up in my junk drawer.

The real question, though, is what to do with all this stuff. Some things you can donate to Goodwill (or, here in Chestertown, WIN, Nearly New, or Hidden Treasures). But what about random bits of junk? What about the four or five extra screws that came with a piece of furniture but won’t fit in anything else? What about broken electronics, and extra cell phone chargers without the phone? Broken necklaces? Random plastic gag gifts? What about the things that its possible someone would want, somewhere, if only you could figure out how to connect the thing with the person?

And so we have landfills. None of us have enough time to somehow figure out how to get all the random things we have to the right places, and the right people. We do our best, certainly, we have yard sales and you get rid of some of it but at the end of the day there are just things that no one wants. No one knows where they came from. They can’t be recycled, because there are too many varied component parts and it’s too energy intensive to separate them.

What are we supposed to do with all of it, aside from throw it away? My vote is to stop producing it all in the first place. And make it commonplace for you to turn in old electronics when you buy new ones. And stop using so much packaging. I bought a set of speakers from amazon.com the other day, and when they arrived they were three boxes deep- as in they were in a box inside another box inside another box. And then held in place by Styrofoam, which is not recyclable unless you have the kind of quantity you can ship overseas (and even then, is that really environmentally friendly?).

It’s a conundrum, certainly.

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Pick 5

As they do over on facebook, I figured I would do a pick five for recycling. Only it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to post on facebook my five least favorite things to find in the recycling, so… here they are.

5 Least Favorite Things to Find in the Recycling
1. Pasta Salad
2. Coffee cups (with coffee)
3. Rotten fruit
4. Rita’s cups (with Rita’s)
5. Sandwiches

5 Least Favorite Recycling Smells
1. Stale beer
2. V8 juice
3. Rotten fruit
4. Milk, ice cream or yoghurt after several days
5. Cola (especially after it gets in your clothes)

5 Awesome Things to Find in the Recycling
In order of frequency, with 1 being the most frequent
1. Books you’ve always wanted
2. Things you’ve been looking for (milk crates, furniture, vases)
3. Money (it happens)
4. Empty and rinsed bottles and cans
5. Treasure maps

5 Dangers of Recycling
1. Broken glass
2. Falling in the dumpster
3. Getting hit in the head (by doors and recycling bin lids)
4. Mosquito bites and bee stings
5. Back strain (heavy bags of paper)

5 Awesome Numbers
1. 24,576.6 lbs (12.3 tons)- the amount of recycling collected at Washington College in the 2008-09 school year
2. 95%- the amount related air pollution cut by making cans from recycled aluminum
3. 102- the number of trees saved by campus recycling during the 2008-09 school year
4. ¼- the amount of energy saved by recycling cardboard from the energy used to manufacture it
5. 1874- the year of the nation’s first curbside recycling- in Baltimore, MD

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The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

Reality Sandwich: The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

It reminds me of the much passed around Stephen Colbert segment titled, appropriately, “The Word.” Specifically the one on Wikipedia. In it he points out that if everyone goes online and changes something on Wikipedia- for example that numbers of African elephants are in fact rising, not declining- then technically, for all the vast majority of the people in the world know- it becomes true.

The same holds true for all environmentalists. Our arguments have literally NO power- because we can say anything we like. We can talk endlessly about climate change, we can show a million charts and graphs and statistics, and the funny thing is, so can the other side. Everyone knows, nearly from birth it seems, that statistics can be manipulated to say anything you want. And so they have no power. You can list the tonnes of carbon in the air, spout percentages of increase until you’re blue in the face, and then someone will come along and point out that no, if you calculate the numbers in another way the increase isn’t so much, that there have been increases in the past, and so on and so forth until no one has the faintest idea who to believe. Another, less volatile example would be nutrition facts- we are back and forth from one year to another about which nutrients are good for you or bad for you and which foods you should eat and which leave out- to the point where most people refuse to believe any nutrition claims they hear, because they know perfectly well that they will change in the next few months, depending on the current fad.

This is not to say that some people won’t believe it- there are many who, among the constant barrage of messages, will cling to almost anything that comes into the mainstream media. Many people panicked over swine flu. But as the author of this article points out, many more just yawned and went about their lives. There have been so many crises- so many pandemics- so many scares about this and that, that it’s the least we can do to even pretend to pay attention to it.

So, if we are to supposedly to save the environment by changing the consciousness of the populace (as most of environmentalists will say- we can’t have change without changing the general attitude toward the environment), and at the same time the general populace is tuning out everything we say, how exactly are we supposed to bring about change? It’s something of a pickle. I think this is a rather valid point:
“When environmentalists focus on cost-benefit analyses and study data rather than real, physical places, trees, ponds, and animals, they end up making all the sickening compromises of the Beltway…Visit a real "mountaintop removal" operation and you know that there is no compromise that is not betrayal.”

It’s quite true. Visit the reality- put it right up in your face- and maybe, just maybe, you’ll get someone to pay attention. It doesn’t always work. I always wondered how anyone who had watched someone die of lung cancer- this was while I was in fact watching my grandfather suffer from the disease, the result of years of smoking- could actually smoke cigarettes. But I met people again and again who, despite looking the prospect of that debilitating, most unpleasant of deaths straight in the eye, weren’t in the slightest swayed from their determination to smoke a pack a day.

As the author points out, we fear that authenticity. We don’t want to look it right in the eye, because once you do, the elaborate web of illusions built up for you from birth begins to crumble, and your life becomes one mess of attempting to untangle reality from the “ubiquitous matrix of lies.” It’s not an easy task, and most people would rather stay in the matrix, though it leaves us with a sense of loss that can never quite be identified, and which we drown in via any number of mind numbing devices.

But there are some who are ready to hear- and it is to these people, the people who are tired of the status quo, tired of spin, tired of images and brands and the false tripe that’s surrounding you, everywhere you look, that we (if we wish to be successful as environmentalists) need to speak to- and not with more spin, not with more hype, but with the naked, simple truth- as plain and straightforward as possible, which means, as much as possible, without words (ironic to be writing this on a blog), but in the real world, where we can touch, and smell, and taste, and feel- the few senses that have yet to be entirely co-opted by others than ourselves.

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Local Co-op(ted)

When Local Makes it Big

So I like to talk about local foods on this blog. When I use the term, I am thinking in my head of something like… oh, I don’t know, food that comes from Kent County. Maybe if I were to stretch it I would include food from the Western Shore- maybe all the way to Virginia, maybe as far as PA, but that’s really pushing it. I can get most of what I need from a pretty compact area.

But now the Frito-Lay company is marketing their foods as local. That’s right. The massive national conglomerate that brings you junk food galore is claiming that their potato chips are local- at least in the areas that are more or less adjacent to their processing plants.

Back up for just a second. My brain quite literally balks at this concept. Frito-Lay- a division of Pepsi, which is actually an international corporation- is making claims of locality?

It makes a certain amount of sense. People want to know where their food is from, especially as issues of food security become more prevalent in the news, as well as more and more press in regards to the numerous benefits of the local food movement. Big companies are going to want a piece of the market, just as they did with the organic label (as the article points out). But as a result, the organic label has been worn so thin it means next to nothing. Almost anything can be labeled organic. And now, it seems, the same will be done with local- a term that seems so straight-forward it’s hard to imagine any way in which it could be co-opted.

But let’s think this through. If, in some places in the country, Frito-Lay buys potatoes from farmer’s within a relatively local radius of their plant, this is at least preventing them buying potatoes from the other side of the country, shipping them to their plant, and then distributing them nationally. This article says nothing about whether the chips from a certain plant are also distributed locally, but regardless, matching local farmers to local plants is a step in the right direction, right?

Well…

Yes, it’s better than shipping potatoes back and forth all over the country, as frequently occurs with other products. Frito-Lay has also banned the use of genetically engineered corn and potatoes in their products, and that may be an even greater step toward sustainability. But can their products be rightfully called local? There are a few missing pieces- whether the chips are distributed locally, for example, or if the chips from one particular plant are still sent all over the country, whether the ads are only displayed locally or not. Not to mention the simple fact that Frito-Lay has plants all over the country, and most of them only produce a few of their many products, which then have to be shipped over terribly long distances…

It makes you wonder, certainly. As the article eventually articulates, local, in the minds of most people, not only means local (regional), but small-scale. “Local” seems to imply some sort of added value aside from the mere distance between the buyer and the grower. However, this isn’t inherent to the term, and I think when we’re talking about what we value in our food it’s important to be as specific as possible, and not presume that when we say “local” or even “organic” anyone will have the faintest idea what we mean. I know for me, the best part of buying local (from within Kent County) is that I’ve met the farmers face to face, and usually have a nice little chat every Saturday morning at the market. I doubt I could do this with any of the farmers who grow for Frito-Lay.

As a point of interest, according to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frito_Lay) the Frito company started in 1932 producing 10 lbs of chips per day, in the owner’s kitchen. I’m going to take a stab and guess that these were, in fact, locally distributed.

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Der Markt

One thing, at least, Germany has in common with Chestertown. Well, again, sort of. Usually two or three times a week, every city or village has a farmer’s market.

The curious thing about the German farmer’s market is first, it’s size. Every one I’ve been to has been something of a crowded affair, with as many stalls as possible squeezed into a square that if you could see it empty would leave you with the impression a full out market could never actually fit into it later. And yet there are aisles of metzgerei (meat sellers), and gemuse and obst (vegetables and fruit) and always an apfelwein stand. You can usually, at least in the ones I’ve gone to, barely fit between the stands, between the narrow aisles and the many people with their oversized shopping bags and baskets and bikes.

The other thing, and this makes me miss my own farmer’s market despite the size and variety offered by the German markets, is that these are not my neighbors. Presumably they grow their vegetables in the vicinity of the city, but I wouldn’t know. For all I know they’re dragging their produce from the next state over. And, with my slow and careful German that apparently no one can understand, I have no way of asking. I prefer to shop from people I know by name, or at least by face, from having seen and spoken with them week after week.

I wonder where this bounty of German vegetables comes from. I suspect they are not all German, especially when we arrive at the market in early May to find zucchini, which in Germany’s climate really should not be ripe until at least August, and apples, which should not be ripe until at least October. Yet here they are, along with a wide array of other out of season vegetables that my friend’s mom tells me are probably from Greece. This is not the idea I have of farmer’s markets: the food is fresh, definitely, and maybe it is less pesticide laden or has traveled a shorter distance than the food in the grocery store (Greece is 2,100 km away, while New Zealand or Ecuador, where many grocery store vegetables come from, are more like 18,200 km). But I always come to Germany hoping to eat German vegetables, and other than spargel (asparagus- Germans love this stuff, especially the white kind, which we don’t have in the states), I am usually disappointed.

The same goes for other foods. Maybe I don’t notice it as much at home, where I’m not thinking about it as much, but looking for German cheese at the market came up with nothing (at least I found some from Holland, the next country over), and even the famous German bread, much to my disappointment, is baked from dough made somewhere else, in a big factory somewhere maybe, and only baked on the premises. It still tastes good, but with that in mind I start wondering about preservatives and artificial sugars, which at home I would avoid at all costs.

It makes me wonder. When I go with my friends to the store, they want to drink Italian wine, or Californian. I only want to drink German, because finally I have a selection of some of my favorite wines in the world, and they are grown and fermented only minutes away. But it really brings into perspective how seldom even someone who thinks most of the time about where her food comes from in actuality is eating locally. After all, I drink German wine when I’m at home.

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And Some Things are Just Like Home

During move out a few weeks ago, I had the fortune to participate in Give and Go, a program developed to collect the leftover items students did not want to take home and donate them to Women in Need. I say fortunate, because although I hauled all sorts of furniture and boxes of random items all over campus on one of the first truly hot days of the summer, I ended up with a number of random things I had in fact been looking for. A floor length mirror, for example. I had been wanting one, and in one hallway there was not one, but two. I had my choice.

I also glanced in the dumpster, and was alarmed to realize that despite our efforts, there was still an array of usable items, including a chair and a relatively new bike. Alas. But this is fairly normal- spending all my time in the vicinity of Buildings and Grounds, I am privileged enough to constantly monitor the items that end up in the dumpsters, and scavenge any useful items I find.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised then to come upon the Mainz University recycling and discover a mountain. Mainz has a much larger university than little old Washington College- about 35,000 students to be precise. The majority of these students don’t live on campus, reducing, I suppose, your average student waste stream- clothes, books, the bizarre little things students tend to accumulate (plastic inflatable hands, anyone?). But here I found a mountain of computers, fax machines, printers, even typewriters, all waiting, I sincerely hope, to be recycled. When I say mountain I am not exaggerating. I could have climbed up the side, as it towered over my head. There was a similar mountain of office chairs. Nothing, absolutely nothing, except office chairs. Most of which looked to still be in good condition.

This in particular blew my mind. Ok, fine, obsolete electronics tend to get thrown out and recycled. I can accept that, even if I don’t like it. But office chairs? What’s obsolete about an office chair? Office chairs in the Custom House are at a premium, so even the one with the broken arm gets used. But here, before my eyes, was a cornucopia of office chairs. Not to mention the four, count them, four, accompanying trailers (as in, the back part of a tractor trailer) full of everything else you can imagine getting thrown away at a college. Wall sized maps (of Romania), planters, desks, lamps, the entire contents of a kitchen (oven, utensils, pans, plates, cake mix, spices), and rows and rows of mini fridges. Not just one. Rows.

And it’s not just the university. Walking around the city, I consistently see piles of what we translate to “big trash,” which the Germans call sparemüll. Furniture by the scores, working tvs and dvd players and just today, an entire kitchen floor, the planks of hardwood stacked on top of one another in an enormous pile. I think somewhere in my mind I imagined Europeans were simply more thrifty than Americans, and would therefore waste far less in terms of usable items. They tend to hang on to their cars until they fall apart, for example. But clearly I was wrong. While I’m sure there are some exceptions, I can hereby state that Germans are just as wasteful when it comes to consumer products as Americans. The evidence lines the streets. It provides a veritable (free) shopping mall for anyone with the time and energy to haul it away. And believe me, many people do, which may be the one difference between here and America.

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The Magic Pfand

Viel Gruβes, loyal readers! I write to you from the far away land of Germany, where recycling is the norm and not the exception. Well. More or less.

Most German cities, and the majority of the small towns, have a unique waste management system when compared to our own American- well, let’s call them attempts at waste management. Germans recycle everything. In fact, not only do they recycle everything, but they get money back for it. Allow me to explain.

When you buy a bottle of soda in Germany, more likely than not it has a pfand attached to the price- meaning instead of 1,25 the soda costs 1,50. When you finish the soda, you take the bottle back to the store and you receive 25 cents in return. This doesn’t sound so awesome if you are lazy and never take your bottles back, but if you are an intrepid scavenger you not only can take your own bottles back but can find bottles with a pfand all over- in the trash, lying in the street, given away for free on street corners- and you can make five euros in only a few minutes. Because, of course, even though recycling is ridiculously easy here, still not everyone does it.

However, it’s certainly in your best interest. In major cities, you simply sort your trash into a variety of bins in your house- one for paper, one for food waste, one for packaging (plastic), and one for everything else (restmüll). This is of course after you’ve recycled all your bottles and cans. You are charged for how much restmüll you put out- everything else is taken for free. So in the interest of saving money, everyone automatically separates their garbage. It’s not a big deal. It’s not an amazing magical environment saving program. It’s just the way things are.

It’s fascinating, coming from America where I have to try really hard to recycle, to watch people unthinkingly sort their trash. When I found myself at the train station with a piece of cardboard and only an unmarked trash can in sight, I thought, aha! At last I have found a place in Germany where I can’t recycle, and prepared to stick the cardboard in my bag for later. But as I did so, my German friend took the cardboard from my hands and put it in the bin. “But it’s recyclable!” I cried. “I know,” she said, “they’ll sort it when they empty it.”

I thought she was kidding.

But no, it’s true, even public all-in-one waste bins are, by law, sorted into recyclables and other waste before anything is thrown away. And since almost everything can be recycled, almost nothing is thrown away.

In this vein, there is generally less stuff produced that would be thrown away in the first place. You don’t get a plastic bag unless you pay for it. It is perfectly common to see people walking down the street with reusable grocery bags (usually filled with pfand bottles)- and also note that I said “walking.” Everyone walks here. Or bikes. Or takes the bus. There are cars on the road, certainly. Small ones. But with petrol at a ridiculously high rate (and parking spots being nonexistent), there’s no sense in driving unless you’re going a long way and don’t feel like taking the train (I can’t imagine why, I love taking the train- all you have to do is sit down and go to sleep and someone else drives) or have a lot of stuff to haul. But I digress.

The one thing that boggles my mind is that, with all this emphasis on recycling and not wasting, things are wrapped that would never appear in plastic in the U.S. Vegetables, for example. Most people put their vegetables in plastic bags in the U.S. anyway, for ease of carrying, but here vegetables are almost always wrapped in shrink wrap on a little tray. And ridiculously small amounts of vegetables. Like a handful of arugula. Or, and I kid you not, seven slices of cheese. In one package. The concept of buying in bulk has not really occurred to Germans, who shop on a regular basis (sometimes every day!). So we’ve got that going for us, at least.

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Walking Tour

For your reading enjoyment, a poem I wrote back in college about the things found on trash pickups. Back in Savannah, GA we did a pick up every month, mostly on the barrier islands, reachable only by boat. This barely even touches on the weird things we've found while picking up trash.


Walking Tour

rusted bicycle, dragged up from the depths
ball basketball three Frisbees
toothbrush hat alligator one faded doll arm
the front half of Percy, cartoon dog
devoid of color and meaning and happy meals
wiffle ball bat tires crab, living in can (cut open to let out)
artificial flower, white, nearly imperceptible amongst real ones
bottlecaps cigarette butts bits of glass nails
two dollars
unopened can of beer, once, one of Coke
shoe shoe cowboy boot
box of empty gelatin capsules
beer can beer can beer can beer can
busted screenless tv full of interesting parts
dried black rose (put into Arbor Mist bottle)
beer bottle beer bottle beer bottle beer bottle
two pairs of underwear, same day- child’s
inflatable raft fishing poles tampons
neon strips- lightless- from cruise ships
the boat of Cuban refugees, unsinkable
crab traps coconuts conch shells
raccoon tracks
the biggest horseshoe crab shell ever seen (kept)
bits and bits and bits of Styrofoam
(will be here in 500 years)
the card to the door of the Econo Hotel
dry eyed withered stare
(avoid dead animals)
infinite straws plastic bags pieces of plastic bags
always a condom
ants
shark skull
palm frond rose
McDonalds Burger King Wendy’s Krystal
blow up kids pool another toothbrush
st patricks day windsock, half buried
buoys boatseats refrigerator Steamvac
Doritos Lays Cheetos Funyuns
cigarette packs filters butts lighters
pillow roofing siding nails car parts tires tires
the decaying body of a man
half a bottle of chardonnay

Home.

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Take That, Recycling

Thanks to the kick ass team of recyclers here at Washington College, I am proud to present you with the final totals of recycling collected in spring semester (from the end of January to this very day).

The five best interns a recycler could ask for managed to amass a grand total of:
5,249.9 lbs of mixed paper
11,389.2 lbs of bottles and cans
4,200 lbs of cardboard

These are astonishing numbers, let me tell you. Especially when you consider as of this time last year we were... well, we weren't really recycling much at all. Let's be honest.

I cannot thank these dedicated students more for their amazing hard work, especially in whole heartedly committing to a program in its fledging year... and especially for pulling together an extra 2700 lbs of recycling by challenging the sororities to a competition- an unheard of number considering it was collected in only 4 weeks. One day I'll post on here about the amount of work that goes into recycling- it's definitely a candidate for Dirty Jobs.

For now, let's just say the Recycling Fairy strikes again!

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Green Girl Talk

The revised text of the lecture, back for your edification.

All right. We’re here to talk about periods. Who hates getting their period? Who was told by their mother the first time they got their period that it was a curse, that it would be the bane of your existence, that you now had to suffer for the rest of your life, or until you got pregnant or menopause, those blessings of female existence.
But wait. This lecture is supposed to be about the environment! What does this have to do with it? Well, a lot. For one, if you aren’t even comfortable talking about your period, you’re going to have a problem with most of the alternatives I’m going to outline. The reason we even ended up with the products most women use today is that women were uncomfortable with their bodies, uncomfortable with talking about them, and uncomfortable with finding out the facts. Not to mention, willing to let themselves suffer when it came to their periods. We expect it to suck, and therefore it does.




So let’s talk “feminine hygiene.” Disposables have only been widespread since the 1930s. The only way they became popular was that they allowed women to drop money in a jar on the counter without speaking to the clerk. Kotex introduced the equivalent of the disposable pad in 1921, while the self-adhesive pad wasn’t introduced until the 1970s. Before that, women used rags, fabric, wads of cotton, sponges, whatever worked best, and usually washed and reused the same rags each month. There were belts, suspenders, or sanitary panties with hooks or tabs to hold pads in place, because tight fitting underwear is a recent trend. For thousands of years, women have used reusable pads that they likely made themselves, and no one seemed to mind.
So how did we get stuck on disposables? Well, for years, women have been made to feel ashamed and dirty about the natural functions of their body. Early advertisements told women that disposable pads could help them hide their problems by disposing of the evidence. The same theory seems to persist in today’s advertising, when we’ve even gotten to the point of pads with “silent” packaging so the other women in the bathroom won’t realize you’re opening a pad. Our society expects us to hide our periods and pretend nothing is happening- like we’ve got some kind of terrible disease. If we’re buying “sanitary” products, we must assume we are unsanitary. Whatever embarrassment you feel probably came from negative advertising. Periods aren’t discussed openly. Very few of us had positive first periods. The usual response is, “oh, now you get to spend the rest of your life “inconvenienced” once a month.” Likely this has an effect on our periods- how much of PMS is really irritation that for five days you have to continue to deal with the world when you’d rather stay in bed all day eating chocolate and sleeping?
Many other cultures celebrate a girl’s first period with a party and gifts. Others hold menstruation to be a time for meditation and reflection, when women can take a break from regular life. Our culture still seems to think menstruation is a punishment from God. Long ago, women’s cycles followed the cycles of the moon, often menstruating during the dark of the moon and ovulating during the full moon. Even now, women with irregular periods are sometimes advised to leave a light on while they sleep to emulate the light of the moon- which will regulate their periods. This is known as the Dewan effect.
Tell me- what’s unnatural about your own blood? Knowing your own body and being aware of your cycles gives you self-confidence, especially the first time you observe all aspects of your cycle and are not only able to predict the exact time you will get your period, but feel when you ovulate, and, amazingly enough, this can also improve your health and destroy some of those symptoms normally associated with periods- fear, pain, agitation, etc. A positive outlook can go a long way. It’s no big deal if someone knows you have a period. Are you afraid they’ll find out you’re a woman?
Disposable pads are made of wood fiber, polypropylene, and polyethylene (#5 and #4 plastic). Tampons are made of a cotton rayon blend with a polypropylene cover, unless you buy those which are all cotton or have a cardboard applicator. In a woman’s lifetime she can use over 15,000 sanitary pads or tampons, adding up to about 250 to 300lbs of waste. There are 85 million women of menstruating age in America, throwing away about 13.5 billion pads and 6.5 billion tampons per year (2001). Can you even picture 13.5 billion pads? These fill landfills and clog the sewer systems, and can take over 500 years to degrade. Over 170,000 tampon applicators were collected along US beaches in one year.
In addition, both tampons and pads can contain traces of dioxin, a carcinogen. This is left over from the bleaching process, and over time can accumulate in the system, causing, surprise, cancer. Have you ever noticed how the ingredients aren’t listed on a box of tampons? Tampons also put you at risk for Toxic Shock Syndrome, which occurs when bacteria build up in the vagina from the fluid absorbed by a high-absorbency tampon. The FDA uses research provided by tampon manufacturers to tell the public that tampons are completely safe- even though there are no federal standards of quality or absorbency that could determine which are less likely to cause toxic shock.
Now for some solutions. You could start with all organic non-chlorine bleached tampons, though that does nothing to solve the waste problem. The cost is about the same or a little more than regular tampons. There are also reusable options. If you feel the need to use a reusable coffee cup in the morning, there is no reason not to use reusable pads or a tampon alternative. These include cups like the Keeper or Diva Cup and natural sponges. The Diva Cup is a small silicone cup that collects blood and is emptied when full. It usually can stay in up to 12 hours, and will last 10 years if properly cared for. The come in different sizes, to accommodate a variety of vaginas. The initial cost is $35, which over ten years amounts to about 29 cents per month. Natural sponges are animals that live on the ocean floor, which are dried out and cleaned and can be reused for about six cycles. They are, however, dead animals and have to be scraped off the ocean floor, which is not exactly an environmentally friendly option.
Reusable pads come in an amazing variety of options. You can purchase them from one of many female run companies such as Glad Rags or Lunapads. A starter kit costs anywhere from $30 to $150. Or you can make your own out of scrap fabric. They are usually cotton with a terrycloth liner; some also have a piece of nylon for extra protection. They come in all shapes and sizes and colors and if you make your own you can of course customize for the best fit. They’re bigger than normal pads because they wrap around, but they’re also more breathable and are highly recommended to women that have problems with frequent irritation or infection, which can be caused by the plastic backing of disposable pads.
There are always issues with any choice. Just look at tampons- in some countries they’re sold with little plastic finger covers so that women don’t have to touch themselves. That sounds strange until you realize that some countries don’t sell tampons with applicators. You don’t have to make the switch all at once- people will start by using reusables at night or at home, which can cut over 1/3 of the waste. Yes, you have to clean them yourself; yes, you have to get over touching your own blood. People will see them and wonder. Reusable pads will get stains, but if you soak them in cold water and wash them the stains will be minimal, and stains do not mean they are dirty. They make special bags so you can carry them around during the day, though Ziplocs work just as well. You can generally wear them longer than disposables because the cotton is more absorbent (and also less likely to leak). You really only lose from 2tbsp to one cup of fluid during each cycle. Plus, you never get the adhesive stuck to your hair.

“To make the switch from disposables to reusable products requires an attitude change from being able to throw away the mess (or is it the evidence?) of our menses and perfume and deodorize at the same time, to accepting the reality of this natural part of our bodies.”

I also wanted to bring up, at least briefly, birth control. I never used to discuss this in my lecture because, well, for a long time I thought the benefits of not getting pregnant outweighed the downsides of birth control. But as there are alternatives, and birth control becomes more and more of an environmental issue, I wanted to at least mention it.
There are two reasons this topic is important for girls. One, like pads and tampons, there is an environmental concern in regards to birth control. There have been a lot of rumors circulating in regards to hormones ending up in our water supplies, and whether these are all true or if we really have to worry yet, no one seems entirely sure. It’s typically safe, when it comes to pollution, to err on the side of less pollution is better.
The second, and this has been subject to even less research, is that birth control in its many conventional methods has not been proven to be entirely safe for all women. Most methods haven’t been out for a long period of time, and several have been pulled from the market after they were discovered to have negative effects on our systems, such as Norplant, and suspicions have been raised about many of the other forms- though no one has bothered to figure out what exactly all the side effects are.
I’m not going to go extensively into alternatives, because this is an area where you have to choose for yourself. Some people don’t seem to have the same bad reactions to hormones as others, and some people have a harder time counting days and paying attention to their own bodies. And sometimes accidents just happen. Believe me, I have contemplated going back on regular birth control for the convenience more than once. But I am one of those people who can’t tolerate hormones in my system. Even aside from the risk factor, I do not personally like to be dependent on pills to take care of my body any more than I like being dependent on pads made of plastic that come from the drug store. If there is a more localized alternative, that gives us control over our own bodies, and puts the knowledge of how they work back into our own hands, then that’s the option I’m going to take.
When it comes right down to it, the real question is, do you love your body? One of the most radical things you can do, for yourself and for the environment, is to care about yourself, and to be attuned to what’s going on. I mentioned before that with practice you can literally feel yourself ovulating. That kind of power can change your life. And if you care about yourself, and your body, you’re going to treat it right- and that means not tormenting it by trying to shove your period to the side, and trying to hide from the simple fact that you are a girl and you menstruate and I am here to tell you this is beautiful and amazing.
And, to not lose sight of the theme of this lecture, I strongly believe you can’t love the planet while you’re hating yourself. Look at the damage we do to the environment and how much of it has to do with how much we just don’t care about its effects on ourselves- thousands of kids get asthma every year from power plants, but we let it slide- thousands of people get cancer from pollutants in the air, in the water, and we do nothing… because we don’t know how to love ourselves, dirty and chaotic and imperfect animals that we are. If you can change that, you’ll be surprised how quickly everything else falls into place.

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