End of Year Recycling Tally

38,474.3 pounds.

19.2 tons.

Of recycling. This does not include the secure paper that gets collected, which I would guess is at least another few thousand pounds, and it definitely doesn't include all the items that were collected during Give and Go to be reused, or any of the composting that was done (another few thousand pounds).


Yes, it is the end of the year. And over the course of the spring semester, the recycling team collected a grand total of 38,474.3 pounds of recycling. Over the course of the entire year- 65,078.4 pounds (32.5 tons). Well done, recycling team. Well done. That is the equivalent of 12 adult male Asian elephants. Or 260 newborn elephants.

I have to add that a few thousand pounds of that recycling was done in the last week of term, after finals, when everyone apparently cleaned out every single liquor bottle they had drank throughout the year. I could tell, because they had signed and dated each and every bottle, and many of them dated back to September. I'm not sure what has prompted this trend, but it certainly makes end of year recycling a lot less fun. All those glass bottles are pretty heavy.

I also found, as I was recycling, several couches, refridgerators, tvs, two countertop grills, a coffee maker, a VCR, an untold number of lamps and trash cans, about a million storage boxes of some variety, a lot of unopened beers, books, clothing, two pairs of rubber boots, bedding, pillows, a desk, hundreds of hangers, vases, and a fish bowl. Oh, and my personal favorite, a deck of Bible Go Fish cards. I'm kind of mystified by how all these things get thrown away. We do offer a pick up for unwanted items- there is a drop off in the Student Center, where items can be left to be donated to thrift stores and the food pantry. But apparently some people were uninterested in taking the time to move their goods to the appropriate place. Leaving them instead for the poor housekeepers (and me) to haul away.

So while we've done an excellent job at recycling, we've still got a ways to go. Next year let's make it the goal to reduce as much waste as possible- and not just the bottle and can kind!!


Here's a fun post on recycling written by one of my favorite people ever, the trash guru clickclackgorilla: Save the Earth with Our Easy 12-Step Program

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County Threatens to Cut Recycling

Chestertown Spy: County Cuts Curbside Recycling

Dear readers,

When you read the above news item, please also read the commentary. I would like to attempt to dispel some of the preconceived notions regarding recycling that the general public seems to hold. I feel that as the Recycling Coordinator for a 2000 person community I can speak with some accuracy in regards to the larger issue of the surrounding Kent County community.

First of all, recycling is an expensive proposition. As Ford Schuman states in the commentary (and he is one of the few other people who can speak accurately about recycling, being the head of a recycling company himself), “It has always been a misconception that recycling pays for itself. Recycling easily costs less than landfilling. Even if you have to pay $20/ton to ship a load to a manufacturer that accepts it free, you’re well below the trash tipping fee of $55/ton, not counting shipping. Plus you don’t have to safeguard the recycling for perpetuity and more jobs are created.”

Recycling does not pay for itself. Recycling will never pay for itself so long as raw materials are cheap and largely subsidized. Consider the plastic bottle. Plastic bottles are made of PETROLEUM, ie OIL, and we all know oil is in short supply. However, it is so heavily subsidized by the federal government that the price is unnaturally low. This allows beverage companies to use it copiously to produce plastic bottles for your consumption. You are not paying the price to them. They are not paying the price of extracting the oil, particularly from conflict areas. The federal government (and our soldiers abroad) are paying for this with YOUR tax dollars.

After you’ve used a plastic bottle, if it gets recycled, it is then somehow the county government’s responsibility to figure out what to do with it. They need to put out the money to collect it, and, because people are insufferably lazy, in Kent County they have chosen to do this via curbside collection to make it as easy as possible. We have gone a step farther at Washington College, because our community was too lazy even to be bothered with curbside. Instead, we installed 230 fairly expensive bins directly in hallways on campus and employ 10 students to empty them on a weekly basis, and still, STILL, we are not capturing all of the recycling that goes through this campus. An enormous amount of it goes into the trash, because apparently it is too “inconvenient” to walk ten feet down the hall to the recycling bin.

The fact that the county has been successful with curbside is a stellar recommendation for their efforts and commitment. But let’s talk costs for a minute. Here on campus, we have spent thousands of dollars on installing recycling bins (one sturdy bin that is able to hold up to the beatings students regularly give them is approximately $120- just as an aside, this is comparably cheap when placed next to your average public trash can). We annually (or rather, the federal work study program) pay about $25,000 for student work. And then there’s me, the only “full” time staff person dedicated to recycling, and considering I am technically only paid half of my salary to do recycling, but spend more like 80% of my time on it, the college is getting a pretty good deal. It’s expensive. And, to top it off, we aren’t paying for containers, or hauling. The county is (thanks, guys).

The point is, we as a society expect to pay to have our trash removed. We somehow expect recycling, because it is associated with the environmental movement, to pay for itself. Newsflash: it doesn’t. It never will, unless oil subsidies vanish and the real cost of raw materials reveals itself (I’m hoping for that option, personally). Recycling is not, and never will be, saving the environment. It is diverting a few types of waste away from landfills and converting them (through an extremely energy intensive and expensive process) into other materials. If we were really concerned about the environment, we wouldn’t be producing the recyclables in the first place, we’d be concentrating on zero waste and reusables. We’d be holding companies responsible for the products they are creating, so that the cost of dealing with a beverage container was put back on the creator (and the purchaser), NOT the tax-paying public and the municipalities.

But that, of course, would be inconvenient.

In closing, if the county is truly shutting down the recycling program because they are disappointed it’s not more of a money generator, I would really like to see the figures on how much they put out annually for trash removal and tipping fees. If these costs are covered by the towns (as I believe they are), then I move that it should be the responsibility of the towns to pay for recycling as they also pay for trash removal. And if people are not willing to pay more to live in town and have someone come to their doorstep to pick up their waste, they need not to create so much waste in the first place.

I invite anyone who complains about the expense of recycling to spend a day collecting and transporting recyclables from the public. After seeing the inordinate amount of materials people waste in the space of a single week, please feel free to come back to me and complain again about the expenses. All we, the recycling collectors of the world, are trying to do is manage YOUR waste in the most efficient way possible.

Believe me, it’s not a job that receives a lot of thanks.

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If you don't get it, we can't help you....

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Suspicious Statistics

I read an article a while back (The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies) that brought something to light I had always known but never really thought about. Companies make claims all the time, without any of us really expecting them to mean anything. So often you see billboards that say things like “best beer ever” or “#1 in the US”, which, if you look at the products being advertised, seems very unlikely. But no one is fussed by this, it’s just the way things are. Companies can make all kinds of claims and no one questions them or pays much attention to them.

As I was driving into work this morning, I passed a Waste Management truck. Waste Management does all sorts of things, but mostly they haul trash and other waste away from businesses and towns and that sort of thing. The side of this particular truck said, “Our landfills provide 17,000 acres of wildlife habitat.” Or something very close to that, I was driving rather fast.

Now, this kind of baffled me. Landfills… wildlife habitat?

…

Sorry, that was a pause while I attempted to make sense of that. I looked it up on the Waste Management website (Waste Management Wildlife Habitat Council), and apparently what they mean is that after landfills are full, they cover them over and plant things on top. I’ve seen covered landfills, but usually they just have grass on top, due to the fact that there are vents all over it to let the methane out. The smell is usually pretty horrendous. Sometimes I think they build schools on top and that sort of thing. Apparently now they’re building wildlife habitat, which is all well and good, we could use more wildlife habitat. It’s the landfill bit that’s got me a little perplexed. Somehow it just doesn’t seem like a great idea.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use landfills for SOMETHING. And wildlife habitat seems to be a better suggestion than most. I’m glad Waste Management is concerned about wildlife habitat. I’m just suspicious when I see messages purporting that a company is environmentally friendly on the side of a truck hauling trash. Their whole company is founded on hauling waste- they are (to my knowledge) the largest such company in the US. And I, personally, do not believe we should be producing all this waste, no matter how much wildlife habitat we build on top of it. I’d rather have the wildlife habitat intact in the first place, thanks ever so much.

But I suppose it’s technically not Waste Management’s responsibility to reduce the amount of waste produced- all they do is haul it after it’s been created. But, I have to ask, if it’s not their responsibility, whose is it?

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Recycling is Bull S***

Treehugger: Recycling is Bull S***

Before anyone gets offended, I’m borrowing the title from Treehugger. And I agree.

*waits for gasps of shock to disappear*

Recycling is a huge waste of time. The fact that students spend a total of about 50 hours per week collecting and sorting recyclables on this campus: waste. Those recyclables have to be trucked somewhere, and Kent County, just like so many other municipalities all over the country, is responsible for finding someplace willing to buy the materials (usually China). They don’t make very much money at it. But the alternative is to dump them in a landfill, and landfills are even more expensive.

Why is this such a waste? What alternative could there possibly be, you ask? Well, not so very long ago in the past, there were refillable bottles. You drank a Coke, say, and then you gave the bottle back. And they washed it out and put more Coke in it. Whoa. Same with most other beverages, including alcohol.

But for this to be possible, there had to be places making beverages in the relatively near vicinity of the place where people were drinking them. Otherwise you had to transport a load of glass bottles over long distances, and, well, obviously glass doesn’t travel very well. Plus it’s heavy, and costs a lot to transport. Having a lot of little places each making soda or beer or alcohol meant lots of little companies each making their own product, often unique, often with local ingredients. There were hundreds and hundreds of brands of sodas, and probably thousands of microbreweries.

Now, Coke couldn’t have that, could they? Thousands of people doing their own thing, making unique diverse products? Bad for business. And Coke couldn’t afford to have lots of little factories all over the place- far more efficient, and far cheaper, to make Coke in one place and ship it all over the country. But not if you have to ship glass bottles back, and wash them, and refill them, and ship them out again. Thus was born the aluminum can. Lightweight and cheap to ship. Can’t be refilled. Never mind the fact that aluminum is ridiculously expensive to mine, that’s all done in Africa, and who cares if strip mining demolishes native populations and leaves millions of people in stark poverty. For Coke, it’s not only cheaper, but now they don’t have to deal with the end product: it’s all yours! Part of the bargain! But what in heavens name are you supposed to do with that aluminum can?

Well, for years, throw it in the trash. Then the environmental movement got all crazy, and you had to recycle it. Notice the key word here: YOU. YOU had to recycle it. YOU had to figure out what to do with it. Municipalities, which are not exactly money making organizations, had to figure out what to do with it. And they, and you, have to do this with every single consumer product.

But I say NO. NO, it is NOT my responsibility to figure out what to do with this plastic bag. I don’t want it. I don’t take them. What the hell are they doing in MY river? I don’t remember anyone ever asking companies to make plastic bags. I don’t remember anyone asking the companies to start producing aluminum cans. And seriously, did anyone go around asking companies to make the ridiculous tons of plastic s*** that plague waterways around the world? I certainly didn’t. And yet it’s supposed to be MY responsibility to deal with it? Are you kidding?

It is time, far past time, that we stop putting all the blame on ourselves. Oh yes, you as a consumer can vote with your wallet and all that. I’m just not sure why we have to continue to be defined as consumers at all, as if we don’t have any option other than to consume. What if we become producers? What if there are local microbreweries, who start taking bottles back again, and refilling them, and selling them? What if you buy products locally, so they don’t have to be shipped at all? What if you buy them from craftspeople, who don’t wrap them in tons of packaging? Or, if you’re still determined to keep using those multinational corporation products, why don’t you DEMAND, with your consumer dollars that are supposed to be all-powerful, that THEY take responsibility for the packaging of their products? That THEY deal with the millions of tons of plastic, of aluminum cans, of other useless packaging, instead of passing that cost on to you, the consumer (because the municipalities are collecting recycling using your tax money)? What if THEY take responsibility for the pollution they create, and not just the waste, but the air and water pollution? Why is it our problem? Did we ever ask for it?

Companies will undoubtedly say this makes their products more expensive, but I say bull S*** to that too. Coke spends billions of dollars on advertising. If their product was really all that great, they wouldn’t have to. They could use some of that money to solve the problem THEY’VE caused.

But, oh right, the global economy depends on shifting all the responsibility away from corporations, who have the legal rights of people, but none of the responsibilities, and putting it on “consumers.” And CLEARLY the global economy is more important than the environment, and our health, and our lives.

How very silly of me.

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Ten Things Not to Buy in 2010

Ten Things Not to Buy in 2010

I think this list is kind of funny because I probably wouldn’t buy a single thing on it anyway, except maybe a newspaper subscription. I disagree that books are going out of style (send me your books! I’ll give them a good home), probably because I’ll never get a Kindle (my eyesight is bad enough without trying to read on yet another computer screen). I can’t understand why anyone in their right mind would buy new college textbooks anyway. And I definitely agree that buying CDs is pointless (when you can get them for free, and save waste in the process). Thumbs up to the no gas guzzling cars or energy inefficient appliances- but that’s another one that should have been a no-brainer.

I have another what not to buy list. In fact, call it a New Year’s challenge to rival the one to exercise more and lose that last ten pounds (except I encourage you to actually try and do this one). In fact, this one is even more of an imperative: it might actually make a difference.

1. Things from the grocery store
If you’re lucky, you live in an area with a farmer’s market and CSAs and co-ops. The marvelous thing about CSAs is that you don’t have to think about it at all- you just show up for your pickup and there is an array of fabulous delicious (local) produce for your selection! There are even meat CSAs and if you are in the right area fruit CSAs- all of which you pay for beforehand, in the winter- so you don’t even need your credit card when you go. The farmer’s market can supplement your purchases with things your CSA doesn’t offer- ranging from bread to pastries to jam to candles to produce to chicken to lamb to eggs and much more. Finally, for those products you can’t typically find at the farmer’s market, you can join a co-op to get (more or less) locally produced dry goods- I get flour and other baking necessities, as well as dry beans and rice, from my co-op. As long as I remember to put in my order each month, a wonderful friend of ours divides up the orders and gives everyone their bills. If you don’t know of a co-op in your area, start one up! It’s easy- it just requires a little extra time each month to put in orders and email everyone when its time to come pick them up. As a result, the only thing I buy at the grocery store is paper towels, and occasional random items like salt and lemon juice.

2. New Electronics
Seriously, why would you even bother to buy new electronics? Talk about a waste of resources. Check out this website for more on why: Last Year’s Model

3. Disposable Pads and Tampons
Many, many, reasons for this one, from the environmental to the personal. Check them out here: Green Girl Talk

4. Anything that comes in individually wrapped packages
And that includes granola bars- as well as candy, gum, tampons, crackers, snack products, and who knows what else. It’s pointless to individually wrap something when you can just buy a big version and save the waste. Besides, have you ever noticed that individually wrapped items are ALWAYS more expensive than bulk? Buy in bulk- save money, save time, save the waste!

I also want to include in this one bottled water. This is the biggest waste of resources known to consumerism, if you ask me. DRINK TAP WATER. If your tap water is not drinkable, bring it up with your city. Don’t spend all your money on bottles of water that are probably not much cleaner than your tap water, AND require ridiculous amounts of energy (and oil) to produce, as they are made out of oil, and the FDA does not allow bottles that contain food products to be made out of recycled plastic. So you can recycle all the water bottles in the world and STILL each new plastic bottle must be made from oil. Besides, even recycling uses ridiculous amounts of energy. Recycling plastic is not efficient.

5. Tissues
Handkerchiefs. I had to use a tissue again the other day, after having switched to handkerchiefs maybe… three years ago? And I got snot all over my hand. I was not pleased. Tissues are sad pathetic excuses for handkerchiefs. Believe me, your nose will thank you. I make mine out of old shirts, and just throw them in the wash when they get gross. They come out good as new!

6. Gag gifts/ Keepsakes/ Paper weights/ Things they sell at the Hallmark Store
I find these to be the most irritating things to receive from other people. They don’t DO anything. Apparently sales of them are high because there are entire stores devoted to these sorts of things. I go inside them every once in a while out of fascination: what is all this for? Why do we spend our hard earned money on things that have absolutely no purpose? Gag gifts can be funny, but it is more the concept that is funny, and after you’ve seen them once the laugh is over and that’s the end of it. Then what? Then it just sits around collecting dust and taking up space. Same with the objects people buy- I mean, one or two, sure, but seriously, some people have hundreds of these random little figurines and statuettes and who knows what else sitting around.

7. Soda
Do yourself a favor this year and give your system a break. It will thank you- as will the waterways that are poisoned every year by run off from the corn fields that go into the production of soda and other items made entirely of corn. You can find all about it elsewhere on this blog: here and here and here, to start.

8. Cleaning products, especially the nasty ones
You can clean with vinegar and baking soda. Really. There are tons of recipes out there for making your own cleaning products from very basic ingredients, and there are even more recipes for personal care products. Do some research, be a little creative and DIY, and spare our waterways from the nasty chemical runoff coming from our sinks and drains. No one needs fish kills and fish with both types of reproductive organs. If you must buy cleaning products, look for things that are biodegradable and contain the least number of toxic death chemicals possible. And buy in bulk.

9. Clothes
I once made a pact with my cousin not to buy any new clothing for a year. I used to have a serious addiction to buying clothing, especially shoes, and found myself spending an awful lot of money and time on the pursuit, and then not wearing half of what I bought. So I made a pact, and I broke the habit. Now I still almost never buy clothing, unless I really need something, and when I do I try and give away at least one item in my closet (to keep it even). I think in the last year I’ve bought: underwear, new snow boots, and leggings (which I wear every day). Definitely saves an awful lot of money, and reduces waste.

10. iPhones
This one is just because they annoy me. I know I already put “electronics” on the list, but I hold a special level of dislike in my heart for iPhones and Blackberries and the rest of them. When my dad is interrupting conversations to check his email on his Blackberry, and my friends are surreptitiously taking pictures of me and uploading them to facebook on their iPhones while we’re hanging out, I develop more and more reasons why the internet should just stay on the darn computer.

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Forget Shorter Showers

Forget Shorter Showers

This is so spot on I almost don't feel the need to comment on it, except I think a lot of people might be confused by the message. But take a look at that statistic: if EVERYONE in the US did ALL of the things Al Gore promotes at the end of Inconvenient Truth, they'd still only reduce emissions by 22%.

22%, people. That's not exactly ending global warming.

It's not that it doesn't help. It's not that we should all go around leaving all our lights on all the time, because yes, the old saying "every little bit helps" stands true. It is, however, why I don't beat myself up when I take twenty minute showers.

I am not releasing billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Industries are emitting billions of tons of carbon emissions into the air. Now, whenever I've pointed this out to people, and suggested possibly shutting down industries, they usually reply with cries of horror and "no, that's not possible!" They then go on to tell me that it's me: the industries are producing all this stuff for me. Well, no, not really. Vote with my dollars? I do. I don't buy anything. Seriously, I really don't buy anything, except every once in a while a new pair of underwear. Oh, and soy milk, I still buy soy milk. But that's beside the point: I don't want the industries to keep producing things. I never asked them to produce all these (mostly) useless things. And yet somehow its supposed to be my fault that the industries keep emitting tons and tons of carbon and pollute the water and all the rest.

I get really, really tired of the arguments that put all the blame on consumers. Even if you stop consuming, which is next to impossible, because you are an animal and you have to consume SOMETHING to stay alive, you will not stop carbon emissions. You will not stop aquifers from drying up. You will not stop the production of millions of tons of waste. You really won't even make a dent- not compared to industry, government, and military uses. But you certainly aren't going to see Al Gore on TV telling everyone to take out industrial plants. Can you imagine? He'd be thrown in jail, or at the very least discredited and never heard from again. His supporters, after all, own many of the very corporate industries that are causing quite a lot of the pollution. Hm.

None of this is to say you don't have any power as an individual. You have quite a lot, as a matter of fact. But you can be guaranteed that any action that is condoned by people who stand to make money off it probably will not stop the destruction. Just a thought.

Also I love the phrase "systematic misdirection." I think that sums things up quite nicely.

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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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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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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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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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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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The Bottled Water Debate

I’ve recently been privy to a series of emails from various college dining services purchasers and the like, all debating the relative merits of banning bottled water from campus, as they call it. To be more accurate, they should say, to stop selling bottled water in campus retail locations. There’s no way they can “ban” bottled water from being brought onto campus from outside sources.

To me, this should be a no brainer. Bottled water is one of the most wasteful inventions in history. Americans throw away sixty million water bottles PER DAY in the U.S. Sixty MILLION. Take a moment to picture that. And arguments that recycling can eliminate this problem are a load of BS. Barely a quarter of the bottles produced in this country are recycled. The obvious and very simple alternative to this extraordinary quantity of waste is to stop selling bottled water. However, the industry, including a number of college retailers, argue that they wouldn’t stock bottled water if people weren’t buying it. However, this is another ridiculous argument, and one that you hear to justify everything from fast food to underpriced sweatshop clothing- “well, people are buying it.” People would probably buy crack if you started selling it in retail locations, but you don’t see anyone doing that, now do you?


To an extent, there is some validity to this argument. People ARE buying all the shit out there on the market, and the people selling it are making money off it- so they keep selling it. McDonald’s would not continue to exist if it weren’t raking in billions of dollars every year. But who’s to blame, really? You can blame consumers for being uninformed and not thinking about their decisions. You can blame the industries for aggressive marketing, especially to children. Hell, you can blame every aspect of this society for making people into consumers, and leaving them with no choice except to be slavishly dependent on what they can purchase- and for being driven to look for the lowest price out of necessity. If we still knew how to grow our own food, and still had access to clean water, things like fast food and bottled water wouldn’t even be issues.

But we are currently trapped within the confines of a consumer culture (for the time being), and that leaves the question: do we stop selling bottled water, or continue in this vein? Stopping selling water would clearly eliminate an enormous amount of waste. But if colleges stopped selling bottled water, they would be required to install more water fountains, so that students continue to have access to water- and that, and this is the key, costs money and does not make any profit for the college.

The various people at other colleges who have weighed in on this like to laundry list excuses like, “tap water isn’t as high quality as bottled,” which is patently not true in most cases (tap water is more strictly regulated than bottled, the problem comes with poor plumbing at the college itself, which is fixable), and rambling about how they only want to offer the highest quality products to their students. I honestly would not be so irritated if they would just come right out and say they don’t want to lose money.

No, if they really cared about students they would be more interested in providing the cleanest water possible- in a form far more accessible than expensive bottled water, ie public fountains at more regular intervals. And if they cared about the environment, it wouldn’t even be a question. But, like people everywhere, they refuse to acknowledge their real motivations- instead attacking the environmentalists for not also attacking bottled soda (uh?).

It comes down to the same thing that is ALWAYS an issue, and is at the heart of every environmental argument: if we all had access to clean water, would bottled water be in any way successful? Is it within our rights as human beings to continue to access one of the basic necessities of life without paying an arm and a leg for it? It hearkens back to the public bathroom issue. The trend right now is to make you pay for everything, basic necessity or not. The perfect consumer is one that doesn’t have any other options.

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Plasmic energy

It's hard to not be skeptical of innovative "green" technologies, but this one actually seems pretty cool. Florida's St. Lucie County has announced plans to team up with Jacoby Energy (a self-proclaimed "environmentally friendly" corporation) to develop the United States' first plasma gasification plant. This would allow the county to not only produce energy via landfill waste, but to also- hopefully- reduce the need for landfills at all.

According to Scientific American, creating and maintaining such a system is a fairly complicated process. Electrical energy would be used to heat solid waste up to 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and this waste would then be broken down into plasmic ore that can be used to generate electricity. The new, Floridian plant has been estimated to produce enough energy to power more than 50,000 homes.

But all of this is not an entirely new concept. Inhabitat explains that NASA invented the idea of gasification over forty years ago as a way to create proper re-entry temperatures for shuttles and satellites. And Taiwan, Japan, Canada, and England have all touted the establishment of their own plasma gasification plants. While these systems have not come without criticism, they have also been acclaimed by engineers, environmentalists, and chemists throughout the world.

Being the overly-skeptical cynic that I am, I had a few questions about the environmental safety and "greenness" of plasmic gasification. A few minutes of research, however, led me to find some scientifically-sound answers:

• Question: Wouldn't gasification plants release harmful chemicals and metals into our atmosphere? Answer: Not necessarily. Landfill incinerators don't have to gasify every item in the trash. Some items, like those containing lead or mercury, would most likely be spared from incineration. No answer yet on the sulphur and chlorine contained in plastics.
  

• Question: Is this process actually sustainable? Wouldn't we be wasting a ton of energy to keep the plant running? Answer: Some scientists argue that gasification is a highly sustainable process. The only energy really required is the power used to start the plant. After that, the gasification process is self-sustaining. It will be able to power itself.

I don't claim to be an expert at chemistry or physics, and I know just as much about energy and plasma as the next person. Plasma gasification, as wordy and initially-inconceivable as it is, has nevertheless managed to spark my interest in aspects of "going green" that I had really never considered. It will be interesting to see how this technology pans out in the future.

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