community recycling

By Matt DeNoto

If you live in an apartment building in Los Angeles (as I do), you may have this sticker on your dumpster:

I first noticed it a few months ago. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I called the number to see what the deal was. Apparently all the trash that gets put into the dumpster is picked up by Crown Disposal and then, instead of heading straight to the landfill, it is dropped off at Community Recycling in Sun Valley. Over the phone, I asked what, exactly, did they recycle. “Paper, plastics, glass, you know, everything.” My first instinct (being a cynic) was suspicion; was this for real or was it just a hollow PR smokescreen to make residents feel like they didn’t have to take responsibility for doing any recycling because it’s all being done for them?

So I asked for a tour. And they said yes.

From the outside, Community Recycling starts with a large, flat expanse covered with huge piles of garbage. Bulldozers move the different piles around while garbage trucks arrive to drop off their precious cargo. Just beyond lies the facility itself, an interesting-looking jumble of structures connected together like a hamster’s habitrail. One box-like structure, a couple of stories up off the ground, is connected to the next by a downward sliding cylinder. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to take one picture while I was there, and here it is:

This is Mr. Basura, who sits in the Community Recycling main offices when not out teaching children about garbage and recycling. I was told this by Nicole, Community Recycling’s PR person, who would be giving the tour to me and couple of other community members. This was going to be the first tour specifically for community members. Nicole had previously been giving them only to schools. Once we’d all arrived, Nicole brought us up to a presentation room where the tour would begin.

At this point, I am going to stop using the word ‘tour.’ Because, as it turned out, the morning consisted mostly of a slideshow that Nicole narrated for us, followed by a brief walk around the outside of the facility on the sidewalk (basically the same view anyone driving by would get). While it was generous for the company to bring us in and give us some information, tour is a bit generous of a word.

The first slide was of a pie chart, labeled 1999 California Waste Characterization. As Nicole explained, the chart represented a breakdown of all the different types of garbage California threw away in 1999. It represented trash not just from residents, but also businesses and industry. Easily the biggest pie slice was Organic Waste, which includes food and yard waste. (The chart may be based off this study by the California Integrated Waste Management Board. According to this study, organic waste also includes rubber, textiles and carpet.) The next biggest slice was Paper. Then C&D (Construction & Demolition). Much smaller were the slices for Plastic, Metal and Glass.

In order to recycle as much as possible, Nicole said, Community Recycling devised three separate processes to handle almost all the different categories.

The first process handles ‘traditional’ waste, which includes the trash collected from my dumpster, along with other residential and office-based garbage. When the garbage trucks drop off the trash, it is first loaded into a trommel, a big cylindrical tumbler that shreds the waste out of the garbage bags and separates it for the next step. The waste leaves the trommel and is loaded onto a conveyor belt where workers pull out whatever looks recyclable.

At this point I asked Nicole about the privacy concerns associated with having people go through every piece of garbage someone throws away. She indicated that there was no hard and fast policy in place, but there were supervisors watching over the workers at all times and the pace of the work doesn’t really allow the trash to be inspected that closely. She did advise that sensitive information should always be shredded before being thrown away.

The workers separate out the recyclables into their appropriate categories: paper, metal, plastic, and glass. These are then pressed into large bales, where they can be sent out to other plants for the actual recycling process.

So once again, we are faced with a bit of a misnomer. Community Recycling doesn’t actually recycle these materials. It sorts waste and sends it along, either to be recycled or (what’s left over) to the landfill. Perhaps we simply haven’t yet thoroughly enough defined the concept of ‘recycling.’ The Community Recycling facility mostly sorts waste and then sends it off to other places. Does that count as recycling? It’s a noble and necessary process either way, but we may need some new terms to parse down the steps of what ultimately is ‘recycling.’

Tangents aside, the bales are sent off to other recycling plants. For the majority of materials, this means a trip overseas.

I asked Nicole about contamination. Doesn’t having all the trash mixed together result in a lower-grade product? Nicole’s answer, which I can’t really argue with, is that if the recycling plants are buying it, it must be good enough. So apparently separating and cleaning the different classes isn’t really that big of a deal for people throwing things away.

The only real piece of advice Nicole had for residents was to hold onto ‘hazardous’ materials. These include batteries and CFLs, which should be recycled at a dedicated center that handles those types of items.

I then asked Nicole how much ‘traditional’ waste gets recycled and how much gets sent along to the landfill. She said about 20% is recycled. It doesn’t sound like much, but it must be remembered that most of the products we use and throw away were never designed to be recycled, as I’ve mentioned in a previous article. Even items that can be recycled, like a plastic bottle, cannot be recycled into new plastic bottles. They are ‘downcycled’ into less valuable plastic items, like park benches or speed bumps. For products that are made from several different classes of items, like a toy with metal gears inside a plastic shell, the work necessary to break the item down is not cost-effective. It gets sent to the landfill.

The second process is exclusively for the ‘organic wastes,’ mostly food. Community Recycling takes the wastes to its composting facility, the biggest in the nation. One hundred and fifty acres of compost. Here the waste is laid down in huge, seven-hundred-yard long mounds. As the composting process takes place, the centers of the mounds reach well over one hundred degrees. The facility has a machine that rolls over the mounds, churning the compost to ensure that every bit is processed.

One of the great things about this process is that most of the waste doesn’t come from you and me. Community Recycling gathers the food waste from those who throw it away the most: restaurants, cafeterias and grocery stores. When produce goes bad, grocery stores load it up into the cardboard boxes in which they receive it and hand it over to Community Recycling. An interesting part of the process is that the food is dumped onto the composting mounds as it is received, boxes and all. These boxes may be laced with plastic or wax, but they’re left on the mounds during the composting process. The big churning machines break up the foreign material into strips, which makes it easy to filter out at the end of the process, resulting in clean, pure compost. It generally takes about three months to get from food to compost. This is sold to local farmers, or used at one of the four thousand acres of Community Recycling-owned farms.

The final process is strictly for C&D. Constructing or demolishing a building results in a completely different kind of waste than living in a home with a family or working in an office, but the opportunity for recycling is still great. The main types of waste from this process are wood, metal and drywall.

The metal is sold off to be melted down and recycled.

The wood is processed into woodchips, which are then transported to one of Community Recycling’s two biomass power facilities in Central California. Together, the two facilities generate over thirty-five megawatts of power.

The drywall is broken down into its component parts, namely paper and gypsum. The paper is recycled and the gypsum is broken down into a dirt-like powder. This powder can then be used for fertilizer or for erosion control because of its excellent water absorption and retention properties.

As one who is familiar with the economic arguments AGAINST recycling (namely that recycled material is more expensive than pure, virgin material), I asked Nicole whether or not the plant pays for itself. Nicole said the plant was owned by a private company and did indeed pay its own way.

At this point, the presentation ended and Nicole led us out of the building to the sidewalk, where we looked at the facility a bit. She showed us a large pile of compost and offered for us to touch it. We declined.

It was a bit anti-climatic, but still an informative morning. As I mentioned earlier, this was the first ‘tour’ specifically for community members. Community Recycling is slowly reaching out to the public, as their currently half-unfinished website demonstrates.

Community Recycling is important not just for the work it does, but also because it demonstrates that recycling can be a successful business in and of itself. As the Revolution progresses, Community Recycling could become a model for others entering the Green Industry.

But for now, it’s just nice knowing my own garbage is going to good use.

more opinions about children

I need to share with you all that I am terribly surprised about something.  Let me start by saying… admitting.. that I have a preconceived notion of all things religious.  

I think we are so bombarded by extremes about religion that my opinions are justified. You hear much more about the religious fanatics starting a cult in Montana, Texas, or San Diego. So much so, that I might guarantee that this image evokes an emotion in you that might be negative.  However, it must be argued that the news rarely mentions the good news or the reasonable opinions of different sects.  

So, my admission is this… the Christian Science Monitor is a great periodical and has become a constant source of information for me.  Go to the wikipedia reference information, here, and you will see it was formed specifically to not evangelize and is not a religious themed newspaper.

There is no point in sharing this except I felt it was an elephant in the room that I had to address before continuing to link you all to articles I find useful.

So, now that that is out of the way… let’s discuss an article I happened upon.  It’s about overpopulation.

The author discusses the current articles being published about over-population and criticizes what has been said.  For one, he didn’t like this article, citing for example, that:

And if we’re to blame for the emissions of all of our progeny forever and ever, doesn’t blame equally fall upon our progenitors, going all the way back to a clump of self-replicating molecules some four billion years ago?

He also briefly mentions this article where there is a simple conclusion to over population: educating women.  And, if any of you have ever seen Idiocracy, the following argument sure rings true:

And is it really a wise strategy to deploy environmental stewardship to urge people to voluntarily stop having kids? Even if such a strategy worked (a big if), the only people to heed this advice be those who care about the environment, while those who don’t care about the environment would continue breeding as usual. Given that children generally tend to share the social beliefs of their parents, this starts to looks like a recipe for eliminating environmentalism from the gene pool.

And, so, like many of us he concludes that it is not so much over-population but what kind of people we consist of:

But in the end, it’s not really population itself that is inherently the problem. While there are no doubt physical limits to how many people can occupy the planet at one time, the real issue here is waste. If we continue with our current methods of production and consumption – extracting finite resources, rearranging their chemistry, and then dumping them into the sky, the sea, and the soil – then its almost inevitable that we will make the weather go all weird, poison our oceans, and consign our descendants to picking through our landfills.

what is it about this hormone?

For some reason Estrogen is a hormone that loves to be mimicked.  Add to that the fact that we (The United States) love to add this mimickers into our food and water supply.

We have already discussed, at length, the addition of Bisphenol-A and phthalates to a variety of items and the affect they are having on our infants and children.  Now, scientists have identified two food additives that could be possible hormone mimickers, as well: propyl gallate and 4-hexyl resorcinol, according to Environmental Health News.

In the study, the scientists used computer models to test 1500 chemicals for estrogen mimicking properties, which brought the potential culprits down to thirteen.  When those thirteen were exposed to cells, two of them (listed above) were confirmed as “xenoestrogens”.

Propyl gallate is the more common additive which is used to prevent fats and oils from spoiling that can be found in a range of foods including baked goods, shortening, dried meats, candy, fresh pork sausage, mayonnaise and dried milk.  4-hexyl resorcinol is a chemical used to prevent shrimp, lobster and other shellfish from discoloring.

It is important to note that of the 3000 food additives used none of them are required to go through stringent testing, per the FDA.  In fact, just over half that have actually been tested for toxicology reports.  

Globally, the market for additives is expected to reach more than $33 billion by 2012. There are five main reasons that companies add compounds to food: to emulsify, to preserve, to add nutritional content, to add flavor or color and to balance alkalinity and acids.

 

“With some 3,000 compounds being used in food formulations there may be other additives with estrogenic properties that come to light with these types of studies,” Hicks said.

 

Using the traditional animal testing system, “it would be impossible to test all of the additives in a short time,” Cozzini said. “Every day we discover new molecules, and we must continue to identify new ways to study them.”

opinion: carbon calculator, week 10

Week 10, and the last, in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

STOP HAVING KIDS, or at least so many

The Vatican released a statement recently that the birth control pill does more harm to the environment because of all the hormones being secreted out of female urine.  This is laughable, especially when you consider all the damage done by the things listed above.

Interestingly, what can help the environment the most is being more responsible for the amount of children you are having.  You have a certain eco-footprint.  When you have a child, consider that your footprint just doubled.  You are using more water, more electricity, and buying more things.  You may use the television as a babysitter.  You are doing more laundry.  You may even be drinking more coffee.  Your home has gotten bigger.  Your car has gotten bigger.  And, your waist has gotten bigger.

I know this is something that many people do not want to hear.  I am not saying that your child isn’t fantastic and doesn’t deserve the best.  I have children in my life (not my own) that I love and think the world is better for them being here.  But that is not to say if you have four kids, I think you are irresponsible… because I do. 

Especially, if you consider yourself an environmentalist.  Because those two things do not go hand in hand. 

why putting stuff down the drain is bad

Aside from the fact that it may not get filtered out for our safe consumption, there are additional problems with chemicals in the water supply.

Study: Range of pharmaceuticals in fish across US, via Newsweek

 

Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.

Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.

“The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it,” said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment.

 

Shampoo in the Water Supply Triggers Growth of Deadly Drug-Resistant Bugs, via The Guardian UK

 

Fabric softeners, disinfectants, shampoos and other household products are spreading drug-resistant bacteria around Britain, scientists have warned. Detergents used in factories and mills are also increasing the odds that some medicines will no longer be able to combat dangerous diseases.

The warning has been made by Birmingham and Warwick university scientists, who say disinfectants and other products washed into sewers and rivers are triggering the growth of drug-resistant microbes. Soil samples from many areas have been found to contain high levels of bacteria with antibiotic-resistant genes, the scientists have discovered – raising fears that these may have already been picked up by humans.

“That is a natural evolutionary process,” said Gaze. “If other bacteria are killed, those that are resistant to QACs will survive and, without competition, will multiply in vast numbers. However, it turns out that the piece of DNA that confers that resistance also contains genes that confer resistance to antibiotics. In this way, we have created an ideal environment for the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in our drains and sewers. These microbes are now being spread round the country in river water and in sewage sludge used on farms.”

 

god is watching us

Two articles came out in the last week where well-known religious leaders spoke out about the environment and their opinion that God would be disappointed.  The links are below.

God ‘will not give happy ending’, via BBC.  In this article the Archbishop of Canterbury discusses why he believes God will not save us from our mess.

“I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin,” he said.

“God’s faithfulness stands, assuring us that even in the most appalling disaster love will not let us go – but it will not be a safety net that guarantees a happy ending in this world.”

Without a change of heart, Dr Williams warned, the world faced a number of “doomsday scenarios” including the “ultimate tragedy” of humanity gradually “choked, drowned, or starved by its own stupidity.”

God would be giving us a stern talking to, via Daily Dispatch.  This is a letter by Desmond Tutu.

Our forefathers had a direct, visceral connection to nature. Meat had to be caught, and killed, carried, then skinned, a taxing business. Fruit and vegetables had to be sought out growing in the wild or carefully tended. That effort caused our ancestors to waste very little.

Modern life has removed that connection and the realisation of our impact on the earth. Supermarkets and packaged foods hide the processes involved in feeding us.

In short, the consequences for our actions are delayed or hidden, so we assume they are waived.

Yet the laws of physics are not mocked and the distance between us and our resources is being shrunk, like an elastic band returning to its original size. That process usually involves a stinging sensation and we’re starting to feel the pain in many ways.

lights out

In case you haven’t heard….

Saturday night at 830 is EARTH HOUR 2009: http://www.earthhour.org/home/

Everyone on the PLANET is being asked to turn off their lights at 830 pm, your local time.

I am inviting you all to participate in this once a year event!  Here is a chance to do something small, but potentially have a huge impact, to tell your government that you care about the planet and want… nay, DEMAND… change!

As always…. SPREAD THE WORD

ice is a species?

I found an article today that I just find so, SO fascinating that I felt it was important to share with my readers.  How’s this for an introductory paragraph:

A different kind of ice is replacing ancient Arctic ice. The new stuff is qualitatively different. It’s thinner, darker, wetter. Worse, it may already be changing the local weather and the ability to grow new ice. It could even alter the oceanic circulation that mediates global climate, reports Nature. Oh, it’s bad for polar bears too.

I think it is important to note that while many argue there was more ice created in 2008, therefore the belief in global warming should not be believed and is just rhetoric, it is extremely important to note what kind of ice was formed.  In other words, multiyear ice is the good stuff.  It’s NOT being made.

The original article can be found HERE, via MotherJones

some environmental news, 3.25.09

How Big Is That Widening Gyre of Floating Plastic? via the Wall Street Journal

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it has been called, has become a symbol of what some say is a looming crisis over trash. But this floating mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean is hard to measure, and few agree on how big it is or how much plastic it holds. That makes it difficult to determine what to do about it.

What is still true, no matter how big the size, the marine life is eating, and as a result dying from, this plastic.  And what is also true… we are putting it there and it will be our job to get it out.

Rise in malaria rates, drug resistance tied to climate, via the Daily Climate

The malaria parasite is highly sensitive to changes in temperature, and even subtle warming can dramatically increase populations of the mosquitoes that transmit the disease, said ecologist Mercedes Pascual.

Some scientists have argued that climate is not involved in the increasing highland epidemics. Instead, they say, adaptations in the parasite that make it resistant to anti-malarial drugs are the key drivers.

But Pascual said that this “either-or” view is misguided and improperly lets global warming off the hook.

‘Flawed’ Red List putting species at risk, via The New Scientist

 IS probably the most influential barometer of extinction risk, yet the Red List is unscientific and frequently wrong. So claim a growing number of conservation scientists, including several who help compile it. While no one wants to see an end to the Red List, which covers 45,000 species, many fear that the sometimes shaky methods behind the creation of the listings are downplayed, meaning time, money and effort can be misdirected trying to save “safe” species while others creep towards extinction.

10 Easy Ways to be Labeled a “Terrorist” by the Government, via PlanetSave

8.) Attend VEGAN potlucks!!!:  While Al-Qaeda continues to release video communiques threatening Americans, the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are using anti-terrorism resources to attempt to infiltrate vegan potlucks.

bottled water news

A new bill was introduced in California today that would force companies to disclose pertinent information to the public about bottled water, according to PlanetSave.

Assembly bill 201, sponsored by the nonprofit Food & Water Watch, would require that all bottling companies disclose to the public the quantity of water they extract, the source of the water, and whether the source is public or privately owned.

Given how desperate we are in California for water, and the fact that we are knee deep in a drought, it is very important to know where water is coming from, especially if it is a local resource.  I mean, would you want your water to go to serving the public, or would you want it going to a private company that is going to re-sell it for profit?

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