An organic way of life

We didn't have a refrigerator at home when we were kids.  In the near-equatorial conditions, and in a vegetarian household, that meant buying vegetables practically every other day.  Because potatoes are more tolerant than most other vegetables, they were stored in a dark corner and were often the option if a guest showed up un-announced--after all, those were also the days before emails and telephones, and relatives did knock on the door without a heads-up.

For whatever reason, I liked involving myself in the kitchen affairs.  Not that I cooked back then.  But, I think I had far more interest than the typical boy did in how the food preparation happened. Perhaps my mother has forgotten me asking her questions like why we needed half-a-kilo of the vegetable and not more.  Like my grandmother, I too was always impressed with how my mother seemed to cook the exact quantity for a meal; rare was a day when we ended up with more food.

In that kind of an old lifestyle, only the needed fruits and vegetables and milk were purchased, and they were all consumed.  Food was never wasted.  Never.

I wonder if my interested involvement with those household affairs is also why I continue with some of those old practices.  Even in my life on the other side of the planet from the old country, I seem to do grocery shopping every other day.  But, hey, I rarely ever have to throw food into the trash can!

But, of course, I have the organic waste to deal with.  Everything from banana and orange peels to coffee grinds and more.  A few months ago, our garbage collection service introduced collecting food waste for recycling.  M bought me a stainless steel compost bin for the kitchen.  Into that bin goes the banana and orange peels and coffee grinds.  Thanks to all that, the regular trash bag rarely gets filled anymore even for the biweekly service!

So, of course, I was immediately drawn to this essay in The New Yorker.  It is all about recycling organics.  You know, like the food stuff and more that affluent societies casually throw out.  "South Korea recycles ninety-five per cent of its food waste."  That.Is.Amazing!!!  At the other end is New York City, for instance:

recycling of organics—food waste, yard waste, pretty much anything that rots—remains voluntary, even though such material makes up about a third of New York’s trash. All but five per cent of the city’s organic waste goes to landfills.

There is a reason that we worry about the organics that go to landfills:

Organic waste doesn’t just stink when it’s sent to landfills; it becomes a climate poison. Yes, we’ve been schooled again and again in the importance of recycling—by friends, by pious enemies, even by “Wall-E.” But the recycling of organics is arguably more important than that of plastics, metal, or paper. Composting transforms raw organic waste into a humus-like substance that enriches soil and enhances carbon capture. In landfills, starved of oxygen, decomposing organics release methane, a greenhouse gas whose warming effects, in the long run, are fifty-six times those of CO₂. The United States has greater landfill emissions than any other country, the equivalent of thirty-seven million cars on the road each year.

USA! USA! USA!

The thirteen thousand tons of food waste produced daily in South Korea now become one of three things: compost (thirty per cent), animal feed (sixty per cent), or biofuel (ten per cent). “People from other countries ask me very often, ‘How did South Korea achieve this success?’ ”

Read the essay to find out how South Korea managed to do this.  And what every one of us can do about this important issue, irrespective of where we live on this pale blue dot.

PS: The essay ends with a wonderful note on the globalized lives that we lead.  The South Korean interpreter, Lucia Lee, laments about her boyfriend's problem that there's not much that he can eat in South Korea because ...  He is a Jain.  Yes, a Jain. From India.  Isn't life beautiful!

One consumer at a time is the wrong approach

Welcome to today's episode of "If only people listened to me!"

For years, I have been ranting writing and saying that mantras like "recycle" or "become a vegetarian" is nothing but individuals feeling good about how they are helping the natural environment, but is really nothing more than, well, like peeing on oneself on a cold night to feel warm for a couple of seconds!

And this rant is from a nature-loving (mostly) vegetarian who is conscientious about his trash and recycling.

The rant against feel-goodism is because it means that "we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over."  We consumers have been brainwashed into believing that we created these problems and that we can solve these ourselves, if only we behaved "correctly" in our homes.

Awful bullshit that is.

And that's what this review of  Inconspicious Consumption: The Environmental Impacts You Don’t Know You Have points out about the book's message:

[Tatiana] Schlossberg says, “it is not the fault of the consumer that cashmere is cheap, and it’s not wrong to want nice things or to buy them, sometimes. ... It’s not within your control how some company sources and produces its cashmere, or the size of the herd that they got it from. That should be the corporation’s burden … or governments should make sure they act responsibly.”

Like I said earlier, welcome to today's edition of "If only people listened to me!"

So, does it mean that we individuals cannot do any damn thing?  We merely come up with ideas like Extended Producer Responsibility and circular economy that seemingly go nowhere?

Well, yes, as individuals who recycle and reduce trash while being a vegetarian, we are powerless.  But, get a few of us together and ...

Governments and corporations, of course, don’t do such things automatically — they need citizens to push them. But it doesn’t require every citizen to push in order to make change (since apathy cuts both ways, social scientists estimate that getting 3 or 4 percent of people involved in a movement is often enough to force systemic change, whereas if they acted solely as consumers that same number would have relatively little effect). You can obviously do both, and all of us should try — but fighting for the Green New Deal makes more mathematical sense than trying to take on the planet one commodity at a time.

You want an example?  I can give you plenty from my own blog.  But then who cares for sriram's rants, right?  Here's from the review:

[Instead] of trying to figure out every single aspect of our lives, a carbon tax would have the effect of informing every one of those decisions, automatically and invisibly. The fuel efficiency standards that the Obama administration put forward and Trump is now gutting would result in stunningly different outcomes. And so on.

In a democracy (call it a republic if you are one of those rightwing nutcases!) we collectively deal with these issues via elections and the government.

We aren’t going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We’re going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.

Elections have consequences, as 63 million people reminded us!

BTW, who is the reviewer, you ask?  None other than Bill McKibben.  

Stop blaming consumers for our plastic crisis

My city is one of the many all across the country that are struggling to reconfigure the recycling collection, now that China has given us the much-needed kick in the rear end.  I am surprised that China took our crap--often the literal crap too--for this long, which allowed consumers in the US to waste without care.

But, it is not as if conscientiously recycling waste will clean up the air, water, and soil, and remake this the garden of Eden.

Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper.

It makes us feel good, for sure.  But, if feelings alone can make wonders, then ...

Encouraging individuals to recycle more will never solve the problem of a massive production of single-use plastic that should have been avoided in the first place.

Aren't the manufacturers held accountable for this?  Right?  But we forget that over the years we people have put business and profits well ahead of anything in life.  We don't care a shit about anything else.

I want to proceed further only after reminding ourselves that the economics related to the use of plastics is highly complex.  It will boggle one's mind when we look at the different ways plastic makes our lives better.  The core problem is one of consumption; plastics is merely a symptom. But, recognizing that we are not going back to the caves, we ought to think about the downsides of plastic.

In dealing with the downside, instead of the problem being tackled at the source, the industry has successfully managed "to shift the onus of environmental responsibility onto the public."  There is "almost no responsibility on plastic manufacturers for the numerous environmental, economic and health hazards imposed by their products."

It is like with the fossil fuel industry too.  The older I get the less I understand why we call all these "progress"!

So, what does this public responsibility for the private crapping mean?

Effectively, we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over. We can swim against this plastic stream with all our might and fail to make much headway. At some point we need to address the source.

We need to face up to the reality:

Our huge problem with plastic is the result of a permissive legal framework that has allowed the uncontrolled rise of plastic pollution, despite clear evidence of the harm it causes to local communities and the world’s oceans. Recycling is also too hard in most parts of the U.S. and lacks the proper incentives to make it work well.

This means that we need to address the problem right at the source.  Easier said than done, right?

Actually, it can be done.  Like how more and more restaurants are banning plastic straws, or provide them only upon request.

A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making wastefulness an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U.S. cities, and are under consideration in California and the U.K.

Notice that such approaches go beyond individual consumers.

A better alternative is the circular economy model, where waste is minimized by planning in advance how materials can be reused and recycled at a product’s end of life rather than trying to figure that out after the fact. To make this happen, we can support groups like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation that are partnering with industry to incorporate “cradle-to-cradle” (i.e., circular economic) design into their products.

So, think about what you want to do in this project in order to mobilize people.

Start conversations with your family members and friends. Call your local and federal representatives to support bottle bills, plastic bag taxes and increased producer responsibility for reuse and recycling. Stand up against preemptive bans on local plastic regulation. There are signs that corporations are listening to consumer opinions, too.

Imagining such possibilities in the trump era, which was made possible by 63 million, might be rather difficult.  But, the alternative is worse.

Deal with your own shit!

Some of us knew that it was only a matter of time.  It finally happened.

We have to deal with our own crap--it is no longer somebody else's problem!

"We" as in even right here in Eugene: "On Thursday, the reverberations of China’s tough stance reached Sam Miller, owner of Lane Apex."

What does Lane Apex do?  "picks up curbside commingled recyclables such as plastics, unsorted paper, cardboard and metal cans from homes in Eugene."

What has this got to do with China?

China, by far the world’s biggest importer and re­processor of recyclables, has put the United States on notice that this fall and early next year, it will begin turning away all but the most pristine used plastics and unsorted waste paper.

Of course, it is not merely Eugene:

With China’s looming ban, the entire West Coast system for sorting and shipping off recyclables is beginning to slow down, as the industry realizes it may not be able to get rid of the stuff

Back in 1987, when I was new to this country, one of the interesting stories for me was about the barge from New York that was on the sea and for thousands of miles--the gar-barge.  The awesomely rich geographic areas have always used poorer ones as their dumping grounds.  China used to be one of those poorer areas.  Not anymore.  It is now an economic and political power in the world.  And it is no longer interested in other people's garbage.

“It could have a negative impact on recycling in general, as the system has relied on China for so long now,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Waste Management, the largest waste-service provider in the U.S. If the Chinese market is no-longer available, some experts question whether U.S. municipal recycling programs can remain viable, or if many of the products now considered “recyclable” will be reclassified as garbage bound for landfills.

How did this export of garbage to China come about?

For decades, the market for recycling exports has benefited thanks to the massive U.S.-China trade deficit. With more container ships arriving on U.S. shores then heading the other way, shippers were desperate for anything they could find for the return trip.
“And the thing they chose was scrap materials,” Moore told Bloomberg BNA. “Because of discounts the shipping companies offered, it ended up being cheaper to send that stuff to China than to process it here.”

Let's see.  China makes a whole bunch of stuff, while polluting its air, water, and land, and while treating its people like shit.  We buy the stuff that we really do not need, and generate a whole lot of recyclable trash.  But, we don't want to pay for the processing of the recyclables.  We put them in the empty containers and sent them to China.  Now, it is time to pay the piper!

Meanwhile, we have shifted to online shopping because, well, we don't have enough time to spend on Facbook and Instagram and whatever else and, therefore, we can't be bothered to go to the store round the corner to get a roll of toilet paper.  We place orders online, and they are delivered with a whole lot of packing materials.

“Online retailers like Amazon still need cardboard boxes and most comes from China,” said Jakob Rindegren, the recycling policy adviser of the U.K. association.
One corrugated box retailer on the online shopping site Taobao reached by Reuters, said the price of cardboard boxes had nearly doubled since the end of August to 8.8 yuan ($1.33) each.

As I wrote in this post on recycling, two years ago--almost to the very date:

I am especially drawn to issues like this because we are forced to think through the complications and question our own preferred ideas on how to make this world a better place for tomorrow.  A constant examination, a Socratic questioning, in which there is no sacred cow, so to speak.

The solution to all these is simple, right?  Consume less, and take care of your own shit!             

Reduce, yes. Re-use, yes. Recycle? Hmmm...

Even though the garbage trucks come to our neighborhood every week, I have opted for trash pickup only every other week.  Not because there is a huge cost savings--the rate differential between weekly and biweekly service wouldn't even pay for a latte at the coffee place that seems to serve a blackish liquid that looks like it came from charcoal!  I consume very little, and throw the recyclables into the blue bin.  There is very little of trash for me to worry about.

Over the years, I have been convinced that even the recycling that I do is more for my own feel-good benefits than for anything else.  I blog often, like here, that I am a hypocrite for worrying about the environment.  I have joked often with students, and even noted once in an op-ed, that my annual flights to visit with the people in the old country contributes immensely more to pollution than I could ever pay for through the recycling.  Yet, the world too is way more impressed with my recycling, instead of being concerned that I take too many trips that are fueled by carbon-based energy sources.

All these are why I did not take any offense with this op-ed in the NY Times, in which the author writes:

To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.
Even those statistics might be misleading.

For the ease of argument, let us suppose that a round-trip flight between Eugene and Chennai will be about 60,000 plastic bottles.  (Of course, I don't fly business class. Not anymore!)  So, if I recycle about 500 plastic bottles a year (that's a stretch!) I have not achieved anything by recycling, have I?

But then you are thinking, "hey, lots of Americans don't fly that much."  My travel pattern is an outlier, I could claim.  For a regular John Doe, wouldn't recycling help?  And given that the John Doe numbers are far greater than the Srirams, surely recycling helps, right?  Well, it does not:

Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies.

Recycling is a huge money loser.  Last week, one of the local trash hauling services announced an increase in the rate for curbside recycling!  The NY Times op-ed suggests that this is not the local company's fault:

The future for recycling looks even worse. As cities move beyond recycling paper and metals, and into glass, food scraps and assorted plastics, the costs rise sharply while the environmental benefits decline and sometimes vanish. “If you believe recycling is good for the planet and that we need to do more of it, then there’s a crisis to confront,” says David P. Steiner, the chief executive officer of Waste Management, the largest recycler of household trash in the United States. “Trying to turn garbage into gold costs a lot more than expected. We need to ask ourselves: What is the goal here?”

In a country like India, recycling can be a profitable venture, which is why the rag-pickers even search through the public trash piles.  But, as societies get more affluent, the relative cost of recycling climbs up rapidly.  

As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.

I am especially drawn to issues like this because we are forced to think through the complications and question our own preferred ideas on how to make this world a better place for tomorrow.  A constant examination, a Socratic questioning, in which there is no sacred cow, so to speak.

But then we have this urge to do something.  Climate change is for real.  We know we have to reduce our carbon footprint.  Can we do anything at all?  We need to travel a different route for that:

It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed after conducting what is probably the most thorough comparison of the social costs of recycling, landfilling and incineration. Dr. Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell University, considered everything from environmental damage to the pleasure that some people take in recycling (the “warm glow” that makes them willing to pay extra to do it).
He concludes that the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals, and by imposing a $15 tax on each ton of trash that goes to the landfill. That tax would offset the environmental costs, chiefly the greenhouse impact, and allow each municipality to make a guilt-free choice based on local economics and its citizens’ wishes. The result, Dr. Kinnaman predicts, would be a lot less recycling than there is today.

As you know very well, this is a road that politicians do not, and will not, take.  Whether it is in the context of trash, or the fossil-fuels that we burn, the incorrect price for carbon is the real problem.  Carbon tax, anyone?

Oh, btw, the op-ed's author, John Tierney, was following up on his own lengthy report for the NY Times from twenty years ago.  The title of that report?  Recycling is garbage.

The poor have a right to .... garbage :(

A few days ago, the Register Guard published my opinion piece on the Third World India, which is not drawing the same level of attention as does the First World India.  The following news item from The Hindu makes the intersection of these two Indias quite surreal:

Ms. Bhadakwad had come 18,000 kilometres to the annual U.N. climate conference in Cancun on behalf of 6,000 organised landfill recyclers in her hometown Pune, to demand access to the waste now trucked instead to a new incinerator. Without their dump, they’re trying to survive by going door to door for trash in a community 20 kilometres away.

“We have a right to the waste that can be recycled,” Ms. Bhadakwad told a reporter. “We want to continue making a living without interference from such big private companies.”

Their environmentalist allies say some 50 million people worldwide depend on collecting waste materials for a meagre livelihood. And these advocates and poor recyclers have an environmental argument to make – incinerators not only produce toxic pollution, but “by burning waste they increase carbon dioxide emissions,” the biggest global warming gas, said Mariel Vilella, a campaigner with the international group GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives.

By collecting and recycling plastic bags and bottles, glass, aluminium and other material, those 50 million rag-pickers “represent a huge opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Vilella told reporters

Reminded me of the following video, from Nicholas Kristof, that I sometimes use in my classes: