Living Like Ed

by Ed Begley, Jr.

  TerraPass is the best way I have found to mitigate my carbon footprint, and the company makes it very easy. For a plane flight, you just go online to TerraPass.com, log on, and enter your miles traveled and how many people are traveling. You can then buy a TerraPass to balance the emissions for your level of energy use. You can also buy a yearly TerraPass, if you just want to give an estimate to make things easy so you’re not doing it every trip. And it’s very inexpensive, something like $7 for the last airplane trip we took.

  So far, 40,000 people have bought TerraPasses, so that’s a lot of green energy fed into the system, a lot of very real offsets that have occurred. Imagine if 400,000 people did it. If four million people did it. Everybody would take notice then.

  A TerraPass for Your Car

  Maybe you can’t go out and buy an electric car or a hybrid or an alternative-fuel vehicle right now. You don’t have the money at the moment, or maybe you really love the car you have. You can still make a real difference, environmentally speaking, by purchasing a TerraPass for your car.

  They’re going to ask you, “How many miles do you drive annually?” All you do is see what it says on your odometer and—unless you had some extraordinary big year of driving, or big year of not driving—divide that number by the amount of years since you bought the car, if you bought it new. (If you bought it used, look at the receipt and see how many miles it had when you purchased it, then deduct that from the total on the odometer before you average out your annual mileage.)

  Next, you select your car model from the list on the website, and it will tell you what size TerraPass you need to mitigate the amount of CO2 you put out in a year’s worth of driving.

  I mostly drive my electric car, but I do drive cross-country in the hybrid sometimes, so I computed that amount for my cross-country drives. For a Prius, for 10,000 miles a year, it was less than $40. It wasn’t a lot of money, and I feel good about it.

  It’s All About Choices

  Every day, you have choices—probably even more than you realize. You can get in your car and drive to a store that’s three blocks away or you can walk there. You can ride your bike there. You can get some exercise and reduce pollution and reduce traffic congestion at the same time—or not. Your call.

  If you have to go farther than you can comfortably walk or bike, you can choose public transportation if that is an option where you live. You can take a train or a bus or the subway. Again, it’s a chance for you to reduce traffic congestion and reduce pollution and multitask, too. You can get some work done or read a book while you ride.

  When you do have to drive—say it’s 40 degrees below zero outside or you have to go someplace that you can’t reach by public transportation or you can’t get there quickly enough by bus or by train—you still have other choices. You can drive an electric car or you can drive a hybrid or you can drive an alternative-fuel vehicle. You also can get a TerraPass, make one choice—one easy choice for very little money—and make a genuine difference, no matter what you drive. And the same goes for those times when you have to fly.

  It’s all about choices, and none of them are painful. They’re not going to make you suffer—regardless of what my wife might say. Often it’s quite the opposite. Often, these choices will make you feel good while you do something good.

  Which brings us to another series of feel-good, do-good choices: choices about what to do with your trash, with your waste. And the short answer is: Recycle.

  Health experts say walking 30 minutes a day will add 1.3 years to your life. Walking greatly reduces the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer and glaucoma. Walking can lower your body fat, your cholesterol levels, and your blood pressure.

  If you ride 4 miles on a bike instead of driving, you will keep 15 pounds of pollutants out of the air we breathe. If just one person in your family uses public transportation regularly—as a way to get to work or school or wherever he or she needs to go—your household can save more than $1,400 worth of gas in a single year.

  Public transportation usage saves the equivalent of 300,000 automobile fill-ups every single day.

  You can’t make gasoline on the roof of your house, but you can make electricity on the roof of your house. And that electricity can power your house and it can power your car.

  Imagine getting free gasoline for the rest of your life. That’s what it’s like when you charge your electric car with your own solar energy. While there is a cost to install the solar panels and for the battery system, once it’s in, you essentially get all that energy for free!

  According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the average American drives 29 miles per day—well within the range of an electric vehicle.

  Some people actually consider 1900 to be the heyday of the electric car. At the time, 28 percent of the roughly 4,200 cars produced in the United States were powered by electricity!

  Most automobiles get better gas mileage on the highway than they do in city driving, but some hybrid cars get better mileage in the city than they do on the highway. If you commute locally or in stop-and-go traffic, that’s a real benefit.

  Why use perfectly good corn that could feed people here and in other countries to make fuel? Save that corn and those soybeans for people, and then turn the waste into biodiesel fuel.

  According to the National Resources Defense Council, the use of biofuels—especially cellulosic biofuels—could reduce our annual greenhouse gas emissions by 1.7 billion tons by the year 2050. That’s more than 80 percent of our current transportation related emissions.

  Since 40 percent of all car trips are 2 miles or less, it’s really easy to make the change from driving to biking.

  Currently, there are no alternative fuels for airplanes, but they could conceivably run on biofuels someday.

  One round-trip flight from the United States to Europe will add 3 to 4 tons to your carbon footprint.

  According to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester, CO2 emissions from airplane travel in Britain will surpass those from automobile travel in the next five to seven years.

  Driving a hybrid can reduce global-warming pollutants by one-third to one-half.

  3

  * * *

  RECYCLING

  OLD BECOMES NEW

  * * *

  Nearly everything can be recycled—or reused, which is another wonderful form of recycling. There’s value in just about everything, even that tattered old throw rug. Groups like Freecycle find new uses for old, cast-off items. If you tell members, “I’ve got an old throw rug that’s tattered,” someone may know somebody who can use it. A rescue pet clinic might need something for the dogs to lie around on, for example.

  So let’s start with the basics, a sort of Recycling 101, before we get into more detail about how you can recycle and reuse all kinds of different stuff.

  Recycling is Ed’s life. It’s his passion.

  When we first decided to move in together, I realized I was going to have to embrace recycling. Every single thing I wanted to dispose of would have to be considered. Could it be recycled? If so, which bin did it go in? (He had a ridiculous number of bins and still does!)

  I learned that just about everything you own can be recycled, and my lifestyle had to reflect that. Today, if I want to make a change around the house, that change has to involve recycling. I can put a new rug in my Pilates studio—as long as it’s my old living room rug, cleaned and reused. But what do I do with the nasty old rug that was in the Pilates studio? Ed wanted to give it to Goodwill. But who wants a torn-up old rug?

  Eventually, Ed agreed, but he still said, “If anyone thinks this is going in a landfill, they’re out of their mind. Maybe the fiber can be used for something. Fiber has value.”

  To Ed, everything is potentially something else. I never under-estimate Ed when it comes to recycling. He’ll always find a way.

  Why Recycle?

  Recycling is important for a number of reasons. First and
foremost, there’s energy to be saved in most recycling programs, aluminum being at the head of the class, the top of the heap.

  When you think about it, just back-of-the-envelope calculation will bring you to the same point that every study does: It takes so much less energy to mine our aluminum on our street corners and in our alleys and at our recycling centers than it does to travel to Jamaica, use large John Deere or Caterpillar equipment to mine bauxite, to refine the ore, to take it to a smelter, to bring it to the United States, and to fabricate it into a can. That’s a number—all that work and all that energy is a number. Now, what’s the other number, to have curbside recycling bins and recycling centers all across the country, where you can mine the very pure form of bauxite known as aluminum and use a minimal amount of energy to make that into a new can?

  Another very important point: The idea of using these perfectly wonderful resources—be they petroleum, bauxite, or any other resource—to make different things, then to throw those things in this big toxic soup known as a landfill, only to have to go get more resources and use them up is crazy to me. Recycling saves a tremendous amount of natural resources.

  Landfills

  The other issue is: Where does all this stuff go?

  “Honey, throw that away.” “Sweetie, can you throw this away for me?”

  Where is away? Away is just someone else’s backyard.

  Landfills serve us the way the portrait served Dorian Gray. They allow us to cavort in an orgy of consumerism until the final day of reckoning—which is yesterday or today, depending on where you live.

  You can call a landfill other things. They call it a sanitary landfill. They call it a dump— a more appropriate name, I suppose, because people want to just dump stuff on someone else and sweep it under the rug.

  But it ultimately doesn’t do a very good job. All landfills leak. It’s not just solid matter that’s thrown in a landfill. There are liquids, too, and a lot of them are toxic. Rightly or wrongly, people do throw toxic substances in a landfill. I say “rightly or wrongly,” but of course it’s very wrong. That’s why there are hazardous waste drop-off sites and hazardous waste pickup days. People should take advantage of that, but do they? Absolutely not. Sadly, they throw their half-used can of cleaning solution, the old can of paint they don’t need anymore, their batteries, their old computer monitor, right into a trash can, where it is picked up and mixed together with all the other allowable waste and sent off to a landfill.

  What happens next? It rains. Of course, the people who build and manage landfills are very careful. They put a cap on the top of the landfill, or a liner, to keep the rain out.

  A liner is just a big sheet of plastic, and, of course, plastic leaks. The rain will eventually get down into the landfill.

  But wait, isn’t there another liner on the bottom of the landfill, so it won’t leach on down into the water table below? Sure there is, but when you’ve got all these sharp objects in a landfill, they cut or tear holes in the plastic. So the liquids are able to seep out of the landfill and into the earth below.

  Any landfill is essentially a big bathtub in the ground. And as any plumber will tell you, all bathtubs will eventually leak. Some liquid will eventually get through.

  Gravity always wins, even with matter in a solid state. How quickly do you think it wins with matter in a liquid state? Over time, toxic substances will leach into your water table—the same water beneath the earth’s surface that supplies wells and springs. The water that we drink and swim in. The water that fish and other sea creatures live in. Hmm, I wonder if that’s a good idea.

  You need only travel to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in New York City—or any landfill in America—to see all the birds circling overhead. Circling. Landing. Feeding on the toxic elements in the landfill. And, with great regularity, getting snared on the plastic rings from six-packs. Ingesting all of those Styrofoam peanuts, all of those different plastics. Many different species are adversely affected by landfills because of the toxins and the ubiquitous presence of plastics that harm them in so many ways.

  The Landfill Siting Issue

  There’ve been landfills for thousands of years. In the earliest settlements of man, you can find midden mounds, which are basically landfills. There’s detritus. There’s trash left over from former civilizations.

  When there were one billion of us on the planet, we could seemingly act with impunity as there was plenty of space to dump our trash. Now that our planet is more crowded, people have started to complain, rightly, about the landfill near their home, the odor from the landfill, the vermin that congregate around the landfill.

  In days gone by we enjoyed the illusion of disposal, of throwing things away and having them just disappear, or cease to exist. In the West, there was so much space, it was possible to site landfills out of sight, out of mind. People on the East Coast, by no small coincidence, understood that this illusion was in fact false much sooner than the rest of the country because the East is far more densely settled. In the ’80s, an orphan garbage barge from Islip, New York, created an uproar when the residents of Nassau County, Long Island, couldn’t get another municipality to accept their garbage. So the people with the garbage decided they’d take it somewhere else. And those people wouldn’t take it. They tried another place and got the same story. That barge made a 6,000-mile journey before they found somewhere to dump the load.

  And all this played out in front of us, thanks to the media, and it woke us up to the question of where this stuff goes. People got to thinking, “Would I want a landfill in my backyard?” I sure don’t. Do you?

  All that attention to landfill siting and the overabundance of garbage gave recycling a big boost. More and more states came on board with recycling bills and instituted deposits on containers. And it’s continued to grow since then due in large part to landfill siting concerns.

  The Economics of Trash

  Despite the fact that no one wants trash, there’s a lot of money in it. It’s big business. For years, organized crime had a tremendous presence in the waste-hauling industry. It’s my understanding that that’s changed, and I hope that’s the case. But there are some very big waste haulers who, for years, were opposed to recycling programs because they felt it encroached on their business.

  Some of these waste-hauling companies have gotten into the recycling business in a big way themselves because they’ve come to realize there’s money to be made there.

  The unfortunate side effect of this is that many of the smaller recycling firms, the mom-and-pop firms, have been driven out of business, and that’s very sad.

  There’s another side to the economics of trash, too:

  Many things—from the sun visor in your car to the screen door on your house—are made as a unit. If part of it breaks, you’re expected to replace the whole thing; you can’t just change the mirror in the sun visor. And there’s no easy way to replace the screen mesh in a new screen door. So people are being encouraged to throw away things that likely would not have been thrown away a short time ago. That makes for more trash. But it also creates more opportunities for recycling, including many of those we’re about to discuss.

  Curbside Recycling Programs

  Fortunately, many cities across the United States have a curbside recycling program. These include many smaller municipalities and suburban areas, as well as large locales including:

  • Boston

  • Houston

  • San Antonio

  • Portland (Maine, Oregon, and Tennessee)

  • Grand Rapids

  • New York City

  • Kansas City

  • Salt Lake City

  • San Diego

  • Albuquerque

  These curbside programs have vastly increased the amount of material coming into the MRFs, or materials recovery facilities. That’s material that doesn’t go to a landfill, so these programs can be a huge boon in many ways.

  But there has been criticism abo
ut the pollution created by these recycling programs. That is to say: trucks—diesel trucks, in many cities—driving around and picking up this material. “For what?” critics say. “So people can feel warm and fuzzy about recycling?”

  I will concede there is a certain amount of pollution involved in collecting recyclables. Critics also say that there’s a lot of energy used and—in their opinion—wasted on these curbside pickup programs. In my opinion, it takes a lot less energy to mine this stuff in our alleys and on our street corners than to mine new raw materials at the source, and it also prevents more material from going into the landfills.

  When you consider the low-hanging fruit, the most energy saved is by collecting and recycling aluminum. If you go back to the top of the pyramid—the amount of aluminum recycled vs. mined in Jamaica—it’s still a beneficial trade-off.

  Critics also argue—and they are correct—that there have been highly inefficient recycling programs that do not make a positive environmental contribution. They are operating at a net loss, an environmental deficit, by generating diesel fumes.

  There’s another challenge to making these programs environmentally viable: our urban miners. For years we in the recycling realm have praised those—our homeless and others who clearly are not homeless—who go around picking the gold (in this case aluminum) out of the recycling bins. When the recycling that’s picked up by the town or city has already been cherry-picked of most of the valuable materials, the city can’t get its redemption value—that is, the deposits you and I have paid on aluminum cans and glass bottles and other containers. The municipalities running these recycling programs count on that money. And suddenly, they’re picking up mostly corrugated cardboard, and there’s not as much money coming into the coffers to support the program. There’s no money to be made in a curb-side program from chipped cardboard (especially if it’s contaminated with other waste), different papers, and glass containers. Deciding to reclaim these materials is a judgment call at best, because you’re basically hauling around sand. That’s all glass is made of. There may be a deposit on it, but sand is heavy, and it may not be as economically viable to recover as those aluminum cans.