by Edward Humes
“Managing” waste is universally viewed as a positive. Everyone wants clean cities, sidewalks and streets, a healthy, sanitary environment for our kids. But our focus on managing a waste problem by making it appear to disappear has blinded many of us to the reality of how much food, fuel, water and other things of value we waste every day. For most of human history, such waste has been viewed as shameful or worse. Gluttony is, after all, one of the seven deadly sins, and it’s not because it’s associated with obesity, a threat to an individual’s survival, but because it represents overconsumption to the point of wastefulness, a threat to an entire community. Today, however, a gluttony of consumption has become the norm. That postwar marketing ploy of J. Gordon Lippincott, the push for us to throw perfectly good things away and buy new things to replace them so that somebody else can get rich—an idea that goes against our basic instincts and common sense—still holds us in thrall. We are married to a disposable economy dependent on waste.
This really didn’t make much sense in times of plenty. It certainly makes no sense today. The challenge for all of us is to find the way back. It’s a good time to stop managing waste, and start wasting less.
Which brings us to the coolest thing about trash, and the most heartening thing about our horrifying 102-ton legacy: It is one of the few big societal, economic and environmental problems over which ordinary individuals can exert control. You don’t have to fight City Hall to do it. You don’t have to organize protests or marches or phone banks or political action committees. As a consumer, as a homeowner or renter, as a person who eats and wears clothes and drinks water, you can choose to be more or less wasteful. You can choose to save more and spend less, which automatically means you will waste less. You can ban the bag from your own daily life. The smallest of steps can shave a piece from those 102 tons and save money for your household while you’re also saving the planet. Bea Johnson sets an amazing example that can be daunting to the rest of us, but remember, it took her family two years to transition to a low-waste lifestyle. Not all their choices are right for other families, nor do they have to be in order to go on a useful trash diet. It can start small, a slow shift to a new normal. Little changes that, if they go viral, will carry big payoffs.
That’s my challenge. I’m going to suggest five things anyone can do to be less wasteful. Try them out. Then suggest five of your own. E-mail them to [email protected] or post them on Twitter @EdwardHumes and we’ll start a conversation about figuring out the best strategy for making America less trashy and Americans a bit richer in the process.
Here are my five:
1. Refuse. Bea Johnson’s simple decision to just say no to a lot of stuff is the home run of waste reduction. From unwanted mail-order catalogs to recreational shopping excursions to printed phone bills rather than virtual ones, just refuse them. Say no to those stupid promotional key chains and tchotchkes that come free at conferences and fundraisers. You know it’s junk, and accepting it just encourages more. Refuse. Your trash pile will shrink dramatically.
2. Go Used and Refurbished. Whether it’s a computer, a TV, a car, a book or a coat, used or refurbished goods are always cheaper, are often indistinguishable from new (and many manufacturer-refurbished computers even carry same-as-new warranties), and their environmental footprint is a fraction of new products. You are keeping resources out of the waste stream and saving yourself big bucks, all at the same time.
3. Stop Buying Bottled Water. It’s a waste and a fraud wherever domestic water supplies are safe, which is virtually everywhere in the U.S. You don’t need it. Get a couple of reusable bottles and put tap water in them.
4. No More Plastic Grocery Bags. No, this one won’t save the world (though it will help the oceans), but Andy Keller’s right: Plastic bags are the gateway drug of waste. If you can get that monkey off your back, you’ll see how easy it can be to start chipping away other parts of your 102-ton legacy.
5. Focus on Cost of Ownership. The disposable economy wants you to think about the cost of things at the checkout stand. That’s how we end up with cheapo DVD players that become trash in a year, clothes that fade and wear out after a few washes, and cable boxes that eat more electricity than a fridge. The disposable economy gives us things that are cheap in the short term but costly and wasteful over time. Saving up for purchases of things that are more durable, long-lived, reliable and efficient saves money over time, and radically reduces the waste we produce. And it does something else: The act of saving for something that’s really good, something that we really want in our lives for years to come, encourages us to say no to other things we don’t really need. It encourages saving instead of spending. And that means far less waste, too.
CUTTING WASTE, be it in government, in business or in the home, always makes sense—economically, environmentally and morally. It is a strategy that always has benefits. Waste is tied to all the big problems of the day, from climate change to peak oil to high energy costs and rising prices of the raw materials our industries and infrastructure require. Waste-cutting is the secret to sustainability, security and prosperity. That 102-ton legacy doesn’t have to be the end of the story. It’s in everyone’s power to make it the starting point instead.
Send your top five (or two or ten) waste-cutting solutions to [email protected] or post them on Twitter @EdwardHumes. Let’s crowd-source the 102-ton legacy into oblivion … or at least put it on a major diet.
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. This calculation is derived from the most recent and most accurate data on America’s annual municipal waste generation, the biannual study by Columbia University and the journal BioCycle, which put the nation’s trash total at 389.5 million tons in 2008. The population of the country was put at 301 million that year by the U.S. Census, which yields a daily waste generation amount of 7.1 pounds per day.
2. “Plastic Water Bottle-Makers Sued by California over Green Claims,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2011.
3. “Products, Packaging and US Greenhouse Gas Emissions,” Joshuah Stolaroff, Product Policy Institute, September 2009.
4. “The State of Garbage in America,” a joint study by BioCycle and the Earth Engineering Center of Columbia University, by Rob van Haaren, Nickolas Themelis and Nora Goldstein, published in BioCycle, October 2010. Data is from the year 2008. The study is published biannually.
5. This calculation assumes a U.S. adult population of 230 million and an average weight of 178 pounds (195 pounds for men and 165 pounds for women), as reported by the National Center for Health Statistics in “U.S. Body Measurements, 2009.”
6. The BioCycle/Columbia University biannual survey of municipal solid waste sent to landfills, recycling, compost and waste-to-energy facilities draws on actual state-by-state data from the nation’s municipal waste systems and is the most accurate actual count of America’s trash. The better-known annual MSW report from the EPA does not use actual trash disposal data, but instead relies on a materials flow analysis and data from manufacturers to estimate the amount of products and materials consumed by Americans and how long those products and materials are likely to last. From these assumptions, combined with waste characteristic sampling studies for non-manufactured waste, the EPA estimates calculate how much stuff ought to be thrown out every year. Actual trash data is not used by the EPA. This method has come under fire for its chronic tendency to underestimate total trash and landfill loads, while overestimating the proportion that gets recycled.
7. Ibid.
8. Garbage In, Garbage Out: A Note on the Numbers
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s annual report, “Municipal Solid Waste in the United States,” is widely considered the most authoritative source on waste and trash in the country, a garbage ground zero for journalists, researchers and elected officials on how much trash we make, burn, bury and recycle, and how much of it is plastic, paper, metal, food scraps, or yard trimmings. Overall, according to the EPA, the country’s annual �
��waste stream” broke down in 2008 this way: 54 percent of the municipal waste (135.6 million tons) went to landfills, a third (84 million tons) was recycled or composted, and the remaining 12.6 percent (31.6 million tons) was burned in waste-to-energy generating plants. The grand total of municipal waste reported: 251 million tons. At that number, America’s daily trash footprint would be 4.5 pounds a person. But that’s more than 2.5 pounds a day less per American than the correct amount, 7.1 pounds, and more than 130 million tons light for the whole country’s yearly tally.
So how can that be? Where did the EPA go so badly wrong with a report it’s been producing for decades?
Most might guess coming up with trash numbers would involve a lot of weighing of the streams of trash headed to landfills. This would be a relatively straightforward task—laborious, but straightforward. Every municipal waste landfill in America has scales. They weigh garbage trucks going in full, they weigh them going out empty, and by calculating the difference, they determine how much trash gets dumped—each load, every load, every day of the week. It’s how dump operators plan for the future, budget their resources and manpower, and, not incidentally, it’s how they make money: They charge by the ton. Recycling, composting and waste-to-energy operations work in an analogous way to produce a statistical snapshot of our waste. Many states compile reports summarizing this data in order to plan and evaluate their own conservation and recycling efforts.
But the EPA does not use this information. It does not weigh trash in the real world—not a single piece of it—nor does it contact the nation’s landfills to get that information. Instead, the EPA relies on “materials flow methodology.” In plain English, this means the EPA calculates trash amounts based not on objective weights and measures, but on data supplied by manufacturers on how much stuff they sell (for instance, the number of plastic bags made and sold in the U.S. every year), how long that stuff is likely to last before becoming trash, and how much of it gets recycled, composted or burned. These are industry estimates reported through a national honor system, checked by equations, not scales. Waste sampling studies are then used to estimate national figures for yard trimmings, food scraps and other non-manufactured municipal waste. Sometimes press reports on garbage are used to flesh out the data further. Together, this amalgam of information is used to produce an estimate of the total waste stream—a figure lying at the end of a long chain of promises, assumptions and theory.
This method dates back thirty years, to an era when there were ten times the number of landfills and thousands of illegal dumps in the U.S., and the industry was largely unregulated and uncharted. Using the indirect method of materials flow analysis made sense then—it was the best anyone could do. But there are far fewer landfills now, a web of state reporting requirements have been placed on them, and the ability to do a direct, more accurate count of waste, rather than rely on indirect life-cycle calculations, has existed for more than a decade.
The flaws in the EPA’s approach are easily detected. The EPA estimates that a total of 135 million tons of trash were buried in landfills in 2008. The problem: A single landfill operator, Waste Management, Inc., reports burying almost the same amount of trash that year, 125 million tons, all on its own. Waste Management may be the biggest trash company in the world, but they don’t own America’s entire landfill business—they control only a third of America’s active landfill space. There are more than a hundred other major waste-management companies in the country, not to mention the many publicly owned and operated landfills, and their combined landfill business easily exceeds Waste Management’s. One simple check reveals that the EPA numbers are badly off-kilter.
It fell to a partnership between Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center and a respected, if obscure, trade journal, BioCycle, to do the actual trash counting that the feds had declined to do. This project produces numbers from the real world of trash that reveal the serious, even scandalous, gap between the EPA stats and reality—the biggest, dirtiest and poorest-kept secret in the trash biz.
How bad is the disparity? Americans are sending more than twice as much garbage to municipal landfills as the EPA figures suggest. Adding insult to injury, the EPA also incorrectly inflates the proportion of trash recycled—we’re not doing nearly as well as we thought. The amount recycled and composted isn’t a third of all our trash, as the EPA reported for the last several years. It’s barely a quarter of it. In 2011, the EPA leadership finally admitted there was a problem and publicly solicited advice for improving its annual garbage survey.
Not all EPA solid waste statistics are flawed, however. While the materials flow methods used to calculate the amount of trash aren’t working well, the methods used to calculate the composition of our trash continue to be useful. These calculations are informed in part by studies of real-world samples of typical Americans’ trash—how much of it is plastic, metal, paper, food scraps and so on. These figures are expressed in the EPA annual reports as percentages. Because extrapolating national estimates from real-world samples is a tried-and-true, scientifically valid technique, the EPA’s percentage estimates on the composition of trash are used throughout this book as the best available data. However, in passages or lists in which those percentages are used to derive quantities of a certain type of trash, such as reporting that 5.4 million tons of rugs and carpets are sent to landfills each year, this quantity is calculated by applying the EPA’s composition percentages to the Columbia/BioCycle total waste figures.
9. Even the Pentagon sources its silicon from the same China that, as recently as 1999, was banned from importing Apple Inc.’s most powerful personal computer because it might be used in weapons systems. (Of course, ten years later, most Apple products, like every other U.S.-branded computer, tablet and smart phone, were being built in Chinese factories.)
10. Journal of Commerce.
CHAPTER 1
1. “The State of Garbage in America,” BioCycle, October 2010.
2. “Mission 5000,” EPA, 1972.
3. The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, better known as the Superfund, is a federal program for cleaning up hazardous waste sites. It was created in response to the severe pollution and health threats posed by the Love Canal disaster and other, similar crises. At the end of 2010, there were 1,280 sites slated for cleanup on the Superfund priority list.
4. According to Seagull Control Systems, Inc., which markets such seagull barriers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture also recommends monofilament lines as the most effective safeguard against landfill-marauding gulls.
CHAPTER 2
1. From Municipal Journal, Volume XLV, No. 26, July–December 1918; and “Health Survey of New Haven: A Report Presented to the Civic Federation of New Haven by Charles-Edward Amory Winslow, James Gowan Greenway and David Greenberg of Yale University,” Yale University Press, 1917.
CHAPTER 3
1. “Consumption of Sugar Drinks in the United States, 2005–2008,” National Center for Health Statistics, August 2011.
CHAPTER 4
1. “Mission 5000,” EPA, 1972.
CHAPTER 10
1. Estimates of plastic bag usage by the average American vary. Industry estimates put the figure at five hundred disposable bags per capita, according to American Plastics Manufacturing, Inc. Andy Keller of ChicoBag considers this to be a very conservative figure, and has published calculations based on manufacturing and EPA data that peg annual plastic bag disposal for 2009 at 739 bags per person. This figure may also be too low, as the EPA consistently underestimates the amount of trash generated by Americans.
2. Keller’s calculation is based on the annual consumption of plastic grocery bags in the U.S. reported by the International Trade Commission in 2009—102 billion—multiplied by his assumed average bag length of 1 foot, then divided by the earth’s circumference, which is 131.48 million feet.
3. International Trade Commission, 2009.
4. American Plastics Manufact
uring, Inc.
5. “By ‘Bagging It,’ Ireland Rids Itself of a Plastic Nuisance,” New York Times, January 31, 2008.
6. Substituting a local bag ban for a bag tax was the brainchild of San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, a quixotic Bay Area politician whose spectrum of achievements defies categorization. He graduated president of his class at the San Francisco Police Academy, worked for the district attorney investigating white-collar crime, cofounded the California Green Party and supported the legalization of marijuana. Mirkarimi argued that taking on the plastic bag “plague” was a necessary first step in healing environmental damage: “Instead of waiting for the federal government to do something about this country’s oil dependence, environmental degradation or contribution to global warming, local governments can step up and do their part. The plastic bag ban is one small part of that.”
7. California Secretary of State, lobbying activity reports.
8. “Miracle No: Groups Call on Major Leagues to Denounce Miracle-Gro Deal,” SafeLawns.org, March 14, 2010.
9. “Recall of Scotts Miracle-Gro Products,” EPA, Region 5 Pesticides, May 2008.
10. “Small Plastic Bag Lawsuit Could Have a Huge Impact on Green Business,” Forbes, June 21, 2011.
11. “Battle of the Bags,” BagMonster.com, September 25, 2011.
12. “Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2006.
13. “What We Actually Know About Common Marine Debris Factoids,” FAQ, NOAA Marine Debris Program, http://marinedebris.noaa.gov/info/faqs.html#5.
14. “Hilex Poly and ChicoBag Reach Settlement over False Marketing Claims,” PR Newswire, September 13, 2011.
15. “Advance Polybag and Superbag Support Hilex Poly’s Victory in Settlement of ChicoBag Suit,” press release transmitted by Reuters, September 15, 2011.
16. “An Overview of Carryout Bags in Los Angeles County,” staff report to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, August 2007.