THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  Packaging Done Better

  So far, the most serious effort to reduce packaging waste has been undertaken in Germany. In 1991, the German government adopted a packaging ordinance, the foundation of which is the belief that the companies that design, produce, use, and profit from packaging should be held financially responsible for it—an idea known as extended producer responsibility.45 What a concept!

  The ordinance requires companies to pay according to both the volume and type of packaging they use, which gives them incentive not just to reduce packaging, but also to use safer materials. A full 72 percent of bottles are required to be refillable!46 To simplify the logistics of meeting the requirements, some companies got together and set up the Duales System Deutschland (DSD). Companies pay DSD based on their packaging use, and the money is used to collect the packaging waste and safely reuse, recycle, or dispose of it. DSD is commonly called the Green Dot program because participating companies put a green dot on their packages, indicating their participation in the program.47 It looks kind of like the yin-yang symbol, which somehow seems fitting.

  Prior to the ordinance, packaging waste in Germany was increasing at 2 to 4 percent each year. Then, between 1991 and 1995, their packaging waste decreased by a total of 14 percent, while during the same period packaging waste in the United States increased 13 percent. After the impressive initial reductions, the rate of further reductions slowed. Subsequently the program focused on developing efficient collection, recovery, and recycling industries, enabling recovery rates of between 60 percent and more than 90 percent for glass, paper, cardboard, packaging waste, metals, and biowaste by 2001.48

  Germany’s system isn’t perfect. At the beginning, the government had to subsidize it since the infrastructure wasn’t in place to make it work smoothly. Their definition of recycling is also so broad that it is not limited to recycling a material for the same use: the majority of plastics are not mechanically recycled back into plastics but processed into synthetic crude oils and chemicals or used as a reducing agent in steel production. Inexcusably, some burning of packaging waste is allowed under the definition of “recovery” in the ordinance.49 There have been scandals in which piles of Green Dot waste have been found in dumps in developing countries, including by me. Those are all problems, yes. But at least the German government has taken a stand declaring that producers are responsible and is tackling the problem, unlike in the United States, where we’re drowning ever deeper in packaging. The German model inspired the European Union to adopt a Europe-wide directive on packaging and packaging waste in 1994.50 Again, it’s not perfect, but at least the governments are trying something to reduce packaging and are moving in the right direction, albeit slowly. And the progress that has been achieved with both these directives is evidence that the incredible amount of packaging waste in the United States is absolutely not inevitable.

  Taking Out the Trash: Whose Job Is It Anyway?

  In fact, that solution for packaging waste is the best solution for all forms of product waste. You see, we have a big problem when it comes to our municipal trash. The term “municipal” means that it falls within the jurisdiction of local government. Garbage management first became a function of local government (instead of individuals) between 1910 and 1930, after it became clear that there were enough people concentrated in urban settings that their sewage, rotting food scraps, and the wastes from their animals were becoming a public health hazard; the problem needed a uniform, centralized solution to protect the health and even the lives of residents.51 But today, our local governments are overwhelmed with the scope of the garbage problem. The Product Policy Institute (PPI) notes that local governments (funded by our tax dollars) are essentially “shouldering the burden of cleaning up after producers and consumers of wasteful products... providing welfare for waste.”52

  Based on analysis of more than forty years of data on waste disposal, the nonprofit Product Policy Institute concluded that municipalities have only truly been successful at effectively minimizing one kind of waste: yard trimmings! That said, municipal recovery of food scraps (aka composting) was only started a few years ago—and it looks like it will be equally successful.53 However, what municipalities have been overwhelmed by is the rising tide of products, including recyclables. (I’ll go into more depth about the complexities of recycling later in this chapter.)

  The recommendation of the Product Policy Institute—with which I strongly agree—is that municipal waste departments handle the kinds of waste they were originally created to handle: biowastes and biodegradable materials. Everything else should fall under extended producer responsibility, or EPR, which means that the company that makes the product or packaging must deal with it (with required preference for recycling or reusing it) at the end of its lifecycle. As PPI states, “The rationale for placing responsibility on producers is that they make design and marketing decisions and therefore have the greatest ability to reduce the environmental impact of their products.”54 Also, let’s not forget—it’s their business: they profit from making and selling all those products. EPR only makes sense, right?

  In the absence of extended producer responsibility systems, municipal waste departments—paid for by us, let me remind you once again—are left trying to figure out how to collect, transport, and safely dispose of every product that comes through the system. I constantly meet recycling champions who are dedicated and earnest and who agonize over how to increase recycling rates. But I have to ask: why all this effort to keep cleaning up after corporations that aren’t cleaning up after themselves?

  It reminds me of an insight I had about being a mom. One day I was walking around my house in frustration, picking up my kid’s shoes and schoolbooks and musical instruments and art projects that were scattered all over the house. Why did I always have to pick up after her? In a thundering clap of clarity, I realized why: because I am always picking up after her! Holding her accountable may be more work up front but is better for both of us. Similarly, citizens don’t have to be running around picking up after and reinforcing the bad behavior of companies who persist in making poorly designed, excessively packaged toxic junk that breaks too easily and is hard to recycle. If the companies which design and produce this Stuff were held responsible, they’d be making better, longer-lasting, and less-toxic Stuff in the first place. In this scenario, municipalities would be left dealing only with wastes that are compostable and biodegradable. Of course, we still need effective recycling and reuse infrastructure for existing and even future discards; with EPR, the product manufacturers will pay both for this recycling system and for the shift toward more easily recyclable product designs. In this way, EPR is not an alternative to recycling, but an essential complement. With these pieces in places, we’ll have taken a major step toward both corporate accountability and zero waste.

  Construction and Demolition Waste (or C&D)

  This waste stream is considered a subset of MSW but takes up so much landfill space that it often gets addressed as a separate category. C&D waste includes concrete, wood, gypsum drywall, metal, bricks, glass, plastic, and building components such as doors, windows, old bathtubs, pipes, and more. This is the Stuff you get when you do a remodeling project or tear down an old house. If you have ever done either, you know that the easiest way to get rid of an unwanted wall, room, or entire building is just to demolish it. But smashed up and mixed together, you’ve got a big dusty pile of waste. Separately, what you’ve got are reusable construction materials. The Construction Materials Recycling Association estimates that more than 325 million tons of C&D waste are produced in the United States each year.55 Much of that contains good Stuff that could be recovered and reused, which would reduce not only waste but also the pressure to go cut down more trees and mine more metals.

  Fortunately, increasing costs of and restrictions on landfilling this Stuff, plus a desire to avoid waste and create jobs, have encouraged dozens of new businesses devoted to recovering these valuable resources. While sal
vaging fireplace mantels, doors, windows, and other parts, especially woodwork and metalwork, from old buildings has been happening as long as buildings have existed, more recently, an entire green industry—called deconstruction—has blossomed. Deconstruction is like construction in reverse; it is the careful dismantling of buildings in a way that recovers the components, rather than simply trashes and clears them. From Berkeley to the Bronx, deconstruction companies are salvaging and reselling components from old buildings, keeping materials out of landfills, avoiding virgin extraction and energy-intensive production, and simultaneously creating good local jobs that can’t be outsourced.

  Not far from my home in Berkeley, a pioneer in this arena since 1980, Urban Ore, has been recovering valuable materials from the waste stream and selling them for reuse. I got my bathroom sink, my office desk, a replacement panel for my garage light fixture, and the metal poles that hold up my previously collapsing backyard fence from there—all used, otherwise headed for the dump, and costing a fraction of new ones. Urban Ore favors reuse over recycling because reuse conserves not just the material in an item but also the embedded energy and craft that went into making it. And when they sell a brass faucet or an old Arts and Crafts style door for reuse, they make far more money than they would have if they sold the same piece of metal or wood for its market value for recycling. Across the top of each of sales receipt from Urban Ore is printed “Ending the Age of Waste.”

  On the other side of the country, in the South Bronx, a neighborhood plagued by high unemployment, piles of waste materials all over the place, environmental degradation, and devastating rates of asthma, cancer, and other environmentally related diseases, a cooperatively run business called ReBuilders Source was launched in the spring of 2008. They are diverting much of the estimated 2,000 tons of C&D waste that arrive at waste transfer stations in the South Bronx on a daily basis and reselling it at their 18,000-square-foot retail warehouse. Their mission statement proclaims: “We work to create living wage jobs by recycling and reusing building materials. We work to create alternatives to landfills. We stand for equal opportunity, and economic and environmental justice.”56 The reason this is such a great model is that ReBuilders Source sees the connection between environmental, economic, and justice issues and is tackling them all at once.

  Medical Waste

  This stream gets a lot of attention, and often more than it merits: there’s actually a major gap between the real and perceived threat. People tend to freak out about waste from medical facilities, fearing it may spread AIDS or other viruses. In reality, the bulk of the waste coming out of a medical facility is the same as waste coming out of a hotel, restaurant, or office, because hospitals serve all those functions. It is not unlike other municipal waste.

  A small portion of medical waste is hazardous or potentially hazardous and definitely does require special treatment; this kind of medical waste includes sharps (needles), some pharmaceutical wastes, some low-level radioactive wastes from specialty clinics, and any waste that may have come in contact with a sick patient and thus has the potential to infect others.

  Glenn McRae, founder of CGH Environmental Strategies, who has championed safe management of wastes in health care since 1990 and who has personally sorted through waste at hospitals around the world, says, “Very little is actually hazardous, and, depending on the type of hospital, no more than 5–10 percent is potentially infectious if it is carefully segregated.”57

  That means an effective segregation system is all that’s needed to keep this slim 5 to 10 percent of potentially hazardous waste separated from a clinic’s office paper, equipment packaging, leftover food, etc. Combine that with a systematic replacement of all the disposables (dishes, gowns, sheets, and equipment) with reusable Stuff, and a hospital can seriously reduce its waste disposal needs and costs. Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City has saved more than $600,000 a year through improved segregation and waste reduction efforts.58

  And what about the potentially infectious 5 to 10 percent, the legitimate red bag waste? The best, most cost-effective solution is known as autoclaving, which means high temperature steam sterilization in a machine that is basically a big dishwasher. This is a much safer alternative than incineration, though many hospitals turn to that in their desire to destroy pathogens. The catch is that incineration burns not only the germs or viruses but also the material on which they’re hanging out, which is usually plastic. And burning that plastic creates toxic air emissions, which in turn causes diseases like asthma, neurological and reproductive problems, and cancer.59 Medical waste incineration is so polluting that activist friends of mine in India wanted to hang a banner on a cancer specialist hospital with a belching incinerator in New Delhi to proclaim: “CANCER: caused AND cured here.”

  An international coalition of health care professionals, environmental health advocates, and community members called Health Care Without Harm partners with hospitals to reduce waste, eliminate the use of supertoxins like mercury and PVC, and replace incineration with safer and less expensive alternatives. See www.noharm.org for more information.

  Electronic Waste

  Electronic waste, or e-waste, comprises all the cell phones, computers, TVs, DVD players, electronic toys, appliances, remote controls, etc. that we throw out. The fastest growing, and most toxic, of today’s garbage, e-waste is increasing three times faster than other municipal waste and is packed with hazardous metals and chemicals.60 According to the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, the five most common sources and reasons for e-waste are:

  1. Cell phone upgrades: Mobile phone service providers notoriously give free or cheap phones with new or renewed contracts. And since most of the phones are engineered to break after a couple years, it seems ridiculous to turn down their offer for a sparkly new model with all the latest bells and whistles and risk having the old one break midcontract, when replacement phones are much pricier. Out goes the old one!

  2. Digital TV conversion: In the largest government-planned obsolescence ever, 2009 witnessed the end of analog TV broadcasts, which were replaced with digital. This rendered millions of perfectly fine televisions useless without a special converter box.61 For many people, the hassle of getting the converter inspired them to get the new flat-screen or HDTV they’d been coveting. Out with the old TVs—which each contain about 4 to 7 pounds of lead!62 Amazingly, only six states currently ban dumping these toxic-laden things in landfills: California, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Another six states (Oregon, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Illinois, and North Carolina) agreed to bans that will come into effect between 2010 and 2012—not soon enough to stop the toxic tsunami of 2009.63

  3. Software upgrades: Often new software can’t run on older machines because they lack the memory or processing speed. Out with the old, perfectly functional computers! For example, when Microsoft released its Vista operating system, it caused a spike in the e-waste stream.64 The tight mix of plastics, metals, and glass in computers makes them really hard to recycle.

  4. Can’t change the battery: Sometimes it is so hard to access and replace batteries in products that people just replace the whole product. When my daughter was younger, she loved a Sesame Street book that included a phone on which she could call the book’s characters and hear recorded messages. When the battery ran out, I had to pay more than the book originally cost for a replacement battery at RadioShack. Apple’s iPods pose the most infamous battery challenges; unless you’re an electronics whiz, you can’t change the battery yourself but must return it to Apple for a new one, which requires paying a fee and deleting anything stored on the device. With the price of iPods declining, why bother? Out with the old!

  5. Disposable printers: Printers are so cheap, sometimes they’re even free with the purchase of a new computer. They’re often less expensive than a cartridge of replacement ink! Even reaching a real human on the manufacturer’s customer service line to ask about a malfunction can be more of a hass
le than just getting a new one. Out once again with the old!

  “Let’s just get a new one” has become the default response when electronics or appliances break or need some kind of replacement part. As a result, about 400 million electronic products are chucked in the United States each year. In 2005—the most recent year for which we have data— it amounted to 4 billion pounds of e-waste, much of which was still functioning!65 And this Stuff is highly toxic: today’s electronics contain mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, beryllium, and brominated flame retardants, among other nasties. Yet rather than segregating and handling it carefully and responsibly, as is necessary with this level of hazard, in the United States we still dump 85 percent of our e-waste in landfills66 or, even worse, burn it in incinerators.