THE STORY OF STUFF

by Annie Leonard

  While backyard (or garage, laundry room, or front hallway) or neighborhood composting happens at the level of individual households and communities, there are lots of ways government can support it. Where I live, the government waste agency—the Alameda County Waste Management Authority—subsidizes compost bins for residents. These high-end backyard composters or worm bins regularly cost about one hundred dollars if bought in a store. The Waste Management Authority buys them in bulk at a discounted rate, subsidizes part of the remaining cost, and sells them to the public for about forty dollars each. They don’t mind subsidizing the cost because they save so much more money by not having to pick up all that heavy organic waste. Since beginning the program in 1991 (and through July 2009) they have sold more than 72,000 compost and worm bins, which, they estimate, have diverted more than 110,000 tons of organic waste from landfills.89

  Government can also get involved in bigger ways. In 1999, the European Union passed a landfill directive that required a steady reduction of organic waste sent to landfills over the next twenty years. In 1998, Nova Scotia, Canada, adopted a complete ban on landfilling or incinerating organics, which spurred the development of an impressive composting infrastructure.90 So far, twenty-one states in the United States have banned landfilling of yard waste,91 which is a good start because once yard waste composting systems are set up, it’s not hard to add kitchen and restaurant scraps too. Any method of composting is less expensive and much smarter than building sanitary landfills or high-tech incinerators.

  4. Landfills Waste Resources

  How are resources wasted? Let me count the ways. For starters, there’s the hundreds and thousands of acres of perfectly good land taken up with landfills. It’s true that once landfills are filled up, they’re usually covered with dirt and then replanted. After that many of them are turned into parks, parking lots, or shopping malls. But these are ill-fated. Trash settles over time, making the ground unstable, so structures built on top of them often shift and sink. As for the parks, they attract children—and having our kids running around on top of a garbage heap leaching VOCs is just a bad idea.

  As Peter Montague, director of the Environmental Research Foundation, explains, “The moment human efforts cease, nature takes over and disintegration begins: nature has many agents that work to dismantle a landfill: small mammals (mice, moles, voles, woodchucks, prairie dogs, etc.), birds, insects, reptiles, amphibians, worms, bacteria, the roots of trees, bushes, and shrubs, plus wind, rain, lightning, freeze-thaw cycles, and soil erosion—all combine to take apart even the most carefully engineered landfill. Eventually a landfill’s contents disperse into the local environment and then move outward from there, often into local water supplies. It may take a decade or it may take 50 years or more before a landfill spills its contents, but nature doesn’t care. Nature’s got all the time in the world. Sooner or later wastes buried in a shallow hole in the ground will escape and disperse.”92

  But the main waste of resources is the garbage itself. Consider the lifecycle of Stuff as laid out in these pages—behind every piece of garbage is a long history, of extraction in mines, harvesting in forests or fields, production in factories, and extensive ferrying along supply chains. How ridiculous is it to lock up all those resources underground after spending all that effort to extract and make and distribute them in the first place! I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the amount of resources on this planet is finite. We’re running out of them. Locking them up underground is just plain stupid.

  Away by Fire

  Incinerators are big machines that burn waste. Back in 1885, when the first one in the country was built on Governors Island in New York, it seemed like a good way to get rid of potato peels, chicken bones, and fabric scraps. Even then there were much better ways of dealing with those much more benign materials (compost, papermaking, soapmaking, etc.), but today we have no excuse: fire is not an appropriate method of trying to make garbage go “away,” especially since today’s trash contains Stuff like cell phones, VCRs, paint cans, PVC, and batteries.

  There are many scientists, recyclers, activists, municipal officials, and others who are working against incinerators. You could fill a library with their reports as to why incineration is the wrong way to go. Here are my top ten reasons:

  1. Incinerators Pollute

  Incinerators liberate the toxics contained in products into the air. We breathe that air. Those airborne poisons can also easily drop into water. We drink that water and use it to irrigate our food. The poisons in the air also land on farms, fields, and the sea, moving up the food chain into the fish, meat, and dairy that we eventually eat. Even worse, burning trash creates new toxins that weren’t in the original waste. That is because the actual process of combustion takes apart and recombines chemicals into new supertoxins. Some of these combustion by-products are the most toxic man-made industrial pollutants known, like dioxin, for which incinerators are among the top sources globally.93 For example, if anything containing chlorine—clothes, paper, flooring, PVC, cleaning products—is burned, dioxin is created. Older and badly operated incinerators release toxins into both the air and into ash, while more advanced plants release toxins into the ash. In both cases, the toxins include chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects, damage to organs—especially the lungs and eyes—and endocrinological, neurological, circulatory, and reproductive problems.94 Meanwhile many of the toxins haven’t even been tested for health impacts.

  2. Incinerators Don’t Eliminate the Need for Landfills

  Incinerator pushers love to claim they make waste disappear, even bragging about their 99 percent destruction removal efficiency (DRE), which implies that 99 percent of the waste actually does disappear. But that’s not quite true: the waste is just converted to air pollution and ash. And guess what? That ash still needs to be landfilled. In general, for every 3 tons of waste one shoves into an incinerator, we get 1 ton of ash that requires landfilling.95 Waste isn’t destroyed in incinerators; its appearance just changes. Instead of a truckload of trash, we wind up with a slightly smaller pile of ash, plus pollution in the air, our lungs, and our food supplies.

  Incinerator ash is more toxic than the original waste because the heavy metals (which are elements and can’t be destroyed) become concentrated. There are two kinds of ash: fly ash, which comes up the smokestack, and bottom ash, which piles up at the base of the combustion chamber. Fly ash is generally smaller in volume but way more toxic than bottom ash. In any case, some incinerator operators merge the two before they get landfilled.

  And here’s the kicker: the more effective the filter atop the smokestack is, the more toxic its ash. (Think about it: a bad filter is letting more bad Stuff escape, while a good filter catches it, meaning it’s caught in the ash.) You hear a lot about advances in filter technology, as if that’s going to solve everything. But filters don’t get rid of the toxins, they just put them in a different place—it’s like the shell game in which the pea keeps getting secretly moved from under one shell to another.

  3. Incinerators Violate the Principles of Environmental Justice

  Incinerators fall into the category of dirty industrial development that I described in chapter 2 on production. Dirty development follows the path of least resistance, seeking out those communities that developers perceive to lack the economic, educational, or political resources to resist. That means incinerators get built in low-income communities and communities of color, forcing a disproportionate share of the resulting toxic pollution on the people who live there. Plus, not only does an incinerator create pollution directly from its smokestack, it also means heavy traffic from exhaust-spewing trucks that deliver and sometimes drop stinky, hazardous garbage.

  4. Incinerators Are So 1980s

  Is there any fashion from the 80s that is really worthy of a comeback? I don’t happen to think so, but definitely not incinerators. In the 1980s, proposals for municipal trash incinerators were all the rage in the United States. Ellen and Paul Co
nnett, editors of the Waste Not newsletter, which tracked municipal waste incinerators for years, estimate that more than four hundred incinerators were proposed during the 1980s as their proponents went from community to community, touting the environmental benefits of burning trash and promising a techno-fix to the growing problem of waste.96 Most of these planned incinerators were stopped by informed organized community resistance. Those that were built were plagued with technical and financial problems, not to mention those billowing plumes of really noxious smoke and the inevitable ash.

  Following these fiascos, the incinerator industry came to a virtual standstill in the United States for nearly twenty years, with no incinerator larger than those that burn 2,000 tons per day built since 1992.97 Meanwhile, the incinerator industry focused its attention overseas, on countries that were just getting on the disposables-consumption bandwagon. To the industry’s surprise, people there didn’t want them either! GAIA, the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, boasts nearly one thousand members in eighty-one countries who share information and strategies and collaborate to stop incineration and promote sustainable solutions.98

  When the incinerator industry realized the strength of the global resistance movement, they started putting fancy new names on slightly updated technology. The word “incineration” is hardly seen in today’s promotional material; instead these new facilities are called plasma arc, pyrolysis, gasification, and waste-to-energy plants. GAIA calls them “incinerators in disguise.”99 Don’t be fooled by the fancy packaging: they are still gigantic, expensive machines that burn garbage (aka resources) and that produce hazardous air pollution and ash.

  5. Waste-to-Energy Plants Should Be Called Waste of Energy

  The latest fashion among incinerator proponents is to call them waste-to-energy plants, promising to burn up all that stinky garbage and turn it into energy, even claiming that garbage is renewable energy and these monstrosities should get renewable energy credits! Since we have too much garbage and not enough energy, that sure sounds appealing. But here’s the deal: first off, the little bit of energy recovered from burning trash is a very dirty energy, releasing far more greenhouse gases than burning natural gas, oil, or even coal. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, waste incinerators produce 1,355 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour; coal produces 1,020, oil 758, and natural gas 515.100

  Second, let’s step back and look at the grand scheme of things for a moment. When you burn something, the most energy you can recover is a fraction of the energy value (the “calories”) of the actual material; you can’t recover any of the energy investments of that thing’s entire lifecycle. When we burn Stuff, it means we have to go back and extract, mine, grow, harvest, process, finish, and transport new Stuff to replace it. Doing all that takes waaaaay more energy than the smidgen that can be recovered from burning it. If the ultimate goal is to conserve energy, we could “produce” far more energy by reusing and recycling Stuff than we ever could by burning it.

  6. Incinerators Drain the Local Economy and Create Few Jobs

  Capital costs for building incinerators in industrialized countries often run to $500 million—a 2009 proposal for one in Maryland came to $527 million.101 Meanwhile, their counterparts in developing countries generally cost between $13,000 and $700,000, which tells us something about double standards102; most of the incinerators built in poorer countries would never meet the standards set by U.S. or European health and safety laws, as inadequate as those laws still are. Either way, a lot of money gets spent, much of it on high-tech equipment manufactured overseas, and engineers and consultants who obviously aren’t needed after the facility is finished. Once built, incinerators are capital-and machine-intensive, not labor-intensive, offering only a few lousy jobs and even fewer specialized jobs. In contrast, recycling and zero waste programs offer a huge number of jobs—jobs that are safer, cleaner, and greener. For every dollar invested in recycling and zero waste programs, we get ten times as many jobs as in incineration—local, respectable jobs that conserve resources and build community.103

  7. Incinerators Are the Most Costly Waste Management Option

  Any solution to our waste problem is going to cost money, but we should invest in methods and facilities that are actually moving us in the right direction. Incinerators are enormously expensive, by far the most expensive waste disposal option available, short of sending the Stuff to the moon (which some people have considered!). In contrast to the more than $500 million that the above-mentioned Maryland incinerator would have cost, a new state-of-the-art materials reclamation center not far from me in Northern California—the Davis Street Transfer Center, the West Coast’s most advanced facility of its kind—cost just over $9 million. While the Maryland incinerator would expect to burn 2,000 tons of trash per day, Davis Street handles 4,000 tons of materials per day, of which currently 40 percent is recycled. Davis Street provides 250 people with unionized jobs; the incinerator might hope to provide about 30 full-time positions.104 You do the math.

  The cost differential is even more stark in developing countries where recycling and composting are less mechanized and therefore more labor intensive. GAIA has calculated that decentralized low-tech composting in countries in the Global South can have equipment costs 75 times lower than incinerator investment costs.105 Even the World Bank admits that capital and operating costs for incinerators are at least twice that for landfills, even though it continues to fund incinerators in developing countries.106 The only communities that should even be thinking of incinerators are those with money to burn. By which I mean: none.

  8. Incinerators Actually Encourage Waste

  Incinerators are waste addicts. They work better when they are run continuously, so they need a constant supply of waste. Incinerator companies often try to include in their contract clauses that allow them to import waste from other locations if the local waste generation falls below a certain point. How regressive is that? We should be making commitments to reduce waste, not to perpetuate it!

  Also, it turns out that the trash that is most easily burned is the most preventable waste (like single-use disposable Stuff and packaging) and most recyclable waste (like paper). That means incinerators directly compete with efforts to reduce or recycle materials. In many cities, incinerator owners have pushed local governments to take steps to ban informal recyclers, in order to ensure they have enough Stuff to burn.

  9. Incinerators Undermine Creative, Real Solutions

  If your city invests hundreds of millions of dollars to build one of these things, and then you come along with an ingenious idea for reducing waste at its source—forget about it! Relying on an incinerator to solve the garbage challenge signifies a real failure of imagination. It is for those who go along with impulsive temporary fixes, rather than those who can hold the long-term view and consider the broader system that created the problem in the first place. What decisions were made at the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal points that resulted in this waste? How can we go back and make different decisions to design the waste out of the system? Preventing a problem upstream is always far preferable—and more economical—than just focusing on a quick solution.

  10. Incinerators Just Don’t Make Sense

  I’ve met many an engineer who strives to convince me that his latest bells and whistles incinerator is really different: that it really does solve the dioxin issue; that it really does recover energy, etc. Dr. Paul Connett, who has testified at hundreds of hearings on incineration, has a mantra: “Even if you could make them safe, you could never make them sensible.”107 It just doesn’t make sense to invest hundreds of millions of dollars developing machines designed to destroy resources. It is not an investment in the right direction.

  Toxics Use Reduction in Massachusetts

  Municipal leaders, community residents, and businesses will often focus on the question of what’s to be done with the hazardous waste that’s being produced. If both burying and burning are off the
table, what’s the alternative? In fact, a real solution requires shifting our attention upstream, to stopping the flow of waste at its source. This may seem counterintuitive if you’re looking at a discharge pipe pouring muck into a river, but it’s the best strategy for long-term change.

  Here’s an analogy I often use: Suppose you come home from a vacation to find that you left your kitchen faucet running. The sink has overflowed and water covers the kitchen floor, the dining room floor, and most of the living room. It’s a mess. Where do you start: mopping up the lovely oriental carpets or turning off the tap? It’s a no-brainer, right? In the context of hazardous waste, turning off the tap translates to reducing the amount of toxic chemicals used in production.

  An impressive example of how this can work is Massachusetts’ Toxics Use Reduction Act (TURA), which was passed in 1989. The law included ambitious waste reduction goals, requiring Massachusetts companies to track their chemical use and release and to develop plans detailing how the company would reduce toxics by changing the materials or processes they used. In 1990, TURA established the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) at the University of Massachusetts Lowell to help companies and communities research toxic chemicals, figure out innovative and costeffective alternatives, and provide a range of technical assistance with toxics use reduction and energy and water efficiency.108

  It worked. As just one example, the lighting company Lightolier reduced its VOC emissions by 95 percent, its toxics use by 58 percent, and its electricity and natural gas use by 19 and 30 percent respectively. In the process, it saved millions of dollars in operating costs.109 Statewide, TURI’s work has led to a reduction in industries’ toxic chemical use by 41 percent, toxic chemical waste by 65 percent, and emissions by an impressive 91 percent. Manufacturers participating in the program recently reported $4.5 million in annual operating cost savings.110