by David Wann
Beverage containers are another example of how affluenza and weak policy create incredible amounts of waste. Americans consume the most packaged drinks of any country in the world, and after the beverages are guzzled (and only the belches and containers remain), we go through over 650 plastic, aluminum, and glass containers per person, annually. Less than half of these containers are recycled, a lost opportunity for the national economy. About 350 of our annual share of containers are aluminum cans—compared with only 14 containers per person in France.8 Despite the fact that recycling an aluminum can save three-fourths of the energy it takes to make a new can, we throw away more than half of them—wasting the energy equivalent of powering a million homes!9
Although curbside recycling programs in America have tripled in the last decade, many of the beverages we drink are away from home, and there are not enough recycling receptacles on streets and in stores. On the positive side, according to the National Recycling Coalition, in 2000, recycling resulted in an annual energy savings equal to the amount of energy used in six million homes, and by 2005, recycling was estimated to have saved the amount of energy used in nine million homes. We still have a lot of opportunity for improvement.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Container Recycling Institute (CRI), a full 3 percent of the world’s electricity goes into manufacturing aluminum cans, but the U.S. market continues to treat them like dirt. CRI’s research director Jenny Gitlitz comments, “The irony is that while Americans are trashing almost three quarters of a million tons of cans a year, the major aluminum companies are forging ahead with plans to build new aluminum smelters—and hydroelectric dams for power in environmentally sensitive areas including Brazil, Malaysia, and Iceland.” Gitlitz explained that a dam being built for Alcoa’s new smelter in Iceland will submerge 22 square miles of tundra, including habitat for reindeer and the pink-footed goose; up to sixty waterfalls; and what has been called the “Icelandic Grand Canyon.”10
Americans spent about $10 billion for bottled water in 2005, and making the one-use bottles for that market requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year.
The solutions are obvious, yet they sound foreign to convenience-addicted, market-bound Americans like us: Put a mandatory and very compelling bounty on containers to make sure they get recycled (we don’t throw away quarters, do we?), or in the case of glass and PET plastic containers, make sure they’re reused and recycled. Ten states have bottle bills that put a deposit on bottles, but apparently the bounty is still too low, because the percentage of bottles being returned is slipping, along with the recycling of plastic and aluminum containers. Why are we letting all this value get away? As recently as 1960, 95 percent of all packaged soft drinks and 53 percent of all packaged beer was sold in refillable glass bottles, which were returned for reuse twenty or more times. In our frenzied times, it seems we can’t be bothered; our version of the free market doesn’t seem to be able to value something as small as a container. I strongly believe that for the common good (including industry), the U.S. government needs to intervene to recapture the wasted value, as many other governments already have. Here again, Europe is leading the way: In more than thirty EU countries, packaging manufacturers must recycle (“take back”) their products. In Germany, where Take Back regulations debuted in 1991, packaging has become lighter and the volume has decreased. The reuse of refillable glass and plastic containers now exceeds 70 percent in that country.
When we think about a resource-intensive commodity such as packaging, we begin to realize how interconnected resources are with expectations. In a very real sense, packaging assumes that we will ship products long distances and store them on shelves for potentially long periods of time. After all, the main reasons for packaging are to protect the product during shipment and reduce the chances it will be damaged or stolen before being purchased. Plastic bottles make sense to a distributor because they are lighter and cost less to ship. But they aren’t as reusable as glass bottles, and they contain substances (phthalates) that have been implicated in the disruption of human endocrine systems. If consumers demand local products, the whole game changes.
A final aspect of our diet that’s wasteful is what we literally throw out: A typical household trashes 10 to 15 percent of the food purchased. If just a fraction of that waste were avoided, we’d save hundreds of millions of dollars in landfill costs alone, and avoid the unnecessary resource costs of growing more.
It’s What’s for Dinner
The diet-related choice with the greatest leverage for reducing resource use is to eat less meat. As compared with a low-meat diet, a 200-pound-a-year meat diet (about the American average) consumes many times as much land, energy, and water. When humans relied on hunting for a large part of their diet, meat was a rich source of range-fed protein. Grazing animals convert grass into food—something humans aren’t able to do—a very efficient use of solar energy. But in the current industrial way of raising beef, for example, after beginning their lives on grassland, the animals are shipped to dense feedlots and fattened up with grain and soybeans, which create the tender “marbled” beef we’re used to. This is where the inefficiencies begin to stack up. It takes 5 to 8 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef and, as a result, 65 percent or more of the grain eaten in the U.S. feeds livestock, not people. According to the nonprofit British organization Vegfam, a 10-acre farm can support sixty people growing soybeans, twenty-four people growing wheat, ten people growing corn but only two people by producing cattle.11
A very determined cow escapes from Mickey’s Packing Plant in Great Falls, Montana. After a six-hour chase in which she dodged vehicles, ran in front of a train, swam the icy Missouri River, wooed TV and print media across the country, and took three tranquilizer darts, “Molly” won her place in the pasture. © Robin Loznak/Great Falls Tribune
In the classic Diet for a Small Planet, Frances Moore Lappé writes, “Imagine sitting down to an eight-ounce steak. Then imagine the room filled with forty-five to fifty people with empty bowls in front of them. For the ‘feed cost’ of your steak, each of their bowls could be filled with a full cup of cooked cereal grains.” Jean Mayer, a Harvard nutritionist, estimates that if each American reduced the amount of meat he or she eats by just 10 percent, sixty million people could survive, eating the grain directly.12
In addition to the hidden energy costs in meat production, half the water consumed in the United States is used by the meat industry to grow feed. Much of that comes from groundwater that’s being pumped faster than it can recharge. In the High Plains region where I live, state governments have ordered some ranchers to stop pumping from the Ogallala Aquifer, which experts project will be depleted within sixty years.
Where does all the energy in grain go that’s not converted to meat? It gets “expelled” as the greenhouse gas methane, and excreted at the rate of some 87,000 pounds per second of manure, according to the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). This makes every U.S. household’s share of manure twenty tons annually—whether we want it or not. Such volumes of manure could be great natural fertilizer if the livestock were all home, home on the range. However, in concentrated factory-farm conditions, the wastes become potent pollutants. For example, in 1995, twenty-five million gallons of hog waste spilled from an 8-acre lagoon into a river in North Carolina, killing ten million fish.
A very graphic example of how U.S. meat production is unnatural is the E. coli scare over contaminated spinach that hit the nation in 2006. In a New York Times guest editorial, food expert Nina Planck explains, “California’s spinach industry is now the financial victim of an outbreak it probably did not cause.” The contamination didn’t occur on the farms, she maintains, but in the industrial feedlots, where beef and dairy cattle are fed grains that they aren’t equipped to properly digest. “This particularly virulent strain, E. coli O157:H7, is not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on t
heir natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. It thrives in the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates groundwater and spreads the bacteria to crops like spinach growing on neighboring farms.” The problem cascades onto our dinner plates, because human stomachs don’t produce enough acidity to kill the bacteria.13
Yet despite production deficiencies like these, the world’s appetite for meat continues to grow, at the rate of 2 percent each year. To keep up with demand, we now “take care of” fifteen to twenty billion livestock animals!14 Since the industrial revolution began, the world’s farmland has expanded from 6 percent of the Earth’s surface to nearly a third, and much of that land supports the short lives of cows, hogs, sheep, chickens, and other livestock. In developing countries, eating meat is seen as a sign of wealth and prosperity, but it’s also a sign of affluenza. Especially carnivorous are China, which now consumes half the world’s pork, and Brazil, the second largest consumer of beef after the United States.15
Partly as a result of the meteoric rise of fast food, meat has become more of an institution than it ever was. “Meat and potatoes” became “Burgers ’n’ fries.” Writes Eric Schlosser in the book Fast Food Nation, “Americans now spend more money on fast food than they do on higher education. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos and recorded music—combined.”
Monster Thickburger vs. the Mediterranean Diet
A few years ago, Hardee’s unveiled its Monster Thickburger—two pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame seed bun. All that for only 1,400 calories. With fries (520 calories) and soda (400 calories), the meal meets or exceeds the suggested caloric intake for Godzilla—or at least an American male. (For a rough calculation of how many calories to consume, multiply your weight times sixteen. Of course, this will vary with your level of activity.)
With two out of three Americans overweight, and heart attacks the major cause of death in the United States, Hardee’s executives suspected they’d get calls from the “health nuts,” and they were right. Michael Jacobson, director of Center for Science in the Public Interest, quickly pronounced the Monster Thickburger “food porn.” Said Jacobson, “Hardee’s seems not only oblivious to America’s obesity epidemic, but also to the trend toward healthier fast food.” Hardee’s chief executive Andrew Puzder was unfazed, telling reporters, “I hope our competitors keep promoting those healthy products, and we will keep promoting our big, juicy delicious burgers.” Said Jacobson, “A good rule of thumb is that if a burger needs a comma in its calorie count, it’s virtually impossible to fit into a healthy diet.” Puzder quickly distanced himself from customers he never would have had anyway, saying, “The Monster Thickburger is not a burger for tree-huggers.”16
Some people can’t imagine life without thick burgers, but a growing number of people can’t imagine life with them. For them, the so-called Mediterranean diet is far more appealing. The man who first popularized the connection between heart disease and saturated fat, Professor Ancel Keys, also lived more than hundred years. His personal diet, based on complex carbohydrates, fruits, and vegetables, may have been one of the reasons. He conducted a decadelong research project in the 1960s that studied the diet, lifestyle, and incidence of coronary heart disease among thirteen thousand randomly selected middle-aged men from seven countries: the United States, Japan, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Finland, and Yugoslavia. A clear pattern emerged from the study’s data: in the Mediterranean and Asian countries where vegetables, grains, fruits, beans, and fish were dietary mainstays, heart disease was rare. But in the United States and Finland, where red meat, cheese, and other foods high in saturated fat were eaten, heart disease was all too common.17
Many studies since then have corroborated Keys’s findings, leading to strong support among health experts for the Mediterranean diet, a flavorful composite of the traditional foods of Spain, southern France, Italy, Greece, Crete, and parts of the Middle East. Common to the diets of these regions are high consumption of complex carbohydrates (not refined), foods high in fiber, fish, nuts, wide use of olive oil, and moderate consumption of red wine—making them low in saturated fat but high in cholesterol-reducing unsaturated fats. Says nutrition expert Andrew Weil, “Researchers from the University of Athens recently published a study showing that people who ate a Mediterranean-style diet had a 33 percent reduction in the risk of death from heart disease. Their cancer death rate was 24 percent lower than the death rate for those who ate more Western-style diets.”18
In another study from the Netherlands, published in the September 2004 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, those who maintained a Mediterranean diet had a 23 percent lower death rate than those on their regular diets. Says Weil, “Those who followed the diet and also consumed moderate amounts of alcohol, got regular exercise, and didn’t smoke, reduced their risk of death from any cause by 65 percent over the 10-year duration of the study.”19
Dr. Dean Ornish agrees that diets similar to the Mediterranean diet have the right stuff, conferring anticancer, anti-heart disease, and antiaging properties. “I’d love to be able to tell people that bacon and eggs are health foods, but they’re not,” he says. “A diet rich in animal protein increases your risk of osteoporosis, kidney disease, heart disease, and the most common forms of cancer.” Ornish also cites a study in the American Journal of Medicine, concluding that a meat-heavy diet can cause halitosis—not life threatening, but potentially hazardous to your social life. Since the human body gets rid of toxic substances partly through breathing, Ornish asserts that on a heavy meat diet (like the Atkins diet he loves to hate), “you may start to lose weight and attract people, but when they get too close, they might have a problem with the way you smell.”20
For Ornish, the bottom line is the return to vitality he’s seen in his own patients when they changed to diets lower in saturated fat and sugar and did moderate exercise. “We found that even among people with severe heart disease, 99 percent were able to stop or reverse the progression of their disease … People who couldn’t walk across the street before the light changed without getting chest pains, they couldn’t have sex, they couldn’t take a shower, shave … within a few weeks were essentially pain-free.”21
If meat is so heavily implicated in various diseases, and if it takes such a heavy toll on the environment, isn’t it time to question whether we want to be eating it ten or fifteen times a week?
Morgan Spurlock, producer and star of the documentary Super Size Me, was on the Monster Thickburger (or actually Big Mac) diet for ninety straight meals, an adventure that had alarming side effects. In one of the documentary’s most candid moments, he says, “I was starting to become impotent through this diet and couldn’t perform. How many people who are taking the little blue pill, if they started to change what they are eating most of the time, could change the way their sex life is?”22 (The Erectile Dysfunction Institute supports Spurlock’s conclusion, reporting that up to 90 percent of all cases of impotence are physical, not psychological. “Viagra may get you through the night,” says the GoVeg.com Web site, “but a vegetarian diet can get you through your life.”)
“For me,” says Spurlock, “the most horrifying thing of the whole project is the impact the fast food culture has on the schools, and parents have no idea. They give their kids three dollars and say, ‘Okay, see you later. Go off to school and have a good lunch.’ And the lunchrooms are filled with pizza and burgers and soda and candy and chips. It’s like you’re in the middle of the 7-11 having lunch … If anything comes out of this movie, I really hope it has an impact on the school lunch programs, because they need to change …” “Here’s a question for you,” says Spurlock. “Why doesn’t the clown eat the food, in the advertisements? If it’s that good for you, why isn’t Ronald McDonald eating it?”23
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How to Channel the Flow
Information wants to be free.
—Stewart Brand
People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath.
—Marshal McLuhan
Capital can do nothing without brains to direct it.
—J. Ogden Armour
Whether we think of our brain as a file cabinet, hard drive, or … wastebasket, we know that one of its primary functions is to obtain and contain information. And we sense that what we do collectively with that information will determine the fate of our civilization (no pressure, though). Interdependent with the human body and the culture that feeds it “brain food,” the brain is the crown jewel of our species, where we do our daydreaming, investing, designing, and understanding of quantum physics. The brain accounts for just 2 percent of body weight, yet it burns 20 percent of our calories. What’s going on up there on the top floor? Well, we’re solving puzzles—including one called “reducing consumption and increasing quality of life”—and that requires a lot of caloric fuel.
In the transition to a less consumptive yet culturally more abundant world, the brain is like an empty stage set, right before opening night. The new story—our new way of viewing the world—will be created on that stage as the play progresses, and a new, more ingenious lifestyle will unfold. By changing just one line of script—that the brain’s highest use is to create limitless economic growth—we can ensure rave reviews in the history books of future generations. Let’s face it, our descendants won’t be especially impressed with the size of our GDP or the fast pace of our life, but they will be ecstatic (we hope!) that we cared enough to stop tearing things apart for cheap burgers and infinite varieties of soap and underwear. That we learned how to use relevant information to cut waste, create an aesthetically rich way of life, and balance the biological budget so the future could be abundant, too.