A Filmmaker’s Food Waste Story

  • Jeremy Seifert produced the Dive!, a film about food waste and how much of it is actually useful. (Photo courtesy of Dive! The Film)

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.
Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Transcript

A film about food waste is catching attention and awards at independent film festivals across the country.

The film’s called “Dive!,” and reviewers are shocked by the film’s statistics about how much edible food that grocery stores toss into dumpsters.

Shawn Allee reports the reviewers are also enthralled by the filmmaker’s personal story about diving after that food.

Jeremy Seifert didn’t start dumpster diving to make a film.

A few years ago, friends turned him onto it.
One morning, they surprised him with bags of food pulled from a dumpster.

“And so my entire kitchen floor was covered with meat and salads and I was filled with delight and wonder and I just said, “where do we begin?”

Seifert says he dumpster dived for kicks, but that changed.
Seifert is a filmmaker by trade, and he got a filming assignment at a refugee camp in Uganda.
The kids in the camp had hardly any food.

“They were truly hungry and suffering from hunger. And I came back home and two nights later, I was on my way to a dumpster pulling out a carload of food that had been thrown away. That experience filled me with such outrage, that I felt I needed to do something and my expression was to make a film.”

Seifert’s film picks up after his dumpster diving takes this kind of political turn.
It’s not for kicks anymore; he wants to show our food waste problem is so bad, that his family could practically live off food from grocery stores dumpsters.
He gets advice from experienced divers.

“Rule number one. Never take more than you need unless you find it a good home.”

But, Seifert runs into trouble with this rule.
He can’t let food go …

“I’m tired of it, there’s too much. I only took this much because there’s so much going to waste. It’s almost two in the morning, and I don’t have anywhere to put it, really.
I had to save as much of it as I could. In just a week of nightly diving, we had a year’s supply of meat.”

Guilt wasn’t his only problem.
His wife, Jen, explains a practical one.

“The dumpster stuff is really great. but because there’s such a large quantity of it, it can turn to a lot of work. So there’s like 12 packages of strawberries that I need to wash and freeze and cut. It’s not that big of a deal, but it’s just a lot more work than going to the grocery store and picking up just what you need.”

Seifert says the biggest problem with dumpster diving, was that it changed how he felt about food. One morning, he talked to his young son about it and kept the camera rolling …

“I don’t know if dumpster diving and eating food from the dumpster has made me value food more or value food less because it’s easier now to throw food away because we have so much of it. Part of me, I think I’m valuing food even less.”

“You can’t waste food, Dad.”

“I know, I don’t want to waste food. Do you want to waste food?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to waste food, either.”

Seifert tells me that this scene at the breakfast table haunted him, because maybe he was setting a bad example for his son.

“So it was a crisis moment in my food waste dumpster diving adventures. And so by the time the film was over, I was so tired of food and thinking about food.”

Well, Seifert’s had to keep thinking about food.

His film’s at festivals, and he helps activists get grocery stores to donate to food banks.
But things have changed at Seifert’s house.

He doesn’t dumpster dive so much – instead, he’s started a garden.
That way, his boy can really value what makes it to the dinner table.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Pushing the Idea of Pedestrian Malls

  • Last spring, the New York city government decided to close parts of Times Square to traffic, creating pedestrian-only plazas. (Photo courtesy of Sean Marshall)

Since the 1960s or ‘70s, people have flocked to suburban malls to shop and hang out. A lot of cities tried to get people back downtown by keeping cars out—they shut down streets and created pedestrian malls. Nora Flaherty reports the downtown pedestrian malls seldom worked, but some planners think it’s worth a try again.

Transcript

Since the 1960s or ‘70s, people have flocked to suburban malls to shop and hang out. A lot of cities tried to get people back downtown by keeping cars out—they shut down streets and created pedestrian malls. Nora Flaherty reports the downtown pedestrian malls seldom worked, but some planners think it’s worth a try again.

If you go to New York City’s Times Square, you’ll encounter a lot of lights, a lot of noise, throngs of tourists and office workers, and guys hawking theatre tickets…

But these days, you won’t encounter a tangle of cars, cabs, and busses. That’s because last spring, the city government decided to close parts of Times Square to traffic and create pedestrian-only plazas.

Rochelle Paterson works for the city. She says that the extra breathing space suits her just fine.

“I always thought 42nd street was so congested—and sometimes you need a place to sit and just relax.”

Now, New York is densely populated and people are used to walking to get around. It’s busy here. But pedestrian malls in other cities have often attempted to bring crowds into areas that cities wish would be busier.

A few decades ago, cities all over the country were feeling the pain as indoor malls opened in the suburbs….and lots of those cities hoped pedestrian malls would make downtowns centers of activity again.

Poughkeepsie, New York was one; and its mall did end up becoming a center of activity…

Just not the kind they were hoping for. The city shut down traffic. Built a nice pedestrian walkway. But then things went wrong. The city repealed laws against public drunkenness and loitering. A county social services office moved into the mall.

And then came drugs, gangs, and prostitution.

Ron Knapp is the police chief in Poughkeepsie; He was just starting his career in 1974 when the pedestrian mall was first built:

“So you kind of had a tough element out there that you had to deal with. And as those laws loosened up it hurt the mall, and as the businesses further went out, and once you’re in that downhill cycle it’s hard to stop.”

In 1981 Poughkeepsie decided to reopen the area to traffic as part of an effort to—again—revitalize downtown. Most of the 200-or-so American cities that tried out pedestrian malls were not successful. Reid Ewing is a professor of City and Metropolitan Planning at the University of Utah, and he works with the American Planning Association:

“Ped traffic had been light before and businesses not doing that well with people fleeing to the suburbs in the 60s or 70s. And so the ped malls actually exacerbated the problem.”

People thought parking was a hassle. The downtown pedestrian malls were just not convenient.

There have been success stories, though—like Pearl Street in Boulder, Colorado, and Church Street, in Burlington, Vermont. And those successes tended to have a few things in common:

They were not in depressed downtowns; they were in areas where there tended to be a lot of students and tourists, and where people felt safe; and cities needed to provide a lot of activities—things like farmers markets—to bring people in.

In other words, a pedestrian mall could make an already-pretty-nice area, nicer…but it couldn’t pull an area out of the kind of a downhill slide.

….But having learned some tough lessons, a lot of urban planners like Reid Ewing are saying it’s time to try again.

“It’s just consistent with so many things happening today…dealing with climate change, the US obesity epidemic. Getting people out walking who would otherwise get in their cars. It’s a small thing but it’s an important part of this puzzle.”

Planners concede pedestrian malls cannot work just anywhere. But they can work…to make some areas more vibrant, and more environmentally friendly.

For The Environment Report, I’m Nora Flaherty.

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Life Is Rough in the Median

  • Brian Dold works for the Olmsted Conservancy, he says Olmsted designed wide boulevards to be tree and plant friendly. (Photo courtesy of Joyce Kryszak)

Most modern city streets were designed only with traffic in mind. There was little or no attention given to green space. Over time, some cities revamped their streets adding landscaped medians to make them more attractive. But not all cities thought ahead to what it would take to keep those green areas growing. Joyce Kryszak reports, in one city the volunteers who maintain the plants in the medians – are pretty stressed out.

Transcript

Most modern city streets were designed only with traffic in mind. There was little or no attention given to green space. Over time, some cities revamped their streets adding landscaped medians to make them more attractive. But not all cities thought ahead to what it would take to keep those green areas growing. Joyce Kryszak reports, in one city the volunteers who maintain the plants in the medians – are pretty stressed out.

It’s about eight o’clock on a chilly morning. Linda Garwol is dodging two lanes of traffic to take care of the shrubs and trees planted in the City of Buffalo’s Main street medians. At least, what’s left of the greenery.

“Uh, two trees are left. Things have been replanted in some of them,” said Garwol. “It’s a nice project, but it wasn’t well-thought out, obviously.”

Gawrol says just a couple of years after the medians were planted more than 70 of the trees and shrubs have died.

The federal plan that called for the green medians in the street didn’t include money for maintenance or irrigation. The City of Buffalo says it doesn’t have the money to maintain the green strips. Garwol says that’s when she and other volunteers stepped in. But she says there simply aren’t enough of them to get the job done.

“It is tough work. It’s bending, it’s picking up garbage, it’s weeding. So, it’s not easy to get volunteers, especially at this time of the morning. This is the big problem. To avoid the traffic you have to be up early,” said Garwol.

But it turned out that weeding was the least of their problems. Late last summer, it stopped raining. And, the strips are too narrow, the dirt too poor to retain enough water. And… there’s no irrigation system. Unless you count Sister Jeremy Midura. The Catholic nun started braving the traffic to save the wilting landscape in front of her church. Every week day morning at dawn, she tugs five gallon buckets of water between the racing cars.

“They recognize me as the crazy median woman,” said Midura.

“How many of buckets of water do you have to take out there?” reporter. “Well, we use about 12-14 buckets on the larger median across from Catalician Center and our church. Then about ten buckets over by our school area,” said Midura.

But the traffic-dodging nun couldn’t carry enough water for all the two-mile stretch of thirsty plants. By fall, the city finally sent some tanker trucks to water the medians twice a week.

And still trees and shrubs died.

This appears to be a case of bad planning. Experts say anything planted in small medians need to be drought and salt resistant. They have to be planted in the right kind of soil. And irrigation systems should be part of the plan. Otherwise, experts say cities are just throwing away their investment. We wanted to ask the City of Buffalo about that, but the city did not return our calls.

“Right now, we’re walking along what was a Olmstedian bridle-path…”

Frederick Law Olmsted was a 19th century landscape architect. Brian Dold works for the Olmsted Conservancy. Dold says Olmsted designed the boulevard to be tree and plant friendly. It’s thirty feet wide. Two rows of elms arch over the broad, grassy lawn.

Dold says there’s more than enough soil for roots to spread wide and deep and survive droughts. He says, unfortunately, that’s not the case in many urban landscapes today.

“And that really creates an environment where you’re asking too much of a common plant to survive and do well in,” said Dold.

But cities such as Buffalo are learning from their mistakes. The medians now being added down the rest of Main Street will have irrigation systems. A special adaptive soil is being used. And… there’s a good chance the new plantings will survive in the green strip between the lanes of traffic.

For The Environment Report, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

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New Homes for Chimney Swifts

  • The almost-finished tower awaits its new residents on the grounds of the Orono School District's nature center next to Lake Claussen. (Photo courtesy of Stephanie Hemphill)

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

Transcript

There’s one American bird that has an unusual habitat problem. Chimney Swifts have adapted in the past as humans encroached on their territory. But now changes in human behavior are presenting new problems for the birds. And some people are trying to help them adapt again. Stephanie Hemphill reports.

In his dad’s window-and-door warehouse in the Minneapolis suburbs, Derek Meyer is supervising the boys in his scout troop as they build a wooden tower for Chimney Swifts.

They’re using rough plywood to build a narrow box twelve feet high with an opening about a foot square.

Derek is doing this project to earn the rank of Eagle Scout. In the process, he’s learned a few things about the lives of Chimney Swifts.

“They originally lived in hollow trees but when the settlers from Europe came over they started destroying the trees, so they decided to live in the chimneys, and then people started putting wire over their chimneys, so over the last 40 years they’ve lost half of their population.”

Not just wire, but rain caps and other devices to keep moisture and critters out of chimneys.

The new home these boys are building for Chimney Swifts is destined for the nature center next to a nearby school. The school district was planning to tear down an old brick chimney as part of a remodeling project. Rebecca Field found out about that, and she tried to stop it.

“I said, wait a minute, I’m sure there are Chimney Swifts in there and they’re really good birds because they eat about 2,000 insects a day, each of those birds. And their favorite insect is the mosquito.'”

Field is on the board of Audubon Minnesota, and she’d been watching the swifts hanging around the chimney in the evenings. Individually they look like fat cigars with wings, but when they get ready to swoop down into the chimney for the night, there are so many of them, they look like a funnel cloud.

“How they communicate I have no idea, how they put the brakes on when they dive into that chimney so quickly, it’s a mystery but it’s a fun thing to watch.”

In the end the school district decided to leave the chimney up.

So now, a few weeks later, and just in time for the Chimney Swifts to fly back up from the Amazon, the tower is standing on a concrete pad at the school’s nature center.

School naturalist Marleane Callaghan has already brought all her classes, grades three-through-five, to check it out.

“We’ve talked about the bird, what it looks like, the dimension of it, I’ve invited them to come back with their parents to watch in the school parking lot in the evening up at the high school where they’ve left the chimney, and then to walk on down, to be able to identify them.”

This project is part of an effort by Audubon groups all over the country to raise awareness of Chimney Swifts and their need for homes.

In Minnesota, project director Ron Windingstad wants to convince homeowners to make existing chimneys more welcoming. He says people can take the caps off their chimneys during the summer, or just raise them high enough so the birds can fly in from the sides.

Soon these school kids will be able to see the amazing acrobatics of the Chimney Swifts. Windingstad says they hardly ever stop flying, from morning til night. They’ll even sip water and take a bath in a nearby pond, without stopping.

“They’ll scoop down, lower their bill, and fly across it and drink in the water. They’ll use some of these shrubs around here to break off little twigs about the size of a wooden matchstick or toothpick actually, and use that to build their nests, and they do that while flying as well. They are marvelous creatures.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

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Companies Keep Cosmetics Chemicals Secret

  • Researchers have found undisclosed chemicals in a variety of products, from perfume to floor polish. (Photo courtesy of Escape(d) CC-2.0)

When you use cosmetics or cleaning products, you might assume that the government has checked out the ingredients and has deemed them safe. But Julie Grant reports – that’s not the case. Companies don’t even have disclose everything that’s in their products.

Transcript

When you use cosmetics or cleaning products, you might assume that the government has checked out the ingredients and has deemed them safe. But Julie Grant reports – that’s not the case. Companies don’t even have disclose everything that’s in their products.

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics wants the labels on cosmetics to reflect all the ingredients in a product. But spokesperson Stacy Malkan says that’s not what’s happening. The Campaign recently sent 17 brands of perfumes and body sprays to an independent lab.

“We found in these products an average of 14 hidden chemicals that were not on the labels that the lab was able to detect.”

Malkan says some of those hidden chemicals have been associated with asthma and headaches, while others are hormone-disruptors, linked to sperm damage, thyroid problems, and even cancer. Malkan says there’s a reason companies don’t put those chemicals on the labels: they don’t have to.

“It is required that companies list the chemicals in their products, except that if they are part of the fragrance. So there’s a huge loophole in the federal law that allows companies to keep secret the chemicals in fragrances.”

And this loophole exists for more than just for perfumes.
Malkan says they have things like children’s bubble bath can create toxic contaminants. And researchers have found un-disclosed chemicals in nearly all brands of cleaning products – things such as dishwashing soap, floor polish, and air fresheners.

“If a chemical is found in a product, it doesn’t mean that the product is toxic or hazardous.”

Gretchen Shaefer is spokesperson for the Consumer Specialty Products Association, which represents the makers of cleaning products. She says companies are required to list anything that’s hazardous on the label.

As more consumers ask for additional information, she says manufacturers are providing more about their chemical formulas. But Schaefer says most are not willing to disclose the trade secrets of their fragrances:

“It is the fragrance that makes those products unique. And that’s why protecting those fragrance formulas are absolutely critical to the manufacturers of the overall product.”

That’s also true when it comes to companies that make cosmetics and perfumes. The trade group representing the cosmetics industry says that new study, the one that found 14 un-disclosed chemicals in the top perfumes and colognes, is misusing the information. The Personal Care Products Association says the chemicals in question are only a concern at very high levels. But the study doesn’t report the levels of these chemicals.

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics says most of the chemicals it found in fragrances have not even been assessed for safety.

Ann Steinemann is an environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington, and has studied hundreds of cleaning products. She says nearly all brands on the market, even those labeled green products, contain undisclosed carcinogens – which are considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency:

“According to the EPA, things that are classified as carcinogens have no safe exposure level. There is no safe exposure level. Even one molecule cannot be considered safe.”

Bills have been introduced in both the U.S. House and Senate to change labeling laws on things like cleaning products. And the EPA has recently classified some of the chemicals found in fragrances as chemicals of concern. Advocates for improved labeling and safer ingredients advise consumers to use fewer products with fragrances.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Reforming School Food Systems

  • USDA undersecretary of food and nutrition, Kevin Concannon, says today former military generals are concerned because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to qualify for military service. (Photo courtesy of the US Navy)

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

Transcript

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

The national school lunch program started after World War II because the military was concerned. Many young men had been rejected from the draft because of childhood malnutrition.

Kevin Concannon is undersecretary of food and nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He says today former military generals are getting concerned again. That’s because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to serve.

“Twenty-seven percent of them in that age group are so overweight, they don’t qualify for military service.”

And part of the reason so many have gone from being malnourished from not enough food, to malnourished from too much junk food, is the school meals program.

Everyone from first lady Michelle Obama to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is pushing for improvements in the foods served in schools. Chef Oliver spent three months in Huntington, West Virginia for his program Food Revolution – because it was dubbed the unhealthiest city in America.

In this scene, he started by working in an elementary school cafeteria – and goes with one of the workers to check out the freezer.

“The freezer was just an aladdin’s cave of processed crap….So this is pizza for breakfast, and then they have it for lunch tomorrow?”

“I would not ever feed that to my kids, ever.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this…”

“Do you honestly think that we could go from raw state every day?”

“Yes.”

In his efforts to improve the food in this one school district, we see how many barriers there are to doing something as simple as getting kids to eat vegetables and fruits.

There’s resistance from cafeteria workers, the school administrators, the parents, and the kids.

When Oliver serves roasted chicken instead of chicken nuggets, most of it ends up in the trash. And when the schools do start using his menus, more and more parents send their kids in with brown bag lunches – many filled with candy and potato chips.

Kevin Concannon at the USDA says the government cannot do anything about the lunches parents send with their kids. But it can do something about the food served by schools. And he says there is a big push right now to serve healthier foods.

“The direction we’re going in is more fruits, more vegetables, less fat, less sugar, less sodium.”

But, there’s a catch:

“Better, healthier foods cost more.”

So President Obama is proposing adding 10-billion dollars to school food programs over the next decade. The Senate is looking at adding a little less than half that – 4.5 billion. Either way, Concannon says it’s more money than has ever been added to the program.

“It’s no longer a political climate of ‘I’m OK, if you’re OK.’ I think it’s more a realization that this affects health costs, this affects national security, and many of these health conditions are preventable if we get people to eat healthier and to exercise.”

Chef Jamie Oliver agrees more money is needed to provide healthier foods in schools. But right now, he says the government is part of the problem. It offers schools cheap processed food for almost nothing.

“The donated food that you get that is so cheap that you can’t resist it. And it’s from the government. The government is saying ‘We want change.’ ‘Here, why don’t you have some really lovely, cheap processed food.”

The USDA says the government food being sold to schools has improved over the years. But many people say it hasn’t improved enough to ensure that most U.S. students are offered nutritious meals every day.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Keeping Your Lawn From Bugging You

  • There's a movement to stop using pesticides and sprays on your lawn. (Photo courtesy of Horia Varlan CC-BY)

A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with our lawns. We love them when they’re lush. We hate them when they’re full of dandelions and dead patches. It’s easy to have someone come out and spray pesticides to take care of weeds and bugs. But some people say it’s not necessary and could do more harm than good. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

A lot of us have a love-hate relationship with our lawns. We love them when they’re lush. We hate them when they’re full of dandelions and
dead patches. It’s easy to have someone come out and spray pesticides to take care of weeds and bugs. But some people say it’s not necessary and could
do more harm than good. Rebecca Williams reports:

So, you might be using pesticides on your lawn right now. And of
course, the pesticide industry says that’s okay.

The industry says the chemicals are safe to use on the lawn if you use
them correctly.

Alan James is president of Responsible Industry for a Sound
Environment, or RISE. It’s a trade group for pesticide companies.

“If individuals or professional applicators read the labels and follow
labels, the likelihood of misuse of pesticides is virtually zero because the
labels provide all the information a consumer or professional needs to
apply products both efficiently and safely.”

But the problem is, not everybody reads the label.

Alan James says if you’re hiring someone to spray your lawn you should
make sure they’re certified and insured. You should also take your kids’
and pet’s toys off the lawn before they spray.

But a lot of people say there’s no point in using chemicals just to make
your lawn look good.

Jay Feldman is with the group Beyond Pesticides. He says of the 30
most common lawn pesticides, most of them are suspected by the
Environmental Protection Agency to cause cancer, birth defects or other health problems.

“There’s a range of adverse effects that are indicated as a part of the
pesticide registration program at EPA. EPA knows this information.
Why not remove pesticides from the equation, especially in light of the
fact that they’re not really necessary?”

There’s a movement to stop using pesticides in North America. Both
Ontario and Quebec have banned the sale and cosmetic use of
pesticides.

So if you’re not going to use pesticides, what do you do?

That’s a question Kevin Frank gets a lot. He’s an extension agent at
Michigan State University and an expert on lawns.

“I love to mow my lawn on the weekends because nobody can call me on
the phone or email me with questions.”

He’s been showing me green, healthy test plots of grass and some that
look sad and neglected. The scientists here have been working to find
ways to have good-looking lawns without a lot of chemicals.

Back in his office, Kevin Frank says he tells people they shouldn’t be
afraid to experiment.

“Do you have it in you to let it go for one season and see what happens?
And it could be ugly, so you’ve got to be prepared for that!”

He says a healthy, dense lawn is actually really good at fighting off
weeds and pests all on its own. So, how do you get a healthy, dense lawn
without a lot of chemicals? Frank says it might take a couple years to get
there. And it means going against conventional lawn advice.

“We’ve done a great deal of research here at Michigan State that runs
contrary to what I call ‘turf dogma’. You know: water deeply and
infrequently – and we’ve shown if you do it on a more frequent basis you
end up with a healthier plan overall.”

He recommends watering lightly – just 10 minutes – every day instead
of soaking the lawn once a week. Frank says it’s also good to fertilize
twice a year, use a mulch mower, and mow high instead of giving the
grass a buzz cut.

He says that could make your lawn so healthy, it might mean you won’t
need to spray or hire someone to spray your lawn.

He says the biggest adjustment in reducing pesticide use is managing
your expectations, and deciding how many weeds and bugs you can live
with.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Protecting Beaches From Gulf Oil Spill

  • Volunteers are combing every inch of the shoreline, picking up trash and raking driftwood and sticks into the dunes. Normally they’d let the natural debris stay on the beach. But if it gets coated with oil it becomes hazardous waste and has to be shipped to a local landfill. (Photo courtesy of the NOAA)

It’s been weeks since oil began gushing from
a broken underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico.
As BP continues to try to stop the leak, many
coastal communities are scrambling to
prepare for the oil that threatens their
shorelines. As Tanya Ott reports, volunteers in
Alabama are taking some low-tech steps to get ready:

Transcript

It’s been weeks since oil began gushing from a broken underwater well in the Gulf of Mexico. As BP continues to try to stop the leak, many coastal communities are scrambling to prepare for the oil that threatens their shorelines. As Tanya Ott reports, volunteers in Alabama are taking some low-tech steps to get ready:

Within days of the oil rig explosion, Casi Callaway’s phone started ringing off the hook.

“I have hundreds of volunteers calling every minute.”

Okay – well maybe not every minute. But Callaway’s group, Mobile Baykeeper, has been very busy organizing volunteers. In the past week more than 7-thousand people have flocked to the white sands of the Alabama coast hoping to help.

They’re combing every inch of the shoreline, picking up trash and raking driftwood and sticks into the dunes. Normally they’d let the natural debris stay on the beach. But if it gets coated with oil it becomes hazardous waste and has to be shipped to a local landfill. So volunteers are working round the clock to move the material. Tom Herder is with the Mobile Bay Estuary Program. He says they have to be careful because this is nesting season for wading birds like Plovers and Terns.

“You know we were the dumb transgressors the first day. I was throwing stuff in the dunes. And we were just moving stuff up and I wasn’t looking for Plover nests and the Audobon Society kinda got on my case – and it’s good, they educated us. And we’re educating our volunteers.”

They’ve been training volunteers on how to remove debris without disturbing wildlife. But Herder says the clock is ticking and there’s still lots of work to do. So they’re balancing the need to protect wildlife with the need to get the beaches ready. Herder says to do that they’ve been bending the rules a little bit.

“People have to be 18 years old to take part in our volunteer efforts. Shoot – that’s, that’s not necessarily the way people do things here. And we tell people, if you live on the Western shore of Mobile Bay don’t wait for us. Get down there and clean it up yourself. You know. And that’s not rogue.”

While volunteers work to get the beaches ready for oil, BP says it’s working to keep the oil from reaching the shore. It’s using what are called chemical dispersants – basically it’s industrial detergent – to break up the oil deep under the surface. But critics say the chemicals could kill off the larvae of fish that use the Gulf of Mexico for spawning grounds… fish like the Atlantic bluefin tuna. It could also hurt oysters and mussels. But BP’s Steve Rinehart says there’s always a tradeoff.

“Nobody wants an oil spill. We have an oil spill. You need to make judgments about limiting the damager where you can.”

Rinehart says a group of state and federal spill responders, including environmental scientists, has determined that dispersants pose the least risk.

“If the choice is oil going to shore or using dispersant off shore, using dispersant off shore causes less environmental impact. That’s not to say there won’t be some, but it’s less harmful to the environment than having the oil go to shore.”

So basically, it could be an “either/or” – protect the beach with dispersants and you might risk the fish. Tom Herder — with the Estuary Program — says it’s a no win situation.

“I’ve almost been making deals with God. And I can’t bribe God, but he knows I’ll follow through.”

Right now, Herder’s just praying for good weather – and more time – to get the coasts prepared.

For The Environment Report, I’m Tanya Ott.

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The Incredible, Edible Weed

  • People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine.(Photo courtesy of the NBII, Elizabeth A. Sellers)

An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:

Transcript

An invasive plant called Garlic Mustard is taking over forests in the Eastern half of the country, and it could be causing long term damage. Julie Grant reports that some people are getting smart in their efforts to get rid of Garlic Mustard:

Brad Steman spends a lot of time in the woods. He likes the serenity. But as we walk through this park, he winces. The entire forest floor is carpeted with one plant and one plant only: Garlic Mustard. Thousands of them. The thin green stalks are as tall as our ankles.

Steman calls it “the evil weed.” Its triangle-shaped leaves shade out wildflowers, so they don’t grow. Even worse, Steman says Garlic Mustard poisons baby trees.

“So a forest filled with Garlic Mustard you will see very little regeneration of that forest, very few seedlings, small trees. So looking down the line, once those large trees start dying off there’s nothing to replace them. And that now is the greatest threat to our Eastern forests.”

Steman says every year Garlic Mustard is spreading farther into the woods. Anywhere the ground is disturbed.

“So here’s a big stand of it along a trail. This is typically where it starts. This is thick. This is a healthy stand. There’s potential there for an explosion. So we should probably pull some. I’ll pull some; you don’t have to pull any.”

Thank goodness he’s doing it – it looks like tedious work. Steman crouches down and starts pulling them out of the ground, roots and all. He sprayed herbicide on some of it, and so far this season he’s filled 35 big garbage bags with Garlic Mustard plants. He’s sick of weeding. But it doesn’t look like he’s made a dent here. All along the Eastern half of the US and Canada people are pulling up Garlic Mustard from parks and just throwing it away. But some people don’t like this approach.

“All these people are very shortsighted when they’re doing that.”

Peter Gail is a specialist in edible weeds.

“They’re not looking for other alternative uses – creative ways to use these plants that would be profitable, that would be productive.”

Gail says: “If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em.” People brought Garlic Mustard to the US in the mid-1800s because they liked it, to eat. And they even used it for medicine. Yep. That same nasty weed.

Gail says today Garlic Mustard just needs an image makeover. Some weeds have become big stars in the cooking world. A few years ago Purselane was just an unwanted vine, with its fleshy, shiny leaves matted to the ground. Now it’s known as a nutritional powerhouse, and is the darling of New York and LA eateries. Gail wants that kind of fame for Garlic Mustard.

“This is a Garlic Mustard Ricotta dip, Garlic Mustard salsa, stuffed Garlic Mustard leaves – these are all things you can do with this stuff. It’s fantastic!”

Garlic Mustard seeds taste like mustard, the leaves taste like garlic and the roots are reminiscent of horseradish. Gail says people should go after Garlic Mustard in the parks, but then they should take it to farm markets to sell.

“My normal statement is that the best way to demoralize weeds is to eat them. Because when you eat them they know you like them and they don’t want to be there anymore, and so they leave.”

Today Gail decides to blend a pesto using the early spring leaves. He picks every last Garlic Mustard in his yard to make a batch.

“Well there it is, garlic mustard pesto. And it isn’t bad, is it?”

“It’s delicious.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

“I’ll use that on ravioli tonight.”

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Saving Energy With Auto Switches

  • According to the EPA, sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting unoccupied rooms. (Photo Courtesy of Vincent Ma CC-2.0)

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are becoming more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

Transcript

Saving energy can be as simple as turning off the light switch when you leave a room. But in most homes… that doesn’t happen all the time. Lester Graham reports… motion sensing light switches are become more popular because they’ll switch on and off automatically.

In some families, Dad stomping around the house, turning off lights and yelling to no one in particular is legendary.

“How many times do I have to tell you, turn off those lights.”

Don’t burst a blood vessel there, pal.

Well, Dad might have had a point. Matt Grocoff with Greenovation.TV says he’s been poking around the Environmental Protection Agency’s website and found this:

“Sixty-percent of lighting actually goes to lighting an unoccupied room, hallways, bathrooms, your bedroom. Drive by any neighborhood house and you’ll see eight rooms lit. How many of those houses have eight people in them.”

Matt says there’s a solution. Motion-sensing light switches. They can be set to turn on when you walk into a room and turn themselves off when you leave… staying on for a minute or two… or five… or a half-hour. Whatever you set it to.

There are a lot of different types. Laurie Gross is President of Gross Electric in Ohio and Michigan. They’ve been selling lamps and lights and switches for one-hundred years.

She says there are light switches that turn on when you enter and off when you leave, others that you have to turn on and they turn off when the room is empty. Different technology works –well– differently. Gross says passive infrared works well for pantries or kitchens because they detect motion.

“Then there’s ultrasonic which doesn’t need a line-of-sight. So, those are good in public bathrooms so when it senses heat, when go in there, it knows you’re there and turns off if you take a little longer than expected to take.”

And there are switches that use both infrared and ultrasonic… good for places like big office spaces.

You can expect to spend 50 – 60 bucks or more for a good one, depending on what you want. There are cheaper sensor light switches out there… but in this case, you really do get what you pay for.

Now… these switches use a tiny bit of power themselves… so the best place for them is in a room where leaving the light bulb on is not likely to be noticed for a while. Matt tells the story of forgetting to turn off a light in the garage during vacation. That bulb burned for two weeks. A sensor switch makes a lot of sense in a place like that… or in a closet… or a room you don’t use a lot.

Matt Grocoff and his wife Kelly are working to make their 110 year old house the oldest net-zero energy home in America. And he says he loves having motion sensing switches in key areas for the convenience as well as the energy savings.

“We open the door in the kitchen and come through the door with loads of groceries and the light comes on automatically. You don’t have to do the elbow dance.”

His wife Kelly says for her… it’s avoiding a little childhood terror.

“I have a little PTSD from when I was younger and my Dad was constantly harassing us to turn the lights off. Now, I know if I leave the room and I don’t turn the light off, it’s going to go off eventually instead of having my Dad chase me down and giving me some lecture about turning the lights off, saving energy, saving money, blah, blah, blah.”

Funny story about that. Kelly’s Mom, Jane Casselman was visiting when I was at the couple’s house… and she started laughing about Dad lecturing about the lights.

“’Cause in the evening, yours truly would turn all the lights off before going to bed.”

Heh– busted.

For The Environment Report… I’m Lester Graham.

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