Turning Clunkers Into New Cars

  • The scrap heap - what's left of hundreds of cars and other metal waste after they go through a shredder. (Photo by Tamara Keith)

All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:

Transcript

All those clunkers are working their
way toward the final melt-down at
a steel mill. Lester Graham reports
you’ll see the steel from those clunkers
again:

The steel from those clunkers from the “Cash for Clunkers” program will eventually be melted down and used again.

Bill Heenan is the President of the Steel Recycling Institute. He says it’ll be a few months before that scrap gets recycled.

“It takes some time for that old automobile, the clunker in this particular case, to work its way through the dismantling system and then through the shredding system and eventually to the steel mill.”

Scrap yards can remove things such as fenders or hubcaps for used parts, but what’s left – including the engines – goes to the shredder.

Bill Heenan says those 700,000 clunkers won’t mean a glut of scrap steel.

“Let’s say there’s a ton of steel in each one, you’ve got 700,000 tons. That seems like a lot. But in a given year, we recycle 80-million tons.”

That 80-million tons of scrap is melted down and becomes the bulk of new steel products in the U.S., including new cars.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Serving It Up Green

  • The Duluth Grill is a family-style restaurant that's finding ways to cut down on trash, reduce energy use, and encourage volunteering in the community. The hanging lamps use LED bulbs, for a dramatic reduction in electricity use. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

Transcript

Some big corporations and some small businesses are taking a serious look at their impact on the environment. Some are using a science-based framework called the Natural Step to try to operate more sustainably. Stephanie Hemphill visited one, and has this report:

The Duluth Grill is a family restaurant. Tom Hanson is the owner here. He says things started changing for the restaurant when he decided he should be offering healthier foods. He says too many of us are gaining too much weight. So he changed the menu, and now he says people can still go out and have a good time without it all going to their waist.

“Whether it’s French fries or fruit or healthy home-made soups, people can be socially engaged eating out but you’re not necessarily sacrificing your eating habits or eating styles.”

His menu offers healthy ethnic meals, gluten-free foods, and teas that claim health benefits.

Once Hanson started thinking about the health and well-being of his customers, he started thinking about the other impacts of his business. He joined a group of about a dozen businesses recruited by a local non-profit to try out the Natural Step approach to sustainability. The Natural Step was developed in Sweden, but it’s being used all over the world.

Restaurant staffers attended training sessions on how ecosystems work, and on what it means to be sustainable.

Manager Jeff Petcoff shows off the new LED lights in the restaurant.


“They produce 12 watts of energy versus 320 watts from the regular light bulbs that we were using prior to this. It’s a little more intimate with dining at night, but we’ve had a positive reaction to that as well.”

The Natural Step program encourages reducing the use of fossil fuels and other resources that have to be mined from the earth. And it calls for not throwing as much garbage into the earth.


In the kitchen, workers separate the trash. There’s a bin for recyclables, one for trash, and one for food scraps. Petcoff says the food waste goes for compost.

“We’ve just made it very easy for our staff to be able to compost and recycle with the bins all over the restaurant.”

The Duluth Grill has reduced its weekly trash pickup, and saved a bunch of money in the process. Owner Tom Hanson says saving money is nice, but part of the Natural Step program calls for not degrading the earth, like by building landfills.

“We don’t live next door to landfill but somebody does, and once you become aware of it, I think, it becomes more compelling to do it.”

And the restaurant encourages its customers to get involved in helping each other. Next to the front door there’s a bin where people can dump their old magazines. A local youth center is recycling them to raise money.

And there’s a bookshelf where people can leave children’s books; it’s part of a community-wide literacy campaign.

One Natural Step principle is about people: a sustainable business operator makes sure the people who work there, and even the suppliers and customers, anyone who has contact with the business, can meet their needs without a big struggle.

Tom Hanson dreams of offering health coverage to all his staff — and maybe someday even child care.

“You could easily consider day care for your staff as being an expense that no small operator could afford. But when you make change little by little, that step could very well enter into our values, and once it becomes one of our values it becomes affordable.”

Many businesses are making these kinds of changes and you might not even be aware of it. But Tom Hanson would say if you’re not sure, ask. You might prompt someone else to do better.


For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Recycling Your Christmas Tree

  • (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:

Transcript

Most cities discourage you
from throwing your Christmas tree
away. Rebecca Williams takes a look
at what you can do with your tree:

In a lot of cities you can drop your tree off, or a city truck will come and
pick it up. Then they’ll run it through a big chipper and make mulch. Cities
use the mulch for parks or zoos. And sometimes you can buy some of that
mulch for your own yard.

Bryan Weinert is a solid waste coordinator in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He
says you’ve got to make sure you take all the ornaments and tinsel off the
tree before you put it at the curb.

“You know that compromises the quality of our finished product and in
some cases can actually damage our grinding equipment.”

Other places use the trees to create fish habitat. And this year, when the
Vatican is done with its 108 foot tall Christmas tree, it’ll use it to make
wooden toys.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Sagging Mattress Recycling

  • The city of Toronto has started collecting old mattresses at a central recycling center. (Photo by Julie Grant)

One of the bigger things we
throw away are old mattresses. Landfills
are stuffed full of them. Julie Grant
reports that new companies are springing
up to recycle the steel and cushioning
from old mattresses. They say the government
could help, but it’s lying down on the job:

Transcript

One of the bigger things we
throw away are old mattresses. Landfills
are stuffed full of them. Julie Grant
reports that new companies are springing
up to recycle the steel and cushioning
from old mattresses. They say the government
could help, but it’s lying down on the job:

(sound of a mattress factory)

Simon Zysman has been working with mattresses for more
than half-a-century. For the past 16, he’s been running a
business in Toronto that tears old mattresses apart so the
pieces can be reused.

“i’ve only dismantled with my own hands 3,000 used
mattresses and my enterprize in the 16 years has only
dismantled 40,000 mattresses, and therefore i know very
little. I’m just learning.”

Yeah, like Lance Armstrong is just learning to ride a bike.

Now, apparently dismantling mattresses is not a cushy job.

(sound of mattress deconstruction)

Workers pull mattresses from a big pile. I watch one as he
makes a long cut all around the edge, snips material where
it’s connected to the coils. And then pulls the entire face of
the cushioning away from the springs. It’s kind of like
filleting the mattress.

When he’s done, the cushioning goes on one pile. The steel
springs on another.

Zysman sells the different parts to companies in the U.S.
that rebuild mattresses. Other people in the business just
recycle the steel and sell the cushioning for things like
carpet-padding and oil filters.

Zysman used to toss and turn when he thought about the
huge numbers of mattresses out there, but his supply’s not
been steady.

When you buy a new mattress, a lot of times the company
that delivers it will pick up your old mattress. Most
companies just send them to the dump. Only a few pay
people like Zysman to have them dismantled.

Until recently those few have provided Zysman’s only
supply.

But the city of Toronto has started a pilot program to collect
old mattresses from residents at the curbside for companies
like Zysman’s.

“The city’s pioneering mattress recycling program has been
a great boost to us and a great help to us. That is a
wonderful development.”

(sound of a recycling center)

The mattresses the city picks up are stockpiled at a recycling
center.

Bryan Farley runs the city’s new program. He says Zysman
and other people like him are getting paid to keep
mattresses from stuffing the landfill.

“Landfill space in Ontario is a premium. It’s hard to find.
And there are laws and regulations that are more focused on
not putting materials into the landfill.”

Farley figures getting mattresses out of the waste stream will
help the city to meet its ambitious goal of reducing trash by
70%.

Mattresses take up a lot of space. They’re big and bulky and
don’t smash down all that well in a landfill.

South of the Canadian border, in Ohio, Chuck Brickman has
been piecing together a mattress recycling business.

He wishes the government here would help increase the
supply of used mattresses. Brickman can get some from
local hotels and furniture stores, but it’s not enough so far to
run a steady business.

“There’s two companies right now in New Jersey that are
sending 2 to 5 thousand mattresses a month by rail from
New Jersey to a landfill in Michigan.”

Why? It’s cheap.

A few cities and states have special landfill fees for bulky
items like mattresses, but most don’t. So, it’s usually
cheaper just to dump them.

Brickman wants local or state governments to create more
‘incentives’ for the mattresses to be recycled. In other
words, higher fees to dump mattresses.

“It’s easier and more economically feasible for them to throw
them in a couple rail cars and send them a couple states
over because there are no established tipping fees in some
of the Midwestern states like Ohio and Michigan.”

Mattress recyclers say government officials can raise those
fees on dumping mattresses. That would make the mattress
recycling business less of a dream, and more of a reality.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Looking for Answers at the Dump

  • The city of Chicago has hired the company Camp Dresser and McKee to dig through residents' trash and figure out what exactly people are throwing away (Photo by Michael Rhee)

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

Transcript

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

(sound of trucks beeping)

This is a waste transfer facility on Chicago’s South Side. It’s kind of a temporary dump.

Garbage trucks pick up trash from people’s homes and pile it up here. The piles are then packed
onto even bigger trucks and hauled to landfills far away.

Chris Martel looks over the mounds of trash here. Martel is an engineer, and a solid waste
expert.

“There’s a lot of different paper types here, there’s a plastic bottles, all things that are recyclable.”

But they’re probably not going to be recycled. They’re going to a landfill. That’s why Martel is
here.

He works for a consulting firm called CDM, or Camp Dresser and McKee.

The city of Chicago has hired the company to dig through residents’ trash and figure out what
exactly people are throwing away. Martel has been doing waste sorts like this for more than a
decade.

As we walk to another part of the building, he remembers his first one fondly.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife, after giving her flowers out of the trash and stuffed
animals out of the trash.”

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

We get to the waste sorting area. There’s a group of workers surrounded by dozens of large and
small bins.

(BOOM)

(laughs) “That boom was the tipper dropping the waste load.”

A rugged, yellow loader dumps about 300 pounds of garbage at our feet. It’s a sample from one
of the large piles in the facility.

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

Scott Keddy is one of them. He picks up a plastic garbage bag.

“We just open it up and see what kind of surprises lie inside, like it could be this #1 plastic PET
bottle, or this rigid, plastic thinga-ma-jobber that did something for somebody at some point,
which is different from that.”

They’re sorting them into 81 different containers. Each one is for a kind of paper, plastic, metal,
food or some other piece of trash.

The point is to figure out how much of each material people are throwing out. And where it’s all
coming from.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna is commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Environment.

She says the tough thing about creating a recycling program in a city like Chicago is the diversity.
Not only do you have residents and businesses creating waste, but restaurants, prisons,
manufacturers for car parts. Each of these creates a different kind of garbage.

The city has been trying to come up with a recycling program that works for everyone for 20
years. Malec-McKenna says the study will help the city decide how to manage it all.

“You can’t have a cookie cutter approach for a city this diverse. You’ve got to come up with a
range of different kind of program options for it. We’ll come up with the right mix.”

But while the city figures recycling out, the garbage will keep piling up in landfills.

Martel, the waste expert, says he hopes that waste is reduced soon. He says most people don’t
understand the sheer quantities of garbage that are out there.

“Unless you physically see and touch it you don’t realize what a large amount it is and what the
implications are and how easy it is to divert these materials.”

Big cities around the country are realizing this, and working on a solution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Michael Rhee.

Related Links

Part One: Canada’s Take on Trash

  • Jen Spence's collection of trash/ recycling containers on the east side of Toronto. The city has retooled its recycling program in recent years to make it easier for residents. The big blue container is for recycling, the green hanging pail is for compost. Toronto only picks up trash twice a month - but Spence's family doesn't even fill that small trash can. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Sometimes it takes a little public
embarrassment to get on the right track.
Back in 2000, the city of Toronto couldn’t
find a place to send its garbage – so it
started trucking trash across the border
to the US. Julie Grant reports that inspired
Toronto to create one of the most aggressive
recycling programs in North America:

Transcript

Sometimes it takes a little public
embarrassment to get on the right track.
Back in 2000, the city of Toronto couldn’t
find a place to send its garbage – so it
started trucking trash across the border
to the US. Julie Grant reports that inspired
Toronto to create one of the most aggressive
recycling programs in North America:

Some days Toronto has sent as many as 150 trucks full of
trash 300 miles to a landfill in the U.S. For those of you
counting at home, that’s 90,000 highway miles a day. That’s
not only bad for the environment. As gas prices have risen,
it’s also bad for Toronto’s bottom line.

But the bigger issue was Toronto wasn’t taking care of its
own trash. It wasn’t even keeping it in Canada. It was
trucking it to Michigan.

And the people in Michigan – they didn’t like it too much.

They’ve complained about the stink of Toronto’s trash for
years.

They even got the U.S. Congress to look at ways to stop it
from crossing the border.

But, free trade even covers a commodity such as garbage.

The people in Toronto are a little embarrassed by it all.

(sound of a neighborhood)

David Wallett looks perfectly pleased with the landscaping in
his small lawn in east Toronto. But his eyes tilt downward
when he’s asked about shipping the city’s waste to Michigan.

“The downside of that is all those trucks ripping down the
401. I mean that can’t be good for the environment to have
lots of trucks burning gas just getting it there.”

But the City of Toronto had signed a contract with a
Michigan landfill. So the trucks kept ripping down highway
401, even as fuel costs got higher and higher.

Geoff Rathbone is Toronto’s general manager of solid waste.
He says the contract is a dark cloud – but it got the city and
residents on-board with recycling.

“The shipment to Michigan really became a wake up call that
allowed us to set very aggressive waste diversion targets.
And to realize that what we were shipping out of our country
was really more of a resource than a waste.”

Rathbone says Toronto set a tough goal – to reduce the
waste stream by 70%. And the city put up nearly a half-
billion dollars to do it.

But a funny thing happened as they started increasing their
recycling stream. Oil prices kept rising. That meant
commodity prices kept rising, too. Metals, plastics, and
paper have started to gain real value. Recycling paid!

And Toronto kept re-tooling its recycling program to make it
really easy for people.

(sound of a neighborhood)

On the east side of Toronto, Dick Wallett and his neighbors
each have one of those huge cart-like garbage barrels – the
ones with a handle and wheels. But it’s not for trash. It’s for
recyclables.

Jen Spence says it’s much easier than it used to be.

“For awhile it was very complicated. We had to put
newspapers in one bin and glass and bottles and jars in
another bin.”

Now they just throw everything into that one big container
and wheel it to the street. The city picks up and sorts the
recyclables. For free. It also picks up compost. You know,
food waste. Spence takes out a small pail from under the
kitchen sink to show me. It’s latched shut.

“This is the green bin. The city of Toronto sends this out to
anyone who’s going to be producing garbage. It collects
flies really badly, and it’s hard to clean, so they send out
these bags that are perfectly for it. It’s a nice size. It fills up
pretty quick and doesn’t stink. We used to have a huge can
and now it’s just that little guy that goes out every two
weeks.”

The city makes it kind of hard to take out regular trash –
things that can’t be recycled or composted. Like Spence
said, it’s only picked twice a month. And you pay as you
throw. The more you make, the more you pay.

Toronto has been able to cut the number of trucks headed to
the landfill in Michigan in half. And it’s moving toward it’s
goal of reducing the waste stream by 70%.

The city even plans to make energy out of the compost it’s
collecting.

The city plans to generate electricity and eventually make a
biofuel from the compost. That will be used to run Toronto’s
trucks to the landfill.

Oh, but those trucks won’t be going to the landfill in
Michigan.

The city has finally found a Canadian landfill that will start
taking Toronto’s waste in 2010.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Part Two: Canada’s Take on Trash

  • Gerry Moore’s the CEO of Island Waste Management – the company that runs the waste program on Prince Edward Island. He’s pointing at an aerial shot of the compost facility. (Photo by Kinna Ohman)

The recycling and composting rate
in the United States runs just around thirty
percent. That means seventy percent of our
waste still goes to landfills. Government
officials and others in charge of recycling
programs say we’re doing pretty well with
what we have available. But there’s a
community that’s challenging that assumption.
Kinna Ohman reports:

Transcript

The recycling and composting rate
in the United States runs just around thirty
percent. That means seventy percent of our
waste still goes to landfills. Government
officials and others in charge of recycling
programs say we’re doing pretty well with
what we have available. But there’s a
community that’s challenging that assumption.
Kinna Ohman reports:

Prince Edward Island’s one of those places where people who grow up here, stay here.
And it’s no wonder. The island’s off Canada’s eastern coast. It’s covered with rolling
green farmland, dark forests, and copper-red beaches. It’s Canada’s smallest province –
about the size of Delaware.

Prince Edward Island has a population of only 160,000. There seems to be enough room
for everyone.

But not for every thing.

Around ten years ago, the residents of Prince Edward Island saw their landfills filling up.
That meant digging more. They wanted to do something about it – and fast.

So they started an aggressive recycling and composting program.

Gerry Moore’s the CEO of Island Waste Management – the company that runs the
program. Moore says to make it happen quickly,

“We had to make this mandatory. It wasn’t something that we could go out and ask
people, ‘well, listen, this is the right thing to environmentally.’ We made it
mandatory.”

Moore says they had to be tough. If people didn’t separate their compost and recycling
from their waste, the company refused to pick it up. That was a difficult time for
politicians.

“And, to be quite honest with you, in the initial stages, it was fairly painful. But, if
we didn’t do what we did, when we did it, the landfill we have now would be totally
full and we’d have to have another one. We’re recycling everything we totally
possibly can.”

(sounds of a compost facility)

And they are. People and businesses on Prince Edward Island recycle and compost 65%
of their waste. That’s more than double the average in the U.S.

A lot of the former waste now goes to the island’s composting facility. The facility takes
care of miscellaneous garbage that can’t be recycled – things such as certain types of
paper and food scraps.

(sound of door closing)

Gordon Smith shows me the compost curing warehouse. We’re now sealed in with
steaming mounds of dark compost that almost reach the ceiling. It’s muggy and hot.
About 130 degrees.

“So this is our finished compost you’re looking at right here. This large pile. And
that large pile over there as well.”

Smith’s the facilities supervisor for ADI – the company running the composting plant.
The facility handles 30,000 tons every year.

And with all that, you’d think Prince Edward Islanders would say ‘job done.’ Right? But
they’re trying to reduce landfill waste even more.

They want businesses to start using packaging that can be composted or recycled. Many
local businesses have switched.

But there’s a problem. Big multinational chain stores bring goods to Prince Edward
Island in packaging that cannot be recycled or composted. It all ends up in the island’s
landfill.

Gerry Moore knows his province is too small to really influence these companies. So
that’s where he hopes other communities will help out and join in.

“There will be initial pain with that in the front end. And a lot of politicians and
public figures don’t want to go through that pain. But, you know, we only have one
earth. And whether you’re from New York, or Prince Edward Island, or all over
the globe, anything we can remanufacture and reuse is only going to extend the life
of the planet.”

And Prince Edward Island officials think if they can do it, other places can too – if they
have the political will.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kinna Ohman.

Related Links

From the Trash to the Tank

  • Ethanol can be made from material that would end up in a landfill (Source: Patrick-br at Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few years, ethanol’s been
a political darling, but lately it seems the
party’s over. There’s concern the industry’s
using too much corn. That’s contributing to
rising food prices. Well, some companies want
to avoid the controversy. Reporter Shawn Allee explains they want to make ethanol from
stuff we leave behind at the dinner table:

Transcript

For the past few years, ethanol’s been
a political darling, but lately it seems the
party’s over. There’s concern the industry’s
using too much corn. That’s contributing to
rising food prices. Well, some companies want
to avoid the controversy. Reporter Shawn Allee explains they want to make ethanol from
stuff we leave behind at the dinner table:

To give you a sense of how touchy the ethanol issue’s gotten, consider what happened to Presidential
candidate Barack Obama. Last year, he supported mandates to add billions of gallons of ethanol to our
fuel stream. But recently, on ‘Meet the Press’, he was defensive.

“If it turns out, we got to make changes to our ethanol policy to help people get something
to eat, that’s the step we take. But I also believe ethanol has been an important
transitional tool for us to start dealing with our long-term energy crisis.”

Obama and other ethanol backers say we’re not stuck with corn-based ethanol. We can use wood chips
or energy crops like switchgrass.

But this cellulosic ethanol is a ways off.

First, the technology’s expensive. Plus, farmers don’t even grow energy crops now.

So, some companies hope to make ethanol from stuff that doesn’t need farms at all. It would come
from garbage cans, like this one at a coffee shop.

“In that receptacle there’s a lot of paper, and there’s some food bits and there’s some
scraps. So, we’re able to turn that into sugar. And the weak sugar, then we ferment, we distill into alcohol, and we get the ethanol.”

Zig Resiak is with a start-up company called Indiana Ethanol Power. He says garbage could compete
with corn.

“If you have a corn-to-ethanol facility, you’re going to pay for the feedstock. Trash, as a feedstock, we don’t
pay for it. The municipalities actually pay us to take the trash, just like a
landfill will take the trash.”

Resiak’s company isn’t the only one to figure this out. At least three other ethanol firms are asking
cities to hand over their trash, and cash. Besides being cheaper, there might be other advantages to
using garbage for ethanol.

Bob Dineen is with the industry group the Renewable Fuels Association.

“We have garbage all across the country.”

Here’s why that matters.

Before it makes it to the pump, ethanol needs to be blended at refineries. Dineens says those
refineries are far from corn farms and rural ethanol plants, but refineries are often close to big metro
areas, and big-city trash.

“A company that is able to produce from local landfill refuse – he’s clearly going to have an
advantage in terms of transportation, feedstock costs, and all the rest.”

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. The market hasn’t tested garbage-based ethanol yet.

So, what exactly is stopping companies like Indiana Ethanol Power from giving it a go?

Resiak says it’s simple – cities just haven’t been willing to part with their trash.

“Municipalities are very comfortable with putting it in the back of a truck and letting it go to the landfill. They don’t think about it twice. But for us to come in and say we’re going to
take it cheaper and we’re going to save you millions of dollars a year on your tipping fee – that’s different
and that’s kind of scary, and they want to take a good, strong look at that.”

Resiak predicts by the time cities do come around to the idea, there will be even more companies ready to
take garbage bags out of their hands.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Turning Garbage Into Gas

  • Jeffrey Langbehn beside one his family's hunting catches. He directs the Lake County Solid Waste Management District. His enthusiasm for the outdoors is one reason he says he supports the idea of finding landfill alternatives. The prospect of lower waste-handling costs is another. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Trash is usually out of sight, out of mind, but occasionally garbage grabs attention – especially when it starts costing a lot. Landfill fees are rising, and with higher costs to ship or truck garbage, a lot of communities are scrounging for alternatives to landfills. Reporter Shawn Allee found one community that hopes a trendy fuel might solve its garbage problem:

Transcript

Trash is usually out of sight, out of mind, but occasionally garbage grabs attention – especially when it starts costing a lot. Landfill fees are rising, and with higher costs to ship or truck garbage, a lot of communities are scrounging for alternatives to landfills. Reporter Shawn Allee found one community that hopes a trendy fuel might solve its garbage problem:

For most of us, there’s nothing less sexy than trash. But in part of Indiana, that’s changing.

“One second.”

“Take your time.”

I’m waiting for Jeff Langbehn. He heads a solid waste district in Northwest Indiana.

Lately, Langbehn’s phone is ringing off the hook – from reporters and colleagues. And why are they calling? Basically, it’s because Langbehn’s county is leaning toward doing something new with garbage – something that intrigues trash bureaucrats, maybe even the one in your town.

You see, Lake County Indiana is this close to letting companies convert most of its garbage into ethanol, you know, to run cars. Langbehn says his landfill costs are rising quickly. In his case, that would be 42 dollars per ton.

“The two garbage to ethanol providers were for $17.50 ton. Those savings alone made our board say, hey, we have to pay attention to this.”

And so Lake County Indiana sat down with the ethanol operators.

“And we asked the hard questions like, ‘are there any of these things operating in the country?’ All the standard questions you would ask.”

Shawn Allee: “Wait a minute, when you asked who else has done this and they said, no one, what did you think?”

“Well, the fact of the matter is that the components are being used, and have been used for a very, very long time.”

Sure, some components of garbage-to-ethanol technology have been around for a while. But, if you ask ethanol producers where they actually turn trash into ethanol, they say they can do it in labs, or in test facilities. That’s got some folks in the trash biz nervous.

“I guess I’d say I’m cautious and wary of using any new technology to process solid waste.”

Jeremy O’Brien researches trash for the Solid Waste Association of North America – a trade group. He’s seen landfill alternatives come and go.

“Early on in the 1970s we tried a number of technologies including composting the waste stream, anaerobic digestion, and then we also tried incineration.”

Of those, only incineration survived, but early incinerators had a nasty habit of spewing toxic pollutants, stuff like dioxin, out their smokestacks. O’Brien says incinerators are now cleaner.

His point, though, is that it takes time to improve technology. He worries some communities bent on turning garbage into ethanol could end up holding the bag.

“The facility could fail early on and they’d be stuck without having a place to put their waste.”

Indiana’s Jeff Langbehn says that won’t happen to his county. He says the ethanol companies will cover their own financing, and the county will have insurance as a backup. But speaking of backups, there already is another landfill alternative, right?

Shawn Allee: “Why can’t we just recycle all this and make it into stuff people buy again?”

“There are a number of people out there that could give a rat’s patoot about recycling. And that’s the waste stream we’re having to deal with. The other reality is, recycling is expensive, so I don’t believe it’s a realistic possibility for us to recycle everything, both from a cost standpoint and a societal standpoint.”

So, Langbehn says recycling helps, but ethanol might do more. He says he kind of wishes someone else would try trash-to-ethanol technology first, but it’s worth testing out.

And he says it might be so cheap he won’t even have to hold his nose.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Home Deconstruction vs. Demolition

  • The deconstruction method can preserve many of a house's resources in order to decrease waste from demolition. (Photo courtesy of Buffalo ReUse)

Every year, cities across the country spend millions of dollars tearing down condemned
houses and hauling away tons of debris to landfills. But progressive engineers and
community activists have found a way to reverse that wasteful process. A demolition
method called “deconstruction” uses human power instead of the wrecking ball to
preserve and reuse everything from floor joists to the kitchen sink. Joyce Kryszak puts
on her hard hat and takes us to one deconstruction site:

Transcript

Every year, cities across the country spend millions of dollars tearing down condemned
houses and hauling away tons of debris to landfills. But progressive engineers and
community activists have found a way to reverse that wasteful process. A demolition
method called “deconstruction” uses human power instead of the wrecking ball to
preserve and reuse everything from floor joists to the kitchen sink. Joyce Kryszak puts
on her hard hat and takes us to one deconstruction site:



This is not your typical demolition site. There are no wrecking balls or back hoes carting
away splinters of this once grand two-story home. Instead there are walls, lying
everywhere, and workers are taking them apart. A neat stack of harvested hemlock
beams grows on the vacant lot next door. There are cabinets, doors, books, furniture,
and dishes scattered all around them. There’s even a pile of dusty wine bottles retrieved
from the cellar. Deconstruction technician John Markle is covered in the dirt and grime
of the 100-year-old colonial. That’s because he’s taking this house apart with his
bare hands:


“Yeah, you won’t see a wrecking ball on our job site, but you will see a telescopic
forklift…And as you can see right there, we cut the house literally into big pieces,
and just take it apart, piece by piece.”


Markle does have some help. A crew of seven is busy carefully lifting off walls, pulling
apart beams and setting aside the spoils of their painstaking work. With a standard
demolition, about fifteen tons of usable building materials and supplies would have gone
to a landfill. Instead the materials are resold to builders, and at a discount to low-income
families so they can make repairs to their own homes. Dave Bennink is a deconstruction
consultant from Seattle. He’s spent the last fourteen years teaching communities this
sustainable method. And Bennink loves his job:


“We’re creating jobs, we’re keeping things out of landfill, we’re saving energy,
saving resources and we’re helping lower-income families…I mean, how could you not
like it every day.”


And he says the idea is slowly catching on. Bennick has clients in 21 states. Some of
them are private developers. Some are local governments. Right now, he’s working in
Buffalo, New York. He says when city officials learn they can deconstruct a house for
about the same cost as a demolition, in about the same time, the idea sells itself:


“I think they’re looking to make responsible choices, but they’re still looking to
make good decisions with the taxpayers’ money. So, when I can offer them both, I
think that’s more and more appealing.”


But sometimes a good idea needs a push. Michael Gainer is a former teacher and
community activist who needed little convincing. He sought out Bennink to help his city
get a deconstruction not-for profit business started.


Gainer is pretty young and strong, but he was still struggling to open the huge overhead door
that’s slipped off its tracks. This warehouse is where they keep all their salvage and then later sell it . And there’s plenty to choose from:


“We have a pretty big selection of doors, sinks, clawfoot tubs…”


And all of that from only a few months in the deconstruction business. The not-for profit
has already salvaged several houses on private contracts and has contracts with the city to
deconstruct about a dozen houses that were slated for demolition. And all with little to
no start-up money. Gainer says they’ve gotten a few grants, but so far they haven’t seen a
dime. They keep going with contracts and proceeds from sales. He pauses from telling
story to pull back a hair that’s strayed from his pony tail. His bandaged fingers leave a
smudge of dirt on his face. Gainer says the work isn’t easy, but he was eager to dig in:


“You know you gotta get out there and do it though. You gotta do the work. You
know, we talked about this for a year and I was about going bonkers, because I said,
I’m tired of talking about stuff. Let’s just go to work and get it done.”


Gainer is even more eager about the impact on the community. They’ve trained and hired
five, full time employees, a few part-timers, and are paying them all a living wage. They
get full medical coverage too, including the volunteers who pitch in. Gainer says it’s
possible because they’re not just throwing away resources:


“I was looking at wasteful expenditure of a hundred to two hundred million dollars
in a city to throw things in a landfill, and I’m like, this doesn’t make any sense. My
goal is to divert money from wasteful demolition and put young people to work,
improving their community.”


But Gainer says he’d really prefer not to take apart houses. His crew spruces up and
boards up abandoned houses that could still be saved. And he says if someone comes
along who has the vision to rehab it, they’ll help with that too.


For the Environment Report, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

Related Links