(Photo source: Daniel Candido at Wikimedia Commons)
Businesses keep track of the supply-
chain, but no one really keeps track
of trash in the same way. Lester
Graham reports some researchers
think there’s something to learn
from what we throw away:
Transcript
Businesses keep track of the supply-
chain, but no one really keeps track
of trash in the same way. Lester
Graham reports some researchers
think there’s something to learn
from what we throw away:
MIT researchers are going to keep track of some trash, using smart tags – tiny electronic tags. They’ll tag thousands of piece of trash, like plastic bottles. Then they’ll track them online in real time.
Assaf Biderman is with the MIT SENSE-able City Lab. He says already the public seems interested, but he hopes some other people follow along: big city decision-makers and waste disposal companies.
Biderman: “Who could benefit greatly from a better understanding of how garbage moves through the system with the idea of making their processes as good as possible.”
Graham: “Save some fuel, maybe?”
Biderman: “Save some fuel, you know, be better to the environment. I think everybody can benefit.”
Exhibits in New York and Seattle open this week, but starting tomorrow, anyone can follow the trail of trash online at MIT’s trashtrack website.
Bassam Jody of Argonne National Laboratory
is helping develop novel ways of sorting and cleaning
shredder residue left over from cars, construction debris,
and major household appliances.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
Auto shredder residue is a mish-mash of metal, foam and
plastics that get ejected from car shredders.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
Argonne researchers hope to make the
process affordable for the scrap industry. They're perfecting
machines that separate plastics and other materials by
density and their proclivity to sink or float in the presence
of foamy bubbles.
(Photo by Shawn Allee)
We’ve all heard over and over again
about that government program ‘Cash
for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers
thinking about what exactly happens
to dead cars, regardless of how they
die. Shawn Allee looks at
how car recycling works and who’s
trying to improve it:
Transcript
We’ve all heard over and over again about that government program ‘Cash for Clunkers.’ It’s got drivers thinking about what exactly happens to dead cars, regardless of how they die. Shawn Allee looks at how car recycling works and who’s trying to improve it:
You might not think about it this way, but your car just might be the biggest thing you own that gets recycled.
I mean, someday you’re going to junk it, or maybe some future owner will. Anyway, I’m out in front of a car shop in my neighborhood, and with the health of cars in mind, I thought I’d ask some people around here, percentage-wise, just how much of a junked car gets recycled?
“I would say maybe, like, 5% of the car.”
“I’ll say, 20% – 30% probably, of a car.”
“I guess the recycled one could be 30% of the car.”
“I guess, like, 50%.”
“About 70%.”
++
In my little unscientific survey here, it turns out that most people are giving a pretty low estimate of how much of a junked car ends up being recycled.
The auto industry and the federal environmental protection agency say about 80% of the junked car gets recycled. The rest heads to landfills. That sounds pretty good, but that means we bury about five million tons of junked car pieces each year.
To understand why they can’t recycle even more of the car, I’m going to talk with Jim Watson.
He runs ABC Auto Wreckers in a suburb just south of Chicago.
“We don’t want to landfill anything. The objective is to take the vehicle, process it and have all the parts be used.”
Watson shows me his shop where he pulls parts for the used market. A dozen workers lift hoods, twist tires, and pull out stuff I don’t even recognize. It’s like an assembly line in reverse.
“They do an analysis and inventory each of the parts of the car that have a probability of sale and then they harvest or pull those parts off the car.”
Watson and some of the bigger auto wreckers have parts-scrapping down to a science, but it’s expensive to keep pulling parts and keep space open for scrap yards.
Eventually, Watson’s pulls off everything usefull and he’ll send it to a car shredder.
“A machine that beats it apart and shreds the car into small fist-sized or hand-sized components.”
Recyclers can pull out big shreds of steel and aluminum, but about 20% of the car is left-over. This shredder residue gets tossed into landfills. But scientists are thinking about how to recycle this shredded mess.
One works at a lab at Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
“This is what shredder residue looks like.”
Dr. Bassam Jody reaches into a cardboard box and scoops a jumble of car seat foam, metal cable, wood, and shards of plastic.
Jody says shredder residue is a recycler’s nightmare.
“Maybe there are more than twenty different kinds of plastics. I tell you, plastics are generally incompatible, they don’t like each other and they don’t work together very well.”
Jody is developing machines to safely clean and separate all this stuff. It’s tough science.
Jody: “The more things you have in the mixture, the harder it is to separate. The trick is, you have to do it economically, and to produce materials that can be used in value-added products.”
Allee: “What can you make out of them?”
Jody: “Car parts. For example, this is a seating column cover.”
Jody says he gets a kick out of his work. He might just squeeze a bit more good out of our 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.
The study found that differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height.
(Photo source: Brendel at Wikimedia Commons)
There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:
Transcript
There are some ugly terms used
to describe big, grandiose homes.
Critics call them “Garage Mahals,”
“starter castles,” or “McMansions.”
These insults are flung around
in towns where people worry big
houses are sapping the character
out of neighborhoods full of smaller,
older homes. Shawn Allee
met a researcher who hopes to tamp
down the heated rhetoric:
Jack Nasar studies city planning at Ohio State University.
He got interested in the term “McMansion” because it was used in his own neighorhood in Columbus.
“A realestate agent was befriending older people so that when they died she’d be able to get their properties, tear down the house, and then build a much larger house. I started to wonder whether this was happening elsewhere.”
Nasar says teardowns, and the insults used to describe them, are common in many towns. And some local governments are restricting how big these homes get or even what they look like.
Nasar says, with governments stepping in to the debate, there’s more at stake than just name-calling.
“You’re talking about controlling what goes on on somebody’s private property. So, you would want to have good evidence to use as a basis for that decision.”
Nasar recently studied just what it takes for a house to get big enough or different enough for people to say, “yuck” or hurl an insult like “McMansion.” Nasar and a research partner created computer models of streets with rows of houses.
For each test, they made most houses normal, but changed up something about one of them – stuff like the architectural style, the height, or maybe distance between the house and the street. Then, they showed these models to people.
“We had them rate these streets in terms of compatibility, we had them rate them in terms of visual quality or preference.”
Differences in architectural style stuck out most, but after that, height.
“The effect started to be most noticeable when the in-fill house was twice as large as the stuff around it. So, in terms of regulations, it suggests maybe a community could get by saying, ‘you could do a tear-down replacement that’s twice as big as what’s around it,’ but you wouldn’t let it get any larger than that.”
This is a controversial finding.
Some communities keep height range much lower than “twice as big” figure and sometimes they restrict width, too – something Nasar found doesn’t matter so much.
I thought I’d bounce some of his findings off someone involved in the teardown issue.
“This also was a demolition of a small home.”
Catherine Czerniak drives me around Lake Forest, a Chicago suburb. She’s the community development director, and she gets the praise or blame about how teardowns get done.
Czerniak says Nasar’s findings make sense, especially the idea that style matters most.
“We often say height and size aren’t necessarily the key roles -it’s how the design is done.”
But for Czerniak, there’s a hot-button issue Nasar did not measure.
Lake Forest has lots of tree-lined streets and people like how the trees obscure the houses.
“And really, the landscaping really defines the character of the community. Even the estates on the east side, were not there to shout from the street, here I am, look at me.”
To make the point she drives past a mix of old homes and replacements.
I can hardly tell which is which.
“As we go down the street, take note that even though there are some big homes back here, you still feel you’re in a country lane.”
Czerniak says Nasar’s research might quiet down some debates but people will always fight over specific details. After all, Nasar’s test subjects gave quick judgements on computer models.
She says, in the real world, critics spend years nit-picking every little thing they hate about a teardown replacement home and whether it’s going to ruin their neighborhood.
Brian Hickey runs Teardowns.com, a real-estate marketplace
for teardown properties. Some communities complain that
the teardown market encourages the growth of so-called
'McMansion' replacement homes that are seen as too large
and out-of-place for their neighborhoods. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:
Transcript
Your home may be your castle,
but, for some people, too many
homes are as big and grand as
castles. Critics call these homes
‘McMansions,’ and they complain
they’ve ruined neighborhoods
filled with older, smaller houses.
The McMansion fad fizzled during
the real-estate bust. Shawn Allee looks at whether it could
return:
I head to a Chicago suburb called Hinsdale to understand the hub-ub about McMansions. Over the past twenty years, one in three Hinsdale homes got torn down to make room for mostly bigger ones.
Brian Hickey drives me past one-story brick and wood houses.
Then there’s a huge one, with stucco and Spanish tile.
Hickey: “This is an example of something where someone would go, this is more Florida-like.”
Allee: “It looks like it walked off the set of Miami Vice or something like that.”
Hickey: “Yeah.”
Bigger, mis-matched homes sprouted up in Hinsdale during the real-estate boom, and for some, Brian Hickey’s partly to blame.
He runs tear-downs dot com. Hickey finds and sells homes to tear down, and maybe replace with McMansions … or ‘replacement homes’ as he calls them.
Anyway, during the housing bubble, teardowns increased … and so did complaints.
Allee: “Some of the arguments I’ve heard against the teardown phenomenon is that we’re basically tossing perfectly good houses into landfills.”
Hickey: “See, that’s not accurate. To take some of these homes and bring it up to what people in this community would expect in terms of housing amenities, it doesn’t make sense to renovate when you can build new for less.”
The big-home trend faded recently, but if the soft real-estate market improves, you gotta wonder: will people build big again, or will they keep smaller, older homes?
Hickey thinks old homes might lose.
Hickey: “At some point a buyer simply won’t pay that price to live there.”
Allee: “In that one story …”
Hickey: “In that one story, two-bedroom, small kitchen – that the land will be where the value is.”
Some real-estate pros say Hickey’s right: people want big, and they’ll build what they want, where they want.
Others say, the game has changed.
Local governments in Dallas, Denver, and other cities are starting to regulate teardowns, like Hinsdale did.
(sound of a printer)
Robert McGinnis prints me 60 pages of Hinsdale’s zoning codes.
“Hot off the press, it’s still warm.”
McGinnis runs Hinsdale’s building commission. He says the code got up to sixty pages partly because of teardown complaints.
McGinnis: “Pollution issues, the loss of sunlight in some cases.”
Allee: “Loss of sunlight? What do you mean by that?”
McGinnis: “Some of these houses are so tall they end up physically blocking out some of the sunlight.”
McGinnis says it’s hard to stop teardowns – you can just delay or improve them.
“I would like to think, at some point, Joe Q. Public says, ‘I’d really like to live in Hinsdale, but I can’t afford to heat and cool a McMansion,’ so they’re going to look at building a smaller home.”
But McGinnis says this could be wishful thinking.
So, I thought I’d ask some Hinsdale homeowners about the small-home idea.
Just outside McGinnis’ office, I find Greta Filmanaviciute. She’s stuffing official demolition signs into her car.
Filmanaviciute: “I was getting permits. We’re going to tear down old house and building the new house.”
Allee: “Are you guys looking at a house that’s bigger than what you have now?”
Filmanaviciute: “No, actually, we are sizing down, but that’s because we’re a three-person family and I don’t want to have a huge house and then we have high utility bills. This is perfection for us, actually.”
Filmanaviciute says preservationists might not like that she’s tearing down her place, but her neighbors are glad she’s keeping things modest.
She says she’d be proud to start a small-home trend.
Mark Murray, with the nonprofit Californians Against Waste, says that in the space of one month, October 2008, the price for mixed paper on the global market plunged from $100 a ton to less than $30. (Photo by Erin Kelly)
If you want to get a sense of how the overall economy is doing, look outside your window the night before garbage and recycling day. Last fall, you’d have seen trucks full of cardboard circling the neighborhood. By winter, the cardboard poachers had disappeared. That’s because wastepaper – like other recyclables – feeds into a multi-billion dollar global commodities market that rises and falls just like housing prices and stocks. Amy Standen has more:
Transcript
If you want to get a sense of how the overall economy is doing, look outside your window the night before garbage and recycling day. Last fall, you’d have seen trucks full of cardboard circling the neighborhood. By winter, the cardboard poachers had disappeared. That’s because wastepaper – like other recyclables – feeds into a multi-billion dollar global commodities market that rises and falls just like housing prices and stocks. Amy Standen has more:
Last winter, Carolyn Almquist had a problem. Carolyn’s in charge of exports for APL transportation in Oakland, California. It’s her job to move shipping containers full of American exports, like wastepaper, to factories over in Asia. The problem was, the factories in Asia didn’t want them.
“There was no buyer. It would arrive at our terminal, say, in Jakarta, and no one would pick it up.”
Asian paper mills were canceling deals with the ships halfway across the Pacific. And Carolyn – who’s in charge of APL’s exports – was the first to hear about it.
“I’m getting an email saying, ‘what are you people doing? Don’t send stuff without a buyer.’”
Waste paper is the country’s number one export, by volume, so when prices fall, it’s not just Carolyn who’s in trouble.
“Hey, Alex, good morning! Steve Moore calling.”
Steve runs a company called Pacific Rim Recycling, 40 miles north of San Francisco.
“Got any updates for me on the marketplace?”
Every day, he calls around to see how much people are paying for things like newspaper, water bottles, old envelopes.
“What about corrugated?”
Most of our recycled cardboard, and a lot of our plastic ends up at Asian factories where it’s turned into iPhone boxes, polyester shirts, that are then shipped right back to the US market.
Until, that is, we stop shopping.
“When people stop buying those goods and products – the VCRS and the TVs from China – there’s no need for the boxes to go around them.”
That’s Mark Murray, with the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. He says that in the space of one month, October 2008, the price for mixed paper on the global market plunged from $100 a ton to less than $30. In two months, plastic water bottles dropped from $500 a ton, to less than $100.
“What recycling experienced in the last six months is really the same thing the entire global economy has been experiencing.”
So, when the economy falters, recyclers suffer. Some shut down entirely. Others were forced to simply dump unsellable paper into local landfills.
Steve Moore hunkered down to wait it out.
“We couldn’t sell anything for six weeks. All this material was backing up, I had to rent space next door. I had to sell it at $10 a ton, just to get rid of it.”
By February, prices had started to recover, as demand for consumer goods began picking up a bit – but they’re no where near the highs of a year ago.
“And a ton of paper today is worth $100 a ton. Last year, it was worth $200 a ton. It’s a very volatile market, so the economics of that are pretty severe.”
One reason the market’s so volatile is that with recyclables, the supply never stops. No matter how much or how little those Asian factories want our cardboard and our plastic water bottles, we are going to keep putting them out on the sidewalk.
Oil manufacturers can turn down the spigot when demand drops, to control supply so it keeps pace with demand. But bales of paper and plastic just take up too much space. And here at Pacific Rim recycling, the trucks keep rolling in.
(sound of bottles and cans at Pacific Rim)
“The volume of this material is huge!”
But at least it’s moving. Prices for our recyclables might be lower than their peak a year ago, but Steve Moore can relax again.
And, over at the Port of Oakland, Carolyn’s no longer getting angry emails.
“Things are picking up again. Financing has freed up. The banks are a little less nervous, If we had a ship here today, she’s be sailing Oakland full. Life is a little bit easier.”
And Carolyn Almquist knows as well as anyone in this industry to enjoy it while it lasts.
Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling
vortex of trash that has
accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Transcript
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?
Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.
Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?
Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.
Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?
Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.
Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Transcript
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Automakers used to use mercury switches for lights and anti-lock brakes. But when old cars are scrapped and melted down, those parts turn into toxic air pollution.
So automakers and environmental groups created a program to recycle the mercury.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program.
Rich Bell is president of the program, and he also works at Ford.
“None of our members are interested in paying for GM’s environmental legacy issues, and so we’re looking for a path forward, and we’re kind of in the midst of that now.”
In a statement, the new GM said those cars with mercury switches were made by the old GM.
The new GM that emerged from bankruptcy is not responsible for those old switches.
The airport in Portland has installed water collection drains for passengers to dump liquids before getting on their flights. (Photo courtesy of the Port of Portland)
Three years ago, the Department
of Homeland Security passed new
regulations. If you’re a regular
flyer, you know them well: no more
bringing your drinks on the airplane.
It turns out that this ruling isn’t
just inconvenient for us – it’s also
inconvenient for the environment.
Deena Prichep reports
on the beverage restrictions, and
what one airport is doing about it:
Transcript
Three years ago, the Department
of Homeland Security passed new
regulations. If you’re a regular
flyer, you know them well: no more
bringing your drinks on the airplane.
It turns out that this ruling isn’t
just inconvenient for us – it’s also
inconvenient for the environment.
Deena Prichep reports
on the beverage restrictions, and
what one airport is doing about it:
(sound of an airport)
Modern air travel can be a hassle. We take off our shoes, take off our belts, and get rid of our drinks. Announcements like this one are so common that you barely notice them:
“Morning, folks. Make sure you drink up those beverages prior to going through. That includes bottled water, sodas, juice, coffee.”
Okay, you might notice him. That’s Roger Nelson. He’s a TSA guy at the Portland International Airport.
For most of us, following Nelson’s instructions isn’t really a big deal. But while the impact on the passenger is small, the impact on the environment can be bigger than you’d think.
After the ban on carry-on beverages was put in place, many airports saw a big rise in their checkpoint waste. At Seattle’s Sea-Tac Airport, the weight of their trash went up 25%. In the Houston Airport system, checkpoint waste collection went up 70%. Even at an airport the size of Portland’s, they estimate up to a ton of liquid per day was ending up in the waste stream.
Stan Jones is the environmental compliance manager at the Port of Portland. He watches airport trash and recycling to see how good a job they’re doing:
“If we look in the recycling at the checkpoints, people have recycled bottles, but they’re full of beverages. And one thing we don’t want in our recycling is liquids, because the recycling centers don’t want a bunch of wet papers, which wrecks the quality of the recycling. At the same time, we’re seeing if we look in the garbage at the checkpoints, same thing, we got bottles half-full of water, bottles full of water.”
Jones oversees many programs that cut waste at the airport. So he looked into tackling this problem as well. And he found that this wasn’t just an environmental problem – it was costing the airport money. Up to $100 a day in extra dump fees. The tossed-out drinks were also costing money on the staffing side. Janitors struggled to get a handle on overflowing watery trashcans.
Jenny Taylor coordinates the facilities staff.
“One of the things we did was increase the frequency in which the cans were dumped, from every two hours to half an hour. So that was almost a full-time position. That ended up being roughly $100 buck a day, or between $30 and $40,000 a year.”
So with up to $100 a day for extra dumping, and $100 a day for extra staffing, the waste was costing the Airport about $75,000 a year.
So the Port launched a program last fall to tackle the problem. They set up stainless steel collection bins right outside the security checkpoints. Twice a day they’re wheeled off, measured, and drained into modified mop sinks, by janitors like Jason Weixel.
(sound of water draining)
“And, almost 25, I’d say 24 gallons today.”
The liquids flow into the sewer system, instead of being hauled to a landfill, and the empty bottles can then be recycled.
But changing people’s recycling habits can be difficult, especially when they’re running for a flight. Many travelers still toss full bottles into the trash without even noticing the new drains.
But at the Portland International Airport, people like Roger Nelson are there to remind them.
“We do have pouring stations. Yes, the big PS, either left or right, just pour it into there. Once you do pour it, empty out, take the empty bottle with you, fill it up on the other side. Our water is cold, filtered and free. Did I get you on the free part, right?”
So far this little solution is working. The dump stations are diverting several thousand pounds of liquid from the trash every month. And the Port of Portland is working with other airports looking to set up similar systems.
Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)
The Michigan Waste Energy facility shreds and burns hundreds of tons of trash each day. The plant makes enough electricity to power about half the homes in Detroit. (Photo by Sarah Hulett)
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
Transcript
Back in the 1980s and 90s,
dozens of communities across
the US built incinerators to
get rid of their trash. Many
of them financed the massive
furnaces with bonds they’re just
now paying off. And now that
those debts are off their books,
some cities are re-thinking whether
burning trash makes environmental
and economic sense. Sarah Hulett reports:
About 300 garbage trucks dump their loads each day at the nation’s biggest
municipal incinerator.
“You see the conveyor house going across, that’s conveying the fuel to the
boilers.”
That’s Brad Laesser. He’s the chief engineer at the Michigan Waste Energy
facility in Detroit.
The “fuel” he’s talking about is shredded-up trash.
And he says that’s the beauty of facilities like this. They produce electricity.
“So right now we’re putting out about 50 megawatts. But we can go to
here.”
Laesser points to 70 on the output gauge. That’s enough electricity to power
about half the homes in Detroit. And the leftover steam is used to heat and
cool more than 200 buildings downtown.
Sounds great, right?
Well, Brad Van Guilder of the Ecology Center says not so much.
“Be wary of people coming and talking to you about large, expensive magic
machines that are going to dispose of your waste for you.”
Van Guilder says municipal waste incinerators are major contributors to
smog, and spew dangerous pollutants like dioxin, lead and mercury.
And he says huge furnaces like Detroit’s make it nearly impossible to get
viable recycling efforts off the ground.
“Think about what’s in the trash that you throw out every day. One of the
most important components is paper and plastic.”
Both can be recycled. But Detroit has not had a curbside recycling program
for the past 20 years. That’s because the contract with the incinerator
required that all trash picked up at the curb be used to keep the furnaces
burning.
That changed this summer, though – when the contract expired. Now about
30,000 households are part of a curbside recycling pilot project. And there
are drop-off sites where people can take their recyclables.
(sound of recycling center)
Matthew Naimi heads an organization that runs several drop-off sites, and –
maybe surprisingly – he’s okay with the incinerator. Naimi says he sees
trash disposal and recycling as two separate industries.
“I realized that if we shut the incinerator down before we got a good
established recycling program running, we’d be burying our recyclables
instead of burning them.”
And officials with Covanta – which runs the Detroit incinerator – agree that
recycling and incineration can work together.
Paul Gilman is the chief sustainability officer for Covanta. He says landfills
are the problem – not recycling.
“Landfills and energy-from-waste facilities, that’s where the competition is.
It isn’t at the upper step of recycling.”
He says cheap landfill space makes the economics of incineration difficult.
But he’s hoping that could change with the passage of a climate change bill
in Washington. Gilman says in Europe and Asia, trash incinerators like
Detroit’s don’t get treated the same way as power plants fueled with coal or
natural gas.
“So in Asia, under the Kyoto protocols, a facility like this actually generates
what are called greenhouse gas credits. They’re reducing greenhouse gasses
by the act of processing solid waste and keeping it from going to a landfill.”
Where trash produces methane – a potent greenhouse gas.
But the people who want the incinerator shut down say they don’t believe
burning trash is the greener way to go. They want the city to landfill its
waste while it builds an aggressive recycling program.
So far, they’re not getting what they want from city leaders.
The board that oversees how Detroit handles its trash recently voted to go
with incineration for at least the next year.
(Photo source: Daniel Candido at Wikimedia Commons)
