Recycling on the Farm

  • Steve Mohoney (left), of the Clinton County Soil & Water Conservation District, gives dairy farmer Dale Tetreault his first look at "Bigfoot". (Photo by David Sommerstein)

Over the last 30 years, plastics
have become indispensable on America’s
farms. They save farmers time and money.
The problem is agricultural plastics are
filling up landfills. In some places,
farmers actually burn the plastic. That
releases dangerous chemicals into the air.
David Sommerstein reports
on a new effort to bale plastics and recycle
them:

Transcript

Over the last 30 years, plastics
have become indispensable on America’s
farms. They save farmers time and money.
The problem is agricultural plastics are
filling up landfills. In some places,
farmers actually burn the plastic. That
releases dangerous chemicals into the air.
David Sommerstein reports
on a new effort to bale plastics and recycle
them:

Farmers must have been paying attention when Dustin Hoffman got that
famous piece of advice in ‘The Graduate’.

“I just want to say one word to you, just one word.”

“Yes, sir?”

“ Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Plastics.”

Plastics are all over the farm today. Plastic greenhouse covers. White sheets
to wrap hay bales. Black plastic feed troughs.

(sound of moving troughs)

Dale Tetreault shakes a tall pile of the feed troughs on his dairy farm in
northern New York State.

“They’re a hard plastic and they hold molasses and minerals.”

Tetreault says the plastics are handy – essential, really – to keep feed fresh
for his 500 cows. But the material’s hard to re-use because it gets dirty and
tears easily.

So Tetreault’s left with a decision – spend a thousand dollars a year to truck
them to the landfill. Or burn them, polluting the air and water.

“Yeah, exactly, I mean, we’re not talking about some light piece of plastic
here. We’re talking about heavy duty plastic.”

A new machine is giving Tetrault a third alternative. It goes by the name of
Bigfoot.

(sound of motor starting up)

Bigfoot is a portable hydraulic press. It crushes used plastic and ties it up
in bales.

“Quite an interesting contraption, that’s for sure.”

Tetreault’s been saving up used farm plastics for a couple months for this
test run.

“Alright, we ready to try this?”

That’s Steve Mahoney, a farm educator with the local soil and water
conservation district. He bought Bigfoot with a $35,000 state grant.

(sound of engine running)

Mahoney and some farmhands stuff dirty plastic sheets into the baler, then
Bigfoot crushes it down. That makes room for more.

(crushing sound)

“Okay, so go on back up.”

Mahoney teaches the farmhands how to run Bigfoot. With the help of the
local farm extension office, he’s baled plastics at nine farms so far. He
wants all of the area’s farmers to share Bigfoot, to keep plastics out of the
landfill or burn pile.

“It’s an obvious problem on the farms. It’s necessary, but the disposal of it
is a problem.”

The big plan is to recycle the plastic. Mahoney’s coordinating with a
recycling firm in Minnesota to pick up 40,000 pounds of plastic bales. They
could be made into plastic lumber or shingles or road filler.

The thing is, there isn’t much of a market for low-grade, dirty plastic right
now. Lois Levitan directs New York’s Ag Plastics Recycling Project at
Cornell University. She says as fuel costs rise and more farmers bale their
plastic, that might change.

“Markets want to know that there’s a certain quantity of product at a
certain level of quantity and they’re going to become increasingly interested
when they know there’s a steady stream.”

(sound of Bigfoot machine popping out a bale)

“Ok, that’s it, that’s the finished product.”

Steve Mahoney presses a button and out pops a thousand pound bale of
plastic. Farmhand Lennie Merculdi brushes his hands.

“Put it this way, trying to put it in a dumpster, to the barn, and never having
enough room for the garbage, that’s not good either. What’s a few minutes?
You get rid of the plastic, it’s convenient, you tie it up and away it goes.”

For The Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

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Color Changing Bacteria Detector

  • A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

Researchers are working on a tool
that could tell you if your food is safe
to eat before you break open the bag.
Rebecca Williams has more:

A team at Tufts University is working on sensors that could change color to
tell you if a bag of lettuce has dangerous bacteria in it.

The special ingredient is silk. They boiled silkworm cocoons. And made a
thin silk film out of the proteins. The silk film has color changing properties
– like a butterfly’s wing.

Fio Omenetto is the lead researcher. He says it could be possible to activate
the film so it detects the presence of E. coli. Then the film could be put in a
bag of spinach.

“So immediately by looking at color change you will be able to tell whether
the spinach is good to eat or not.”

Omenetto says this is still pretty futuristic at this point. He says it’ll
probably be at least five years before you might see this at the grocery store.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Peace Out, Plastic Bags

  • Whole foods Store Manager Sherry Wiseman, says her Cleveland store hasn’t had plastic bags since February and her customers have hardly noticed. (Photo by Lisa Ann Pinkerton)

It’s one of the eternal questions, ‘paper or
plastic?’ They’re both recyclable, but only paper
bags come from a renewable resource. And since only
1% of all the plastic bags on earth are actually
recycled, Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports some cities and
even one national company are wondering why we need
plastic bags at all:

Transcript

It’s one of the eternal questions, ‘paper or
plastic?’ They’re both recyclable, but only paper
bags come from a renewable resource. And since only
1% of all the plastic bags on earth are actually
recycled, Lisa Ann Pinkerton reports some cities and
even one national company are wondering why we need
plastic bags at all:

(garbage truck sounds)

Americans send around 100 billion plastic bags to landfills every
year, where they’re supposed to be compacted by bulldozers.

(sound of plastic bag in the wind)

That is, unless they catch the wind and transform into mini
parachutes.

Carmine Camillo is a spokesman for the national company Waste Management.

“The tree lines and fence lines can be littered with bags, until we get
a chance to get out there and clean them up.”

This happens so much around the world, it’s picked up the nickname ‘tree condoms’. Besides that,
they clog storm drains, and
eventually end up in waterways and oceans, where fish
mistake them for jellyfish.

The solution, it would seem, is to recycle them.

But shopper Mary Jo Wickliffe says that’s too much of a hassle.

“You unload your groceries and you go home and throw them away. That’s what I do with them.”

Since Wickliffe shops at the organic market Whole Foods she
says she’s been doing less of that. Because the
chain recently bagged the plastic.

Cleveland Store Manager Chery Wiseman says to stop offering plastic bags is a decision that goes against busines school 101.

“It costs us more money to buy our paper recyclable bags, but we
feel that’s worth it to keep the plastics out.”

Whole Foods’ paper bags are made from 100% recycled content and
shopper Bruce Kane says it’s about time plastic went out of
style.

“I notice that China has fines for stores that use plastics. I think it’s a
positive trend and I’m glad to see it coming to Whole Foods and coming to the
United States.”

The trendsetter in this country is San Francisco. It’s the only city to successfully ban plastic bags.

New York City, Annapolis, Maryland, New Haven,
Connecticut, Santa Monica, and Portland, are looking to shun plastic too. But the bruising the city of Oakland took might make them think twice.

A plastics industry group, called the Coalition to Support Plastic
Bag Recycling sued Oakland over its ban and won. It
claimed the city didn’t do its homework on alternatives such as compost-
able plastic bags or a recycling program.

Sharon Kanise is a spokeswoman for the plastics industry at the
American Chemistry Council.

“We certainly hope that the city of Oakland will work with the state of
California on recycling, because it
doesn’t belong in the roadways, it belongs in the recycling bin.”

Plastic bags are made from petroleum and natural gas, but
Kanise says their manufacture and transport uses 70% less
energy and produces half the carbon dioxide that making paper
bags does.

But for some, choosing between paper and plastic isn’t enough. A few people are starting to shop with reusable cloth bags. Some
stores sell them for about a dollar and Wal-Mart recently gave
away 1 million free to its customers.

But the concept of bringing
their own bags to the store is still foreign to some Wal-Mart
shoppers.

Customer 1: “It really doesn’t matter to me, but I’m going to need a
bigger bag than this.”

Customer 2: “It’s easier just to throw these out and come back to
the store with nothing in our hands.“

Customer 3: “Well, it’s just becoming popular, so I’ll start to.”

Whether it’s paper, plastic, or cloth, each can be environmentally-friendly, if
consumers go to the extra effort. But if people keep throwing them away, local governments might attempt to
reduce plastic bag use. A move the plastics industry will certainly
contest.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.

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Designing Bird-Friendly Buildings

  • In Chicago, many migrating birds are attracted by the lights on tall buildings. This attraction causes some birds to crash into the buildings, often resulting in death. (Photo by Lester Graham)

Scientists estimate up to a billion birds are killed every year when they collide into building windows in the United States. Now, a group of bird watchers, biologists and architects are working together… hoping to lower the death toll. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lynette Kalsnes has the story:

Transcript

Scientists estimate up to a billion birds are killed when they collide into building windows in the United States every year. Now a group of bird watchers, biologists and architects are working together, hoping to lower the death toll. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium Lynette Kalsnes has the story:


If you call the group the Chicago Bird Collision Monitors, you’ll hear this message:


“If you have found an injured bird, please place the
bird gently in the bottom of a brown paper sack. A
grocery bag is just fine. Please put the bag with the bird in it in a quiet, dark place that’s warm. Inside, please.”


That’s the voice of the group’s founder and director Robbie Hunsinger. She’s followed those same instructions herself hundreds of times.


During migration season, in a single night, thousands
of birds fly over Chicago. They are attracted to the
lights on tall buildings and crash into the windows.
Hunsinger and other volunteers get up before dawn so
they can rescue the injured birds before the rats and
gulls get them.


After a morning of picking up injured birds, Hunsinger
has filled her car with brown paper bags containing
hurt swallows and cuckoos. Then, she’s driven up to 3
hours round-trip to get the birds to wildlife
rehabilitators.


She’s even cared for some of those birds herself.
Hunsinger has filled her music studio with mesh cages
and used up all her dishes for food and water. She says she decided to do something to help the birds three years ago after she saw 80 dead birds one morning in just a small area downtown.


“It was horrendous. Everywhere we looked, there were
birds, and they kept coming down. They were still
hitting when we were out there. So you’re standing
there, and birds were falling out of the sky.”


Hunsinger says she found the fallen birds clustered on
the sidewalks just as the busy city began to wake.


“It was rather surrealistic. Especially as the sun
started came up, and people started coming to work.
People were stepping over birds everywhere. People in
suits, people in high heels, coming in from the train
stations, going to their jobs in the Loop.”


Hunsinger says something changed in her that day. She
says she could no longer be an armchair
conservationist.
So, she formed a group of volunteers to help her save
the birds.


But rescuing injured birds didn’t seem to be enough.
Now she’s working with biologists, architects and bird-watchers to make buildings safer for birds.


Chicago already asks the managers of its tall
buildings to turn out the lights at night during
migration to avoid attracting the birds. But it’s
become clear that something more has to be done to
prevent so many birds from crashing into the building
windows.


This spring, the city and the Chicago Ornithological
Society will host what’s believed to be the first
conference on bird-friendly design. Those who’ve studied it say the problem is that birds
don’t recognize glass.


“The glass surface will act as a perfect mirror.”


That’s biology professor Daniel Klem Jr. of Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. He estimates that collisions with windows kill a billion birds a year in the U.S.


“A bird is not capable of determining that that image
on the glass surface is not a real tree. It attempts
to fly to it. Or it attempts to fly to light seen in
the window, as if it was a passageway to safety. And
the bird gets whacked and dies.”


Klem says installing windows at an angle or using
patterned glass can help. So can shades or
decals. Klem’s also pushing for research to develop special
glass or coatings that would be invisible to humans
but visible to birds.


It’s a new field. Limiting bird crashes isn’t part of
building design. Ellen Grimes is an assistant architecture professor at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. Grimes says
architects think about light, heat, power, water and
human traffic, but not bird traffic.


“When architects have approached sustainable design,
it’s been an engineering question. But there has not been a lot of consideration of
the biological interactions.”


Grimes acknowledges the issue of protecting birds
might be a hard sell because it might mean
compromising other design elements. But she’s hoping bird friendly design becomes as much
a part of green buildings as energy efficiency.


The rescue group’s Robbie Hunsinger says we share the
migrating birds with other nations. We have an
obligation to be good stewards of the birds.


“This can be fixed. These our our buildings. And we
should do it. We, by God, should do it.”


Meanwhile. Hunsinger is among a group of bird
watchers pushing for a center in downtown Chicago to
care for injured birds that collide with the building
windows. She’d like to keep the cages out of her home music
studio so she can actually practice music.


For the GLRC, I’m Lynette Kalsnes.

Related Links

Rats Scurrying to the Suburbs

  • Life in the suburbs is idyllic to some people... (Photo by Bon Searle)

Unusually heavy rains this summer are partly to blame
for rats pouring out of the sewers in droves all over the country, and the nasty vermin are relocating to some of the most pristine
neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce
Kryszak explains what caused the rat invasion and
what’s being done to evict them:

Transcript

Unusually heavy rains this summer are partly to blame for rats pouring out of the sewers
in droves all over the country. And the nasty vermin are relocating to some of the most
pristine neighborhoods. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak explains what
caused the rat invasion and what’s being done to evict them:


Piercing blue autumn skies and billowing white clouds drift across the chimneys of this modest,
but perfectly manicured suburb. There aren’t even many leaves crunching under foot. Town workers
have already come and vacuumed them all away. But there’s a nasty little secret scurrying under
the porches and behind the garden sheds in this Western New York town. County Sanitation Chief
Peter Tripi takes us for a peek.


“Can you see the teeth marks here? That’s actually rat gnaw marks. And there’s the garbage bag.
And that’s what we found when we went to this property.”


Now, you might be thinking that we trudged through derelict grass and scattered debris to find
these rat clues. Nope. This is a gorgeous, manicured yard – with not a blade of grass out of
place. But Tripi says rats aren’t choosy.


“You would never think by looking side to side that there would be a rat problem in this yard.
Doesn’t matter what neighborhood you live in, or how much money you’ve got. There’s no difference.
They just like your food.”


And you’d be surprised where rats can find food. A garbage can left even briefly uncovered, a
neglected bird feeder, uhhh… dog feces… and even a compost pile.


“Absolutely. This is a rat condo. It’s a grass-clipping compost pile that basically housed rats
to go a hundred yard radius all the way around to the different houses.”


Tripi says rats had to get creative with their housing. A summer of extremely heavy rains drove
the out of the sewers and into some previously rat-free neighborhoods. And with the West Nile
virus killing off millions of birds, the rats have less competition for the food they’re finding
above ground. The consequence is a virtual rat infestation all the way from New York and Illinois
to Virginia, Michigan and L.A. In Kenmore, there have been four thousand rat complaints – nearly
double last year.


(Sound of garbage truck)


Of course, none of this is news to the garbage collectors. They see the problem up close and
personal. Twenty-year veteran Louie Tadaro says this past summer is the worst he’s ever seen.


“Across the street there’s an alleyway and there had to be like ten of them in there, And we
started chasing them with garbage cans trying to kill them, but we couldn’t. By the time we
got there they just split.”


The problem is, they don’t split for long. Vector Control Chief Tripi says now that the rats
have relocated from the sewers to upscale accommodations, they kind of like it.


“And what that means is that they want to live with us. They want to be near our garbage and
our bird feeders. The problem with that is that rats carry diseases.”


We all know about stuff like typhus and the bubonic plague. But there are emerging diseases,
such as a pet-killer called Leptospiroris. It’s killing dogs all across the country. Tripi
says they need to get rid of the rats before the disease starts spreading to humans. So, his
team is taking the rats on, one yard at a time.


Tripi and his Vector control team set rat traps, they fill bait boxes with poison, and – when
they have to – they issue citations to residents who don’t heed the town’s new “rat control rules.” Covered garbage cans only. Clear away all brush. Clean up scattered bird seed and dog feces. Slowly, the rules seem to be working.


(sound of Tripi looking into rat trap)


Still Tripi says it’s mostly educational warfare. And he says now – heading into winter – is the
best time to nip the problem. If the rats get cozy, not only will they stay, they will multiply.
Fully nourished, one adult rat can breed up to sixty baby rats a year.


“The adult rat can live on a little bit of food, but he can’t procreate unless he has a lot of
food source. And they can’t live through the winter unless they’re warm and fattened up.”


So now is the time to – quite literally – put a lid on it. Keep those garbage cans covered, unless
you want some uninvited furry guests this winter, and many, many more come spring.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Joyce Kryszak.

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To Bag or Not to Bag Grass Clippings

  • Reporter David Hammond's yard. He has the vague notion that not bagging grass clippings is more environmentally friendly. (Photo by David Hammond)

At one point or another, most of us have had to do yard work. If it was one of your chores as a kid, you probably developed a strong aversion to it, but as some of us get older, get married, and move to the suburbs, something interesting happens. Taking care of the yard becomes important, but is there an environmental impact? As part of an ongoing series, called “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Hammond takes a closer look at his own back yard:

Transcript

At one point or another, most of us have had to do yard work. If it was one of your chores as a kid,
you probably developed a strong aversion to it. But as we get older, get married, and move to the
suburbs, something interesting happens. Taking care of the yard becomes important. But is there
an environmental impact? As part of an ongoing series, called “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Hammond examines his own backyard.


To bag or not to bag? That is the question. Well, at least that’s my question… on most Saturdays
say about 10am.


(lawnmower sound up far away distance)


That’s when the men of my neighborhood head outside for their weekly call to arms. It’s yard day.
And once the first mower starts, like fruit flies to a banana, everyone heads outside to do their
mowing, edging, and weeding. It’s a procession that lasts all weekend.


(lawnmower sound up close distance, up and under)


This is a new neighborhood… only a couple of years old. Everybody has put in new landscaping,
and everybody spends a lot of time taking care of their lawns. Brian Van Netta is one of my
neighbors.


“It’s the showpiece of the house. It’s the first thing that people see when they drive by and it sets the tone for the rest of the house.”


Around here, that means bagging your lawn clippings. You know the routine. Mow a couple of
strips across the yard. Stop the mower. Take the grass bag and dump it into the compost bag.
Put the grass bag back on the mower. Mow a couple more strips then dump again. Then repeat
all afternoon.


I think it’s lunacy… a waste of the weekend. Something keeping me from solving really important
issues like: Does my beer taste great or is it less filling? I’ve also have a vague notion that not
bagging is better environmentally, but I can’t back it up with facts. So I decide to investigate.


(lawnmower sound out)


First stop – Wade Martingdale. He’s a neighbor who’s worked in the landscape business. Around
here, his word carries weight. Unfortunately for me, he recommends bagging.


“If you have a real full turf grass, you know, real thick and full, that when you cut your grass, the
grass clippings are so thick that actually strangles out your grass, its doesn’t let the water get to the
roots, the air, and then what water does get to the roots, it won’t dry so it can promote disease.”


He also says bagging makes a yard look better… usually as he’s looking at my yard.


“You can’t really tell from a distance, but you can tell up close. Just like your grass has a lot of
clumps in it…” (pause… laughter)


I was getting worried. If bagging was really the best environmental and the best neighborly thing to
do, I might actually have to start. No sense getting kicked out of poker night on account of some
grass clippings, but as I looked down my street at all the 30-gallon bags waiting to be picked up, I wondered where all that waste was going.


(sound of trucks picking up waste – up and under)


Canton Waste Recycling handles all of the recycling pickups in my town. Each week, they pick up
yard waste from nearly 20,000 homes, and then haul it to a regional processing center. There it’s
turned into compost and sold to landscapers and fertilizer companies. The only caveat is that the
yard waste collected from the neighborhoods can’t have any debris in it. If there are stumps or
rocks or concrete in the compost bags, then an entire truckload can be wasted. When that
happens, it gets sent to the landfill.


(begin fading truck sound)


So assuming that folks in my neighborhood are not sneaking any dead cats into their yard waste…
bagging seems like a decent bet environmentally. Sure, there is energy used to pick up and
process the yard waste, but the program employs a dozen local people. I had to give it thumbs up.


(truck sound out)


But now, my worry had turned to panic. I could see the rest of my summer out in front of me. No
more pool. No more picnics. No more Sea Breezes at high tea. No, what I saw was a sweat-stained, fat guy lugging 30-gallon compost bags to the curb. That was going to be my summer.
Hell, it was going to be the rest of my summers.


My last hope was The Huron River Watershed Council. They’re a local environmental group and
have developed a lawn care tip sheet. As I read through it, I started to feel the ol’ fun quotient
starting to rise. That’s because the tip sheet recommended not bagging your clippings. That is, if
you mulched them well when you cut them. Laura Rubin is the Executive Director.


“By leaving them there, they are sort of leaching those nutrients right back into the soil. So when
you mulch them, and you leave them, they just naturally put those nutrients back into the ground
and that’s what the soil needs.”


Rubin says that those added nutrients would allow me to save money because I wouldn’t have to
buy as much fertilizer. I also wouldn’t have to buy the composting bags. Rubin added that she’s
not against community compost programs. Just that leaving the clippings was a simpler
alternative.


“Community-wide composting programs are great and if you have a good one, you can’t go wrong.
It’s just changing the waste stream to a different area, but I don’t want to stress that there’s sort of
a ‘good way’ and a ‘bad way.’ If you send it to a composting program, you are still recycling and composting
that up rather than bagging it, and sending it to the landfill is the worst.”


So in the great bagging debate, it seems that both sides can claim the environmental high ground.
As long as I mulch my lawn clippings well, I can continue not bagging in good conscience. And for
the hardy souls who do bag? You’re good too. In fact, next Saturday, as I watch you schlepping
all those bags to the curb, I’ll tip a glass to you.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m David Hammond.

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