Hurricane Katrina may be able to do what years of squabbling, negotiations and trade panel rulings have failed to do…lift the duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber to the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk explains:
Transcript
Hurricane Katrina may be able to do what years of squabbling, negotiations, and trade panel rulings have failed to do: lift the duties on imports of Canadian softwood lumber to the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Dan Karpenchuk explains:
There are concerns in the U.S. that the huge job of rebuilding New Orleans in the wake of the hurricane could lead to spikes in the cost of construction materials.
The U.S. Treasury Department says it will monitor the situation, and if it’s in the best public interest, then it could drop the tariffs on Canadian lumber. Jamie Lim is with the Ontario Forest Industries Association. Lim says it would be the best move for all.
“Katrina was a natural disaster, but the illegal tariffs that have been put on lumber over the last twenty years is a man-made disaster, and it’s U.S. consumers who’ve been paying the price.”
Canada provides up to a third of the softwood lumber used in construction in the U.S., but for the past four years, Canadian producers have been paying more than twenty-five percent in tariffs and punitive duties.
That’s estimated to have increased the average cost of a house by about a thousand dollars.
One man's junk could be another man's organic groceries or building material. (Photo by Andrew Purtell)
A group of activists has found a way to live almost entirely off the stuff other people throw away. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Amy Coombs finds one person’s trash is another’s ethical lifestyle:
Transcript
A group of activists has found a way to live almost entirely off the stuff other people throw away. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Amy Coombs finds, one person’s trash is another’s ethical lifestyle:
(Sound of dumpster opening and rummaging)
“Cheesy bread, it’s kind of nice heated up… Some people love this crap.”
Jean C. has been dumpster diving for eight years and no longer considers it a chore.
“Dumpster diving can be a spiritual endeavor if you happen to believe it’s a sin to throw away food.”
C. is an activist. She’s also an accountant and is by no means homeless. She says she dumpster dives for food, clothing, office supplies, and building materials because she can’t bring herself to support wasteful manufacturers.
“The point of the dumpster diving lifestyle is to reclaim the waste of consumerist society.”
After dumpster diving in four major metropolitan areas, C. says you would be amazed by how much perfectly good stuff society throws away. If you do your homework, she says you can find almost anything you want.
“We’ve found organic cherries and chocolate and organic tofu, organic tofu burgers, chocolate soymilk, once we even found a whole case of white wine.”
Probably not too surprisingly, health officials say the lifestyle raises some sanitation concerns. Jerry LeMoine is a Food Inspector at the Santa Cruz County, California Health Department. He says even if dumpster-divers go for high-quality organic foods, taking food from a dumpster is risky.
“Potentially any type of bacteria could grow in a dumpster. Flies can get into dumpsters, rats, other types rodents, disease vectors, so it’s just unknown as to what the conditions are there and conditions might change at any moment in a dumpster.”
Dumpster divers say they’re aware of the risks, but Jean C. says she exercises great discretion. She says wading knee deep through other people’s trash is no worse than grocery shopping, as long as you know what to look for.
“We never eat unsanitary or dirty food. We only take meats if they’re frozen or vacuum sealed. Once we found a whole dumpster full of smoked salmon that was not going to go bad for years – and that was good. Everybody ate it.”
Lee Turner,a long-time dumpster diver, says people throw things away because Americans are wasteful. Turner has spent the past thirty years troubleshooting ways to build gadgets from others’ trash. He’s even built a back woods cabin entirely from salvaged materials.
(Sound of crickets)
“Welcome to my home… This is the kitchen, spice rack, this is the food cabinet, got running water, there’s a rain barrel, see…”
(Sound of water)
Turner built his shack illegally in a public forest, but he says he’s always been careful not to hurt the surrounding environment. He considers dumpster-diving to be part of a larger love for Nature.
Turner says using material that’s headed for the landfill makes a lot more sense than buying wood and encouraging the lumber and timber industry to cut down more trees.
“Most of the materials are found materials. Some of the wood came out of dumpsters.”
Turner and C. have turned dumpster-diving into an organized effort. They target the highest quality products, they stake out factory dumpsters to learn when mislabeled items are routinely tossed, and look for store employees willing to leak information about the next scheduled inventory reduction. It’s a conspiracy to salvage.
“What happens in a dumpster-diving collective is that you need to get a small group of quiet people, hopefully, and have them take a large amount of food back to a central location, where you’re going to wash it and process it and redistribute it, so that everyone gets what they need.”
It’s impossible to know how many students, activists, and old nature lovers scour garbage cans, but dumpster-diving is becoming an increasingly popular sport. And despite the social inhibitions and threat of food contamination, activists such as Turner and C. say they won’t abandon their search for edible, usable and fixable refuse any time soon.
A landfill is full of things people don't consider useful anymore. One group begs to differ. (Photo by Roberto Burgos S.)
The landfill is often seen as the end of the line… the burial ground of our trash. But one company says there’s still something to gain from that buried garbage. It’s planning to build a new plant to retrieve one final product from all of our trash. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kasler has the story:
Transcript
The landfill is often seen as the end of the line… the burial ground of our
trash. But one company says there’s still something to gain from that buried
garbage. It’s planning to build a new plant to retrieve one final product from
all of our trash. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kasler has the
story:
You probably don’t think of landfills as “green.” But Steve Wilburn does.
Wilburn is the president of FirmGreen. He says he knows different ways to
turn byproducts of landfills into useful energy.
First, capture the methane that’s produced when all that garbage stews
underground. Second, use it as fuel to generate electricity. Third, turn it into compressed gas for trucks. And finally, mix
it with soybean oil to make soy diesel.
Steve Wilburn says it’s an ambitious project.
“This is the first of its kind in the world. The Green Energy Center concept is
something I came up with about four years ago, and as we explored for ways to
implement it, we needed a centerpiece, a technology that was missing, and that
was to clean up the landfill gas in a very cost-effective way.”
FirmGreen is building what it calls its Green Energy Center right next to the
landfill in Columbus, Ohio. Mike Long is with the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio – SWACO for short. Long says right
now, there’s no practical use for the methane and carbon dioxide produced by the rotting garbage in the landfill.
“Currently, SWACO’s control technology is to have a flare where we burn off the
gases to keep it from getting up into the atmosphere. But the new technology,
we will take that gas and make it into energy and consumer products rather than
just simply burning it and exhausting it.”
Instead of burning those landfill gases, they’ll be redirected a small
electric generator operated by FirmGreen. The electricity will be sold back to
SWACO to power its main office and its fleet garage. That’ll start in just a
few months.
Later, FirmGreen will convert methane into compressed natural gas. That will
be used to fuel SWACO’s vehicles, which could save the waste authority an
estimated 100 thousand dollars a year.
FirmGreen’s President, Steve Wilburn says the final part of the project is the
real profit maker for his company: turning methanol into biodiesel.
“When we create
methanol, we then have the bridge to the hydrogen economy because ethanol is an
excellent hydrogen carrier. It’s also used in the manufacture and production of
biodiesel. Ohio is a large soybean producing state. So we’ll take our green
methanol and we’ll blend that with the soy oil and we’re going to create
biodiesel.”
When the FirmGreen biodiesel processing facility is up and running, it will
need 69 thousand acres of soybeans to produce 10 million gallons of biodiesel
annually. FirmGreen already has a contract with Mitsubishi Gas Chemical
Company to provide 6 million gallons of biodiesel a year. FirmGreen also hopes
to interest the growing hydrogen fuel cell industry.
“Biofuels” have their critics, who are concerned that it takes as much energy
or more energy to create biofuels than they produce. Mike Long at SWACO says
he’s heard that before, but it doesn’t apply to this project.
“The
energy is already here, and is being flared off right now at our landfill. There’s no recovery of the energy, no beneficial
use. So for those who argue that this process would be a consumer of energy, it’s not a net consumer, and right now, we’re wasting energy.”
Long and Wilburn point to statistics from the U.S. EPA. They says the data show
the Green Energy Center will have the same effect as reducing oil consumption by
more than twenty thousand barrels a year. They say that’s like taking 2,000 cars off the road.
Sam Spofforth is with the Central Ohio Clean Fuels Coalition. He says even
when factoring in the fuel used by trucks transporting the methanol to the
remote biodiesel processing facilities, the project still looks green to him.
“In terms of biodiesel, it’s about three point two energy units out for every one energy
unit in. What is even more exciting about this project – methane
gas is about twenty times as potent as a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. So the
fact that they’re using methane that would otherwise be vented into the air
makes the net emissions of those greenhouse gas even more positive.”
The Green Energy Center in Ohio is the first in the nation, but a second one
is planned to be built near Saint Louis, Missouri. With giant landfills venting
off methane in places around the country, if these two make money, it’s a
pretty sure bet others will be built in the near future.
General Motors has been watching its SUV sales take a turn for the worse. In their first fiscal quarter, the company lost 1.3 billion dollars. And now GM says it’ll have to cut 25,000 jobs in the next three years to stay profitable. But some GM workers hope the automaker’s move toward greener vehicles will put it back in the black. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brian Bull reports:
Transcript
General Motors has been watching its SUV sales take a
turn for the worse. In their first fiscal quarter, the company
lost 1.3 billion dollars. And now GM says it’ll have to cut
25 thousand jobs in the next three years to stay profitable. But some
G-M workers hope the automaker’s move toward greener vehicles will put
it back in the black. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brian Bull
reports:
Compared to its competitors, GM has been slow to develop
gasoline-electric hybrid automobiles. In the past, GM officials
have said they’re concentrating on creating hydrogen powered fuel
cells for their vehicles.
But with consumers quickly moving away
from big, gas-guzzling SUVs, GM’s strategy seems to be shifting. Ron
Pohlman works at GM’s Janesville, Wisconsin plant.
“We’re building a new vehicle here in Janesville. It’s a
new version of the Tahoe and Suburban. It’ll have the hybrid engine
in 2007. Then we can have three plants building this vehicle and if
people buy it, we’ll be fine.”
Last year, more than eighty thousand hybrid cars were sold in the U.S.
That only makes up less than one percent of all vehicles sold.
Still, industry watchers say, as long as gas prices keep rising, so will
hybrid sales.
Women marching on behalf of a campaign to remove phthalates and other chemicals from cosmetics. (Photo courtesy of the Breast Cancer Fund)
Teri Olle and her daughter, Natalie Olle Comerford, enjoy playing dress-up with cosmetics, but they choose to use products with fewer chemicals. (Photo by John Comerford)
There are new concerns that products we use every day to keep us clean and make us beautiful may contain toxic chemicals. The targets are things like shampoos, deodorants, hair dyes and cosmetics. Some companies are taking these concerns seriously and giving themselves a makeover. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this story:
Transcript
There are new concerns that products we use every day to keep us clean and make us beautiful may contain toxic chemicals. The targets are things like shampoos, deodorants, hair dyes and cosmetics. Some companies are taking these concerns seriously and giving themselves a makeover. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Halpert has this story:
(Sound of woman and child talking)
Teri Olle is playing dress-up with her two-year-old daughter, Natalie, in the family’s bathroom. Teri is applying lotions to her daughter’s chubby cheeks, while Natalie puts lipstick on her mother.
Little girls like Natalie have been playing dress-up for generations. But Natalie’s game is slightly different. She’s using nail polish, lipsticks and creams made without man-made chemicals.
That’s because her mother is an environmental activist who lobbies against toxic chemical use. With cosmetics, her biggest fear is a group of chemicals called phthalates. Phthalates increase the flexibility of plastic and keep nail polish from chipping.
“Phthalates are testosterone-suppressing synthetic hormones, essentially. And they’ve been linked with all sorts of developmental problems, including, most dramatically, a set of male genital defects that show themselves as birth defects in infant boys.”
Last month, scientists released the first study on male babies. They found a strong link between high levels of phthalates exposure in pregnant women and damage to their sons’ reproductive tract. Studies like this, and others on lab animals showing possible links to reproductive problems, prompted the European Union this past March to ban two types of phthalates from all products sold in Europe. The states of California, New York and Massachusetts are also considering similar plans.
Olle is five months pregnant with her second child. She doesn’t know if she’s carrying a boy, but she says chemicals in cosmetics could be risky for any fetus. So she’s not taking any chances.
“For me, as a person, if someone said to me, ‘You can either use this product that may cause a genital defect in your baby boy or not’, I would think most people would go, ‘Really, we probably shouldn’t be using these products.'”
And it’s not just phthalates that could be a problem. Environmentalists say that the ingredients in cosmetics haven’t been evaluated for health or safety effects. The Food and Drug Administration doesn’t do that kind of testing. And in 60 years, it’s banned only nine ingredients. So there are other chemicals, like coal tars used in hair dyes and formaldehyde used in nail polish, that might cause health problems as they’re absorbed by the skin into the bloodstream.
Because of these concerns, a group of environmentalists called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has convinced 136 natural cosmetics companies to sign a pledge to check for potentially toxic chemicals and eliminate them.
One of those companies is Avalon Organics. Over the past year, Avalon’s spent two and a half million dollars to reformulate their products and switch to more natural alternatives. Gil Pritchard is the company’s President and CEO. He says the jury’s out on whether these chemicals definitely cause harm. Even so, he didn’t hesitate to make the investment.
“It’s convincing enough for me and our company to exercise what we call a precautionary principle – to adopt it and say look, we may not have direct scientific evidence, but there’s enough evidence here to say whoa, I can feel the heat from the stove. I don’t need to put my finger on and burn myself to know that that’s one of the likely outcomes.”
But not all companies feel this way. Procter & Gamble, in Cincinnati, Ohio, has not signed the pledge. Nor have any other major cosmetic companies. Tim Long is a company spokesman. He says environmentalists are blowing this issue way out of proportion.
“The amounts of most of these ingredients that the activists have concerns about are, in fact, extremely small and at the doses used in our products, there’s no scientific evidence to support that they’re resulting in any harm to consumers.”
Long says Procter & Gamble complied with the EU directive and took the banned phthalates out of all of its products both in Europe and the U.S. But he says that wasn’t necessary, since phthalates, along with all other cosmetic ingredients, simply aren’t dangerous. He says his company wouldn’t be using them if they were. And the FDA says that these cosmetics are safe.
Environmentalists say that more research needs to be done to better understand the effect of chemicals used in cosmetics on the body. But Teri Olle says that with so many natural alternatives available, it makes sense to be careful.
“When I became pregnant, I definitely became more conscious of what I was putting on my body. I mean, if you’re supposed to avoid soft cheeses and cake batter, it certainly can’t be good for you to be spraying petrochemicals on your body. That definitely can’t be good for the baby.”
So when the baby’s born this September, instead of using products with man-made chemicals, Teri Olle will be spreading diaper rash ointment with beeswax and apricot oil on her newborn baby.
Researchers have found what they believe is a more energy-efficient way to produce bio-fuel. (Photo by John Davis)
Researchers continue to look for a more energy-efficient alternative to ethanol. A team of Midwest engineers is having some success with turning plants into an additive for diesel fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach
reports:
Transcript
Researchers continue to look for a more energy-efficient alternative to ethanol. A team of Midwest engineers is having some success with turning plants into an additive for diesel fuel. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Chuck Quirmbach reports:
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison are taking the carbohydrates found in corn and other plant matter and putting them into what they call a “four-phase reactor.” Out comes a sulphur-free liquid suitable to be an additive in diesel transportation fuel.
Much attention has been paid to processing corn into ethanol, but Wisconsin professor John Dumesic says he and his colleagues have a more energy-efficient system.
“To make ethanol from an energy point of view, it takes one unit to make one unit. If you look at our process, in a very preliminary sense, then for every one unit you put in, you get two units out.”
Dumesic says the carbohydrate-based diesel fuel additive could be ready for consumer use within a few years. His research is published in a recent issue of the journal Science.
An automotive research firm has conducted another study showing that large sport utility vehicles are falling out of favor with American consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has more:
Transcript
An automotive research firm has conducted another study showing that
large sport utility vehicles are falling out of favor with American
consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jerome Vaughn has more:
A study conducted by the Power Information Network says near-record
high gas prices may be taking their toll on sales of large sport
utility vehicles. The research says most car and truck owners are less
likely to buy a large SUV now than they were in first two months of
2004.
Tom Libby is with the Power Information Network.
“Consumers who before did not have much of a choice if they wanted an
SUV had to purchase a truck-based traditional SUV, now have the option
of getting a car-based SUV, which has several advantages. One of which
is it drives more like a car. Second of all they tend to be smaller,
so they get better gas mileage.”
Libby says the trend could be troubling to the auto industry because
SUVs are among the vehicles generating the highest profit for
automakers. But he says it would take higher gas prices over an
extended period to make the trend away from larger SUVs a permanent
one.
Many environmentalists fear the practice of sewage blending would become more routine if a new EPA policy is enacted. (Photo by M. Vasquez)
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering a new policy for sewage treatment plants. Many environmentalists say if the policy is adopted, it will lead to increased water pollution and greater risk to public health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports on the debate over sewage blending:
Transcript
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency are considering a new policy for sewage treatment plants. Many environmentalists say if the policy is adopted, it will lead to increased water pollution and greater risk to public health. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mark Brush reports on the debate over sewage blending:
(sound of water in sewer)
Some sanitary sewers are tied in with storm sewers. So when there’s a big rainstorm, or when there’s a fast snowmelt, all that water can inundate some sewage treatment plants. To tackle this problem, some treatment plants have adopted a practice known as “blending.” The excess sewage is re-routed around the slower parts of the treatment plant. The dirty water is then mixed with the water that’s been cleaned. It’s sometimes given a shot of chlorine, and then released into creeks, rivers, and lakes.
Kurt Heise oversees the operation of a sewage treatment plant on the Detroit River. He says the practice of blending is necessary in order to keep the plant from being overwhelmed.
“When you have a wet weather event, an extreme wet weather event, if we were to allow all of that combined water in through the normal process the treatment process would be ruined.”
Sewage blending has been around for a long time. To plant operators, it’s a necessary step in handling large amounts of dirty water. But to some people, blending is not seen as a good option. They want the practice to stop.
Instead, they say, cities should invest in their systems to make sure they can fully treat all the water that comes to the plant. Kurt Heise says, if his plant were required to do this, it wouldn’t make sense economically.
“It would almost result in doubling the size of our plant and spending just untold amounts of dollars for an event only happens a few times a year.”
Sewage treatment plant operators say you have to weigh the costs and the benefits before spending hundreds of millions of dollars on expanding the treatment plants. The decision of whether or not to allow blending has been left up to state and local regulators. But recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has weighed in on the subject. And ever since they suggested new guidelines for allowing blending, environmentalists have been critical of their plan. Mike Shriberg is the Great Lakes advocate for the Public Interest Research Group. It’s an environmental consumer activist organization.
Shriberg says the draft blending policy, the way it’s written now, is too broad. And will allow the practice of blending to become routine.
“Our fear is that when you’ve got a treatment plant that uses blending, they’re never going to upgrade to full treatment sewage. And so if a treatment plant is allowed to blend they’re not going to go up to full treatment capacity they have no incentive to do that anymore. It’s sort of the cheap way out.”
Sewage treatment operators say blending is better than seeing the raw sewage overflow into waterways. And they say it’s better than spending large sums of money to fix a problem that only occurs a few times a year. But critics say the EPA doesn’t have a good handle on how often blending is used, and what kind of health risks are associated with the practice.
Some initial studies have been done on blended sewage and how it might affect public health. Joan Rose is a water microbiologist at Michigan State University. She’s written a report on the health risks associated with blended sewage.
“So what I found was that if people were actually swimming in the water and there was a discharge of a blended sewage upstream, that their risk of getting sick, actually getting sick with a virus or a parasite was about a hundred times greater – when there was a blended discharge as opposed to if the water was fully treated.”
Rose says some of these viruses, such as Hepatitis-A, are highly contagious. At this point, there are no good estimates on how many people get sick from blended sewage each year. It’s never been studied, so the impact of blending on public health is unclear. Ben Grumbles is the Assistant Administrator for water at the EPA. He says the EPA is considering the billions of dollars at stake in expanding the nation’s sewer treatment plants versus the risk to public health.
“What we’re trying to do is to clarify what’s legal and what isn’t legal and to recognize the economic realities that sewage teatment plants face across the country in terms of their infrastructure needs, but foremost and above all what leaves the facility has to meet Clean Water Act permit limits.”
But the Clean Water Act permit limits don’t measure all the viruses, bacteria, and parasites found in blended sewage. And so some environmentalists and scientists say meeting the limits doesn’t necessarily mean protecting public health. Grumbles says officials are still reviewing the tens of thousands of comments they received after releasing the draft blending policy.
He says he doesn’t know what the final rule will look like, or if they’ll issue a rule at all. One thing is likely, if the policy is finalized the way it’s written now, it’s expected that environmental groups will take the EPA to court.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mark Brush.
Low-sulfur fuel is now available to everyone, even if they haven't realized it yet. (Photo by Pam Roth)
A quiet revolution of cleaner air began this year for cars
and trucks. Motorists might not know it, but they’ve been burning
low-sulfur fuel as part of a requirement under the federal Clean Air
Act. The requirement was put in place during the Clinton Administration.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports:
Transcript
A quiet revolution of cleaner air began this year for cars and trucks. Motorists might
not know it, but they’ve been burning low-sulfur fuel as part of requirement under the
federal Clean Air Act. The requirement was put in place during the Clinton Administration.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mike Simonson reports:
Low-sulfur fuel is sometimes referred to as “green gas.” The gas isn’t really colored green.
But if it was, people might have noticed that they’re pumping different gas. For two years,
refineries in the United States have been investing millions of dollars to produce the new gas.
Dave Podratz is the manager of the Murphy Oil refinery in Superior, Wisconsin. He says his
refinery spent 26 million dollars to begin making the gas since October.
“It’s not the kind of thing you would notice, the average consumer going to the pump probably
wouldn’t even notice it watching tail pipe emissions, but the sufur dioxide emissions are
definitely going down.”
Podratz says the new fuel cut the amount of sulfur by 90 percent. And other tail pipe
emissions are going down as well. That’s because low sulfur fuel improves the efficiency
of your car’s catalytic converter, Which, in turn, reduces the amount of pollutants like
nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Mike Simonson.
Magazine publishers and other companies are thinking ahead and getting their paper from forests that have been certified. But what does this really mean? (Photo by Stanley Elliott)
Officials in the Midwest want to prove they’re not damaging their state forests. States that sell timber to paper companies are spending thousands of dollars to earn a certificate that says they’re managing the forests in a sustainable way. Paper producers are demanding that state foresters earn certification because officials want to stave off protests from consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports:
Transcript
Officials in the Midwest want to prove they’re not damaging their state forests. States that sell timber to paper companies are spending thousand of dollars to earn a certificate that says they’re managing the forests in a sustainable way. Paper producers are demanding that state foresters earn certification because officials want to stave off protests from consumers. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports:
It’s lunchtime and employees on break from Compuware in downtown Detroit are browisng through the magazine racks at Borders. Melody Kranz says she reads three different magazines every month. She says she is an avid recycler and an impassioned environmentalist, but never considered what kind of paper was going into her magazines.
“I don’t know why I haven’t thought about it, I just haven’t. I will now. Because I’m a gardening nut, I love to garden. So yeah, I just never really thought about it.”
But executive David Refkin is betting that Franz and others like her would think twice before picking up Time Magazine if they thought a forest was demolished to make the paper. Refkin is the Director of Sustainable Development for Time Incorporated. He says he’s noticed a strong surge in environmental awareness over the past two or three years.
“We don’t want people looking at a magazine and feeling guilty that a stream has been damaged and the fish are dying in there, or that habitats aren’t being protected because people are practicing bad forestry practices.”
Refkin says his company wants to take action now, before consumer groups decide to boycott its magazines over ecological issues. Time uses more coated paper for its publications than any other company in the U.S. The company is asking that 80 percent of all paper products Time buys be certified by 2006.
To the average consumer, that may not seem like big news. But for paper producers and foresters, it’s earth shattering. Larry Pedersen is with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources. Pedersen says getting certified means years of work for state employees. The government has to prove to investigators that its management standards take into account issues such as biodiversity, water quality, soil erosion and wildlife habitat. Pedersen says the state is also required to provide records for each tree from the moments it’s planted or inventoried to the time it’s cut down and then made into planks or paper. But he says it’s worth the effort.
“A number of wood and paper-using companies brought it to our attention that they needed to have certified products because their consumers were demanding those. And with us having four-million acres of state forestlands, we saw the writing on the wall that we needed to jump on this.”
State forests in the region generate a lot of revenue. Wisconsin’s forests earn two and a half million dollars from timber sales and Ohio pulls in almost three million. Michigan’s forests bring in 30 million dollars annually. Earlier this year, Michigan’s Governor Jennifer Granholm announced that all state forests will be certified by January 1st of 2006. And the Great Lakes State is not alone… New York, Wisconsin, and Maine are also pursuing certification and Ohio and other states are considering it.
Andrew Shalit, with the environmental activist group Ecopledge, says he’s glad Time Warner is encouraging paper companies and state governments to get certified. But he says that doesn’t necessarily mean the paper is produced in an environmentally friendly way.
“It’s great to say that they’re going to get all of their paper from certified forests. The question is, who is certifying? And in the case of Time Warner, a lot of the forests are certified by a group called SFI, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and their standards are so weak as to be almost meaningless.”
There’s a heated debate over just what certification means. There are currently two groups that certify forests in the U.S. The Sustainable Forestry Initiative, or SFI, was originally founded by the timber industry but is now an independent body. The Forest Stewardship council, or FSC, came out of the environmental movement… or more specifically, out of the effort to protect South American rainforests. Shalit says he doesn’t think SFI certification is as rigorous or as comprehensive as FSC.
“It really is a problem for the consumer because you see something in the store and it has a little green label on it with a picture of a tree and it says sustainably certified, and you think you’re buying something good. It’s hard for the individual consumer to keep up with that.”
Shalit says several states, like Michigan, have solved the dilemma of rival certification programs by getting dual certification. he says although the system has flaws, it will improve if consumers demand more stringent forestry regulations.
Executives at Time Warner hope they can avoid boycotts and pickets by taking action preemptively. The company is leading the push for forest certification in the U.S., and environmentalists say the federal government may have to bow to pressure eventually and get the national forests certified as well.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Celeste Headlee.
