Living Without Plastic

  • Cheryl Lohrman victorious after finding a specialty deli that would sell her cheese and put it, plastic free, in her steel tin. (Photo courtesy of Sadie Babits)

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

Transcript

We use a lot of plastic. Every year some 30 million tons of plastic in the U.S. from diapers to bottles get tossed in landfills. One woman wants to change those numbers. She’s trying to live her life without plastic. Sadie Babits caught up with her to find out if that’s really possible.

When Cheryl Lohrmann comes to the grocery store all she sees is plastic. Plastic yogurt containers, cheese wrapped in plastic shrink-wrap, juice bottles, plastic bags. She doesn’t want this stuff in her life. So Lohrmann decided she’d vote with her wallet by refusing to buy anything with plastic.

“We’re at cherry sprouts grocery store in Portland, OR where I’m going to purchase some cheese and some eggs.”

Eggs are no problem. She just puts them in her used egg carton. But cheese is a different story. She has a small steel tin that looks like it belongs with her camping gear – not the grocery store. And Lohrmann has a special request for the guy behind the counter.

“And that is if I get the cheese not wrapped up in plastic but just in this container or maybe you could put this on paper.”

“Aahhh. I don’t think we can do that because it needs to be wrapped up.”

Lohrmann gets that reaction a lot. So she won’t buy cheese here. It means a trip to another shop – this time a high-end specialty deli.

LouAnne Schooler owns this store. She explains to Lohrmann why they use plastic.

“Plastic, it’s the unfortunately simplest choice because we wrap and re-wrap continuously throughout the day and it can’t be left unwrapped and people need to see the cheese so that precludes it from being wrapped in most papers.”

But Schooler says she’s only too happy to help people like Lohrmann who don’t want their cheese shrink- wraped. So she drops the cheese –plastic free – into Lohrmann’s tin.

“That’s a good chunk of cheese. Magical moment here–thanks for letting me do that”

“Sure.”

Lohrmann started going plastic free a couple of years ago after reading Elizabeth Royte’s book Garbageland. The author tracked her trash to find out where it ended up. The chapter on plastic struck a nerve with Lohrmann.

“I think it’s been taken too far when you have toothpicks individually wrapped in plastic. You know you just start to think is that really necessary given the fact that this is such a toxic material that doesn’t have high enough recycling rights to really justify having it.”

Lohrmann also gets miffed that you end up paying for plastic three times. You pay for it at the grocery store and again to have it hauled to the landfill. Finally, she says we pay for it environmentally – plastic doesn’t disappear. So you might think it’s a little nuts to even think about living a life free of plastic. Lohrmann gets that.

“It is hard right now to feel like you can maneuver to get whatever you want without plastic.”

“Ok, so on a scale of one to ten–ten being plastic free–where are you?”

“I would say probably a nine.”

That’s a nine when it comes to buying groceries. Because let’s face it. Plastic is everywhere even in Lohrmann’s home. There’s her computer, picture frames, even the parts on her bike. She realizes going plastic free is nearly impossible but she’s willing to try to send a message especially to businesses that we need to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

Related Links

Not the Colonel’s Drive-Thru

  • Economists say locally produced chicken can be pricey because there's not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:

Transcript

There’s a trend toward locally-grown
food, but when it comes to locally-raised
chicken, there’s a kink in the supply
chain. Small chicken farmers can’t afford
to process a few birds at big slaughterhouses.
And there aren’t many independent slaughterhouses
around. Shawn Allee reports
there’s an effort to change this:

One idea’s to bring the slaughterhouse to the chicken farm.

The Whole Foods grocery chain could try out small, mobile slaughtering units next year. It might help Whole Foods offer more locally-raised chicken at its stores, but no one’s sure whether it will work.

Economists say the slaughterhouse pinch is a problem for consumers.

Wes Jarrell studies farm markets for the University of Illinois. He says locally produced chicken can be pricey because there’s not enough competition in the slaughterhouse business.

“In order for that farmer to stay in business, they have to charge more and we would certainly like to lower that price to make it available to more people.”

Jarrell says Whole Foods is not the only group to consider mobile chicken slaughterhouses. He says a few state governments, like Vermont’s, are revving up their own portable slaughterhouses, too.


For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

A Good Guide for Shopping

  • The Good Guide website's turkey rating page. (Image by Jessi Ziegler)

There’s a new way for consumers to find
out more about the products they buy.
Samara Freemark has the story
of a new online guide that lets you look
up how good products are for you and for
the environment:

Transcript

There’s a new way for consumers to find
out more about the products they buy.
Samara Freemark has the story
of a new online guide that lets you look
up how good products are for you and for
the environment:

The website is called the Good Guide, and it lets consumers get a pretty in-depth look at more than 60,000 foods and household products. The site ranks products by their impacts on health, the environment, and society.

The Good Guide is the brainchild of Dara O’Rourke. He’s a professor of environmental policy at the University of California at Berkley. O’Rourke says consumers don’t have easy access to the information they need to make smart buying decisions.

“What we’re trying to do is bring the best available science, put it in an easy accessible and free format, then get it to people whenever and wherever they make a decision about a product or a company.”

That’s where the Good Guide iphone application comes in. Shoppers can scan barcodes at the store to get instant product information.

That application, and the site, can be found at goodguide.com

For The Environment Report, I’m Samara Freemark.

Related Links

Study Links Food Preservatives and Diseases

  • Nitrates and nitrites are found in a lot of foods - like bacon, hot dogs, and pepperoni - as food preservatives (Photo by Renee Comet, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

A new study in the Journal of
Alzheimer’s Disease finds a strong
link between some food preservatives
and an increased risk of death from
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

A new study in the Journal of
Alzheimer’s Disease finds a strong
link between some food preservatives
and an increased risk of death from
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Rebecca Williams has more:

Nitrates and nitrites are found in a lot of foods we eat: bacon, hot dogs, and even cheese and beer.

The chemicals aren’t there naturally – they’re added as preservatives. And they’re also used in fertilizers.

Dr. Suzanne de la Monte is the study’s lead author.

She says they found a strong connection between higher death rates from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes and the increases in our exposures to these chemicals in our food and water since the late 1960s.

“What we’ve identified says this is certainly something I would consider very very important. Are there other things? Probably.”

She says people could be genetically predisposed to these diseases.

But she says long term exposure to nitrates and nitrites could also be playing a role in two ways: whether we get these diseases and how severe they might end up being.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

DC Gets Tough on Disposable Bags

  • The Anacostia River in Washington DC is ridden with garbage, and plastic bags make up 20% of the trash tossed in (Photo by Kavitha Cardoza)

For years, the Anacostia River that flows through

Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten

river, lost in the shadow of the better known

Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the

river was so thick you could walk from one side to

the other without getting wet. Today things are

better. But, most people say not enough has been

done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent

tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with

most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha

Cardoza reports if it passes,

the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper

bags in the country:

Transcript

For years, the Anacostia River that flows through

Washington DC was widely known as the forgotten

river, lost in the shadow of the better known

Potomac. At one point, some say the trash in the

river was so thick you could walk from one side to

the other without getting wet. Today things are

better. But, most people say not enough has been

done. DC’s city council is considering a five cent

tax on every disposable plastic and paper bag with

most of the money going to cleanup efforts. As Kavitha

Cardoza reports if it passes,

the fee would be the toughest law on plastic and paper

bags in the country:

Kindergartners from the Evergreen School in Wheaton, Maryland are leaning over a rail and looking at bags, cups, wrappers and other trash floating in the Anacostia River.

They’ve travelled to D.C. to learn more about, as they put it, “what kills fish.”

The five-year-olds are NOT impressed with what they see.

“Bottles, balls, yucky. It’s really, really disgusting garbage!”

The children roll up their sleeves and start pulling trash from the bank. But, it’s going to take a lot more than their small hands to clean up the mess.

Jim Connerly is with the Anacostia Watershed Society. He says Washington D.C.’s own environmental studies estimate each year 20,000 tons of trash is thrown into the Anacostia.

“It’s like a landfill on a conveyor belt.”

Studies also show plastic bags make up about 20% of the trash in the Anacostia.

When grocery bags are thrown away, many of them are swept up by rain water and carried into storm drains that flow into streams. They end up in the Anacostia.

The bags often ensnare birds and turtles. Fish eat the small torn pieces. That results in toxins making their way into the food chain.

Tommy Wells is the D.C. council member who came up with the idea of charging a nickel for plastic and paper bags.

“By charging a nickel, it really gets more into your head than your pocket. Also, it reminds you maybe I should have bought a reusable bag.”

And part of the money raised will help low-income residents buy reusable bags.

But Laurie Walker hasn’t heard about that proposal. She says, as a senior citizen on a fixed income, those nickels can add up quickly.

“Five cents is a whole lot of money, if I put it in a jar, every month when I get paid. I can buy a chicken, hot dogs, eggs for my grandchildren or for myself. I can buy a whole lot with that.”

The fee would raise nearly 2.5 million dollars a year. Besides the reusable bags, the money will fund educational efforts and return a portion to local businesses as an incentive.

The chemical industry which makes the plastic bags hopes anybody opposed to these kinds of fees or taxes will come out against this proposal. But environmentalists like the idea.

(sound of a beaver)

Back at the Anacostia River system, Jim Connerly says, with a little effort, the Anacostia could be trash-free in just a few years.


“In a perfect world, the water quality would be addressed. The thing that’s encouraging to me is that nature is always trying to seek balance. If we let the river alone, if we stop the input of pollutants, it would clean itself. It’s just that we’re not allowing the river to do that.”

Connerly and many others are hoping the Washington DC bag fee helps make that happen.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kavitha Cardoza.

Related Links

Government Fails at Food Safety

  • The reported number of salmonella cases has not gone down since 1996 (Source: Gene.Arboit at Wikimedia Commons)

Government agencies admit they need to do a better job at keeping food safe. Kyle Norris has more:

Transcript

Government agencies admit they need to do a better job at keeping food safe. Kyle Norris has more:

When you discover people are getting sick from a food bourne illness like salmonella, you want to stop others from getting sick from it as fast as possible.

A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US Food & Drug Administration, and the Department of Agriculture finds the government is not getting any faster.

The report found the number of reported salmonella cases each year is about 15 people in 100,000. That has not gone down since 1996.

Lola Russell is a spokeswoman for the CDC.

“We are planning to increase the capacity of state health departments so that outbreaks can be better detected and investigated.”

Russell says the CDC will work to get more “boots on the ground” to detect an outbreak. The report also indicated the FDA is looking at the best options to prevent food borne illnesses in the first place.

For The Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

Related Links

Stores Required to Label Some Foods

  • This rule requires stores to tell you what country some of your food comes from Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Starting this week, supermarkets are officially required to tell you where some of your meat and produce comes from. But as Rebecca Williams reports it can get confusing at the store:

Transcript

Starting this week, supermarkets are officially required to tell you where some of your meat and produce comes from. But as Rebecca Williams reports it can get confusing at the store:

This rule requires stores to tell you what country some of your food comes from.

The rule covers things like beef and pork, chicken, and vegetables.

Supermarkets have already been adding these labels over the past few months.

Deborah White is with the Food Marketing Institute. The group represents supermarkets. She says they don’t like being forced to label specific products – and the law is quirky.

“The law applies, for example, to chicken but not turkey. It applies to peanuts and pecans but not almonds and walnuts and those were decisions that Congress made.”

And there are other quirks. Frozen peas have to be labeled and so do frozen carrots. But a bag of peas and carrots mixed together doesn’t have to be labeled.

The new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, says he wants to fix these quirks. He’s asking the food industry to voluntarily add more information to labels than the rule now requires.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Green ‘Stop-N-Shops’

  • Melissa Rosen and her husband Greg Horos opened Locali's - LA's first "ecovenience" mart. (Photo by Devine Browne)

Not that long ago, if you wanted to buy eco-friendly at the grocery store, your options might have been limited to the granola and beans in the bulk bins. Then stores started carrying organic produce. Later vegetarian fast food appeared. Devin Browne reports now eco-friendly is hitting convenience stores:

Transcript

Not that long ago, if you wanted to buy eco-friendly at the grocery store, your options might have been limited to the granola and beans in the bulk bins. Then stores started carrying organic produce. Later vegetarian fast food appeared. Devin Browne reports now eco-friendly is hitting convenience stores:

They’re called ecovenience stores and they’re showing up all over the country. The point is that they sell convenience store food, only greener.

(sound of a store)

“This is our organic hot pretzel, we have organic hot pretzels. It’s organic flour.”

That’s Melissa Rosen; she co-owns a new ecovenience store in Los Angeles, called Locali. Which is actually spelled L-O-C-A-L-I.

And they’ve got hot pretzels, but organic. Hot dogs, but grass-fed. The store even looks like a convenience store: It’s in a strip mall, it’s near a freeway. They’ve got cold drinks in the fridge and impulse buys like candy near the cash register. The customers are in a hurry, but a happy hurry. They rave about the chips

“It is a flavor explosion in your mouth, it is beyond savory.”

and the slushies.

“Slushies! There you go, the slushies are amazing.”

But then you get closer and you see that the cold drinks are not soda or beer: They’re Kombucha, the fermented tea. The candy is vegan gummy bears and organic lollipops. And the slushie, their signature item, is sweetened with agave.

There are a few 7-11 staples that are missing from the shelves, like cigarettes and lotto tickets. The owners say there are no green versions of those.

Some of Locali’s products are really pragmatic and not that exciting like energy efficient light bulbs and ecological laundry drops. Others are kind of sensational, silly, really.

“For example the vegan condoms. What is that, what is Glyde? I didn’t know my condoms weren’t vegan.”

So, vegan condoms, vegan caviar. Snow cones sweetened with brown rice syrup. They have this really big variety of products that have never been greened before.

And so the question becomes: will new green products like these, however silly, really mean new green consumers? Matt Kahn is an Environmental Economist at UCLA. HE thinks maybe so.

“So the goal might be to create buzz. That if you only sell green light bulbs and a tofu turkey burger, people might say oh yeah, that’s the green place. But if you do some truly wacky stuff, generating this green buzz, might tip, that even a Dick Cheney might come with his grandson hearing that it’s this wacky.”

Which is more or less the point – Locali wants to recruit new green consumers. Consumers who right now live in neighborhoods that don’t really have supermarkets and so they buy most of their food at liquor and convenience stores.

Of course, one of the problems will probably be price. A 16 oz slushie at Locali is $5.49, while a 22 oz slurpee at 7-11 is just $1.40. But Kahn, the economist, thinks because Locali is smaller and more flexible than say a Whole Foods, it might actually have a better shot at making it in new neighborhoods.

“And so a smaller business might have to pay only a couple hundred thousand dollars rather then multi million dollars to build a big boxed store. And that lower fixed cost of entering a market makes it more likely that smaller green stores might experiment more.”

And apparently, the ecovenience experiment is something that a lot of people want to try. In the first six days of business, the owners received phone calls from people in Seattle and DC and cities all over Southern California. And they all asked the same thing: how soon can we open a locali in our local neighborhood.

For The Environment Report, I’m Devin Browne.

Related Links

Organics Rotting in Bad Economy

  • Shopping at organic foods stores is one thing consumers are cutting back on (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Watching paychecks shrink and
retirement funds dissolve is making people
change their buying habits. Many are
skipping things like natural foods because
they’re seen as luxuries. But Julie Grant
reports some analysts say this is just a
short term trend:

Transcript

Watching paychecks shrink and
retirement funds dissolve is making people
change their buying habits. Many are
skipping things like natural foods because
they’re seen as luxuries. But Julie Grant
reports some analysts say this is just a
short term trend:

Michelle DeSalvo’s daughter plans to go to college next
year. But her husband might need to take a pay cut just to
keep his job. So they’re trying to save money wherever
possible. That means no more shopping at the natural foods
store.

Michelle DeSalvo: “It’s definitely more expensive. You have
to go to things that are less expensive and natural is
definitely not that.”

Julie Grant: “So what has changed in your shopping habits?”

Michelle DeSalco: “I go to Wal-Mart. (laughs) Yeah, for
food. It’s cheaper.”

Not everyone is rushing to Wal-Mart.

Brenda Fisher says her family is struggling to pay for two
kids in college, and they’re looking for different ways to buy
food. She used to stop at the butcher shop at Whole Foods
– the national, natural foods supermarket. But not anymore.

“So I would buy their meats because their meats are
incredible. So um, I just can’t afford it. I would actually like
to buy a whole cow from a farmer, because they’re cheaper.
And I just have to get the money together.”

Okay, so not everyone wants to buy a cow. But a lot of
people are moving away from things that seem more
expensive – like natural and organic products.

In recent years, those foods have seen huge sales growth.
But as the economy has turned sour, so have their sales.
Whole Foods Store has seen a considerable sales drop at its
stores. And the company’s stock prices plunged more than
70% this year.

Nancy Koehn is professor of the history of retailing and
consumer behavior at the Harvard business school.
She says some people see upscale stores such as Whole
Foods as an indulgence – and that’s not what they’re
wanting.

“I think we will see, we are seeing, a rush away from a lot of
luxury right now.”

Koehn says that’s short term. She says consumers have
been floored by the tanking of the stock market and the
vulnerability of the financial systems. And they’ve done
something we haven’t seen in 25 years: they’ve stopped
buying.

But Koehn says this is just one moment. She says people
will walk back into stores. But they will have revised
priorities for their homes and families.

“There’s no way anyone’s coming out of this moment without
being effected by it. It’s a much more complicated story than
the rush to Wal-Mart.”

Koehn says natural foods stores, like Whole Foods, and
other environmentally-centered companies, are actually in
just the right place for the long term economic trend. When
consumers start buying again, she thinks, many will spend
money in places that are taking care of workers, animals,
and the environment.

“And I think we’re going to see that the same things that built
Whole Foods, that have made the environment and our
interconnectedness so important to people, and moved that
from item number 10 or 20 on people’s lists of important
issues up to the top 2 to 4. Those aren’t going away because
we’re in the trough of a business cycle.”

Koehn expects that many people will spend their holiday
money at big box discount stores. But she says many who
feel they’ve been treated badly in the economic downturn will
go back to the companies they think treat people and the
environment better.

Koehn expects that by early next year, companies that get
behind sustainable products will wind up being the economic
winners.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Getting More Out of Thanksgiving Dinner

  • A study by the University of Arizona estimates that the average household wastes about 14% of the food that’s bought (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

Thanksgiving is just around the
corner. A consumer expert says you can
avoid wasting a lot of food with just a
little planning. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

Thanksgiving is just around the
corner. A consumer expert says you can
avoid wasting a lot of food with just a
little planning. Lester Graham reports:

A study by the University of Arizona estimates that the average household wastes about
14% of the food that’s bought. Some of it spoils. Some of it becomes leftovers that
never get eaten.

Bob Lilienfeld is the author of the Use Less Stuff Report. He says you can keep a
couple of things in mind. If food is left on the serving platter, it can be re-used. If it
makes it to your plate and it’s not eaten, it’s wasted.

He also says, on Thanksgiving, plan for leftovers.

“Think, when you buy turkey, ‘What else does my family like turkey. Oh, they like soup.
They like chili.’ Buy the ingredients for the next round when you buy the turkey so that
everything is sitting in your home the day after Thanksgiving, and you’re wondering,
‘Alright, what am I going to do with this bird?’”

And, Lilienfeld says, label and date your leftovers. You’re more likely to use them
before they go bad.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links