Tag: recyclable

The Price of Recyclables

  • 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.

For The Environment Report, I’m Amy Standen.

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Sending a City’s Garbage Up in Flames

  • Michigan Waste Energy Chief Engineer Brad Laesser checks the cameras and emissions data at Detroit's incinerator. (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.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sarah Hulett.

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San Francisco Makes Composting Mandatory

  • San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signs mandatory composting into law (Photo courtesy of the Press Office of Mayor Newsom)

San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:

Transcript

San Francisco already leads the
nation in recycling. Now, that
city has the first mandatory
composting law in the country.
Emily Wilson reports that’s got
some people worried about “garbage
cops”:

Putting recyclables into the blue bin is second nature for people in San Francisco.

But this new law now means also putting coffee grounds and eggshells into a green bin.

There are some people who are concerned about Big Brother looking through their garbage. And then there’s the $100 fine.

Mark Westlund at the Department of the Environment says ‘no worries.’ Not much is going to change.

“Well, we get a lot of calls from people who are worried about garbage cops and that frankly is not going to happen. For years now we’ve been looking in peoples recycling to make sure they’re doing it correctly and if not, they get a tag and if they continue misusing it, they get a letter and a follow up call and then a visit.”

So there are warnings before the fine.

Cities across the country will be watching San Francisco’s mandatory composting law to see how it goes.

For The Environment Report, I’m Emily Wilson.

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Looking for Answers at the Dump

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

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

Transcript

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

(sound of trucks beeping)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

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

(BOOM)

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

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

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For The Environment Report, I’m Michael Rhee.

Related Links

Cradle to Cradle Design

  • Used resources can be remade into all kinds of things. These street signs were made into switchplates. (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

The people who make everyday items – from cars to chairs to cell phones – attractive and functional are called industrial designers. Now a new generation of industrial designers is learning how to create products that are environmentally friendly as well. That makes their jobs a bit more challenging. Ann Dornfeld reports:

Transcript

The people who make everyday items – from cars to chairs to cell phones – attractive and functional are called industrial designers. Now a new generation of industrial designers is learning how to create products that are environmentally friendly as well. That makes their jobs a bit more challenging. Ann Dornfeld reports:


A lot of the things you buy have a pretty limited life cycle. Think about it. Before you buy a product, it uses up raw materials, then you use it for a while, then it ends up in a garbage dump. But that doesn’t have to be its fate.


A group of industrial design students at Western Washington University was given this challenge: create attractive, useful products that are also completely recyclable, reusable or biodegradable. On top of that, they had to use waste that would have ended up in the dump.


Rachel Bjarnasson explains what’s known as “closed-loop” design:


“Instead of a product life cycle and a designer’s job ending with that product when the product is at the end of its useful life, that that is just a new material that can be reused and turned into a new product.”


This sustainable design principle has caught on in Europe. There, household appliance manufacturers are required to take back old dishwashers and clothes dryers to reuse their components. U.S. factories are adopting closed-loop systems, too, as a way to save money on raw materials and benefit the environment.


One of the first lessons the students learned was that in closed-loop design, it’s not enough to use recyclable materials. You have to think about how you attach one material to another.


“If you have a recyclable material like an aluminum bonded to a plastic that’s non-recyclable, suddenly the recyclable component is no longer recyclable.”


Bjarnasson says they had to avoid using strong glues for that reason. And also because the adhesives can release toxic fumes.


The students also had to figure out where to get their raw materials.


Seth Tucker wanted to make bracelets out of disposable chopsticks.


“I found that between Japan and China, one billion pairs of chopsticks are thrown away every year. They’re taking down whole forests just for chopsticks!”


He asked local Asian restaurants whether he could install chopsticks recycling bins to collect enough for his project.


“Some restaurants, it was kinda funny, they gave me this kinda look like ‘you’re crazy, I would never give you used chopsticks.’ But it was really cool, ’cause other places were like, ‘oh yeah, totally, we’re definitely cool with the idea.'”


Tucker sanitized the chopsticks he’d collected, cut them into pieces and sandblasted them into what look like little driftwood beads. He strung them into bracelets along with natural turquoise and antique African trade beads.


One student turned newsprint into biodegradable flower pots.


Another made used-up retail gift cards into colorful luggage tags.


Rachel Bjarnasson challenged herself to use fabric scraps that she usually throws away in her job as a seamstress. She stitched strips of silk into baby booties, and lined them with scraps of fleece she got from a local glove manufacturer. Then she cushioned the soles with leftover carpet padding from a flooring company.


“And so all of this was materials that would’ve been thrown out, and I turned them into little striped baby booties.”


Several stores agreed to carry the products. One of them was Goods for the Planet in Seattle. Suzanne O’Shea is the co-owner.


“We were thrilled to do it because one of our goals is to find products as close to home as possible and support the local economy.”


The students’ products were a hit with her customers. O’Shea says some even sold out right away – like the chopsticks bracelets.


And sushi rollers made from stainless steel bicycle spokes flew off the shelves.


“And a lot of chefs that have come in and people that make sushi at home have really been impressed by this design because it has more weight than the standard bamboo sushi rollers.”


And that’s the idea. Student Rachel Bjarnasson says they learned the ideal sustainable product is at least as attractive and useful as the competition.


“You still need to make a product that looks beautiful and has good tactile sensation and is something that people ultimately want to buy. Even if it has the best of intentions in saving the environment, it won’t do its job if it’s not something that people want or need.”


The students say they’ll try to integrate the closed-loop design principles they’ve learned into all of their future products. They don’t want anything they design to ever end up in the trash.


For the Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

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Drumming Up a Green Outlook

  • The Junkyard Symphony warms the crowd with their beats. They say recycling even a little goes a long way. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

It takes a keen eye to see the value in an old hubcap, a dented bucket or a broken bicycle horn. But when you’re searching for musical instruments, the junkyard can be an inspiration. Karen Kelly has the story:

Transcript

It takes a keen eye to see the value in an old hubcap, a dented bucket or a broken bicycle horn. But when you’re searching for musical instruments, the junkyard can be an inspiration. Karen Kelly has the story:

It’s a winter weekend festival in Ottawa, Canada and it’s freezing. And there are a few things you can count on – ice skating, ice sculptures, maple taffy… but bongo drums?

(sound of drums fades in)

As you make your way along a crowded path, you catch sight of the band, and you realize…these guys aren’t playing bongos.


They’re playing on recycling bins. And they’ve got paint buckets hanging on either side of them. Those bottle caps taped to the top turn them into snare drums. And there are PVC pipes sticking out of the bin with metal bowls on top. Those would be the cymbals. And – believe it or not – they sound really good.

(drumming)

They’re called Junkyard Symphony.

Two guys, dressed in khaki-green jumpsuits, playing on instruments they made themselves. Jonny Olsen is the founder of Junkyard Symphony.

“Usually, what I do is go to the junkyard and look through the stuff and take my stick and bang on stuff and experiment with different sounds. I get a lot of ideas for bits in the show just from the props that we find. Just use your imagination, basically.”

Like a beat-up Cheer detergent box. During the show, Olsen picks a little kid out of the audience to hold that box up in the air. And the audience does what it’s told.

(Olsen leads crowd in cheering)

Olsen started Junkyard Symphony about 20 years ago, when he was in high school. But what started as an Earth Day project became a summer job that put him through college. After graduation, he tried to stop, but couldn’t.

“Once I was done, I had so many people calling for the show, and I’ve never really been able to stop it, beacuse I’ve had so many people calling. I wasn’t able to move on to anything else. They wouldn’t let me.” (laughs)


What really gets the audience going are the tricks. There are plungers juggled between the legs. And the audience is invited to throw tennis balls at a tube attached to Olsen’s forehead.


One of Olsen’s favorite tricks is to place a kid on top of a milk crate, hands together, straight up over their head. The drum rolls, along with hundreds of mittens.

The kid’s looking nervous, and Olsen – standing behind him – starts tossing hula hoops at him. Kind of like human horseshoes.


That’s what attracts people like Joe Vinchec on a freezing cold day.

“I find them very creative and hilarious, actually. Quite funny.”


Olsen says he’s got three goals for his show. He wants to expand it beyond Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto – where they play now.


He wants people to have fun.


And he wants people to think about reusing and recycling.


Some people have said he should move on to bigger issues, like climate change. Recycling is old news. But in Ottawa, where Olsen lives – and in many other cities – they’re running out of space for their garbage.


That’s why he argues everyday actions do matter.


“Every little thing you do adds up. Like when we first started Junkyard Symphony, we made our money on the street, by someone chucking in a quarter and eventually, all those quarters added up to my tuition. So if everybody just did little things, it would add up to having a cleaner environment.”


(sound back up)


Olsen blows into a homemade didgeridoo, and aims it at the nearest kid. (audience laughs)

It’s the traditional Australian instrument, but this one is made from a long piece of PVC piping.


Olsen doesn’t talk much during his show. And he definitely doesn’t preach. He believes if you inspire positive feelings – if you get them to laugh – you’re more likely to inspire people to take positive action, as well.

For the Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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Business Trash Audits

  • Plant manager of Anheuser-Busch points out the plastic labels of the beer bottles now being recycled. (Photo by Karen Kasler)

Chain restaurants and retailers often test
their latest services and products in Columbus, Ohio
before launching them nationwide. It’s one of the
nation’s big test markets. But ‘going green’ is not
a trend that’s going well. Karen Kasler reports
recycling rates are well below the national average.
But businesses in this key market are beginning to
show more interest:

Transcript

Chain restaurants and retailers often test
their latest services and products in Columbus, Ohio
before launching them nationwide. It’s one of the
nation’s big test markets. But ‘going green’ is not
a trend that’s going well. Karen Kasler reports
recycling rates are well below the national average.
But businesses in this key market are beginning to
show more interest:


Columbus often bills itself as the nation’s test market. It’s demographics are seen as a reflection
of the nation as a whole. But this national test market is not at the front of the curve when it
comes recycling and other ‘green practices.’ For example, many companies around the country
have going green in the last few years, but businesses in Columbus are just starting to test the
waters.


John Remy works for SWACO, the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio It operates the area’s
landfill. Remy has only recently noticed a sudden jump in the number of calls he’s getting every
day:


“The boss wants the business to go green, and so the employees are left to, how do I go
green? And so they call us and want to know, how do I go green? And how do I do it five
minutes before I called you?”


SWACO advises businesses to audit their waste — to dig into trash cans and dumpsters and see
how much paper, plastic, glass, cardboard, food and other material is there and can be
recycled. Some big corporations were already working on that. Columbus’ Anheuser-Busch
brewery is one of big brewer’s 12 plants nationwide. Plant manager Kevin Lee says “green beer”
is not just a St. Patrick’s Day thing here. He says it’s a way of doing business, from the way the
bottles are labeled:



“The backing off of these labels that are applied onto the Bud Light bottle, we recycle the
backing, and there was approximately 66,000 miles of backing a year that is plastic
backing that’s recycled.”


To the cans that fall off the filling lines and end up in hoppers:


“And we send those cans back to a recycling area where the cans are crushed, they’re
sent for aluminum recycling purposes…”


Lee says the idea is to save money and cut down on trash:


“Everything that is consumed off the line, whether it’s the waste beer or the
waste cans or the waste bottles or cardboard, we want to take those materials, treat them
or recycle them, so that we reduce our demand on the environment certainly, reduce our
costs, and that allows us to be the most responsible manufacturer we can be.”


Multi-million dollar automated operations can afford to smoothly snap new green technology
into their production lines, but it’s a little more hands-on in smaller companies and in non-profit
organizations.


Catholic priest David Gwinner did things the old-fashioned way at St. Paul’s parish just north of
Columbus. He stands by one of two eight-cubic-yard recycling bins outside the church offices.
And he says he started by sorting the trash on his own:


“Many days I would take the recycling, separate it and take it in my car.
Yes, in my Oldsmobile sitting over there and my dog, Margaret. And it started to be two,
three trips a day.”


After a few months of dumpster diving, Gwinner decided to organize the St. Paul’s staff in a
recycling effort. In the last year, Gwinner says everyone has gotten in on it – workers in the
administrative offices, guests in the meeting rooms, and the thousand kids in the school. Now,
the trash dumpsters are emptied three times a week instead of every day, which Gwinner says
has saved the parish 2,400 dollars over the last year. But Gwinner says it’s about more
than money. He’s preaching that this is a “partnership with creation,” and now his mission is to
get that message out to his 12,000 parishioners, many of whom own businesses:


“And if they had one or two or three pounds a day, times 12,000, times 365 days a year.
That tells the story of how huge… it’s a million tons a year that SWACO is receiving that’s
going into the ground. And they believe that a great percent of that is recyclable.”


A study a few years ago concluded 60 percent of commercial and residential trash is
recyclable, with paper and plastics the most common things thrown away. But even as
businesses are trying to take their bottom lines to zero when it comes to waste, their employees
may not be taking that attitude home. 88 percent of people in this test market town don’t
recycle. That number is nearly four times the stat from a recent Harris poll which shows the
national non-recycling average is 23 percent.


For the Environment Report, I’m Karen Kasler.

Related Links

Usps Earth-Friendly Packaging

  • The Postal Service is launching a program to use more recycled and environmentally-friendly materials in its packaging. (photo by Lester Graham)

The US Postal Service says it has made its packaging materials more
environmentally friendly. Rebecca Williams reports the Post Office
says the packaging uses fewer resources and is more easily recyclable:

Transcript

The US Postal Service says it has made its packaging materials more
environmentally friendly. Rebecca Williams reports the Post Office
says the packaging uses fewer resources and is more easily recyclable:


The Postal Service delivers hundreds of millions of boxes and envelopes
a year. The Service worked with a consulting firm to redesign the
packages, down to the inks and adhesives.


Anita Bizzotto is the chief marketing officer for the Postal Service:


“It was actually quite a big undertaking – we worked with 10 vendors,
200 suppliers and we evaluated 1400 individual ingredients and all
component materials of packaging products.”


But some critics of the Postal Service say the agency still has a way
to go. They want the Postal Service to stop promoting advertising
mail… you might call it junk mail. All those flyers and catalogs are
the Service’s second largest source of revenue.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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City Votes to Reduce Toxic Chemicals

  • Purchases and disposal of many common office supplies can lead to toxic chemicals escaping into the environment. The City of Buffalo has found a way to curb some of this leaching.

Buffalo has become the first city in the Great Lakes region
to pass a law aimed at curbing the amount of toxic chemicals entering the environment. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak reports… officials hope to accomplish this goal by changing their buying habits:

Transcript

Buffalo has become the first city in the Great Lakes region to pass a law aimed at curbing the amount of toxic chemicals entering the environment. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Joyce Kryszak reports, officials hope to accomplish this goal by changing their buying habits:


Every day, cities buy tons of office supplies and other products containing toxic chemicals. When these products are discarded, they eventually break down and sometimes leach toxins into the soil and water. The City of Buffalo recently adopted a policy to reduce purchasing of products containing Persistent Bio-Accumulative Toxins, or PBTs. But the decision could put more fiscal strain on a city that’s already in crisis. University at Buffalo Chemistry Professor Joe Gardella helped push for the law. He says a university study convinced the city it could both be fiscally and environmentally responsible.


“It doesn’t create additional exprenses, and, in fact, if one takes a long-term view of the fiscal impact, especially on the issue of creating markets for the recyclables that you’re trying to sell, there can be some really solid benefits to this,” said Gardella.


Under the new law, officials can only pay ten percent more for an alternative product. They say other costs will be reduced by eliminating some unneccessary purchases.


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

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Riders Pay With Recyclables

The city of Seymour, Indiana had two problems: it’s low-income residents
needed public transportation, and like most cities across the nation, it
needed to reduce the amount of waste heading to landfills. Working with
state and federal government agencies, the city solved both problems,
with one solution never before tried in any U-S city: a public bus that
accepts recyclables as fare. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Janet
Babin reports: