Terrain » Winter 2003

Thirsty Monterey County Looks to the Sea

Alexa Dye — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:55:12 +0000

Monterey Bay is home to a dazzling array of marine life—from giant octopus to jellyfish. But on land, water is growing scarce. Facing diminishing fresh water supplies, residents are considering an option more common to desert countries like Saudi Arabia: desalination. If water officials and Cal-American Water have their way, the largest marine sanctuary in California may also become home to some of the state’s biggest desalination plants—and it won’t be alone. At least two dozen proposals for plants sit before local water boards and other regulatory agencies like the California Coastal Commission.
If approved, the new projects would signal a major shift in the state’s water policy. California now has nine low-capacity desalination plants, producing 3,100 acre-feet (AF) of desalted seawater annually. Less than a third is for household use, with the rest going to industrial applications. The current proposals would produce a whopping 220,000 AF per year, with all but 335 AF slotted for homes. (A household typically consumes one acre-foot per year.)
Some of the larger plants are proposed for Southern California, where the water business has always been lucrative. Controversial projects in Huntington Beach and Carlsbad would be the largest in the nation. But the bulk of the proposals target the 250-mile long Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary—ten in all. Together, they would produce about 15,000 AF of desalted seawater a year (or 13 million gallons daily), releasing roughly the same amount in high-salinity brine byproduct back into the sanctuary. The two largest are for the Monterey Peninsula; the other eight combined add up to under 5,000 AF.
Historically, desalination has been seen as prohibitively expensive, inefficient, and a little off the wall, but technological advances have made it increasingly affordable. Elaborate membranes and filters have been redesigned to work better and last twice as long, while other breakthroughs have made the process more energy-efficient. The process is looking more feasible to municipalities and water companies up and down the coast.
The Monterey Peninsula Water District has long struggled with insufficient sources of fresh water. Cal-American, the multinational that supplies the district’s water, has been diverting 66 percent more water than legally allotted from the Carmel River. After the state ordered the company to get a new water source, Cal-American and the Water District’s board filed competing applications for two different 10,000 AF desalination plants. Only one can be approved. Desalination is one way the town can guarantee a steady water source, says Kris Lindstrom of Monterey’s water board. “It’s going to be more expensive, but it will be under local control, in the public hands. If there’s a drought, people won’t have to sacrifice their gardens.”
But in an area like Monterey Bay, where growth has been capped by water scarcity, the idea of a “limitless” water supply creates its own controversy. And in places like Orange County, where growth has been largely unfettered, some wonder where it will stop. The Coastal Commission requires that desalination plants meet current needs only. But a plant’s capacity is easily expanded. “The fundamental problem with desalting the ocean is that it’s growth-inducing,” says Mark Massarra, of the Sierra Club’s Coastal Program.
In addition to fears of increased development and high energy demand, concerns have been raised about environmental impacts of desalination. Due to lack of experience with high-capacity plants, officials are unwilling to speculate on the environmental effects. Depending on the design, risks could range from destruction of the seabed to localized increase in water temperature and salinity. The disturbance of endangered species onshore is also possible.
“One of the problems with coastal desal plants is what they suck in and what they do with what comes out,” says the Sierra Club’s Dan Sullivan. When a plant pumps in seawater for treatment, the water runs through a series of grates and filters, trapping and killing organisms of all sizes. While some low-capacity plants have managed to decrease entrapment by burying their intake pipes under the seabed, no one’s figured out how to design larger capacity intake systems that won’t harm fish, marine larvae, and other organisms. The EPA estimates that trillions of ocean organisms are lost around the country each year to water-cooled power plants’ intake systems, which are similar to those of desalination plants.
Desalination also has an unwelcome byproduct—brine, a concentrate of salt, other minerals, and organic material. As part of the process, brine is pumped back into the sea. Anywhere from 1.5 to 3 times as salty as ambient seawater, brine is heavier and therefore difficult to diffuse into the ocean. With a constant feed, the outfall can create a plume of high salinity water that sits offshore, which may contribute to the growth of harmful algae blooms like red tide.
The plant Cal-American has proposed to serve the Monterey Peninsula would sit alongside California’s largest power plant at Moss Landing. The practice of siting desal facilities together with existing power plants, known as “co-location,” is widespread. Cal-American would tap Duke Energy’s massive cooling water supply, desalinate it with reverse osmosis, and send the brine byproduct back into the sea with wastewater from the plant’s cooling system. Some see this as encouraging an already destructive system. “Co-location is a method of artificially extending the lifespan of antiquated coastal power plants using once-through cooling, which is extremely destructive to marine life,” says Massarra.
While planners believe it easier to get co-located facilities approved, this may not be true for the Moss Landing proposal. The plant’s intake and outtake pipes jut into the mouth of Elkhorn Slough, at the apex of protected Monterey Submarine Canyon, home to many creatures, from delicate marine larvae to sharks and otters, that depend on minute shifts in salinity to survive in the slough.
Despite challenges to building an environmentally sound facility for the Monterey Peninsula, either at Moss Landing or elsewhere in the district, Lindstrom remains positive about the possibilities for desalination. “When it’s done right, we won’t be impacting the marine environment,” he says. “Getting an environmentally acceptable site, a subsurface system, and brine disposal that doesn’t damage the environment, these are pretty much the same issues with any desal plant. It’s not going to be easy, but if we get through it, it will be monumental.”
Of the projects proposed statewide, at least six are to be privately run, which raises concerns about corporate control of municipal water supplies. Once private companies take charge, critics warn, it’s a short leap to undermining community control of water and the environment. International trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA can protect privately owned desal plants from local and state environmental regulations the Coastal Commission is working hard to establish. “GATS, GATT, NAFTA and other so-called ‘free-trade’ agreements could end up being the tail that wags the planning dog,” says Massarra. “Or worse, they could nullify the Coastal Act and other California planning and environmental laws.”
Proposals will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis by the Coastal Commission, as well as at least 16 other regional, state, and federal agencies. The commission is scurrying to draft an in-depth report exploring desalination and making recommendations to the state legislature on guidelines and regulations. The commission’s draft report outlines serious environmental impacts like loss of marine life, destruction of habitats, and inducement to sprawl. A public comment period for the report is open until November 7

Unions and Organic Farmers Clash over Stoop Labor

Helen Christophi — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:53:25 +0000

Organic farmers and labor unions are squaring off in the state legislature in a battle farmers fear may threaten organic growing. Senate Bill 534, authored by Los Angeles Democrat Gloria Romero, outlaws weeding fields by hand and is meant to protect farm workers from spinal degeneration and other back injuries. The bill, supported by the United Farm Workers and the California Labor Federation, passed the state Senate this spring but was defeated in the Assembly in September. Supporters expect the bill to be reintroduced next session.
Proponents say the bill closes a loophole in a 1975 state Supreme Court ruling, also meant to reduce back injuries, that outlawed weeding with short-handled hoes. Weeding by hand quickly caught on after the ruling, but supporters contend that method is even more destructive, since it forces workers to bend even further. SB 534 requires workers to switch to long-handled hoes, eliminating bending altogether.
“This is a human rights issue,” says Romero staffer Kristine Guerrero. “We’d be outraged if we were subjected to unsafe, damaging work conditions. None of us would be at work with our keyboards to our knees.”
While acknowledging the bill’s good intentions, both organic and conventional farmers are fighting its passage. “I oppose this bill because of the damage it will do to organic farmers,” says Vanessa Bogenholm, board chair for California Certified Organic Farmers and owner of VB Farms, a 25-acre operation in Watsonville, where she grows strawberries, raspberries, and a variety of vegetables. “Weeds are always our largest problem, and hand weeding is our last resort.”
Many row crops are planted only a half-inch apart, and weeds grow in the row. Bogenholm and others say long-handled hoes would be impossible to use without damaging the crops. They believe herbicides would be the only way to control weeds if hand-weeding is prohibited.
Organic farmers, who can’t use herbicides, say they would be especially hard-hit, and some fear SB 534 could push them to conventional farming. “The cost to stay organic would be too much, and [organic farmers] would drop out of organic certification,” says CCOF’s Brian Sharpe.
Bill advocates argue that long-handled hoes are effective substitutes for hand-weeding. “Herbicide use will not increase,” argues the UFW’s Martha Guzman. “If you can use a short tool, you can almost always use a long tool.”
She insists SB 534 is essential to worker health and contends unions are struggling alongside organic farmers to reduce chemical use: “United Farm Workers has fought for over 40 years to eliminate pesticides, especially fumigants and carcinogens.”
Proponents amended the bill to exempt organic farmers for two years to give them time to alter their methods; organic growers would have until January 1, 2006 to comply with the new regulation. After that date, they could be exempted if they can prove that weeding with long-handled tools would damage crops.
But Vanessa Bogenholm says farmers would qualify for exemption only if they can prove “significant damage,” which the bill does not define. Bogenholm says assessing damage by a fixed rate doesn’t work: “For raspberries, significant damage is one plant,” she says, noting that raspberries are long-bearing perennials. “If I lose ten percent of my raspberry crop, I’m out of business.”
Not all farmers view the bill as a threat. Jim Cochran, owner of Swanton Berry Farm, says employee safety in the field is imperative: “We should acknowledge this issue and try to modify our work practices to accommodate worker health.” But he believes a compromise is necessary for certain crops. “It’s impossible to grow strawberries without hand-weeding,” he says. “After we plant them, we need to weed them two or three times, but it’s not something that happens all year long. We could live with some special provisions.” Cochran worries that a similar bill is looming regarding harvesting by hand, which involves just as much bending and is conducted over a period of months, not weeks.
Cynthia Rice of California Rural Legal Assistance insists a ban on stoop-labor harvesting isn’t next on the docket. “There is nothing I’m aware of in the legislative process that addresses stoop labor, and we monitor this. That has been [organic farmers’] hysterical opposition.”
“Just because [organic farmers] have better environmental practices does not mean they have better labor practices,” Guzman says. “The market for organic products is growing, but the social sustainability for the people providing the food is not.”

When It’s Ebola, NIMBY Makes Sense

Vanessa Gregory — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:53:03 +0000

UC Davis may one day house the Western National Center for Biodefense and Emerging Diseases and its Biosafety Level 4 labs, equipped to study deadly pathogens such as ebola, anthrax, and hantavirus. In February, the UC Regents submitted a proposal to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to build the $200 million research facility, and the university is a lead contender for funding. The plan has generated intense opposition from Davis residents and faculty concerned about safety, security, and the possibility of classified bioweapons research at the lab.
UC Davis Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw assured citizens: “The record shows that such facilities have operated safely in this country and around the world.” But security breaches at UC-managed Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National laboratories, the February escape of a monkey from UCD’s California National Primate Research Center, and the Department of Homeland Security takeover of a biocontainment laboratory in New York have heightened fears.
Samantha McCarthy, a ten-year Davis resident, says she’ll move her family if the lab is built. As a member of activist group Stop UCD Biolab Now, McCarthy is part of the opposition movement that convinced the Davis City Council and Senator Barbara Boxer to write letters urging NIAID to build the lab elsewhere. The letters reversed both the neutral stance of the City Council and Boxer’s previous support for the lab. “People do not want this thing, and we’ve made sure that voice is being heard,” says McCarthy. “This is unsafe for any community.”
But Andy Fell, UC Davis’ information rep, says what UC calls the “National Biocontainment Laboratory” will benefit Davis, California, and the nation. “There’s no Biosafety Level 4 lab west of the Mississippi,” says Fell. “If there is a major disease outbreak that overwhelms the capacity of the state health system to diagnose samples, it will provide extra capacity and more expertise in infectious diseases. And it will help to train the new generation of scientists who can work in this area.”
For many public health scientists, the facility is long overdue. “It’s of the utmost importance,” says Nicole Baumgarth, assistant professor at the UC Davis Center for Comparative Medicine. She worries about threats to public health from West Nile virus, SARS, and even influenza in a more pathogenic form. “It’s only in the wake of September 11th that people have realized how bad the public health infrastructure actually is.”
But faculty and residents say that the lab’s 9/11 link makes them especially nervous. “The proponents of the lab believe this will give them new facilities to do useful work in public health,” says John Roth, UC Davis professor of microbiology. “The less optimistic view is that this will be a biodefense lab to do classified research with high security.”
The Request for Proposals issued by NIAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) states that the labs will be built to “conduct research on pathogens that are considered to be of significant research importance for biodefense,” and allows the Department of Homeland Security to take over the lab in “emergency circumstances.” Opponents also contend that it gives NIH, not UC Davis, final authority over the research agenda.
In an April 17 open letter, UC Davis Vice Chancellor of Research Barry Klein wrote that UC Davis would control the facility, and that “there are no plans to perform classified research at the NBL or, for that matter, anywhere on campus.”
Roth and other faculty members linked the lab to the administration’s “war on terrorism,” and concluded, “it is highly unlikely that classified research could be avoided at such a facility. The lab’s explicit mandate and governance structure and the nature of UC and NIH policy all pave the way for classified research.” Says Roth, “Homeland security is bringing this money for, basically, biological warfare. And by putting it on campus they give it respectability.”
Representatives from NIH visited the campus on July 17, indicating continued interest. UC Davis’ existing veterinary, medical, and agricultural research laboratories and West Coast location make it a serious competitor. A final decision to award up to two contracts will be made this fall.
Activists aren’t waiting. On June 5, Stop UCD Biolab Now filed a lawsuit, claiming that the Regents failed to include adequate environmental reviews in the proposal. City Councilmember Mike Harrington has encouraged the City of Davis to consider a similar suit. “I would hope NIH is smart enough not to give something like this to the UC Regents,” says McCarthy. “But until I know that they’re not giving it to them, we’re not slowing down.”

Bush’s Bill Misses the Forest for the Trees

Vanessa Gregory — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:52:50 +0000

Using public lands in California and Oregon as a backdrop this August, President George W. Bush toured the West, stumping for his “Healthy Forests” initiative. “The worst thing that can happen to these old stands of timber are these fires,” Bush told an audience in Redmond, Oregon. But forest activists say the Healthy Forests initiative and the legislation at its center, the Healthy Forest Restoration Act, pose a far more serious threat to California forests than does fire.
“It would essentially give them the green light to go ahead and log anywhere in the name of fuels reduction and forest health,” says Christine Ambrose, a longtime Northern California forest activist working for American Lands, who fears the bill would significantly change the way California’s 20 million acres of National Forest are managed.
In May, the Healthy Forest Restoration Act sped through the House and may, in a slightly revised form, come up for a vote in late October. Bush says the initiative will expedite the thinning of forests, which he contends is stymied by foot-dragging litigation that endangers forest health and the safety of nearby communities.
But Northern California environmentalists say the initiative will limit their input in Forest Service-proposed projects like the Knob Timber sale. Located in a portion of the Klamath National Forest adjacent to the Marble Mountain Wilderness, the Knob Timber sale would open parts of the wild and scenic Salmon River’s watershed to logging. Coho and spring chinook salmon, summer steelhead, Pacific fisher, northern spotted owl, and northern goshawk call the area home.
Environmental Protection Information Center, the Klamath Forest Alliance, and the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center are challenging the sale. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act would restrict the process through which individuals and organizations participate in Forest Service decisions. It would also eliminate parts of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) so that the Forest Service and other government agencies would not have to consider alternatives for logging and road building, and it would put courts under strict deadlines when reviewing Forest Service projects.
“All it does is put out $400 million dollars for logging,” says the Wilderness Society’s Michael Francis. “It pretty much guts the NEPA process, and then it tells citizens that you really don’t have a right to vote or comment on these things, and if we go to court we’re going to put our thumbs on the scales of justice so you can never win.” The Knob Timber project is now on hold because environmentalists have sued. But Ambrose says sales in the same watershed are in the works, and without adequate recourse through the courts, environmentalists might not be able to stop them.
Francis and Ambrose doubt the plan will mandate the kind of thinning that might prevent catastrophic fires. They say the bill’s method of using private logging companies to carry out fuels reduction projects—and paying them with what is cleared—ensures that the plan won’t work. The Healthy Forest Restoration Act does not specify the removal of small trees and brush, nor does it exclude large-diameter trees from thinning projects.
Ambrose points to a photo of trees marked for cutting in the Knob Timber sale. “What the Forest Service should be targeting are those small trees in the back of the photo,” says Ambrose. “Instead what they’re doing is going in and targeting these last big ancient trees and saying that they need to get rid of them for fire risk.”
American Lands is encouraging support of an alternate bill, the Forestry Community Assistance Act (S. 1453), introduced by Senators Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer. The alternative focuses fuels reduction efforts in defensive zones around communities, leaves NEPA intact, and maintains the independence of the judiciary system. “There is an alternative,” says Ambrose. “We don’t have to let the Bush administration try and trick everyone with this fear of wildfire.”

Davis Bio-Lab Falls to Community Protest

Vanessa Gregory — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:51:31 +0000

The National Institutes of Health will not fund a Level 4 biodefense research facility at UC Davis. Community group Stop UCD Biolab Now and other opponents had cited risks of accidental release of pathogens such as anthrax, or a security breach, and claimed the lab’s research might include classified bioweapons work. UC denied that charge.
The institutions chosen to receive $120 million to build and operate the labs are Boston University Medical Center and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston. Citizens in Boston are suing under state environmental law, while on October 7, the Texas state attorney general denied a request by bioweapons watchdog Sunshine Project to make some of UTMB’s safety records public. Sunshine Project’s Edward Hammond notes, “Across the country we’re losing access to information, and at the same time more research is being conducted in secret or in quasi-secret. Now that it is clear where all of these facilities are going to be, we can move beyond the not-in-my-backyard and into the more serious business of…making sure that [these programs] do not engage in activities that are dangerous to the public or to US treaty compliance.”

Salvage Logging in Duncan Canyon?

Dan Engber — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:51:22 +0000

During the two weeks leading up to September 11, 2001, the Star Fire roared through steep canyons south of the Middle Fork of the American River in Placer County. The fire scorched more than 16,000 acres, including Duncan Canyon, a designated “Roadless” stretch of Tahoe National Forest. Home to huge sugar pines, incense cedars, and other old-growth conifers, the canyon is one of the last examples of pristine mid-level forest in the Sierra Nevada, and a critical habitat for spotted owls, northern goshawks, and even wolverines. Now the burnt-out trees of Duncan Canyon are the subject of a legal dispute over whether commercial loggers can enter protected lands in the name of fire safety.
In the aftermath of the fire, the Forest Service proposed to solicit bids for a private helicopter harvest of the canyon to reduce the risk of future fires. Opponents argue that logging-for-profit is inconsistent with forest health, as only the biggest, most valuable logs are removed, while the more flammable underbrush and small-diameter trees are left behind. Conservation groups contend that the loss of large dead trees would damage existing habitat and that a logging project might deprive Duncan Canyon of its protected status. Says Sierra Club attorney Aaron Isherwood, “When you’ve logged once, it’s easier to log again.”
If the Forest Service succeeds in promoting a harvest in Duncan Canyon, it will have widened a loophole in the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. This Clinton-era administrative order secures 58.5 million acres of undeveloped forest (or two percent of the United States) from commercial development, except under very special circumstances. A roadless area is subject to logging only when it “maintains or improves” the forest—by reducing hazardous fuels, for example, or restoring wildlife habitat—and only when the timber being removed is “of generally small diameter.” Whether the logging in Duncan Canyon fits these criteria is the central issue in a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club, the John Muir Project, and the Center for Biological Diversity. A legal outcome on what conservationists call “the loophole in the Roadless Rule” could have important consequences for commercial logging projects in roadless areas. “If a court were to rule that this logging is consistent with the Roadless Rule,” warns Isherwood, “it would potentially open the loophole in a way that was never intended.”
In July, a federal judge in Sacramento issued a temporary restraining order blocking the proposal. With the fast approach of winter snow, even this delay could mean de facto victory for the environmentalists. Rot and desiccation have already depreciated the lumber, and another season under snow would render it commercially worthless. “Even at this point in time,” says Rich Johnson, district forest ranger, “we might not get a bidder…and it wouldn’t be feasible to do it ourselves.” Environmental groups say they’ll push ahead with the lawsuit all the same. A decisive victory in the courtroom—in the form of an official ruling that logging would violate the Roadless Rule—would set a legal precedent and strengthen roadless protection throughout the country.

San Francisco Fights the Power

Alis Valencia — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:50:32 +0000

Last year, San Francisco set ambitious energy goals: seven megawatts (MW) of power were to be generated from renewable sources by 2004, and 50 MW by 2012. In 2001, voters approved Propositions B and H to fund solar power and conservation projects. But so far, the only project completed is a solar generator at Moscone Center, which produces 688 KW—just enough for the Center itself. Another solar installation is slated for the sewage treatment plant at Bayview Hunters Point. No plans for new wind projects have been announced, and a test of tidal power is in early planning stages. But recently, renewables have been overshadowed by a proposal to build a massive fossil-fuel power plant that could supply almost half the city’s needs. With energy in abundance, will renewables lose momentum?
Mirant Corporation has requested a license to expand its existing Potrero Hill gas-fired power plant into a $432 million behemoth to supply 540 MW of energy to any highest bidder. City officials have threatened to deny the facility its water and siting permits. They’d rather install four much smaller gas-plants, to run only at peak times.
Residents in Potrero Hill and nearby Bayview Hunters Point, having suffered through years of power plant pollution, are loath to see any new plants approved, especially a huge one, even if it replaces a few older facilities. “We’ve got toxic sites, a Navy shipyard, PG&E and the sewage treatment plant,” says Lynne Brown of Bayview Hunters Point. “We’re inundated with toxins—two freeways that are west of us; diesel trucks on Third Street; diesel buses in the community. It’s a never-ending saga.”
New natural gas plants won’t guarantee cheap energy: On October 14, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that San Franciscans would soon see energy bills rise 30 percent, thanks to increased demand for natural gas, which fuels most California power plants. That, renewables advocates say, is something the state should consider before it locks into another contract for natural gas. “Companies like Mirant say ‘We’re so much cheaper than solar,’ but then when you factor in the fuel costs, they’re much more expensive,” says Paul Fenn, who wrote Proposition H. That $432 million price tag, he notes, covers only hardware—so long as natural gas supplies vary, energy prices will be erratic.
Only renewable power sources can free the state from the volatile fossil fuels market, says Fenn, which is why it’s important to pursue alternative energy. “You have Dick Cheney saying ‘Solar is cute, but it’s not a real power source.’ And he’s right. It’s a boutique industry. We’re saying let’s do a $250 million investment in solar; $100 million in wind. Let’s produce not just 1MW in renewables here and there, but 50MW. Those are numbers energy companies will take seriously.”

Changing Currents

Alis Valencia — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:50:26 +0000

In May, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to allow a pilot project to generate power from the San Francisco Bay’s strong tides, the first such project in the nation. HydroVenturi, a London- and San Francisco-based company, is funding the estimated $3-million to $4-million cost and plans to recoup its investment through sale of power to the city. Unlike other technology designed to turn the flow of water into electricity, HydroVenturi’s has no moving parts. It uses a series of open pipes, placed at least 30 feet below the water’s surface, to capture tidal energy and drive on-shore air turbines. Possible sites for the project include Alcatraz Island and west or east of the Golden Gate Bridge. Environmental groups say they need much more information before they can evaluate the project’s impacts, especially on fish, plankton, and sediment. There may also be onshore effects at the turbines, substation and connection to the power grid. A tidal generation project in England has shown minimal effects on marine life, some of which can pass through the pipes unharmed. According to company projections, the cost, spread over 20 years, would be about seven cents per kilowatt hour, comparable to current PG&E rates. HydroVenturi aims to complete the EIR and permitting phase by 2005, and to be generating power by January 2007. If it works as predicted, says city energy specialist Peter O’Donnell, the tidal energy system could be generating 200–250 MW—close to one-half of current in-city power generation—by 2015.

Bulging at the Waste

Amy Standen — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:48:22 +0000

Stepping through the urban tumbleweed of paper, plastic water jugs, and shards of glass at the Berkeley recycling facility, you begin to see what these people are up against. On an average day, trucks will unload about 21 tons of would-be trash into a facility half the size of a football field. Then the sorting begins: Nine people work all day translating the mountains of refuse into marketable materials.
Americans generated over 230 million tons of waste in 2000. Of that, about 54 million tons were recycled, much of it set aside by residents, picked up in trucks, and processed through facilities like Berkeley’s. Another 16 tons were composted. But despite our best efforts, we’re clearly being outrun by garbage. The 160 million tons of garbage we sent to landfills that year will remain with us far longer than we imagine; elaborate (and often futile) technologies designed to discourage groundwater and air pollution have the paradoxical effect of allowing even the most transient garbage, like newspapers or hot dogs, to survive a decade or longer in a landfill. The trash we incinerate— about 20 million tons—may return in the form of cancer-causing dioxins and ash. Whatever we do with our waste, there is no such thing as throwing it “away.”
Like many popular environmental movements, modern recycling caught on around the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970. Most early efforts were drop-off stations for paper, cans, and bottles. Without city subsidies, proceeds couldn’t cover expenses; programs were volunteer-run to divert waste, not to make a profit. In 1973, the Ecology Center became one of the first community groups to do curbside pick-ups, beginning with a monthly newspaper collection. This year, the Center celebrates the 30th anniversary of one of the longest-running curbside programs in the country.
In the ’80s, the stench of garbage became hard to ignore. Landfills, most lacking seepage-preventing liners, had filled up. In 1987, the EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act set a deadline for the closure of small unlined landfills, forcing many out of business and driving up fees at others. The emblematic event of that decade was the 1987 voyage of the barge Mobro 4000, which cruised for seven months along the Atlantic seaboard, down into the Gulf of Mexico, through the Bahamas, and all the way back to Brooklyn carrying 3,299 tons of garbage no one would take. When the cargo was incinerated, it left 430 tons of ash in the Islip landfill.
To divert more recyclables from the waste stream, cities began funding curbside pick-up programs. This was a public relations boon for large garbage haulers and landfill operators like Waste Management Inc. and BFI, which already dominated the industry in many states. Both companies had spent much of the ’80s fighting antitrust and price-fixing allegations, including the ’87 grand jury conviction in what prosecutors called “the largest criminal antitrust case in California history.” BFI and WMI embraced the curbside programs as a way to spruce up their images, says Peter Anderson, who directs the Center for Competitive Waste Industry. By 1998, curbside programs had grown from a handful of community efforts to about 9,000 pick-up programs and 12,000 drop-off centers, by the EPA’s count.
During the ’90s, recycling became a national pastime. As schools across the country implanted the new three R’s—reduce, reuse, recycle—into the minds of the nation’s youth, letter-writing campaigns persuaded McDonald’s to discontinue its polystyrene packaging, and Coke to pledge 25 percent recycled content in its drink bottles (a promise it never kept, later settling for a 10 percent goal, which it has met in some products). In 1989, the EPA set a 25 percent goal for municipal recycling nationwide; over the next few years, a flurry of legislation promoted institutionalization of waste reduction. With the increase in curbside programs came consolidation of the industry: Waste Management, Inc. now dominates, with 20 million residential customers. The same company also operates the nation’s largest single share of landfills, as well as 16 trash incinerators. Both operations are more lucrative than recycling, leading some to charge that the company has little financial incentive to ramp up recycling efforts.
National recycling rates climbed from 14 percent in 1990 to an estimated 23 percent in 2000. The increase was especially dramatic in California, where, in 1989, Governor George Deukmejian signed AB 939, Senator Byron Scher’s landmark legislation requiring every county and city in California to divert 50 percent of its waste by 2000. According to one estimate by the editor of Resource Recycling, more Americans recycle than vote.
But the recycling movement seems to have reached a plateau. Between 1990 and 1995, Americans made a seven percent jump in recycling of household wastes like bottles, cans, and newspaper. But over the next five years, that rate increased less than two percent. Meanwhile, we generate almost exactly as much garbage as we did a decade ago: four and a half pounds a day each, by the EPA’s count. After a decade of waste reduction education, we’re still sending over three of those pounds to the landfill or the dump.
You could argue that recycling has actually worked against waste reduction. With the advent of recycling programs, particularly city-sponsored curbside pick-ups, consumers began looking to recyclers—rather than to Coke or McDonald’s—for solutions. If your program failed to pick up juice boxes, well, that was a problem with the curbside collector, not the juice box.
In 1994 Tri-CED recycling, a nonprofit curbside program, won an eight-year contract with the city of Hayward. Among the conditions was that Tri-CED pick up polystyrene, a virtually immortal plastic most people know as Styrofoam. “The city of Hayward made it a requirement when we bid on it,” explains Richard Valle, Tri-CED’s director. Encouraged by a fledgling polystyrene recycling facility, city officials were convinced residential polystyrene could have a second life as packing peanuts.
But the residential polystyrene Tri-CED collected came out of the same bin as other recyclables, and it was often contaminated with shards of glass. After a few months, the polystyrene facility began rejecting the bales, which left Tri-CED in a bind. “It had been conveyed to the customers that we picked [polystyrene] up from the inception of the program,” recalls Valle. “Residents had become accustomed to it.” Having told residents that polystyrene was recyclable, and holding out the hope that another polystyrene recycler might one day materialize, the city council was reluctant to take it off the pick-up list. So, every year, Tri-CED writes a letter to the Hayward city council requesting permission to landfill all the polystyrene it collects, and every year the city council complies. “We landfill about thirty 250-pound bales every six months,” Valle says.
It’s the kind of conundrum one faces in an industry where supply—not demand —is the starting point. City officials and residents may pressure their curbside programs to collect a broad array of materials as efficiently as possible, but it’s up to the operators to get the stuff recycled.
“There’s a misconception that the more kinds of things you pick up at the curb, the more advanced you are,” explains Dave Williamson, who runs curbside recycling for the Berkeley Ecology Center. In fact, picking up more materials may not result in more efficient recycling: “Juice boxes, multi-layered packaging, a lot of these are collected at the curb and they’re only really marginally recycled.” The more complex a product, the harder it is to isolate its recyclable parts. Similarly, a more complex load—like one containing newspaper, glossy magazines, and thick stock white office paper—is a far more expensive recycling project than, say, three separate piles of sorted paper. Enough of any one isolated material will find a buyer; the more mixed your load, the lower the price you’ll get.
Paper, one of the first materials to be recycled en masse, makes up the lion’s share—about 80 percent—of what residents and businesses put out for recycling. It’s also a big chunk of the waste stream: according to the EPA, most landfills contain about 40 percent paper. But not all papers are created equal. “I think people tend to believe that because things get picked up at curbside, [the paper they buy] has recycled content,” says Sue Kinsella, director of Conservatree. “They don’t know that putting newsprint out doesn’t translate into office paper.” Only a small percentage of office paper on the market contains post-consumer recycled content, despite the approximately 600,000 tons of office paper that get recycled each year (about half of what’s used in offices). A mixed paper load is more likely to “downcycle,” to come back as something less valuable and less recyclable than its first incarnation. This is an argument many operators make against single-streaming (see page 16), which further complicates sorting by allowing residents to combine paper with other recyclables.
While recycled aluminum and glass reliably make it back to grocery store shelves, the plastic you put on the curb faces an even messier future than paper: plastic bottles, which most curbside programs now collect, most often reincarnate not as bottles, but as synthetic fleece and plastic lumber—none of which is, in turn, recyclable. Almost every plastic juice bottle on the market is made primarily from virgin plastic (see page 20), thus representing all the environmental and human health costs of a petroleum-based, non-biodegradable product. “There’s only so much you can do with reused plastics,” says Bob Besso, who runs San Francisco’s curbside program for Sunset Scavenger. “And once it’s recycled, it’s not like it’s coming back in the same form, like tin or aluminum containers do.”
That’s a bitter pill to swallow for curbside operators like Williamson, who has watched plastic bottles replace recyclables like glass and aluminum over the years. At the Berkeley recycling facility, he and I watched as a team of sorters worked the conveyer belt. At the start of the line two men, their hands a blur, weeded garbage or “residuals” out of the line. Next busiest was the plastics guy who quickly diverted plastic bottles—anything with a 1 or 2 and a base wider than its neck—into a chute by his side. To his right, a revolving magnet pulled the tin cans, with an occasional BANG… BANG…BANG. Near the end of the line, just before the eddy separator sucks up aluminum cans, a glass sorter leisurely pulled out a bottle here and there. Ten years ago, says Williamson, that glass sorter would have been the busiest guy on the line. “The future is plastics!” he jibes.
For a long time, the Ecology Center curbside operators resisted adding plastics to the pick-up, in the belief that collecting plastics gave the false impression that they were recyclable. But eventually, residents’ demand prevailed. “Refusing to take plastics didn’t get people to stop buying them,” recalls recycling consultant Ruth Abbe. “They just got pissed off.” Berkeley still collects only #1 and #2, a picky operation compared to San Francisco’s, where operators collect the full range of plastic bottles labeled one through seven, even though some of those breeds will never have another life: Polystyrene (#6) is difficult to find a market for, and PVC (#3) is so toxic that recycling it, while technically feasible, is considered hazardous to human health.
Professional recyclers like Williamson and San Francisco’s Bob Besso may laud new municipal composting programs, for example, or argue the virtues or evils of single-streaming, but all agree that recycling, for most materials, is hardly a solution. “Recycling is a last chance,” says Besso. “It’s not something you should bank on.”
Since AB 939 became law, nearly every city and county in California has met the 50 percent waste reduction mandate. San Francisco and Berkeley claim 51 percent diversion, Los Angeles, 60 percent, and the Humboldt town of Blue Lake (pop. 1,160), 91 percent. Creative accounting helps: thrift shop drop-offs qualify as diversion, as do yard sales and—most gallingly to many environmentalists—“waste to energy” plants, or incinerators (see page 24). Many cities are taking the diversion mandate much farther. Alameda and San Francisco have both set 75 percent waste reduction goal for 2010 and a 100 percent “zero-waste” goal for 2020.
Meanwhile, some cities, like Mayor Bloomberg’s New York, have cut curbside programs altogether, claiming they’re simply too expensive to sustain. Bloomberg’s right, to a certain skewed logic: It’s still cheaper to dump garbage into a landfill than to reuse or recycle it. But that calculation fails to consider the enormous costs that a throw-away culture incurs along the way. Recycling an aluminum can takes 96 percent less energy than making a can from virgin aluminum. Making water bottles of virgin plastic requires four to eight times the energy of a recycled plastic bottle. Whether it’s bauxite mining (for aluminum cans) or petroleum processing (for plastic containers), water use, water and air pollution, and other environmental costs of producing materials from scratch make recycling look cheap.
In San Francisco, city officials are considering making recycling mandatory with fines for households and businesses that don’t recycle, combined with enforcement to help the city meet its goals. But zero waste is nothing more than a pipe dream as long as residents continue to purchase and dispose of non-recyclable, non-reusable goods. “There shouldn’t be anything on the market that’s unrecyclable,” says Besso.
The real responsibility to close the loop, zero-waste proponents argue, belongs with the manufacturer. Bill Sheehan, founder of the GrassRoots Recycling Network and the grandfather of the “zero-waste” movement, has long argued that until manufacturers feel the pressure to dispose of their products, there will be no end to landfills—that waste, essentially, is a problem of design. “Recycling could be self-sustaining if manufacturers made things that were recyclable,” says Sheehan, who recently left the GRRN to found a new organization focused on consumption and production policy, called the Product Project. “Instead, the recycling industry constantly has to keep up with new materials that make municipal recycling almost impossible. It makes you crazy. As long as the taxpayer pays to dispose of product waste [the packaging and consumer goods that compose 75 percent of consumer waste], there’s no incentive to make things less toxic, less overpackaged. It’s like welfare for corporations.”
“Extended producer responsibility” is already mainstream in Europe, where programs like Germany’s Green Dot system force manufacturers to either take back their packaging or contribute to the national recycling program on the basis of how much packaging they produce. The incentive seems to have worked: according to one study, 80 percent of German manufacturers moved to “optimize” packaging in the first two years of the program.
Here, California and eight other states require newspaper to contain some percentage of post-consumer recycled content. Most recently, Governor Gray Davis signed California’s SB 20, which targets high-tech waste (see page 21). It’s a start, says Sheehan, at getting manufacturers to reclaim products at the end of their lives. “You don’t want to take back a computer monitor with nine pounds of lead?” jokes Sheehan. “Well, hello! Welcome to the real world of what municipalities have been dealing with for decades.”

Separation Anxiety

Linnea Due — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 06:44:22 +0000

One-compartment trucks zoom through neighborhoods, emptying big blue bins full of recyclables. No sorting required—residents stuff all their paper, glass, and cans into the same bin. Northern California counties that switched to collecting combined recyclables, called single-stream, have seen their tonnage increase by an average of 30 percent—some cities, like Sonoma County’s Windsor, recorded a jump of 70 percent.
The method, pioneered in Southern California in the late ’80s, comes with another plus: it costs less. According to sorting equipment manufacturer Erik H. Eenkema van Dijk, during Sacramento’s trial program, collection man-hours were reduced by nearly half and total annual costs dropped 10 percent. Los Angeles cut its collection costs by a quarter while diversion rates went up 140 percent. To cash-strapped cities trying to meet the state-mandated waste reduction rate of 50 percent, single-streaming is a boon. And since the mid-’90s, the stream has become a flood: in California, most large cities have switched to single-stream or are in the process of switching.
Downstream, the picture is not so rosy.
Paper represents from 70 to 80 percent of recycling tonnage—and unlike plastics, it can be reused eight to ten times over as office paper, tissue, or packaging. But in a single-stream system, broken glass often becomes mixed in with the paper. Shards can injure workers at sorting stations or at paper mills that handle recycled paper; pieces of glass as fine as sand can lodge in sensitive gears in mill machines. Some mills have stopped accepting recycled paper from municipalities that use single-stream collection, while others buy only from cities whose sorting systems produce the cleanest bales.
In a March 2003 study of single-streaming conducted by San Francisco-based paper recycling advocacy group Conservatree, executive director Susan Kinsella writes, “Single-stream collection requires us to rethink why we’re recycling at all.” She was surprised at the extent collectors and cities, faced with growing pressure to divert more residential waste away from landfills, dismiss problems at paper mills: “Over and over, local government people told us, ‘Diversion is the only thing that matters to us.’” Kinsella contends that collectors made a unilateral decision. “Many seem to no longer be concerned about the fact that it’s not working for many of the manufacturers nor for producing a significant segment of high quality recycled products that purchasers would trust.” Kinsella says, “I understand diversion to be a strategy. But what’s happened is that it’s become the only goal.”
Diversion rates can play tricks. Kinsella’s report says that Canadian and US mill representatives complain that up to 20 percent of single-streamed paper is so contaminated it ends up in a dump. When Eureka Recycling in St. Paul, Minnesota, conducted a study in 2001, the company found that 1 to 5 percent of source-separated material had to be dumped, versus 15 to 27 percent of single-stream material.
Much of the West Coast’s paper is sold to mills in China. Newer Chinese mills don’t have sorting lines where glass is removed by hand, and manufacturers there are disturbed enough by the increase in glass-contaminated paper from the US that they’ve increased purchases of lower-grade fiber from Japan.
Yet switching to single-stream often permits collection of other classes of materials. “We’re co-collecting garbage and recyclables in a split truck,” says San Francisco recycling program manager Bob Besso. “In the second truck, we collect food waste and yard waste. So we’ve put two trucks back on, but we’re collecting three streams instead of two.” Besso says the primary motivation for switching was to raise the diversion rate, which has gone up 20 percent. “We’ve exceeded 50 percent, but San Francisco has a 75 percent goal for 2010 and 100 percent by 2020.” Most of the increase was in organics, of which Besso’s food-waste collection is the first in the nation—some 300 tons of food scraps daily are turned into finished compost sold to golf courses, farms, and vineyards.
Kinsella, who attended a September paper industry convention in Washington, DC, says mill operators are grudgingly accepting that they must change their own process to deal with single-streamed bales. But Kinsella advocates adding two more streams to single-stream: glass and office paper, which loses much of its recyclability when mixed with other paper. She notes that there is equipment that can sort out grades of paper, but it’s costly: “Why would you mix it up and pay more to separate it when it should have started out separated to begin with?”