WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ARCHIVE   BACK TO ARCHIVE INDEX

02 Mar 01 - tuna pouches; zero waste; demolition reuse; the demise of repair ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- The first three postings are in response to the 2/28/00 posting about Tuna in a Pouch, a new product from Bumble Bee Seafoods. -------------------- From Steve Engel, Metro, Portland, OR: Regarding Bumble Bee moving from cans to plastic pouches for its tuna packaging: Energy-wise, metal and glass are much more resource-heavy than plastics: multiple furnace days at 2500-3000 degrees to make a can or bottle, and then you only recycle 50 percent of those containers. So of course recycling cans and bottles saves a lot of energy; they CONTAIN a lot of energy. (Not to mention the extraction impacts.) But the 50 percent of cans and bottles the public tosses (and it may be higher for smelly fish cans) represents a huge waste. Sorry to be counter-conventional wisdom here, but plastics generally are made from natural gas or oil fractionation by-products, and packages are formed (notwithstanding the energy used to make the polymers) at 400-600 degrees. The only concerns I have about this switch are that (1) I don't like the ability of plastics to preserve nutritional value for any length of time; and (2) I don't like the recent findings that oils and fatty acids can leach unpleasant plasticizers and vinyl chlorides - if indeed that's the type of plastics Bumble Bee will use. E-mail: Engels [AT] metro [DOT] dst [DOT] or [DOT] us ----------------- From Tony Kingsbury, Dow Plastics, Midland, MI: I remember from work done by Bob Lilienfeld of the Use Less Stuff Report a few years ago that flexible pouches were very resource-efficient packages and that steel cans would have to be recycled at 80-plus percent in order to be as resource efficient, assuming all the pouches are disposed of in a landfill. Thus, from an environmental standpoint, the pouches are a great example of true source reduction. However, from a cost standpoint, they will not likely be a huge market success, in my opinion. E-mail: rakingsbury ( AT ) dow ( DOT ) com ----------------- Excerpted from a message from Blair Pollock, Chapel Hill Solid Waste Management Department, Chapel Hill, NC: TUNA CANS VS. POUCHES If there is any analogous analysis that can be transferred from vacuum foil coffee pouches vs. coffee cans, it would be this: Carrying the same amount of product, the coffee pouches, while not recyclable, were analyzed to produce less net new waste per unit of product delivered, and less net energy (from one study I recollect, but cannot cite). But, with the tuna pouch, the kitty cats at home miss out on all the tuna juice drainings for their dry food! Mine would really miss that, whether water or oil. E-mail: bpollock [ AT ] co [ DOT ] orange [ DOT ] nc [ DOT ] us ----------------- Link to the cover story in the March/April 2001 E Magazine, written by Jim Motavalli (forwarded by Erv Sandlin): ZERO WASTE No Longer Content to Just Recycle Waste, Environmentalists Want Us to Reduce it to Nothing http://www.emagazine.com/march-april_2001/0301feat1.html ----------------- The next three postings are in response to the 2/28/01 posting asking for ideas for salvaging demolition materials for reuse, after an earthquake. ----------------- From Judy Crockett, Solid Waste and Recycling, City of Portland, OR: Free brick piles were extraordinarily successful when we were doing demolition of a city block in downtown Salem. Folks showed up with trucks and carted away tons (literally) of old bricks, and the paper did several nice stories about what they (re)used them for. E-mail: JudyC ( AT ) BES ( DOT ) CI ( DOT ) PORTLAND ( DOT ) OR ( DOT ) US ----------------- From David Allaway, Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, Solid Waste Policy and Program Development, Portland, OR: I worked on a demolition of 7 buildings in an entire city block in downtown Salem, Oregon. Several of the buildings were of brick construction. There was no deconstruction in the traditional sense; other than some pre-demolition salvage of doors, etc., and removal of some very large timbers, almost everything was demolished with heavy demolition equipment. On several of the buildings (but not all), the demolition contractor was able to demolish the building in such a way that many bricks were kept separate from mixed demolition debris. (Other bricks were mixed in with mixed rubble.) The separated bricks were then pushed into a pile on a side of the block. The pile was fenced off from the rest of the demolition site and opened to the public as "The Great Brick Giveaway." This was done on several occasions over a month or so. The Giveaway was tremendously popular and generated lots of good press. There were even a few sentimental stories that came out of it, like an elderly man who had been married in one of the buildings 50 years ago, and asked for one of the bricks. The bricks were removed by the public (at no cost to the contractor) very quickly. The contractor estimates that more than 600 tons of brick were reused in this manner. This was all done in the downtown of Salem, not super-high density like Seattle, but not a "neighborhood or rural" area either. I've also heard (although I haven't confirmed this) that there is a small brick building that is in the process of being demolished in downtown Portland. A contractor is supposedly salvaging the bricks, scraping off the mortar, palletizing them (I assume), and shipping them off-site for resale (I don't know where). Again, I haven't confirmed this so I don't know the details, but if it's true, it suggests that high-value brick reuse/salvage is possible (and presumably cost effective) even in a high-density downtown area. E-mail: ALLAWAY ( D O T ) David ( A T ) deq ( D O T ) state ( D O T ) or ( D O T ) us ----------------- From Ken Sandler, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): EPA developed a guide called "Planning for Disaster Debris" a few years back. It includes case studies of cities that have previously dealt with natural disasters and may spark some good ideas. It's on the web at: http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/disaster.htm E-mail: Sandler [ D O T ] Ken [ A T ] epamail [ D O T ] epa [ D O T ] gov ------------------ Excerpted from a short article by James Surowiecki in the 3/5/01 New Yorker magazine: FAREWELL TO MR. FIX-IT Across the nation, Mr. Fix-It is going the way of the ragman. By some accounts, only a fifth of the repair shops that were open 15 years ago are around today. Even the computer-service business is slow, as evidenced by PC Service Source's descent, last year, into Chapter 11. In the good old days, the repair trade was a business where you were guaranteed a steady stream of customers. Today, about all you're guaranteed is a long lunch break. That's because the repair business is on the wrong side of the most powerful trends in global manufacturing of the past 20 years: the sharp rise in quality and the steady decline in price. When it comes to most manufactured goods, these are the good old days. Products are more reliable and more durable than ever. In a recent survey, Consumer Reports found that, in most product categories, repair rates were between just ten and twenty per cent. The average life of a car is up by nearly half since 1970. All this, and stuff often actually costs less. Your run-of-the-mill VCR is 40 per cent cheaper than it was seven years ago. High quality, low price: for the repairman, it's a deadly combination. "You don't find the kinds of things you had decades ago, like toasters that could electrocute you or TVs that blew up," David Heim, the managing editor of Consumer Reports, says. "If you buy a TV, you're going to get a good picture, and if you buy a stereo you're going to get great sound. In fact, the guy who used to test stereos for us told me that you cannot buy a bad stereo." Americans have become the most demanding consumers in the history of the world - we expect our machines to work. Nonetheless, we have a vestigial memory of the days when they didn't. How else to explain the fact that, every year, people shell out millions of dollars on extended warranties that they seldom get a chance to take advantage of? The lingering allure of warranties is understandable if you consider how recent the quality revolution is. Before the 1980s, most American corporations saw quality as something that cost them a lot and profited them little. They believed that it didn't play a big role in a consumer's decision to buy a product, and that there was no way to make things both better and cheaper. Japan's success in the 70s changed that. Japanese companies, influenced by the ideas of the quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming, began winning market share by producing televisions, cameras, cars, and VCRs that were vastly superior to American products. Eventually, American companies woke up and adopted Deming as a prophet. The impact of the quality revolution was immediate. The marketplace no longer tolerates shoddy products. Consumers have grown so accustomed to things being ever cheaper and ever more reliable that companies have to keep driving cost down and quality up just to stay in the game. Great news for you and me, but not for Ricardo Gomez, who runs an electronics-repair shop in Brooklyn. His big hope these days is that all the DVD players in Brooklyn start breaking down, since they're still expensive enough to be worth fixing. But he knows that can't last. "Pretty soon, they'll probably become too cheap to fix, too," he says. - end -