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23 Apr 01 - paint; lunches; catering; education attack; paper consumption soars; correction ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- From Steve Long, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, recycling markets program, Boston, MA: Does anyone know if paint companies have ever been encouraged to make and sell sample/test colors in anything smaller than a quart? Every time I paint a room I apply test patches to get the color "right" and it usually takes three attempts with different shades of the same color. Every time I try a color, I have no choice but to buy a full quart of paint, whereas about four ounces would be plenty for the test. I acknowledge the excess of three tries (not to mention the guilt associated with waste). I want to keep an open mind about solutions other than the paint company making smaller sample sizes. Thanks. E-mail: Stephen [DOT] Long [AT] state [DOT] ma [DOT] us -------------------- From Lea Dutton, Global Stewards website, San Rafael, CA: This year I volunteered to head up a project for a local environmental organization - the project's aim is to encourage residents in my county to pack waste-free lunches as many days as possible during the month of April, in celebration of Earth Day. This program is in its 6th year and we are really seeing a lot of participation, especially in the schools. The county board of supervisors and two cities proclaimed April to be waste-free lunch month. We mailed flyers and waste fact sheets to principals in every school and all government agencies; sent press releases to the newspapers; and added the event to several local online event listings (for the county and earth day). Here are what the flyers look like: -- www.globalstewards.org/wastefreemonth.htm -- www.globalstewards.org/wastefreefacts.htm This may be a worthwhile program for others. E-mail: Dutwell ( A T ) aol ( D O T ) com -------------------- From Carl Hursh, Pennsylvania Dept. of Environmental Protection, waste reduction and recycling program, Harrisburg, PA, responding to the 4/17/01 posting seeking model language for contracts with food vendors and catering services: This is an excerpt from our standard catering contract. It's been in place for several years: MEAL REQUIREMENTS: Styrofoam and plastic utensils are not acceptable. Paper products shall be from a renewable resource. Cups and plates shall be reusable (i.e., china, stoneware). EXCESS PREPARED FOOD PROVISION: The Contractor agrees to make a good faith effort to donate to a nonprofit organization for ultimate free distribution to needy individuals any apparently wholesome food or grocery products apparently fit for human consumption that are not consumed at the function. A good faith effort includes, but is not limited to, contacting one or more of the entities appearing on the referral listing maintained by the state Department of Agriculture. RECYCLING REQUIREMENTS: The Contractor shall: - Plan the meeting so that the volume of waste shall be reduced to the greatest extent feasible. - Utilize, to the greatest extent feasible, products, packaging and other materials that are made from recycled materials. - Ensure, to the greatest extent feasible, that disposable materials supplied for the meeting are recyclable. - Provide, to the greatest extent feasible, clearly marked containers for the collection of recyclable items by: Coordinating with the establishment where the meeting is held; coordinating with local recycling programs or municipal or county recycling coordinators; undertaking the collection, transportation, processing, and marketing of the materials itself; or entering into contracts with other persons for collection, transportation, processing and marketing of the materials. E-mail: chursh (A T) state (D O T) pa (D O T) us -------------------- A column by John Tierney in the 4/20/01 New York Times: TURNING TYKES INTO ZEALOTS In honor of Earth Day, our text is "RRR You Ready?" the new waste-reduction manual, weighing five pounds and prepared at a cost of $2 million, that has been distributed to public schools by the New York City Department of Sanitation. For safety purposes, let's begin with Chapter 4, "How I Can Be a TrashMaster!" This chapter instructs students who have learned the modern three R's - reduce, reuse, recycle - to "share" their knowledge with their families. That means getting their families to follow dozens of rules, including this one: "Return wire hangers and plastic bags to the dry cleaners." Before your family sets up a new bin for dry cleaners' bags, you might consider advice from another source, the American Academy of Pediatrics. "Never leave plastic bags lying around the house," the academy's child-care manual warns. "Bags from the dry cleaner are particularly dangerous. Knot them before you throw them away so that it's impossible for your child to crawl into them or pull them over her head." Perhaps a truly dedicated RRRer could carefully knot each bag, store it out of the reach of children and then unknot it for the dry cleaner. But why take any risk to save a few pennies' worth of plastic? Why waste so much time and effort to save a bag that may well be useless by the time it gets back to the dry cleaner? You could raise similar cost-benefit objections to just about every other "waste reducing" tip in the manual, and you could end up agreeing with the wayward student who appears in an accompanying video. "Recycling is just another evil plan by grown-ups to keep kids from having fun," he complains. "What's wrong with a little garbage?" But you, like that unenlightened student, would be missing the point of the curriculum. It's not intended to teach children about economic tradeoffs. Its purpose is to inculcate a system of beliefs and values. To Catholics who grew up on questions in the Baltimore Catechism like "Who is God?" or "Did Adam and Eve obey the commandment of God?" the questions in the RRR manual have a familiar feel. "What is waste?" "Why do we need to think about our waste?" "Why do we waste so much?" These are not questions meant to be debated. Our wastefulness is a given, just like Adam and Eve's original sin. "In previous generations, people lived by the adage of `waste not, want not.' They were careful to buy only what they needed, and reused whatever they could," the manual explains. But now we have eaten from the apple, and it's wrapped in plastic. "Every time we throw something away," the manual laments, "we are throwing out a lot." The manual does mention in passing that recycling is expensive, but it doesn't bother noting that it's more expensive than burying trash. And it certainly doesn't point out how much money (more than $500 million) New Yorkers could have saved over the last decade if there had been no recycling program. No, the manual instead preaches reverence for handling waste. Students who can't pass reading or mathematics tests are urged to spend classroom time building a museum of garbage, then go home and determine the weight of their family's trash, all the while hectoring their parents to avoid "overpackaged" takeout food in plastic containers. Saving plastic is a new spiritual quest, but past societies have just as passionately revered natural resources and reviled human pollution. The Druids worshiped trees and sacrificed people. Saving dry cleaners' bags seems tame by comparison. But not everyone today shares these values or wants to see $2 million in public money spent on a manual to promote those values in public schools. I don't want my child to be a TrashMaster who weighs garbage and feels guilty for polluting the planet when he writes on only one side of a piece of paper. I respect the neo-Druids' beliefs, but why should these beliefs be taught in public schools? Robert Lange, the director of the Department of Sanitation's recycling program, answered by pointing to the widespread support for recycling. "It is a value judgment," he said, "but it's advocated by a large part of the population, including the City Council." True enough, but a majority of the population also believes in Christian dogma, and that doesn't justify preaching it in public schools. New York intellectuals like to mock Kansans who insist on teaching creationism, but at least creationism is presented as an alternative to Darwinism. In our schools, recycling is the one true faith. --------------------- A 4/23/01 letter to the editor in the New York Times, in response to the above column, from Paul Berizzi, executive director, Environmental Action Coalition, New York City: Mr. Tierney says he doesn't want his child to feel guilty for polluting the planet when he writes on only one side of a piece of paper. That's a parent's prerogative. But is Mr. Tierney unconcerned about his son's education when the subject is math? Try this problem: A 50-sheet, lined, double-sided writing pad costs $3. If each of New York City's 1.1 million public school students received two pads a year (less than one page per school day) and wrote on just one side, this would cost taxpayers more than $6 million. How much money could be saved if they wrote on both sides of that paper? Mr. Tierney may not want our children taught about saving trees, but a lesson in saving money should be part of any sound education. -------------------- Excerpted from an article by James Brooke in the business section of the 4/21/01 New York Times: THE PAPERLESS OFFICE? NOT BY A LONG SHOT Something happened on the way to the paperless office. Instead of shrinking, paper sales ballooned. And the biggest beneficiary was Canada, the world's largest exporter of office printing paper, which more than doubled its exports in the last 15 years - the height of the computer revolution. The computer age has produced a golden age of paper, putting aside 1980's predictions that new paper mills would one day be as unnecessary as new power plants. Hewlett-Packard, the printer manufacturer, forecasts that North American laser printers will spew out 1.2 trillion sheets this year - a jump of more than 50 percent in five years. Fax machines, photocopiers and other devices add to that. With Americans unable to stop clicking their print icons, Canada's paper mills ran at 94 percent of capacity last year, exporting a record 31.5 million tons of white paper, largely to the United States. Printing and writing papers, the fastest-growing segment of paper exports to the United States, grew 14 percent in 2000. "Just about every innovation in the digital revolution was supposed to cut out more paper," reads the year 2000 annual review of the Forest Products Association of Canada, an industry group based in Montreal. "Precisely the opposite continues to happen. The 200-million-plus personal printers sold since 1998 need paper. Sales of inkjet specialty printers designed to print digital photographs will jump from 2.1 million in 1999 to 6.3 million in 2003." During the 1990's, the number of laser printers in the United States increased twelvefold and the number of fax machines increased 22-fold, according to Dataquest, a research company in San Jose, Calif., owned by the Gartner Group. And new paper-hungry appliances are coming. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, has a new interactive television printer that it has styled to complement living room decors. To feed all of those devices, analysts forecast that office-paper consumption would increase by at least another 50 percent over the next 10 to 15 years, the Forest Products Association's chairman, David L. Emerson, recently wrote to his members. Paper industry experts gathered for PaperWeek, the industry's recent conference in Montreal, said that futurists, like Alvin Toffler, had underestimated the resilience of paper and people's attachment to the 2,000-year-old product. E-mail, for example, often ends up on paper. Research indicates that people tend to print out e-mail messages that are over half a page in length. Offices that extend e-mail to workers see paper consumption increase about 40 percent, according to the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. In addition to reliability, paper offers portability, ease of reading and better retention. Some surveys indicate that people retain 30 percent more of what they read on paper than on computer screens. People generally find that paper documents are easier to annotate and to compare. Ink on paper is hard to beat for resolution - the clarity of printed words. Laser-jet-printed pages commonly have resolutions around 600 dots an inch, or about six times the clarity of computer screens. "When in doubt, print it out," chortled Frank A. Dottori, president of Tembec, a Montreal-based paper and forest products company. "There always will be new uses for paper." But, he warned: "The paper industry should not be complacent. In the business area, the use of paper will decline. When I started in business there were 13 copies of invoices; now there is none of that." But while businesses phase out paper invoices, e-commerce has led to new needs for paper, notably cardboard boxes that Amazon.com and other retailers use to ship goods ordered over the Internet. "Before we would produce one box for 144 books, now we produce 144 boxes for 144 books," said Lise Lachapelle, president of the Canadian paper association. "The billings, the magazines, the catalogs, the packaging that you receive with e-orders - all that is paper." The paper makers' party is damped a bit by the development of electronic books and papers. Next year, the Microsoft Corporation's eBook Group plans to market its Tablet PC for about $3,500. Thin, lightweight, with a long-life battery and a wireless Internet connection, this reading machine is to be loaded with the Microsoft ClearType software, offering resolution four times that of today's computer screens. In 2003, electronic newspapers - or portable, Internet-connected, high-resolution reading devices - are expected to be marketed by two companies, Gyricon Media, a Xerox subsidiary, and the E Ink Corporation, a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But, so far, in just the way that motion pictures never killed live theater and television did not extirpate radio, Web sites are not replacing newspapers. At the peak of the Internet boom in the late 1990's several consultants predicted that the newsprint market would soon shrink as millions of Americans turned to the Web for news. But in fact, during the Internet go-go years, American consumption of newsprint grew about 10 percent, to 12 million tons last year from 10.9 million tons in 1996. Instead of shrinking, Canadian newsprint exports to the United States expanded last year by almost 6 percent. Worldwide, newsprint demand grew last year by 3 percent. The adoption of electronic replacements of paper "will be more demographically driven than technologically driven; young people will adopt faster," said Francois Perron, a paper and forest products analyst for Merrill Lynch Canada. "It is a very real concern for the paper industry. But at the same time, in other parts of the world, literacy rates are rising. Will they skip paper? I doubt that." ---------------------- Correction from Tom (thanks to Barbara Zaccheo and David Allaway for catching this): In the 4/20/01 posting of an article from the official website of the Government of Tibet in Exile, I incorrectly identified Dharamsala as being in Tibet. It is actually located in northern India and is the seat of the Tibetan Government in Exile. - end -