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01 Oct 01 - electronics; British website; Fresh Kills landfill; Miss America ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- From Wayne Rifer, Rifer Environmental, Portland, OR: As part of my work with the Western Electronic Product Stewardship Initiative, I'd like to solicit comment on the hierarchy below. Electronic scrap, a more sophisticated waste stream, demands a more sophisticated management hierarchy. Please review this and provide your ideas and comments to me at: wrifer [ A T ] concentric [ D O T ] net There is also a diagram that goes with this, called the "End-of-First-Life E-Product Management Pathway." If you are interested in that, e-mail me and I will try to e-mail it to you as an attachment. E-WASTE MANAGEMENT HIERARCHY The traditional integrated solid waste management hierarchy has been adopted in various forms by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and numerous state and local governments: 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle 4. Recover energy 5. Dispose Electronic products are a new type of waste that demand a more sophisticated hierarchy, based on the same principle of resource conservation: 1. Reduce - Extend the functional life of products through methods such as product design for longer-life and software upgrades 2. Reuse a. Pass-on - Second hand trading of the product b. Service - Repair, upgrade or rebuild the product at the location where product is being used 3. Remanufacture a. Refurbish - Rebuild the product at a central facility b. Remanufacture - Disassemble product into component parts at a central facility and assemble remanufactured products with used and new parts 4. Recycle a. Recycle with disassembly - Reclaim materials after product disassembly to generate clean materials streams, recover valuable components, and remove hazards b. Recycle without disassembly - Shred and separate material streams using mechanical methods 5. Recover energy 6. Dispose E-mail: wrifer [ A T ] concentric [ D O T ] net -------------------- Link to the "Use It Again" waste reduction and recycling website, from the United Kingdom's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs: http://www.useitagain.org.uk This website from the British government has resources and information on reuse, reduction and recycling. (Note that some of the pages may take quite awhile to load.) -------------------- Excerpted from an article by Mark Schoofs in the 9/28/01 Wall Street Journal: The 3,000-acre Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island in New York City is the world's largest landfill. At its peak, in took in 29,000 tons of trash a day. It was finally closed six months ago. Now it has been reopened, on an emergency basis, to receive the estimated 1.25 million tons of debris from the World Trade Center disaster. The landfill has been transformed into a huge open-air crime lab. Law enforcement agents sift through the debris, looking for human remains and evidence of the terrorist crime. The only parts of the World Trade Center that aren't going to Fresh Kills are the heavy structural girders (which are sent directly to two recycling companies in New Jersey), and possibly part of the jagged exoskeleton of the building, which may end up being preserved somewhere as a monument. (Some of the metal that's going to Fresh Kills now, such as car bodies found in the rubble, will probably eventually be sent to scrap yards for recycling.) New Yorkers have sent trash to Fresh Kills since 1948. Its name - always a little eerie, and especially so now - has nothing to do with death or garbage. "Kil" is an old Dutch word for waterway; Fresh Kills was once a beautiful marshland. Fresh Kills Landfill may be the best archeological record of postwar America, containing everything from LPs to DVDs, typewriters to laptops, and newspapers that can still be read, even after 40 years. William Rathje, a research professor at the Stanford Archeology Center at Stanford University in California, has excavated parts of the landfill, boring 24 wells down as far as 100 feet into the garbage. Computers didn't usher in a paperless society, he found. To the contrary, the amount of paper deposited in the landfill in the 1980s was 10 percent higher than in the 1970s, he found. That's also true for the other 20 dumps Rathje has studied, but Fresh Kills has some unique features. For example, it has a far greater amount of textiles than any other landfill Rathje has researched. That might reflect the city's garment district, he says, or it might mean that New Yorkers are more fashion conscious and "don't want to wear the same thing again and again." Now, the landfill will almost certainly house the World Trade Center. No final decision has been made as to the final resting place of the towers, but the expense of moving the debris a second time would be huge. If the ruins stay there, it will only add to the mystique of a place already enveloped in legend. Some people say that union leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose body was never found, is buried at Fresh Kills. A deceased elephant once ended up there. And, it turns out that the often-repeated story - that Fresh Kills is so big it can be seen from space with the naked eye - is true. -------------------- From Janine Bogar, Thurston County Solid Waste, environmental education, Olympia, WA, responding to the recent postings about the Sept. 22 Miss America pageant, where Katie Harman of Oregon, who was named Miss America, mentioned that Oregon was "the national leader in environmental protection": Yes, "objectionable" things are less objectionable if they have a good message in them. There are millions of Americans out there watching Miss America, and so if a green message appears in this non-green venue, more power to all of us. We have to get our message into "mainstream" stuff, or how else will we reach the people who really need to hear it? And by watching this stuff, we know what's in it, how to use it for our messages, how to reach the people who are watching it (not that I watched Miss America, but then, I do watch "Friends" on a semi-regular basis). Is this a trade-off or just giving in to the crappier aspects of our culture? I can't say for sure, and I don't know where to draw the line, but I do know EVERYTHING is a trade-off. There's good and bad with every choice. E-mail: bogarj [A T] co [D O T] thurston [D O T] wa [D O T] us - end -