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03 Jun 03 - transport packaging; DVDs; compost; conferences ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- The first two messages are in response to the 5/30/03 news item about efforts to promote reusable transport packaging. --------------------- From Laurie Stoerkel, waste prevention advocate, San Francisco Bay area: The Northern California Recycling Association invited a representative from a manufacturer of plastic reusable containers to speak at our yearly update. Yes, we all agree that reusing a container is good. But this manufacturer's product used zero percent recycled material in its production, and it was unclear what happened to the plastic at the end of its lifecycle. Metal, wood and cardboard containers are reusable too. If we are going to promote plastic, we should consider the entire lifecycle of the product. E-mail: LStoerkel ( A T ) oaklandnet ( D O T ) com --------------------- Excerpted from a 5/30/03 press release from the Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance, St. Paul, MN (forwarded by Laurie Gustafson): MINNESOTA REUSABLE TRANSPORT PACKAGING DIRECTORY NOW ONLINE The Minnesota Office of Environmental Assistance (OEA) has recently published the online Reusable Transport Packaging Directory, which is available at: http://www.moea.state.mn.us/transport Businesses that switch to reusable transport packaging save money, reduce labor costs, and protect the environment. Reusable transport packaging is wood, metal, plastic, or composite pallets and containers that can be used multiple times. Reusable pallets and containers are designed and built to last for many years of use, and replace one-time or limited-use pallets and boxes. About 50 percent of the waste generated in Minnesota comes from businesses and institutions. Over 17 percent of that waste is packaging. Nationally the U.S. EPA estimates that nearly 11 million tons of corrugated cardboard was thrown away in 1999. --------------------- From Tony Kingsbury, Dow Chemical, Midland, MI, responding to the recent postings about the Disney corporation's plan to introduce disposable DVDs: Two comments on the Disney DVD action: 1) CDs and DVDs are recycled in huge quantities. At last estimate, about 40 million pounds were recycled of the polycarbonate used to make CDs and DVDs each year in North America. This recycled polycarbonate is typically blended with other plastics and colorants and used in a variety of useful items. The additive being used by Disney (to make it "self-destruct") should not affect the recyclability of the polycarbonate, since it doesn't go back into clear items. 2) Don't forget that renting a video or DVD is a process. Besides the making of the actual video or DVD there is the going to and from the video rental store. Using publicly available lifecycle data on polycarbonate, I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming a person drives a car (20 mpg) 2 miles round trip to the rental store. The action of driving this far would consume 7.5 times more energy than it would to create the DVD. Thus if our goal in reuse and recycling is to conserve resources, one would have to rent 8 movies at a time to be better off from a resource standpoint. I also assumed that there would not be a special trip for the disposable DVD since you would pick it up on another shopping trip to the grocery store or mall. So if 10 percent of the 890 million DVDs were disposable, we would add 0.01 pounds per person per year to our landfills while saving over 3,000,000 gallons of gasoline (assume 2 DVDs per trip are rented). My point in pointing out these figures is that we have to look deeper sometimes. E-mail: rakingsbury ( A T ) dow ( D O T ) com --------------------- The next three messages are in response to the recent postings about whether putting food waste into home composting bins designed for yard waste will attract rats. --------------------- From Yen Chin, City of Seattle, Seattle, WA, specifically following up on his 5/27/03 posting on this topic: As I replied to Larry Warnberg privately, I should have mentioned that the City of Seattle defines a home composting materials stream to handle food wastes. It recommends worm bins and such outdoor devices as green cones (properly installed) to decompose kitchen waste. These are easy and relatively foolproof methods for folks who want to take their kitchen waste out of the waste stream. I have used a worm bin for kitchen waste for more than a decade. My two-person household that eats-in most of our meals produces about a quarter of a cubic yard of worm compost a year. Since a portion of that material comes from the bedding (not the kitchen waste), I cannot see how a four-person household would produce more than half a cubic yard of material from their kitchen waste alone. So most of the 3-4 cubic yards of compost claimed in previous postings come from YARD WASTE not kitchen waste. As Dave Kunz pointed out, "For those of us who know how and use the right equipment, avoiding vectors (vermin) is easy." Precisely my point and the gist of my initial criticism of the banana peel ditty. Such ditties necessarily target beginning composters who could easily do the wrong things or use the wrong equipment. If they did so and got a rat infestation, isn't it likely that they would discontinue composting all together? And what do you suppose they would tell their friends about composting? The whole point of outreach at this time is to reach beginners and those folks who are well-meaning advanced beginners. If we continue to produce pieces that come from our somewhat advanced knowledge and strike us as cute, we will continue to alienate the majority, including many who consider joining the choir. E-mail: Yen [ D O T ] Chin [ A T ] ci [ D O T ] seattle [ D O T ] wa [ D O T ] us --------------------- From Renee Kimball, Enuf!, Portland, OR: Regarding mixing kitchen waste and yard debris/compost: It's been our experience that having both a compost heap AND a worm bin makes the "breakdown" job for both kitchen waste (worm bin) and yard debris (compost) faster. Added advantages of a worm bin include: Continued elimination of kitchen waste through the winter, the bonus of high nitrogen/time release fertilizer, plus hundreds of adoring pets you neither have to walk nor name. In addition, contrary to the "official" admonition to keep meat, milk and bread products out of a worm bin - worms will eat ANYTHING once living. This includes leather belts, rubber gloves, cotton socks and oily rags. Therefore, you can successfully put ALL the aforementioned items in a worm bin. The trick, however, is to have a bin made of impermeable materials to keep out "unwanted snackers." And no, meat does not make a worm bin stink - it only stinks when it's going anaerobic. I stuck in a whole chicken skin once to find out if it was true. Anyone interested in a worm bin design made from cement cinder blocks (we call it The Worm Bunker), please e-mail me and I'll send a design sheet on it. It is so well insulated, it hardly slows down in winter and kicks off to a roaring start in spring. It even successfully withstands nutria (God's version of a rat/beaver/possum on steroids). E-mail: Renee ( AT ) EnufWaste ( DOT ) com ------------------- From Carl Woestwin, City of Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle, WA: This is in regards to the "rats in yard waste compost bins" postings. Here is a long-winded response I made in a 1999 letter, when this very same issue came up in our fair port city, favored by both humans and rats: It's a challenge to follow an issue that draws so many opinions! However, as one of the people who put together the original Master Composter Program, and as someone now managing that project and compost bin distribution for the City of Seattle, I feel the need to provide some historical perspective and personal experience. It is true that whether you put fish or carrot pulp in your composter is a gardening and composting issue. However, on another level, it is a policy issue. Our original decision was made in 1985, when Seattle Tilth Association put together a proposal to the City to manage the Backyard Composting Program. This was the first such program in the country. We knew that Seattle, a seaport with a moderate climate and lots of food and cover, was home to a substantial population of rats. We were starting a new and proud venture in Seattle, to turn a large number of residents on to the joys and satisfactions of composting. However, we also felt it necessary to alert them to the pitfalls, the worst of which in my mind is rats. We carefully weighed the pros and cons, knowing full well that a faster, higher quality compost can be created by the addition of food wastes. We weighed this against the fact that when something gets as popular as we hoped composting would become, there would be people, perhaps a lot of people, who would not pay such close attention to how they compost. Again, that was 1985. When we did a random survey of 600 Seattle households in 1999, we found that 50 percent of the 155,000 single-family through four-plex households were composting. 25 percent of households (that's 39,000 households) said they were composting food wastes to some degree. In fact, many of those folks are putting their food wastes into their yard waste bin, something we'd expressly cautioned them against doing. Was it a bad idea to caution all the food waste composting households without a worm bin or a Green Cone to ignore the advantage of the fertility embodied in their food wastes? I don't really think so. Why? Because I'd estimate that 95 percent of those households compost "passively." That is, they open their bin and drop whatever's next on top. Period. In our early enthusiasm for composting, we educated everyone on three-bin systems, regular turning, carbon-nitrogen ratios, correct moisture levels, compost critters and the wonders of redworms. As we watched what really happened with the compost bins, we were at first disappointed. Not many people were finding the time or desire to make hot compost. Is that a failure of the program or a failure of human nature? Neither, I've come to believe. It is just what is. And, taking off my gardener's hat and putting on my solid waste manager's hat for a minute, I say hurray! We've kept on selling compost bins and even more people and a higher percentage of the population are composting today. They don't do it perfectly, but a conservative estimate, taking into account all the people who tell us they don't use their bin, suggests that approximately 16,000 tons of organic waste don't need collecting at curbside. And, the program is cost effective for the City. For perspective on the rodent issue, let's look at two Canadian programs. The Canadians have been very big on composting. And the City Farmer Project, funded by the Greater Vancouver Regional District, which encompasses all of metropolitan Vancouver, B.C., educates residents on mixing food waste into their yard waste. However, for awhile, they were also encouraging people to buy metal bins with solid bottoms. They've since backed off the metal bins, but they then became very strict on having brick, pavers, or other solid surfaces under the bin, a lid and very small openings in the walls of the bin. They take their rodents seriously! The other program is based in Toronto, Ontario. Toronto has probably distributed more compost bins than any place in North America. But they almost had their program shut down when they had a big upswing in their rodent population (or so the public came to believe from all the media on the subject), and a daily paper ran stories on how compost bins were attracting rodents. By the way, I'm also drawing from personal experience. I've had rats enter the crawl space of my home. They tend to make their nests in the insulation in the walls. And pull the insulation down from the ceiling. Sometimes they die, perhaps of old age or perhaps of the rat bait I put out when the traps didn't work and I grew tired of hearing scratching in the basement walls. Though they are fellow life forms, they tend not to have the manners to die out on the back 40, but rather let their own decomposition process happen in a wall. With good luck, you are not familiar with the odor. Yes, yes, call me rodentaphobe! Call me an extremist! I have to laugh when people tell me they've never seen a rat anywhere near the food waste they put in their bin. As if the rats are silly enough to risk dangerous daylight encounters when the cover of night is available within 12 hours! But, back to my point. There's the gardening perspective and then there are other perspectives, such as human health in the city. Unless advised otherwise by my managers at the City, I will see that the Master Composter/Soil Builder Program continues to ask composters to put all food waste in a dedicated food waste composter. This may not be the best gardening and soil fertility practice, but I believe it is sound policy for the health of our City's residents. For more on this issue, see this 1994 article on Vancouver's City Farmer website, "Rats in Home Composters - How We Deal With A Rat Complaint Call At City Farmer": http://www.cityfarmer.org/ratincompost5.html#rats E-mail: Carl [ D O T ] Woestwin [ A T ] ci [ D O T ] seattle [ D O T ] wa [ D O T ] us ------------------ Excerpted from a message from Maggie Clarke, Hunter College, City University of New York, New York City: The Air and Waste Management Association (AWMA) annual meeting is taking place in San Diego this year, and features a provocative panel discussion entitled, "Getting to Zero Waste: A Sustainable Future Begins Today." We are pleased to have assembled a fine panels of experts. Linda Moulton-Patterson, Chair, California Integrated Waste Management Board, will speak on "Zero Waste and Product Stewardship," engaging manufacturers to take responsibility for their products and packaging in order to achieve zero waste. She will highlight the Board's initiatives with regard to electronics waste and discuss what role local/state government can play in advancing these policies. Gary Liss, GrassRoots Recycling Network and consultant, will speak on zero waste businesses and residential and business incentives and policies to encourage zero waste. Rick Anthony, GrassRoots Recycling Network, will speak on resource recovery parks, zero waste plans for communities, the 12 master categories of discards and zero waste efforts being pursued globally. I will moderate the session, which will take place on June 24 at 1:45 pm in Room 15B of the San Diego Convention Center. Daily rates are available for attendance at the conference. All information about AWMA, this conference, and registration is available at: http://www.awma.org/ACE2003 The conference is actually quite large, going from June 23-26, and there are many sessions of interest in the fields of integrated waste management and sustainable development. We hope to see you there! E-mail: mclarke [ AT ] hunter [ DOT ] cuny [ DOT ] edu ------------------ Link to the website for the California Resource Recovery Association's annual conference, to be held July 20-23 in Ontario, in Southern California (forwarded by Gary Liss): http://www.crra.com/conf2003 This conference, which focuses on recycling and waste prevention, has a different theme for each day. The themes are Consumer Responsibility, Producer Responsibility and Community Action. - end -