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18 Jun 03 - internal grants; ordinance; charity dumping; consumption ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- From Angie Timmons, Hennepin County Environmental Services, Waste Reduction and Recycling Programs, Minneapolis, MN: I am exploring the idea of an in-house grants program for waste reduction and environmentally preferable purchasing projects. Hennepin County has 13,000 employees, in 34 departments in over 50 different buildings. Over the last 4 years I have worked on reinvigorating our internal waste reduction efforts and expanding our environmentally preferable purchasing program, with some success. I'm sure like many other local governments, right now many of our county departments are facing major budget cuts. Because of this, I have been struggling because some departments are interested in implementing a waste reduction project or piloting an environmentally preferable product, but do not because of initial start-up costs, one-time equipment purchases, higher prices of the product, etc. I am wondering if other local governments have tried a similar internal grants program? I am especially interested in examples of funding guidelines. Thanks. E-mail: Angie [DOT] Timmons [AT] co [DOT] hennepin [DOT] mn [DOT] us Phone: (612) 348-2477 --------------------- Excerpted from a 6/17/03 article by Mary Beth Schneider in the Indianapolis Star: INDIANAPOLIS CASE QUESTIONS INTERPRETATION OF UNSOLICITED MATERIALS ORDINANCE The city sees it as advertising. Its distributor sees it as a newspaper. Landlords see it as litter. But Indianapolis apartment dwellers will continue to see the Renter's Gazette on their doorsteps unless the Indiana Court of Appeals rules otherwise. On June 17, three appellate judges heard arguments from attorneys for the city of Indianapolis and Cary Campbell Realty Alliance, which publishes the Renter's Gazette, in a case that will help decide just who can plunk down written materials on the doorstep. Under an Indianapolis city ordinance, no one can distribute a "handbill" - which includes almost any published material - on private property if the owners object, with two exceptions: the US mail and newspapers. It's a loophole Campbell seized on back in 2001, when the Marion County environmental court granted the city an injunction against Campbell Realty, which had been hanging cards on apartment doors to advertise homes. To fit through the loophole, it became a "newspaper," the Renter's Gazette. The court still didn't buy the transformation. But Campbell continued to evolve his publication, including publishing it weekly, on newsprint, and adding a masthead - with a newspaper's name printed boldly at the top of every front page. And in July 2002, Marion Superior Court Judge Michael D. Keele decided the Renter's Gazette was a newspaper, after all, entitled to all the First Amendment privileges of every other newspaper - including the right to toss it on folks' doorsteps. But city attorney Jeff McQuary argued the Gazette is just an unwanted advertisement masquerading as news. The articles - such things as Congressional or Indiana General Assembly bill summaries, or lists of officeholders' names and phone numbers - often don't change from issue to issue, McQuary said. There are no reporters. And the only ads are Campbell Realty's. "The sole purpose of all the changes made to the Renter's Gazette was to evade the ordinance," McQuary told the appeals court judges. Brenda Franklin Rodeheffer, Campbell's attorney, argued that the ordinance violates First Amendment rights of freedom of speech by restricting Campbell's ability to communicate with the tenants. ------------------- Excerpted from a 6/17/03 article by Laura Florez in the Visalia (CA) Times-Delta: CHARITY DROP-OFFS TURNING INTO DUMPS A garbage bag filled with smelly trash. An exercise bike with no seat. A broken television. Piles of homework assignments. Couches with missing cushions. Tires. Those are just some of the items that Visalia area residents donated over the weekend to charitable organizations like the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries after attendants left drop-off sites for the day. Visalia is located between Fresno and Bakersfield. In 2002, Goodwill Industries of San Joaquin Valley, which serves 10 counties in the valley, had to pay $130,500 in trash and dumping fees to get rid of trash left at its donation sites. Had that money been saved, the organization could have put an additional 65 people through an occupational field training program and gotten them jobs, said Denise Ost, vice president of corporate services for the local Goodwill organization. The Salvation Army has spent $48,287 in dumping fees in the past eight months to haul trash away from its donation sites in Visalia and five other area cities, said Capt. Michelle Pierce, administrator of the Salvation Army adult rehabilitation center in Fresno. Money generated though the Salvation Army's thrift stores fund its drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs. Salvation Army and Goodwill both said they would like more help from local governments in dealing with this illegal dumping problem. --------------------- Excerpted from a 6/12/03 article by Noel Paul in the Christian Science Monitor: AMERICA'S CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION Without calling for an immediate downshift in spending, some observers are growing increasingly critical of what they describe as the nation's knee-jerk culture of consumption. Business and government have come to portray consumption as a panacea for a variety of public ills. Consumer-confidence data, which many economists say are at best ambiguous, are now examined like tea leaves by marketers and media. More important, the spending boosterism has ensnared, in part, a record number of Americans in bankruptcy and debt. In response, experts are reexamining the context in which the nation's consumer culture was born, and asking whether it might be time to shape a more balanced ethic of saving and spending in America. "This pattern isn't sustainable even in the short term," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank. For the most part, people are spending too much, say some experts. Consider the drop in Americans' personal savings. In the 1980s, consumers saved about 10 percent of their disposable income. Last year, they tucked away only 3.7 percent. One consequence: Personal debt has soared. Consumers owed an average of $8,940 in credit-card debt last year, up from $3,275 in 1992. Overall, they owe more than $1.7 trillion in credit-card bills, up from $1.1 trillion in 1995. Partly as a result of tax cuts to fuel spending, the federal government's debt also is growing dramatically. Between fiscal years 2003 and 2005, say observers, the government will accumulate about $400 billion in added debt. Western notions of frugality and fiscal prudence have held a significant place in American intellectual thought from the 17th century to present day. Adherents of the ethic often make their voices heard on the public stage in cycles. Many observers cite the 1992 presidential campaign of Ross Perot, fueled largely by public distress over government debt, as one of the most prominent contemporary examples. This temperament of austerity intensifies during conflict. During the Vietnam War, when President Lyndon Johnson promised America could produce both guns and butter, the antiwar movement still took a strong anticonsumption turn. "During war, people often don't want business as usual," says Lawrence Glickman, a professor of US economic history at the University of South Carolina. Even during peace, Americans have never easily accepted the ethic of consumption. In a recent study of American literature, Professor Glickman found very few examples of writers who celebrated spending money and buying products. And yet the idea that steady and even rising spending by consumers is vital to the well-being of the nation has been generally accepted by many Americans for more than 50 years. Experts point to the theories of early 20th-century economist John Maynard Keynes to explain the infatuation with consumer behavior. Keynes said that the economic depressions that rocked the US and Europe during the 1930s resulted from a lack of consumer demand. To keep the economy strong, he argued, governments should stoke consumption. Once the nation's factories were at full strength following World War II, US officials began implementing Keynes's theories, shaping a consumer culture in which families were capable of buying all that American factories could produce. The new era of consumption, say experts, grew out of a coordinated effort on the part of leaders across a broad swath of American life, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Madison Avenue. "Various groups in power and authority came together around the notion that they could build a prosperous economy based on the idea of mass consumption," says Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard University historian and author of "A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America." She added, "It was a strategic, concerted effort to get people to buy." Americans now seem to have little instinct to voluntarily cap their spending. According to a recent Christian Science Monitor poll, 27 percent of Americans plan to spend the money they get from the new federal tax cut, compared to 18 percent who will save. Part of the reason might be hesitancy on the part of political leaders to encourage fiscal prudence. Washington has shied away from uttering anything negative about consumption ever since many Americans bristled at President Jimmy Carter's 1979 address to the nation, in which he said: "Too many of us now tend to worship selfindulgence and consumption." -------------------- Excerpted from a 6/16/03 opinion piece by David Wann on the AlterNet website: THE FASTER WE CONSUME, THE FASTER WE PRODUCE Marketing analyst Victor Lebow wrote this in 1950, and it's just as true today: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption a way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever-increasing rate." The message we get every day is hurry up and consume. But many scientists now agree that over-consumption is the world's most serious environmental threat, because for every product we consume, an average of 20 times its weight in raw materials was consumed to make it. The raw materials that go into a gadget or article of clothing may have disrupted biological habitats at the mine site, farm field, or chemical plant. Then, product manufacture, distribution, advertising, and packaging take their toll. At the end of the line, our use of the product may contribute further impacts in health, air, water, and land. Every day, each American consumes 120 pounds of stuff, figuring in all the natural resources used in the making of our products. Stone and cement, coal, farm products, minerals, oil, wood, and so on flow at increasingly faster rates from sacrificial sites, as if the speed was turned up on a conveyor belt smorgasbord that runs through field and forest and right into our neighborhoods. The faster we consume, the faster we produce, the faster we consume, and on and on. The average American now requires roughly 24 football fields (or acres) of natural resources to maintain his or her standard of living, despite the arithmetic fact that there are only five acres available for each person on the planet. And five acres per capita must also meet the needs of millions of other species that support us and share the planet with us. As countries like China strive to raise their levels of consumption, where will four or five more planets come from? - end -