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03 Jul 03 - opting out; plastic bags; cruise ships; reuse ideas ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- From Tom Watson, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, and the National Waste Prevention Coalition: For years the National Waste Prevention Coalition has been involved in efforts to reduce unwanted mail, because of all the paper waste from that junk mail. As many of you know, we recently expanded our efforts to include unwanted phone books (for a summary of that project, see the Coalition website at http://www.metrokc.gov/nwpc). First with junk mail, and now also with phone books, the Coalition has continually made the point that the mailers and distributors of these materials need to make it easy for residents and businesses to "opt out" of receiving them. It seems so obvious. But it usually is not that easy to opt out. Many of us know that, because we've been frustrated ourselves, or we work for a solid waste agency and people have called us who are frustrated about this. But now the tide may be turning. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission just launched a national Do-Not-Call list, allowing people to opt out of receiving unwanted phone calls from telemarketers. In just the first five days that this Do-Not-Call registry has been available, more than 15 million Americans have signed up. Support also appears to be growing in Congress for legislation that would create a national "Do-Not-Spam" list to allow people to opt out of receiving unwanted e-mails, or "spam" (that one might be a lot harder to enforce). This is a great time to increase pressure on the direct mail and the telephone book publishing industries to make it easier for people to opt out. In addition to the nuisance factor - which junk mail and unwanted phone books dumped on the porch share with telemarketing and junk e-mail - we also have the added environmental issue. Junk mail and junk phone books waste resources. And who bears the financial burden for recycling and disposal of junk mail and unwanted phone books? Local governments and their taxpayers. The public obviously wants the choice of whether or not to receive unsolicited phone calls and e-mail messages and stuff in the mailbox and stuff on the front porch. Just think, 15 million people in five days! A lot of people in the direct marketing industry have got to be freaking out right now. Just as I was finishing this message, I learned (thanks to Marcia Rutan), that the Center for a New American Dream, a great activist organization, has the same idea. They're starting a new campaign, asking Congress to establish a national opt-out registry for junk mail, modeled after the telemarketing Do-Not-Call list. For information on their campaign, see this webpage: http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/campaign2003.html and this press release: http://www.newdream.org/junkmail/pressrelease2003.html Let's use this window of opportunity. Work with the Center for a New American Dream, the National Waste Prevention Coalition and other groups in our national efforts to reduce junk mail and junk phone books. Make your voices heard locally and in your states as well. All we're asking is for the mailers and distributors of these materials to be responsible, and give people a choice. If you have any questions or comments, or if you want to get involved in the Coalition's projects, please call or e-mail me. I'll be out for a week but will be back in the office on July 14th. A related article is below. Thanks! E-mail: tom (D O T) watson (A T) metrokc (D O T) gov Phone: (206) 296-4481 --------------------- Excerpted from a 7/3/03 column by Mike Himowitz in the Baltimore Sun: GOVERNMENT TAKES OUR SIDE AGAINST PESKY TELEMARKETERS "Few rights are so fundamental as the right to privacy in our daily lives, yet few are under such frontal assault. Our dinners are disrupted by unwanted phone calls. Our computer accounts are besieged with bothersome spam. Our mailboxes are swollen with advertisements for products, goods and services. We conduct our whole lives against the white noise of commercial solicitation. These intrusions exhaust us, irritate us and threaten our cherished right to be left alone." Those are the words of Michael J. Copps, a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and it would be hard to say it better than he did. Americans are fed up with commercial stalkers, and they're finally getting a break. Copps spoke June 26, the day the FCC endorsed a national Do-Not-Call list and one day before the public got its first chance to register their phone numbers in a government database that most telemarketers will be prohibited from calling after Oct. 1. It was a sweet way to turn the tables on an industry that has used technology so effectively to interrupt people's lives 100 million times a day with pitches for mortgages, credit cards, insurance policies, vinyl siding and storm doors. By yesterday morning, five days after it became available, 15.3 million people had put their numbers on the Do-Not-Call list - a phenomenal response rate made possible only because the government used the World Wide Web and a toll-free phone number to let citizens sign up. Almost lost in the publicity surrounding the stampede was a piece of even better news. The original Do-Not-Call list, established by the Federal Trade Commission, did not cover banks, some insurance companies, airlines and other major telemarketing offenders that the commission doesn't have the power to regulate. But the FCC has a much broader mandate because it controls the very medium that telemarketers depend on. Its vote to approve similar restrictions, on the day before the list went live, brought almost every type of enterprise except non-profit agencies and political organizations under the umbrella of the law. This was a rare act of interagency cooperation, and it probably happened only because Congress told the agencies to work together - or else. Whatever the reasons, the consolidated list should produce a dramatic reduction in unsolicited calls in the fall. Thanks to computerized "predictive" dialing systems, which keep workers occupied efficiently but also produce those annoying "dead" calls, the telemarketing industry makes up to 104 million solicitations a day. Industry analysts say that as many as 50 million phone numbers could wind up on the Do-Not-Call list, leading some telemarketing operators to predict that a third of their business could evaporate by year's end. Some telemarketers predict a loss of up to 2 million jobs, a high number of which are in rural areas where companies have found cheap, willing labor. While I hate to see people lose jobs, my sympathy is tempered by the fact that the primary purpose of those jobs is to get us to stop whatever we're doing and answer the phone for another credit card or insurance pitch. Ironically, the very existence of the Do-Not-Call list will make life more difficult for those who don't sign up. With so many numbers off limits, telemarketers will undoubtedly launch an even more furious assault on the phones that remain. So, unless you enjoy telemarketing calls, it's a good idea to register. If you have an e-mail address (which is used to confirm your signup), you can do it online at: http://www.donotcall.gov (Note: People can also register by phone by calling toll-free at 1-888-382-1222. The first few days of the program, this number has been available only in states west of the Mississippi River. But as of Monday, July 7, anyone in the U.S. can use that number. Consumers calling the toll-free number must call from the phone they want registered.) --------------------- Excerpted from an article by L.J. Williamson in the Summer 2003 issue of OnEarth, a magazine published by the Natural Resources Defense Council: PLASTIC BAGS STILL RULE IN AMERICA The plastic bag is ubiquitous. Nothing epitomizes better the mindless profligacy of our consumer culture than these cheap, flimsy, yet depressingly indestructible little bags that get caught in our trees, blow down streets, and wash up on our beaches. Americans throw away one hundred billion polyethylene bags a year. About 80 percent of our groceries go home in plastic bags. Though plastic bags take up less than four percent of all landfill space (they're easily compressed), estimates on how long they take to decompose range from a hundred years to a thousand. Which is why, in other places around the world, this homely bag has finally entered the political spotlight. On January 1, Taiwan banned the free distribution of plastic bags in supermarkets and other stores. Bangladesh began enforcing its own ban after discovering that discarded bags were clogging drainage and sewage lines, which increased flooding and the incidence of waterborne diseases. South Africa now prohibits all plastic bags under 30 microns thick (typical grocery bags are 18 microns) in the hope that customers will reuse the sturdier bags. The United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand are all considering imposing a tax on plastic bags, following the lead of Ireland, which instituted a 15 cent per bag tax in March 2002. That tax has reduced plastic bag use by 90 percent in Ireland. Grocery stores complained about having to collect the tax, which requires them to ring up bags like additional purchases. But as a spokesman for an Irish supermarket chain explained to the London Independent, "Eventually, most people said, yes, it's the right thing to do. We just needed to be pushed into it." Yet few think a tax, much less a ban, on plastic bags would take hold in the United States. Our grocery stores strive to create a perfect "climate of consumption," where nothing impedes the consumer from impulse to purchase, said Allen Hershkowitz, a recycling expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "For stores, it's not just a cost issue; it's about them making the customer's experience as convenient as possible." Polyethylene was invented in the 1930s, but it wasn't used to take our groceries home until 1977. Visionaries of the plastics industry saw the bags as a way to increase their market share in grocery stores beyond the already omnipresent tear-from-the-roll sacks in the produce department. But the real watershed came in 1982, when the industry persuaded two of the nation's largest supermarket chains, Safeway and Kroger, to replace traditional paper bags with the much more cost-effective plastic model. For customers, the appeal could be summed up in one word: handles. Paper bags didn't get handles until the late 1990s, and by then it was too late. Plastic had taken over. Of course, no one thought ahead about how we would dispose of all this new waste. Only an estimated 0.6 percent of grocery bags are recycled. According to one commonly-cited study from 1997, 58 percent of Americans prefer paper to plastic; yet a report by the Film and Bag Federation the year before found that four out of the five grocery bags we actually use are plastic. How to explain the discrepancy? People actually do prefer paper (despite paper's own environmental problems), but supermarkets have made it difficult to choose anything but plastic. Stores have a financial interest in keeping their checkout lines moving smoothly, and having more than one option at the end of the line slows things down. Even more important to supermarket executives everywhere is price. Plastic bags cost about four cents each, while the average paper bag costs twice that amount. True, paper bags hold between two and three times as much as plastic ones, but when all the numbers are crunched, supermarkets still save by using plastic when you factor in all those "single-bag" orders, in which a customer's entire purchase fits into a single sack, whether it's paper or plastic. Stores could save even more money if customers brought their own bags, but officials at some stores feel that encouraging customers to bring their own bags encourages petty theft. ------------------ Excerpted from an article by Ross Klein in the July 2003 edition of New Times, a Seattle-based magazine: CRUISE SHIP WASTE ADDS UP On the average cruise ship, 100 gallons of wastewater and sewage and seven-and-a-half pounds of solid waste are produced daily by each cruise ship passenger. These are among the materials that a typical cruise ship with 2,600 passengers, on a one-week voyage, produces on average: - 245,000 gallons of sewage - 2.2 million gallons of grey water - 37,000 gallons of oily bilge water - 141 gallons of photo chemicals - 7 gallons of dry cleaning waste - 13 gallons of used paints - 5 pounds of batteries - 10 pounds of fluorescent lights - 3 pounds of medical waste - 108 pounds of expired chemicals. Some of this ends up in the ocean, either intentionally or because it is mixed with grey water. Plastics, as well, make their way into the ocean when incinerator ash is discharged - there is no guarantee that all plastic and dioxins have been eliminated - and when it goes down the toilet or the pulpers in the galley. -------------------- Link to ideas for do-it-yourself home improvement projects with used building materials, from the Loading Dock website: http://www.loadingdock.org/membership/howto.html The Loading Dock is a non-profit organization in Baltimore that makes surplus building materials available, at a low cost, to low-to-moderate-income families. - end -