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15 Apr 05 - PVC; cleaning; foam; swap; call; hybrids; schools; geeks; NYC; refill
** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM **
-- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition
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Forum archive: http://www.nwpcarchive.org
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From Don Van Dyke, California Integrated Waste Management Board, Business
Resource Efficiency and Waste Reduction Section, Sacramento, CA, responding
to the 4/8/05 news article about polyvinyl chloride (PVC):
For a person who does not like to use PVC, nothing can be quite so
disheartening when converting a home's landscape to reduce water use as the
complete reliance on PVC in water-efficient irrigation methods. If you use
a drip system, you use PVC. There are no alternatives. You could limit
your use of PVC by using nothing other than a garden hose, but at just about
any latitude south of Oregon, and any longitude far from a coast, you will
use a lot more water if you do it that way. Of course mulch conserves a
tremendous amount of water. But your choice is basically between using more
water than you want, or snaking what seems like a mile of PVC tubing around
your yard. And if you own a home in a city or suburb, chances are that a
local ordinance will require you to landscape at least your front yard.
E-mail: DVanDyke [A T] CIWMB [D O T] ca [D O T] gov
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From Gina Temple-Rhodes, Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, Duluth,
MN:
Here is a good, extensive article on non-toxic cleaning alternatives for the
home, published 4/11/05 in the Fort Wayne (IN) Journal Gazette:
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/living/11366023.htm
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From Tom Watson, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, and the
National Waste Prevention Coalition:
CORRECTION
The 4/8/05 edition of the Forum included a link to a sample letter that
people can use to complain to manufacturers using hard-to-recycle
polystyrene foam pieces to package their products. It has been pointed out
that there are a couple of errors in that letter. The letter refers to
expanded polystyrene packaging material as Styrofoam, which is incorrect.
The letter also states that this packing material is made with
"ozone-depleting CFCs and HCFCs." This is also incorrect. According to the
Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers, "Expanded polystyrene (EPS)
manufacturers use pentane as its primary blowing agent. EPS transport
packaging has never been made with CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) or HCFCs
(hydrochlorofluorocarbons)."
E-mail: tom ( D O T ) watson ( A T ) metrokc ( D O T ) gov
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Link to Swapstyle.com, an online clothes exchange website (seen in Real
Simple magazine):
http://www.swapstyle.com Using this free
service, women can swap, sell and buy clothes with people from around the
world. This website has been featured in a number of fashion and lifestyle
magazines.
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Link to information on a conference call discussion Wednesday, April 20,
with James Gustave Speth, sponsored by the Center for a New American Dream
(forwarded by Deepa Premnath):
http://www.newdream.org/bookclub The
conference call, at 8 p.m. eastern time, is open to interested persons.
Speth, author of "Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global
Environment," is the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies. He has also advised former presidents Clinton and Carter, and
helped found both the World Resources Institute and the Natural Resources
Defense Council.
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Link to information about the winner of the Center for a New American
Dream's contest to come up with a slogan to promote fuel-efficient vehicles
(following up on a 12/14/04 posting about this contest):
http://www.newdream.org/prius/index.php
The winning slogan is: "Green
cars today. Blue skies tomorrow." For submitting that slogan, Beth
Keefauver of Asheville, NC, won a 2005 Toyota Prius hybrid car. Nearly
35,000 entries were received.
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Link to the website for the Green Schools Initiative (seen in the Pacific
Northwest Pollution Prevention Resource Center bulletin):
http://www.greenschools.net The Green
Schools Initiative is a mostly-volunteer effort based in California that
aims to make U.S. schools healthier and more ecologically sustainable. The
website includes the Initiative's new report, "The Little Green
Schoolhouse."
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Link to the website for Geeks for Givers, a non-profit organization based in
Connecticut that refurbishes donated electronics and provides them to other
nonprofits, including educational institutions and healthcare facilities
(seen in Recycling Today):
http://www.geeksforgivers.org
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Link to information on the 11th annual "Art from Detritus: Recycling with
Imagination" art show in New York City April 14-May 22 (forwarded by Athena
Sarafides):
http://www.synagogueforthearts.org/art.htm
The exhibit includes pieces
from more than 50 artists.
Photos from last year's show are at:
http://www.ncognita.com/detritus2004/detritus.html
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Excerpted from an article by Misty Edgecomb in the 4/8/05 Bangor (Maine)
Daily News:
RETURN TO REFILLABLES ENVISIONED
For most American consumers, refillable milk bottles - not to mention
reusable soda and beer containers - are as foreign as the milkman who once
delivered them to the front door. But a retired banker from Bangor named Jay
Dresser believes Maine should look to the past to create revolutionary
environmental policy, so he has proposed state legislation to ban the can
and require that all soda and beer containers be refillable.
Every new plastic soda bottle - including recycled plastic - relies on new
petroleum, most frequently from oil wells in the Middle East, said Dresser.
Without recycling, 10.7 million barrels of crude oil would be required to
produce the 39 billion plastic soda bottles sold each year in the United
States, according to industry figures. Though recycling is popular in Maine,
less than a quarter of all soda bottles is recycled for any use nationwide,
says the American Plastics Council. Beverage industry leaders have yet to
make good on their promises to include 10 percent recycled plastics in their
bottles by 2005.
"To destroy a bottle after using it just once seems illogical to me,"
Dresser said. "As the cost of oil goes up, the cost of containers goes up,
and that makes (reuse) more feasible." Dresser has spent 13 years studying
the issue and believes the nation could realize $1.7 billion in savings
annually if energy and raw materials were conserved by using refillable
containers just five times apiece. The full potential for refillables is far
greater, with the reusable bottles now being marketed in Europe and Latin
America able to sustain being washed and refilled 25 times, and glass
bottles 35 to 50 times each, according to industry figures.
Such a system was business as usual worldwide until plastic bottles came on
the market 40 years ago. Consumers found the new packaging both exciting and
convenient and began bringing beer and soda home more frequently. The United
States led the world in embracing plastic bottles and aluminum cans - so
much so that today, only between 5 percent and 7 percent of beverages are
sold in reusable bottles as compared to nearly 90 percent in the early '60s,
according to industry statistics.
Yet, to a small degree, Maine entrepreneurs are still making bottle reuse
work. Smiling Hill Farm's Westbrook dairy has been refilling glass bottles
since 1996. Farm manager David Knight said the system works economically,
but it relies more on a sense of nostalgia and the dairy's flavored milks
than its environmental benefit to draw new customers. Despite a deposit of
at least $1 per bottle to cover its cost, tens of thousands of bottles go
missing every year, he said. "I just hate ordering new bottles," Knight
said, especially since an industry study released in 1994 indicates that to
ensure the reuse of bottles is energy-efficient, each bottle must be
returned, washed and refilled at least 10 times.
At White's Orchard Farms in Frankfort, Ann Wilson and her husband, Cecil
Linscott, also market their milk in refillable glass bottles and see about a
third of those bottles disappear. But for White's Orchard, a small operation
that sanitizes its 500 or so bottles each week in a commercial dishwasher,
it still makes sense economically and environmentally to encourage reuse.
Several of Maine's microbreweries offer refillable containers to a niche
market. At the Bear Brew Pub in Orono, owner Matt Haskell offers a $2
discount to customers who bring back "growlers" (64-ounce jugs) to be
refilled, and has a fairly good return rate from the pub's regular
customers, he said.
Internationally, soft drink bottlers - even large American firms such as
Coca-Cola and Pepsi - have used refillable soda bottles made of a heavy-duty
plastic since the 1980s. Finland offers refillable plastic beer bottles, and
Denmark requires that 100 percent of domestic products be sold in refillable
containers. Closer to home, the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island
has required since the 1970s that all "flavored and carbonated" beverages,
including soda, beer, seltzer and tonic water, be sold in refillable
bottles. A system of deposits is used to encourage participation, and in
1999 the provincial statistics boasted a 98 percent return rate on the
bottles - without losing popular American products such as Coca-Cola and
Pepsi. "They found a way to make it all work," said Garth Simmons of the
provincial government's environment office.
In Ontario, canned beer isn't illegal, but it is subject to a provincial tax
that refillable glass bottles are exempted from, so more than 80 percent of
all beer is sold in the refillable bottles. American beer manufacturers
challenged the policy before an international free trade organization in
1993 - and lost. Today, the same beer that is marketed in cans in the United
States is packaged in refillable glass bottles for the Canadian market. But
no American state has ever required refillables, and large U.S. retailers
discourage their use worldwide, arguing that collection of the used bottles
is burdensome. In fact, Maine is proactive just in having a bottle bill to
encourage recycling - something that only 10 states do.
Dresser pictures a system in which existing redemption center infrastructure
is used to collect the bottles, which would be shipped to a series of
communal bottle-washing and sanitizing facilities. A modern bottle-washing
plant costs about $2 million to build and could easily be paid for by the
resource savings in just a few years, he said.
Maine's waste management policy cites the hierarchical slogan: "Reduce,
Reuse, Recycle," so refilling bottles is legislatively preferable to
recycling them. But state officials were hesitant to embrace Dresser's plan.
Hal Prince, who handles both bottle redemption and food safety for the Maine
Department of Agriculture, does not oppose the refillable idea, but needs to
have concerns resolved before he could support it, he said.
No system exists now for ensuring the cleanliness of reusable bottles,
except for the dairy industry, which is regulated separately. And while the
idea of promoting reusable bottles would not conflict with Maine's bottle
bill, it could interfere with operation of redemption centers that
increasingly have turned to automated "reverse vending machines," which
crush bottles as they are redeemed and could not be used to handle
refillables. A growing market for recycled materials - particularly in China
- also discourages refilling bottles, according to State Planning Office
figures.
"I think the bottle bill is doing pretty good, all in all," said Oakley
Jones, state manager for Coca-Cola. The governor recently honored the
company's Maine operation for its recycling rates - far above the industry
average at nearly 90 percent, Jones said.
Lawmakers on the Legislature's Natural Resources Committee considered
Dresser's proposal earlier this spring, but voted not to move the concept
bill forward. Several committee members criticized Dresser's numbers,
concerned that they may not reflect the full cost of reusing bottles.
Indeed, an independent study published in 1994 by an environmental policy
group states that the number of uses is critical, estimating that 10 uses of
either a glass or plastic bottle would offset the energy needed to transport
and wash it. Any fewer and reusing is actually more energy-intensive.
Committee chairman Sen. Scott Cowger, D-Hallowell, said the idea is
intriguing, but perhaps impractical, given the effort that Maine has put
into its bottle redemption and recycling system.
The market has simply moved away from glass bottles, which are heavy,
breakable and notoriously difficult to recycle, said Jones of Coca-Cola,
adding that he was not fully informed about refillable plastic technology.
Some refillable glass was used by Coca-Cola in Maine up until the bottle
bill came into effect in the 1970s. Even then, consumers were rejecting the
refillable bottles, he said. The expense of making a transition back to
refillables now would be "just huge," he said.
Several legislators recommended that Dresser wait until oil prices rise so
high that the beverage industry comes around to his way of thinking. But
Dresser has spent too long preparing his case to give up easily, he said.
Major beverage companies rebuffed him, he said, so he plans to seek support
from environmental groups and spend the next few years refining his economic
model. When the 123rd Legislature convenes in 2007, he'll be there.
- end -
No system exists now for ensuring the cleanliness of reusable bottles,
except for the dairy industry, which is regulated separately. And while the
idea of promoting reusable bottles would not conflict with Maine's bottle
bill, it could interfere with operation of redemption centers that
increasingly have turned to automated "reverse vending machines," which
crush bottles as they are redeemed and could not be used to handle
refillables. A growing market for recycled materials - particularly in China
- also discourages refilling bottles, according to State Planning Office
figures.
"I think the bottle bill is doing pretty good, all in all," said Oakley
Jones, state manager for Coca-Cola. The governor recently honored the
company's Maine operation for its recycling rates - far above the industry
average at nearly 90 percent, Jones said.
Lawmakers on the Legislature's Natural Resources Committee considered
Dresser's proposal earlier this spring, but voted not to move the concept
bill forward. Several committee members criticized Dresser's numbers,
concerned that they may not reflect the full cost of reusing bottles.
Indeed, an independent study published in 1994 by an environmental policy
group states that the number of uses is critical, estimating that 10 uses of
either a glass or plastic bottle would offset the energy needed to transport
and wash it. Any fewer and reusing is actually more energy-intensive.
Committee chairman Sen. Scott Cowger, D-Hallowell, said the idea is
intriguing, but perhaps impractical, given the effort that Maine has put
into its bottle redemption and recycling system.
The market has simply moved away from glass bottles, which are heavy,
breakable and notoriously difficult to recycle, said Jones of Coca-Cola,
adding that he was not fully informed about refillable plastic technology.
Some refillable glass was used by Coca-Cola in Maine up until the bottle
bill came into effect in the 1970s. Even then, consumers were rejecting the
refillable bottles, he said. The expense of making a transition back to
refillables now would be "just huge," he said.
Several legislators recommended that Dresser wait until oil prices rise so
high that the beverage industry comes around to his way of thinking. But
Dresser has spent too long preparing his case to give up easily, he said.
Major beverage companies rebuffed him, he said, so he plans to seek support
from environmental groups and spend the next few years refining his economic
model. When the 123rd Legislature convenes in 2007, he'll be there.
- end -
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