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23 May 05 - Value Village; schools; job; retirees; papers; pills
** 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 Yen Chin, Seattle City Light, Seattle, WA, responding to the news
article posted 5/13/05 about the expansion of the Savers/Value Village
thrift store chain:
When I first moved to Seattle more than 20 years ago, I worked briefly for
the Northwest Center for the Retarded (now known as the Northwest Center)
driving a truck and picking up donations of clothing and other household
goods. At the end of the day I'd take my load to a Value Village where the
goods would get unloaded, sorted and sold. The most valuable commodity for
Value Village was clothing, but we picked up and delivered all sorts of
goods. I have no idea what happened to books, pots and pans or electronic
goods.
However, I do know what happened to clothing that didn't sell during its
allotted time on the sales floor. Once a week one of our trucks would make
the rounds of all the Value Village stores to pick up bales of unsold and
expired clothing. The truck then took the bales to Buffalo Industries, a
rag company in Seattle.
I often shop at thrift stores, and I think they serve a useful purpose in
the context of our overly consumptive society. However, I do not idealize
them; I understand that they run on waste and that they can serve as a
palliative for middle-class consumers that allows them to continue their
shopping addiction with a clearer conscience.
E-mail: Yen [ DOT ] Chin [ AT ] seattle [ DOT ] gov
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Excerpted from a 5/13/05 Associated Press article by Ben Feller (forwarded
by Carl Hursh):
IN SCHOOL CAFETERIAS, TRASH PILES UP DESPITE RECYCLING EFFORTS
As students walk by with their lasagna, snacks and fruit, Sally Oswald sees
a cafeteria routine that most parents do not. This is no lunch line. It's a
trash line. Students at Hammond Elementary in Laurel, Maryland, outside
Washington, DC, toss away half-eaten apples, untouched sandwiches and
portions of pizza slices. That's on top of the packaging, from shiny juice
pouches to plastic bags.
Even on Wednesdays, when the school encourages "waste-free" meals, lunchtime
yields about 100 pounds of trash. Students weigh the trash to check each
grade's progress in reducing waste, but the numbers go up and down like
signs of a struggling diet. "When you think that this happens in every
elementary school every day, it starts to speak to you," Oswald said,
looking at the weekly trash tallies. "This is a real problem."
In scattered communities across the country, schools are working to keep
their cafeterias from becoming trash heaps. Whether driven to help the
environment, save money or stop a careless tossing of food, some educators
say they are hungry to make lunch more efficient. The mission isn't easy.
Many parents favor throwaway packaging that's quick and easy, right down to
pre-wrapped peanut-butter sandwiches. Students have their own reasons for
leaving things behind - some feel too rushed to finish meals during brief
lunch periods, some don't like the food, some don't think to reuse those
sealable bags.
It adds up. A single student produces 45 to 90 pounds of garbage a year in
disposable lunches, according to New York's Department of Environmental
Conservation. A federal review of the National School Lunch Program found
that wasted food costs more than $600 million, plus an untold nutritional
loss.
At Oak Hills Elementary in Ventura County, California, students filled eight
barrels a day with lunch waste just a few years ago. Principal Anthony
Knight was appalled to find most of it was water bottles, plastic bags and
paper products that could be recycled. So he enforced zero-waste tolerance.
Students, under the watchful eye of peer monitors, divided their trash into
waste and recycling bins. Parents were strongly encouraged to eschew
conveniently packaged foods in favor of reusable containers. Before long,
the waste was down to about one barrel a day. "There was resistance at
first," said Knight, now superintendent of the Oak Park Unified School
District. "Some people accused us of sticking our nose out of the
educational realm and into their personal business. But most parents thought
it was great because they were being taught by their children how to
recycle. It became embedded in the school's culture."
Yet many food service workers from rural to urban areas say their schools do
nothing to limit food waste, according to an informal survey by the American
Federation of Teachers. "You offer the kids choices, but you can't force a
child to eat," said Alma Hackler, a lunchroom worker at Fontainebleau High
School in Mandeville, Louisiana. "All you can control is to try to provide
them with a nutritional meal." Parents do have control, however, over how
they pack lunches, said Amy Hemmert of Santa Cruz, California, who tracks
waste-free programs nationwide and runs a website that offers tips and sells
lunch kits of colorful, reusable containers.
At Hammond Elementary in Maryland, some of Oswald's environmentally
conscious fifth-graders have taken ownership of waste-free Wednesday. They
skip their recess to monitor other lunch periods, taking turns on a
microphone to remind other students about the value of recycling. There are
signs it is working. On one recent day, fourth-grader Julie Kaplan showed
off a lunch packed in reusable containers and announced plans to take home
the leftovers. The 9-year-old had not one piece of trash. "We're saving
nature," she said.
The school has had to tweak its experiment. Students in the grade with the
least trash were praised as "losers" - as in trash losers - but that didn't
go over well. Now they're called winners. Next year, students hope they will
be offered prizes, such as extra recess. Meanwhile, the waste-free days have
had only minimal impact. Change will take time, said Oswald, who oversees
the program. Parents have to think differently about food shopping, even if
their kids have to nudge them. "This is the age when you can have a huge
opportunity to make an impression," she said. "It's powerful for young kids
to get the message. We've just become a generation of waste."
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Link to a job posting for a Resource Conservation Programs Coordinator for
San Mateo County, Redwood City, CA:
http://www.recycleworks.org/job_announcement.html
The annual salary for
this position is $50,377 - $69,264. The deadline for applications is
Thursday, May 26. Applications can be submitted online. San Mateo County
is located just south of San Francisco. This position is within
RecycleWorks, a program of the San Mateo County government that is
responsible for waste prevention, recycling, green building, composting and
sustainability programs. The job is based in Redwood City.
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Link to the website for Waste Reduction Partners (WRP), a program in
Asheville, NC, where retired professionals provide technical assistance on
waste reduction and energy and water conservation to businesses and
institutions:
http://www.landofsky.org/wrp According to
an article in the 10/31/04 Parade Magazine, "Since Jan. 1, 2000, WRP's
clients have produced 109.1 million fewer pounds of solid waste while using
105.8 million fewer gallons of water and 14.8 million fewer kilowatt hours
than they would have without the retirees' help. Total saved: $5.75 million.
In comparison, WRP's entire budget during this period was less than
$500,000."
WRP, a project of Land-of-Sky Regional Council, is also supported by several
other agencies. Specific services provided by WRP's retired professionals
include waste stream audits, development of waste reduction policies and
assistance in publicizing success stories. The full Parade magazine article
about WRP is at: http://archive.parade.com/2004/1031/1031_scientists1.html
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Link to a call for papers for the Transdisciplinary Journal of Emergence
(TJE) "Garbage and Culture" issue (forwarded by Alex Erzen):
http://knowledge.sdabocconi.it/emergence
Click on "Call for Papers" on
the right. Deadline for submissions for the "Garbage and Culture" issue is
September 1, 2005. It does not appear that there is any payment for the
articles. TJE, an international on-line journal based in Europe, is
published semi-annually. Papers for the upcoming issue may address such
topics as: Perceptions of garbage; politics of producing/consuming/storing
garbage; waste management policies; production/consumption of green
products; garbage and the sublime.
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Excerpted from an article by Stephanie Strom in the 5/18/05 New York Times:
FINDING NEW MEDICINE CABINETS FOR UNUSED PILLS
As the cost of prescription drugs climbs, more of the nation's officials and
consumers are weighing how to salvage at least $1 billion worth of unused
drugs that are being flushed down the toilet each year.
Though the Food and Drug Administration generally forbids the redistribution
of prescription drugs once they are dispensed to consumers, states are free
to set their own policies for drugs controlled by nursing homes,
long-term-care centers and other pharmacies. "They seem content to let the
states be laboratories, and that works out rather well because the dollars
the states are saving are in a lot of cases federal dollars," said James
Cooley, chief of staff for Diane Delisi, a Texas state representative and
the author of legislation to expand Texas' limited drug recovery program,
which may pass this spring.
Several states, including Oklahoma, Louisiana and Ohio, have passed
legislation in the last few years allowing unused drugs to be recovered from
those organizations for distribution primarily to poor patients. Nebraska
even permits consumers to return unused drugs if they are in
tamper-resistant packaging, like the blister package most familiar in
over-the-counter medicines, skirting the F.D.A. prohibition. Recovery has
been modest, but California, Maine, Washington and other states are
pondering similar programs in hopes of lowering health care costs, however
marginally.
Other supporters are trying to push the idea further. An inventor in
Massachusetts is seeking a patent on a system that would knit together
existing technologies to address the myriad issues of drug redistribution.
"We recycle newspapers, we recycle soda cans, we recycle plastic," said
Moshe Alamaro, the inventor, who is a visiting scientist at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's ludicrous not to recycle
expensive drugs." Mr. Alamaro added, "It should be criminal to throw these
drugs away, and instead it's required." The concept has more skeptics than
believers. The hurdles include concerns about patient safety and privacy,
the lack of an infrastructure to process and redistribute drugs, and
administrative requirements.
To sidestep the questions of recycling, Representative Tim Murphy, a
Republican who represents Pennsylvania in Congress, suggests that the
federal government take a different tack and make it easier for doctors to
prescribe small quantities of drugs initially to determine whether a patient
can use them. Monthly or longer prescriptions, now encouraged and sometimes
mandated by states and insurers to hold down costs, lead to waste that could
be curbed through redistribution.
The amounts discarded are unknown. Though many states require nursing homes,
hospitals and consumers to follow specified procedures for drug disposal,
the rules add costs and are largely ignored, state health officials and
others say. A study published in the Journal of Family Medicine in 2001
estimated that $1 billion a year in drugs prescribed to the elderly are
thrown away, and Mr. Alamaro estimates that a more ambitious system for drug
recycling could recapture 5 percent of the nation's prescriptions, or about
$6 billion worth annually.
Existing programs are a long way from that, however. The prevailing method
of dispensing prescription medicine in bottles leaves it too vulnerable to
tampering and contamination for any chance of recovery. Pharmacies, the most
likely candidates for redistribution, have little incentive to take on the
administrative burdens and potential liabilities. And states have not
committed to developing the databases and other systems that would be
needed, much less wrestled with how to ensure adequate supplies of drugs for
patients to continue a regimen. So far, only one clinic has expressed
interest in participating in the Missouri program. Ohio has failed to get
its program off the ground more than two years after it was approved by the
legislature because of a lack of interest among nursing homes.
Among the handful of states pressing ahead, Louisiana is one of the most
advanced, with 12 pharmacies that distribute unused prescription drugs.
Expired drugs and controlled substances, those that are potentially
dangerous, are not accepted. As in other states, the drugs are collected
from nursing homes and assisted-living centers, which have a carefully
controlled storage and distribution system and use blister packaging.
Nonetheless, concerns about safety and hygiene have dogged the Louisiana
program, said Malcolm J. Broussard, executive director of the Louisiana
Board of Pharmacy. "We run across the thought that these are secondhand
drugs, and 'don't poor people deserve the same drugs as anyone else?' " he
said. In Louisiana, the recovery and redistribution of unused medicines is
handled by charity pharmacies that cater to the working poor, thus avoiding
thorny questions of who gets reimbursed for returned medicines and how.
Mr. Alamaro is convinced that many problems can be resolved with technology,
greatly expanding the pool of retrievable medicines. He and his partners
want access to the shelved drugs in the medicine chests of consumers like
Florence Weisfeld of New York. Mrs. Weisfeld, 80, a former social worker,
ached and had flu-like symptoms when she took Lipitor, the
cholesterol-reducing medication. So her doctor changed her prescription. "I
had 25 Lipitor tablets left in my medicine chest, and all I could do with
them was flush them down the toilet," Mrs. Weisfeld said. "Such a waste."
Recycling Mrs. Weisfeld's Lipitor would require sweeping changes in the way
drugs are dispensed. Mr. Alamaro's plan contemplates replacing bottles of
pills with blister packaging or something like a high-tech Pez dispenser.
Such packaging could be encoded with information about the drug and who paid
for it. That data would then be used to determine the drug's integrity and
reimbursement, which Mr. Alamaro envisions as a system of credits. For
instance, a consumer returning a drug to a pharmacy would receive a credit
toward a future co-payment. Patients could return drugs by mail to a
reprocessing center or deposit them in a secure box at a pharmacy, which
would then forward them to an inspection center.
The states that are trying drug redistribution have found novel ways to
overcome some of the problems. For instance, Oklahoma drafted a corps of
retired doctors to ferry drugs between donors and two participating county
pharmacies. Proponents of drug recovery programs say the real test will come
in California, where the Senate is considering a bill to establish a drug
recycling program that was first advocated by five first-year medical
students at Stanford University. The Stanford students estimate that a
program to recover drugs from nursing homes and long-term-care facilities
would save the state $50 million to $100 million a year.
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