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Even if I wasn’t a proud “outreach advisor” to the Plastic Pollution Coalition, I would have been charmed by, and urged you to check out, this new video by the group about you-know-what in our oceans. It’s short, sweet, and intoxicating. I like the film’s simple message, which is aimed at individuals concerned with a massive, seemingly intractable problem: “refuse disposable plastic.” I think it’s doable. (A version of this post originally appeared at OnEarth.org/theroytestuff)  (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... A reusable water bottle in Saguaro National Park. Credit: National Park Service In honor of World Water Day, let’s celebrate an action recently taken by a national park that should properly be interpreted as a boon to environmentally friendly water consumption. Proponents of the right to buy whatever single-serve packaged beverage they damn well please have long argued that eliminating bottled water from vending machines will force the public to instead buy high-calorie drinks, which have a bigger environmental footprint than does bottled water. (This shift in buying behavior hasn’t yet been proven; but yes, for the record, bottled water does have a lower carbon footprint than bottled sodas, juices, or teas.) But Saguaro National Park, just east of Tucson, has thrown the baby out with the bathwater: officials there have announced that the park will quit selling not only bottled water, but sodas as well – a decision that should eliminate up to 40 percent of the park’s recyclable waste stream. (Remember: recycling, good; reducing consumption, even better.) Take that, Grand Canyon National Park (which recently banned the sale of bottled water — but not sodas — after a huge kerfuffle with Coca-Cola, maker of Dasani water and a $13-million donor to the National Park Foundation). Like that park and Zion National Park, in Utah, Saguaro will be installing hydration stations — those contraptions formerly known as “water fountains” — for filling reusable bottles. If parks in some of the hottest, driest areas of the nation can take this step without fear of losing visitors to either disenchantment or dehydration, what’s stopping all the others? (No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
In cities with tasty, healthful water, I’m all for more fountains. Drinking from a fountain is cheaper than buying bottled water; fountains take water-delivery trucks off streets, so there’s less traffic and fewer diesel emissions; they keep empty bottles out of trash cans, gutters, and waterways; tap water is healthier than other packaged beverages; and fountains remind us of the fundamental connection between the natural world and our own well-being. But as the comments to Stoner’s piece show, there are still people who are afraid of getting sick from fountains, although microbiologists say the odds of contracting a disease this way are extremely low. (Granted, good fountain design and adequate water pressure help.) And then there are those concerned about low levels of contaminants in tap water. To this second point, I would note that large cities, where this fountain renaissance is beginning to take shape, usually have the best tap water. Why? Because they have enough paying customers, staffing, oversight, and expertise to run their systems properly: they protect their watersheds, enforce anti-pollution laws, upgrade filtration equipment, and repair infrastructure (though we all know that municipalities need many millions more to do all of this better). Yes, we continue to find contaminants in our drinking water, but that’s partly because we have the technology to detect contaminants at parts-per-billion, or even parts-per-trillion, levels. Can these low levels harm us? That’s the gazillion-dollar question: so far, the jury is out on pharmaceuticals in our waterways. Meanwhile, the EPA is investigating the regulation of hexavalent chromium, tightening the regs on atrazine, and screening an array of suspected endocrine disruptors that could end up in our drinking water. The studies are expensive, they take a lot of time, and the consequences of increased regulation are mind-boggling. (To remove hexavalent chromium from drinking water in parts of California’s Coachella Valley, for example, would cost more than $275 million and necessitate a water rate increase of 74 percent.) Yes, we can remove anything from water if we run it through enough money. But millions of Americans drink from residential wells and can’t afford to test their own water, let alone treat it with special filters. (Read about nitrate-contaminated water as an environmental justice issue in “Not a Drop to Drink,” by moi, in the spring issue of OnEarth.) Water contamination is an almost overwhelmingly complicated issue. But the situation isn’t hopeless: we can stop polluters, clean up contaminated aquifers, and filter harmful contaminants either at municipal plants or at our kitchen and bathroom faucets — a far less costly solution, considering that we don’t drink the vast majority of the water piped to our homes. And we can continue to promote fountains — both as a public service for the thirsty, and as a reminder that safe water is a resource upon which we’re absolutely dependent, and that we all hold in common. Image: Mugley/Flickr This post first appeared at OnEarth.org. (No Ratings Yet) Loading ...
But a recent story in the New York Times spurred another consideration: will less consumption hurt the vast world of informal waste workers, the millions who pick through urban dumps in developing nations recovering metal, textiles, plastics, paper, and other materials for repair, reuse, or recycling? It’s not a well-paid or safe living, but it’s useful work, and for the most part, human hands do a better job at recovering valuable materials from the waste stream than do machines. Around the developing world, though, multinational waste haulers are starting to horn in on the informal sector (see Mai Iskader’s Garbage Dreams to learn about this struggle in Cairo or the website of Chintan Environmental Action and Research Group to read about the issues in India.) Mexico City claims to have cut its waste stream from 12,600 tons per day to 4,000, in part by instituting a composting program and ramping up curbside recycling (awesome, if it’s true). But that means there’s less stuff for the city’s quarter million pepenadors to claim. Interestingly, a candidate for the presidency of Mexico told the Times that Mexico’s recycling market cannot absorb more than 20 percent of the country’s waste. “There isn’t the infrastructure, nor the markets, nor the prices, nor the regulations for this to work,” he said. Surely it makes more sense to develop those markets and regulations today than to bury these materials for a few decades and then mine them when we can no longer afford to extract virgin materials. Throughout history, garbage has exerted an evolutionary force as communities respond to its social, economic, and environmental challenges. In the developing world, the management of garbage — an underappreciated but crucial service — has started to empower trash pickers to organize politically and to educate their children so they can rise above their parents’ constraints. When and if large garbage haulers enter these markets, they should turn first to the experienced waste workers, who have intimate knowledge of local conditions and know best how to wring value from discards. Even in a less consumer-driven world, there will still be plenty to recover. Image: World Bank/Flickr (This post originally appeared at OnEarth.org) (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... NOAA's model tracks where debris likely will circulate in the Pacific Ocean. Courtesy of J. Churnside/NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Do-gooders can always be counted on for beach clean-ups, but Oregon’s Seaside Visitors Bureau has taken this impulse to a new level, trying to lure visitors to its shore to scavenge for Japanese debris linked with last year’s tsunami. (Don’t worry: it’s unlikely to be radioactive, say researchers, as the household goods and other materials were miles away from Fukushima by the time nuclear reactors malfunctioned.) Worried about navigational hazards, NOAA is tracking the debris. Its first wave — some 1 million to 2 million tons of trash– is due to hit U.S. territory (northwestern Hawaii, to be specific) within days. What doesn’t wash ashore there will continue to slowly drift and float, joining up with the “dismal abundance of discarded plastic” already congregating and circling in the North Pacific garbage patch, which now sprawls over at least 270,000 square miles. Sorry, Oregon, your disaster tourists may have to wait until 2013 to start their scavenging engines. But Hawaiians will get another whack at it when the debris field circles back around in years to come. After the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, tons of debris was swept into the Pacific. Much of it is buoyant enough to float on the surface and can be moved around by small scale currents and large scale circulation patterns, such as the North Pacific Gyre. The gyre, bounded by the Kuroshio Current on the west, California Current on the east, and Equatorial Current on the south tends to entrain debris in the center of the Pacific basin, creating what is commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Though the bulk of the marine debris remains in the ocean for years in an area north of Hawaii, individual pieces are continually washing up on the continental and island shores that border the basin. NOAA’s Marine Debris Program leads efforts to track and remove much of this existing trash, and is currently assessing the tsunami debris. Scientists as NOAA’s Earths System Research Laboratory developed the debris dispersion model, shown here. Using five years of historical weather patterns, the model is used to approximate how debris will circulate across the basin. (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Credit: Chris Upson/Wikimedia Commons Much ink has been spilled on the deplorable state of the nation’s drinking water and wastewater infrastructure — and the terrifying sums ($390 billion according to the sometimes-hyperbolic American Society of Civil Engineers) it will take to remedy the situation. The EPA estimates $188 billion is necessary to manage stormwater and preserve water quality nationwide. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but there are some positives attached to that pricetag: it’s not only going to bring us cleaner, safer drinking water, says a new Green for All report called Water Works. Spread over five years, that investment would also generate $266 billion in economic activity and create close to 1.9 million jobs.  Credit: Green for All Water Works functions as a primer on our infrastructure woes (from cracked pipes to sinkholes to combined sewer overflows), focusing on green infrastructure as a major part of the solution. The good news — if you’re a glass-half-full type — is that there has never been a better time to tackle these problems: borrowing money is cheap, construction costs are down (because of increased competition for jobs) and unemployment is high. But where will we get the money? From municipal bonds, state revolving loan funds, higher rates for consumers and other (nonspecified) “fee-based approaches,” says Water Works. (The report shies away from the polluter fees proposed in Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s Clean Water Trust Fund.) Government spending will add to the national debt, but it will doubtless pay off in the long term with healthier people, a cleaner environment and the avoided costs of filtering ever-dirtier water. At any rate: do we have a choice? Age and neglect have caught up to our water systems, some of which date back to the end of the 19th century. Climate change wreaks havoc even with relatively youthful infrastructure: extreme heat, drought and deluge all cause pipes to shift and crack. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave both the nation’s drinking-water infrastructure and its wastewater infrastructure a D-minus in its 2009 fell 12 feet into the earth when a sidewalk over a ruptured drainpipe suddenly collapsed. Although the woman was rescued from the sinkhole, it took divers and emergency workers more than a day to find the body of her son, who had been swept by rushing waters through subterranean pipes to a sewage collector. In his State of the Union speech, President Obama called on Congress to pass legislation to repair the nation’s infrastructure. He proposed footing the bill with half the money we’ll save from ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Congressional Budget Office, that’s about $440 billion dollars between 2012 and 2021. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start. 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Not that again, I groaned. Does anyone really listen to pro-recycling arguments these days? The subject is so 20th century, so fraught with disappointment and misunderstanding. But what Jackson said was actually quite bold, and it certainly needed saying: “If we could increase our recycling rate from about 39 percent to 80 or 90 percent,” Jackson said, “we would do a bunch of things. Certainly, we would have a cleaner environment. We would save a tremendous amount of water and energy. We would create millions of jobs, because recycling, in and of itself, would become a supply chain in our country — a very domestic one. . . . Think of [recycling] as a homegrown jobs program and an environmental program and an energy program and a water program all in one.” It sounds like magical thinking, but groups like the Institute for Local Self Reliance have been talking about the jobs angle for decades, and groups such as NRDC have harped on the energy and water benefits for even longer. (See “More Jobs, Less Pollution“ — a report released last November by NRDC along with the BlueGreen Alliance, the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, Recycling Works! and the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives — for data that support Jackson’s claims.) All we need to do is expand access to recycling programs for residents and businesses, to increase the number of recycling bins in public places, to broaden the range of materials accepted by processors (think textiles, electronics, construction and demolition debris, and agricultural and industrial waste), to limit the use of packaging and other materials that can’t be recycled or composted, to shorten the supply lines between generators of scrap materials and their end users, to develop composting programs that handle food as well as yard and garden waste, and to educate everyone about all these changes. (Oh yeah, and end subsidies that encourage burying and burning waste.) Jackson’s comment reminded me of a Simpsons episode called “Lisa the Vegetarian.” Homer: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Lisa, honey, are you saying you’re never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon? Could recycling be that wonderful, magical animal (and pay for itself, too)? One can always dream.  (1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5) Loading ... A recycling bin that's trying. Credit: Scott Dodd After finishing my coffee at a New York City Pret a Manger restaurant recently, I lingered near the trash bin, which was divided into separate sections with uniquely shaped openings — not unlike a toddler’s shape-sorting block toy. In my hands: a napkin, a paperboard coffee cup, a cardboard sleeve, a plastic lid. It took me, something of a garbage geek, nearly a minute to figure out what I was supposed to do with each discard. Did the napkin go with the paper, or did the napkin go with the food waste, which was bound for a composting operation beyond the city limits? (After all, paper is compostable, though experts say ’tis a far better thing to make new paper from old, in places where recovery systems can handle potentially soiled paper, rather than to make compost from paper.) Did the plastic lid go with the plastic recycling or into the compartment labeled “trash?” At home, the lid would have gone into the trash, as New York City’s Department of Sanitation, like many others, accepts only narrow-necked plastic bottles for curbside recycling. But businesses in New York hire private carters and so march to a different drummer. Pret a Manger uses Action Carting, a progressive company that collects food waste for composting and, I happened to know, a wider range of plastics for recycling. I did, eventually, study the educational illustrations above the waste bins, which should have set me straight. But still I had trouble identifying the cup lid among so many different shapes. Maybe I need to go back to kindergarten and the block sorter. Or maybe the illustrations could be a little clearer. (Or perhaps the bins could have a built-in object recognition device: I hold before an electric eye my lid, empty fruit cup, or sandwich box, and a quiet, friendly voice tells me where to put it. I’d prefer a more parsimonious — that is, less technological and less expensive — fix, but what can I say? People do love their apps.) I can’t offer enough props to Pret for lightening its environmental impact and nudging customers in the same direction. But my interlude at the waste bins tells me that we’ve got a ways to go down the path toward sustainable packaging (an ideal that ought to include no packaging). According to the EPA, packaging makes up nearly one third of municipal solid waste; between 1990 and 2007, containers and packaging have increased by nearly 14 million tons. Pret a Manger, which works with environmental groups (like Global Green), packaging designers, waste haulers, paper mills, and composters to blunt the impact of its single-use packaging, and is still experimenting with the perfect receptacle, is leading the way. But peering inside the bins, where cups were mixed willy-nilly with “trash” and bottles were mixed with napkins, I wondered if the public really had the stomach to follow. (1 votes, average: 3.00 out of 5) Loading ... Grand Canyon National Park Last month we learned that, in an attempt to cut down on litter, the supervisor of Grand Canyon National Park was set to ban sales of bottled water within the park, starting in January of 2011. (Dasani is the brand sold by concessionaires.) But two weeks before the ban was due to go into effect, the head of the national park system balked. Dasani water would stay, out of “concern for public safety in a desert park.” (Never mind that Utah’s Zion National Park had enacted a similar ban, to great acclaim, in 2008.) Soon the relationship between Coca-Cola, which produces Dasani from tap water, and our national parks was revealed: over a period of years, the corporation has given $13 million to the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that generates private donations for the park system. Environmentalists are up in arms — about the continued (and continuously promoted) use of disposable plastic water bottles, of course, but more importantly about the heavy influence of corporations in public spaces and debate. There are some angry comments on blogs about the issue, and many people erroneously seem to believe that park visitors would be stripped of any water bottles they carried into the park. Not true. Nor was it likely that the death toll from dehydration would rise. The parks and concessionaries had spent $300,000 developing “filling stations” in preparation for the ban; it’s hard to escape pro-hydration messages in the park (they’re everywhere), and it’s easy to buy reusable bottles on park grounds if you don’t already have them. For readers who can’t remember what personal hydrological conditions were like 30 years ago, suffice it to say that single-serve plastic bottles of water were not ubiquitous. And yet millions still hiked and camped, carried water, filtered water where they found it, and sometimes waited until they reached their destination (!) to slake their thirst from a fountain or sink. I hiked and camped in the Grand Canyon in the Pre-Perrier Period. I learned, on a day that I hauled my heavy backpack more than twenty miles across the Tonto Platform and up the South Canyon rim, that thirst can be a great motivator. Our multiple water bottles had long run dry, and we were reduced to eating dry oatmeal in our desperation for calories, with five miles yet to go. All I could focus on was the ice-cold elixir that flowed at trail’s end from a fountain in the dimly lit lobby of the Bright Angel Hotel. (Reader: I survived. I hope this water fountain has, too.) The Coca-Cola-National Parks fracas seems to be taking on a life of its own, to both groups’ detriment. Dozens of media outlets have picked up on the story, and already more than 94,000 people have signed a pro-ban petition at Change.org. Here’s hoping that the will of the environmentally minded, rather than a corporation representing the interests of its shareholders, will prevail. (No Ratings Yet) Loading ... Editor's Note: I highly recommend this book. You can purchase in the Adventures store. The price will be the same as if purchased directly from Amazon. Adventures receives a small percentage of the purchase price which goes to the production of this site. Rose George, author of 2008′s shockingly forthright and shockingly entertaining The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, has a bone to pick with hydro-philanthropists, whether species Hollywood (Matt Damon excepted) or species Rotary Club. They’ll raise money to dig wells for thirsty Africans, but they’re loath to address the dire need for adequate toilets (or their culturally appropriate equivalent). And yet: two thirds of the world’s population has no toilet or latrine, and diarrhea kills more children annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. (If that’s too abstract a number, picture a jumbo jet full of children crashing every two hours, every day.) Feces are indeed, as George notes, “a weapon of mass destruction.” In “Shit: A Survival Guide,” the monothematic fall issue of Colors magazine, George introduces readers to sanitation evangelists and to the brave folks who clean our sewer pipes and alleyways. She also considers the roles of fear and shame in toilet use and looks at the wide world of alternatives to a porcelain throne (meet the flying toilet). More than a cultural tour of toileting and its discontents, the magazine explores a smorgasbord of dichotomies: shit kills and it saves lives; it pollutes water and promotes plant growth; it stinks and it can be used to cook food. A graphically hip précis of Big Necessity, the Survival Guide goes well beyond the usual lamentations for decent toileting facilities to question some basic assumptions about where, when, and how we go. It’s become common in urban green circles to question the wisdom of using expensively treated drinking water — especially in water-short places — to flush away human excrement, but George forces us to question the morality of flushing away such a valuable fertilizer. There’s phosphorous and nitrogen in them thar feces. To buy a copy or preview parts of the quarterly, go to the Colors Magazine website. (November 19 was World Toilet Day, which is meant to draw attention to the importance of sanitation around the world. Check out Matt Damon “talking sh*t” [or typing, via twitter and facebook] for an entire week at Talk Sh*t All Week. Meanwhile, WaterAid and Amnesty International have launched Give A Crap About Human Rights, highlighting the rights to water and sanitation in the context of housing and women’s rights. Learn more about the day that dare not speak its name at World Toilet Day.  (2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ... |
 
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Nancy Stoner, formerly of the NRDC and now the Acting Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Water, blogged recently about drinking-water fountains. Lamenting the disappearance of fountains in public places over the last several decades, she notes that when we lose fountains, we also lose “public knowledge about the importance of investing in drinking water systems, which provide dependable, affordable and clean water.”
The question has dogged social movements that go by names like 
Just before the holidays, EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson went on the 
Elizabeth Royte is the author of "Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It"; "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash"; and "The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest". Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.
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