The end of garbage
From CNN Money.com: Zero waste is just what it sounds like - producing, consuming, and recycling products without throwing anything away. Getting to a wasteless world will require nothing less than a total makeover of the global economy, which thinkers such as entrepreneur Paul Hawken, consultant Amory Lovins, and architect William McDonough have called the Next Industrial Revolution.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
The End of Garbage
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Zero-Waste Efforts
Sarah Rich
March 20, 2007 2:05 PM
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We talk more and more often these days about the potential danger of half-steps toward sustainable practices. Now that the idea of being greener has infiltrated most corners of the business world, we're at a critical point where thinking only part of the way to a true solution means settling for something that may never get us all the way there.
What are some of the all-the-way solutions we're talking about? You could call them "The Zero's" -- zero-energy, zero-carbon, zero-emissions, zero-waste. The only way to surpass total elimination of the harmful byproducts of our lives is to create ways to suck up our own waste and reverse the damage. But acknowledging that there are enormous hurdles between halting our current momentum, and getting the pendulum to swing the other way, going for zero is probably the best combination of a solution that is both high-impact and quickly-attainable for the average individual, city or business.
Fortune Magazine recently ran an article about the smart business move that is zero-waste, and the "total makeover of the global economy" that will be required in order to obliterate the concept of throwing things away. In a garbageless economy, industry functions like a biological system in which one manufacturer's byproducts are another's fuel (or even the fuel for the same process) -- what Bill McDonough and Michael Braungart describe as "waste=food." And the advent of such a neobiological system may amount to "The Next Industrial Revolution."
The Fortune article points to San Francisco's model municipal waste disposal and recycling system, run by Norcal:
Norcal operates a $38 million facility that disaggregates all the recyclables in those blue bins. Conveyor belts, powerful magnets, and giant vacuums separate computer paper from newsprint, plastic jugs from water bottles, and steel and tin cans from aluminum. Materials are then sold to global commodity markets - and we do mean global.
Wastepaper, for example, is the U.S.'s No. 1 export by volume to China, according to PIERS Global Intelligence Solutions, which tracks trade. Ships that bring products from China to the U.S. return with wastepaper, which becomes packaging for goods made in China.
A second innovation is the city's handling of food scraps. Another Norcal facility grinds all that up with yard waste and cures it for three months. Banana peels, onion skins, fish heads, and other detritus are thus transformed into a nutrient-rich product dubbed Four Course Compost, which sells for $8 to $10 per cubic yard.
When I lived in San Francisco, my food scraps went into this giant compost heap, and the resulting substance went to growing some of the regions finest wine grapes and sweetest peaches. But the heart of the Fortune piece is not about how nice the compost is in San Francisco, but about how to get other cities, big businesses, and average residents, to take the time to become cogs in the zero-waste machinery. While systems like Norcal's work amazingly well to separate out components which don't get sorted by hand at home or in factories, there's a certain degree to which mass participation at the origin of disposal would make the process run more smoothly. So financial incentives come into play. San Francisco offers community members a discount on waste hauling if they accept a smaller bin for non-recyclable/non-food waste. It's a "pay as you throw" pricing scheme that leads easily to that critical extra second of thought before tossing a recyclable bottle into the trash bin.
Pricing incentives also apply up the chain at the producer level. Not all municipalities have structures in place that charge households according to the quantity of discarded waste, so it is also necessary to hold the bottle-maker accountable for the object's ultimate fate. "Take-back" laws and fees such as those charged to plastics manufacturers for the 5 billion bottles they set loose in the world each year encourage producers to take responsibility for their goods beyond their point of departure from factory to retail site. These incentive schemes get us thinking about the end-of-life scenario of product -- that point at which an object's fate lies literally in our own hands. But hopefully thinking harder about it also lead us to want fewer unsatisfactory options and less headache when it comes time to discard something. In other words, "pay as you throw" is a late-stage solution for what Jared Blumenfeld, the director of San Francisco's environment department, rightly pins as an early-stage design problem.
The deeper purpose here is to change the way things are made. "From our perspective, waste doesn't need to exist," says San Francisco's Blumenfeld. "It's a design flaw."
As we discussed yesterday, a good way to instigate change in the design phase is through impact assessments such as Wal-Mart plans to enforce starting next year, which can make producers think much smarter about how their goods are made, knowing that their decisions will be exposed to consumers with a greater degree of transparency, and that whatever they make will land back on their doorstep.
Wal-Mart also has a zero-waste goal, as does Herman Miller, Patagonia, Nike and others. The city of San Francisco has a zero-waste goal, as does Boulder, Colorado, most of British Columbia, and Buenos Aires (for a list of zero-waste cities around the world, check out Zero Waste International Alliance. It's a comprehensive, multi-stage approach that will raise awareness enough -- from designer to manufacturer to consumer to waste-hauler -- to make possible the "total makeover" our industrial process needs.
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