Just in time for the holiday shopping season, The Story of Electronics introduces you to the design strategy that has us dumping our electronics every 18 months and rushing out to buy new ones: It’s called Designed for the Dump, and it’s a major problem for our planet and our wallets.
This is the story where we challenge CEOs and the electronics industry to take back their products once we’re done with them, offering a real solution to the growing problem of toxic e-waste.
Mayor Gérald Tremblay on Tuesday unveiled a new sustainable-development plan for Montreal that will focus on improving air quality and reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, conserving water and reducing garbage sent to landfills, and making neighbourhoods more livable to stem the exodus of residents off the island.
The five-year plan, which Tremblay said will cost $1 million in the first year, was adopted by the city’s executive committee Tuesday morning.
It includes a goal of cutting polluting greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 per cent in 2020 compared to 1990 levels, a target that is even more ambitious than the provincial government’s, which is 20 per cent by 2020.
This article got me thinking about recycling which is one of the oldest, best-established environmental habits for everyday-folk to practice.
Is it really just a grand show that consumes more resources than it’s worth?
No matter your conclusion, the best course of action is to use less and throw away less before it has to be carried away by someone else to somewhere else.
Most of the stuff we throw out — aluminum cans are an exception — is cheaper to replace from scratch than to recycle. “Cheaper’’ is another way of saying “requires fewer resources.’’ Green evangelists believe that recycling our trash is “good for the planet’’ — that it conserves resources and is more environmentally friendly. But recycling household waste consumes resources, too.
Popular impressions to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not running out of places to dispose of garbage. Not only is US landfill capacity at an all-time high, but all of the country’s rubbish for the next 100 years could comfortably fit into a landfill measuring 10 miles square. Benjamin puts that in perspective: “Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch outside Bozeman, Mont., could handle all of America’s trash for the next century — with 50,000 acres left over for his bison.’’
Extra trucks are required to pick up recyclables, and extra gas to fuel those trucks, and extra drivers to operate them. Collected recyclables have to be sorted, cleaned, and stored in facilities that consume still more fuel and manpower; then they have to be transported somewhere for post-consumer processing and manufacturing. Add up all the energy, time, emissions, supplies, water, space, and mental and physical labor involved, and mandatory recycling turns out to be largely unsustainable — an environmental burden, not a boon.
“Far from saving resources,’’ Benjamin writes, “curbside recycling typically wastes resources — resources that could be used productively elsewhere in society.’’
Microscopic spinning orbs and spirals of green goo are the answers to our planet’s energy crisis and arable land shortage. At least that’s what Aaron Baum, a 40-year-old Harvard graduate and Stanford PhD, has concluded.
And Baum should know. After a mid-life crisis of sorts, he spent months researching the types of science that would most benefit the world and concluded that algae are it. Now, he wants to share his passion with the public by creating communities of people with their own algae farms. Imagine that – you can have a personal algae tank that provides fresh, ultra-nutritiousfood on a year-round basis.
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We’d like to create an international network of people growing all kinds of algae in their homes in a small community scale, sharing information, doing it all in an open source way. We’d be like the linux of algae – do-it-yourself with low-cost materials and shared information…
For biofuel, you want a species that produces a lot of oil. Many species of algae can produce huge amounts of oil — they can be more than 50 percent oil by weight, compared to normal plants that only produce a few percent.
Algae can produce about 100 times more than typical oil plants like soybeans, on a per acre basis. You can grow enough algae to replace all of the fossil fuel in an area that’s small enough to be manageable.
1. Only one planet that we know of in all the galaxies of the universe has a living, breathing skin called dirt. For 2 million years, humans have used dirt to grow their food for survival. If we don’t take care of the soil, our future is condemned. We can’t survive on Twinkies alone. (But it sure would be *fun…*for an hour or so.)
2. A handful of soil contains tens of billions of creepy-crawly microorganisms. These organisms keep plants, animals, and the planet alive.
3. Industrial farming is eroding the soil and disrupting its structure. We’ve lost a third of our topsoil in the last 100 years.
4. When there are miles and miles of only one species and one variety growing on our farms, as there is in modern-day industrial agriculture, this creates a vulnerable system. Monocultures are dangerous to our future. Diversifying crops on our farms, especially in drought, can keep the system from collapsing.
5. When we grow just one species on our farms, it’s an all-you-can-eat restaurant for pests. Once a pest learns to unlock the key to that plant, you have a pest infestation, and then you add pesticides. Exposure to pesticides, especially in children, has been linked to higher birth defect rates, cancer, learning disabilities, and abnormal hormonal changes.
6. Insects and plants are so like us physiologically, cell to cell, protein to protein, gene to gene, that if a pesticide is going to kill plants and insects, it’s going to kill humans, too. *Ta-da!*
7. Chemicals (synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) deplete the life of the soil. They take away the structure and the moisture of the soil. They take away the very organisms that make the soil fertile. When you add a layer of compost to your dirt, instead of a nasty chemical fertilizer, you’re adding life to your dirt, and can then call it “soil.”
Repeat after me: *Compost, compost, compost*.
8. When the land is dead and we add synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to feed the crops, only about 20 percent goes to the plant roots. In the Midwest, the rest of the wasted fertilizer flows into the rivers and streams, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. This excess fertilizer feeds algae that grow and suffocate nearly all of the marine life, creating “dead zones” where only jellyfish survive. This mobile nitrogen combines with oxygen, which forms nitrous oxide and rises into the atmosphere accelerating climate change. Twenty-five percent of greenhouse-gas emissions come from agriculture.
9. In India, farmers have been pushed to buy more genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and tractors. Now a farming activity that was zero cost is increasingly expensive. In India, over the last decade an *estimated 200,000 farmers have killed themselves*, many by drinking the pesticide they can no longer afford.
As farmers around the world go broke and lose their farms, their land is taken over by international agribusinesses that grow genetically modified single crops for a globalized economy.
10. Each year 100 million trees are turned into 20 million mail-order catalogues.
A home-made documentary about one couple’s quest to live waste-free comes to Montreal on Monday at Concordia University’s de Sève Cinema, 1400 de Maisonneuve West, 7PM. I hope to see you there!
The Clean Bin Project is a feature documentary film about a regular couple and their quest to answer the question “is it possible to live completely waste free?”. Partners Jen and Grant go head to head in a competition to see who can swear off consumerism and produce the least landfill garbage in an entire year. Their light-hearted competition is set against a darker examination of the sobering problem waste in North American society. Even as Grant and Jen start to garner interest in their project, they struggle to find meaning in their seemingly minuscule influence on the large-scale environmental impacts of our “throw-away society”.
I don’t intend to pick on Westmount since every community on the island probably has a similarly large ecological footprint.
Westmount's Ecological footprint is the red, outer-most border
Nevertheless, it is just amazing when you look at the map above. The BLUE border is the physical size of Westmount. The RED border is the ecological footprint, or the size of the Earth’s resources it devours. The GREEN border represents the “ideal ecological footprint” according to some academic (see the full research here).
What’s the #1 source of this enormous ecological footprint? WASTE with 59% of the entire footprint! Waste has to be carried far away by gas powered vehicles and then stored in a place that takes space away from farms, towns and other productive spaces.
So, the #1 way to reduce your ecological footprint is to Compost! Yea, compost! It’s easy, it’s fun and you get empowered in the face of this ecological train-wreck called “modern, western life.”
This is great news, if it ever gets implemented. At least the money is there. Now, local NIMBY opposition must be overcome. This is local, sustainable thinking at a state level. Bravo!
On Monday, Ottawa and Quebec gave $215.1 million to Montreal, Laval, Longueuil and the South Shore regional municipality to build compost treatment centres. Montreal Island municipalities will add another $79.9 million for its centres, while Laval will kick in $56.9 million.
The question now is where the facilities will be built…
As for the Montreal Island, Montreal Mayor Gérald Tremblay launched a preemptive strike against “not-in-my-back-yard”-ism Monday by reminding suburban mayors and Montreal city councillors that four potential sites were identified in the island-wide waste-management plan, which the agglomeration council unanimously adopted last summer. It called for four compost-treatment centres, two in the centre of the island, and one each in the west and east ends.
Tremblay said that towns and boroughs have until June to submit potential sites in industrial areas for four compost treatment centres – two closed facilities that will convert garbage into biogas and compost, and two semi-closed facilities that will create only compost.
Construction could begin in 2011, with all centres up and running by 2014, said city spokeswoman Valérie de Gagné. The first to be built will be located in the central part of the island, she said. Montreal will also set up a sorting facility in the centre of the island where regular garbage will be taken in order to remove any recyclable or organic materials before it goes to a landfill site.
“The challenge is going to be to convince people to use a brown bin,” Tremblay said, adding that it took years for people to get used to sorting recyclable materials out of their garbage. “We have no choice – we have to go ahead with this.”
Here’s a solution to a problem commonly seen at holiday parties, or any party for that matter where people share food. When you bring your homemade spinach dip or guacamole to a party, you must remember to take back your container (usually a “Flubberware” of plastic poison), or even worse, use a disposable container that ends up in landfill.
With edible containers, you don’t have to worry about polluting or retrieving your container after the party is over.
Diane Bisson, a Montreal design professor, has developed edible materials that can be moulded into containers. She insists that they are unlike the corn- or potato-based comestible plates that have been tested in Europe and taste like cardboard.
“I’ve spent a year testing about 400 different samples to come up with 40 recipes,” said Bisson, 49, who teaches at the Université de Montréal’s School of Industrial Design.
“The whole purpose of this is sustainable design,” she said. “It’s all about reducing disposable objects, the cardboard and plastic plates that are in every food court and every home. Objects like that get used once and then are thrown out. They’re filling the landfills. We have to find something better…
In 2011, she will work with scientists to refine her recipes for the market.
“We intend to have different flavours and tastes but they will be more neutral and the shapes will probably be closer to the shapes people know,” she said.
“But right now I’m being very creative so we can perhaps open new ways of handling the food, perceiving food and thinking about sustainability.”
Instead of relying upon the state of California, the city of San Jose has taken it upon itself to become energy independent (Montreal politicians take notice).
Europe has already adopted this technology because it kills two birds with one stone: reducing the amount of organic waste that goes to landfills and renewable energy gets produced.
San Jose, CA – Achieving a goal of 100 percent energy independence is a little closer for San Jose thanks to a momentous move by the City Council today. The City Council authorized the City Manager to negotiate and execute a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop potential lease terms and guidelines for developing an organics-to energy bio-gas facility…
This project would also see the cooperation of GreenWaste and Harvest Power, Inc., a company that provides leading technology and project development capabilities for harnessing the renewable energy in organic waste.
The Zanker Road Biogas facility would be the first facility in the U.S. with the technology to turn organic waste into bio-gas, keeping San Jose at the forefront of clean technology innovations. The technology that would find its home at the San Jose facility would use a process known as dry anaerobic fermentation to generate renewable bio-gas and high-quality compost. This technology has already been made popular in Europe.
All of the existing anaerobic digestion systems in common use in the United States currently process wet waste. By contrast, the technology for the proposed Zanker Road Biogas would use the dry fermentation technology specifically designed to process the relatively dry organic waste found in the municipal solid waste stream which is difficult to recycle without extensive pre-processing and currently ends up in a landfill.
This anaerobic digestion system technology has been commercially demonstrated in Europe by BEKON Energy Technologies, which has built 12 facilities in Germany and Italy and has 13 additional facilities scheduled for construction in 2009.
“This project not only demonstrates San Jose’s leadership in the production of renewable energy but will help us meet the economic development, zero waste and energy goals of our city’s Green Vision,” said San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed.
This article got me thinking about recycling which is one of the oldest, best-established environmental habits for everyday-folk to practice.
