Billions of gallons of raw sewage flow into Great Lakes annually, report says

The Great Lakes, subject of our favorite mnemonic device (HOMES), is being contaminated by homes -- and other places where people poo. According to a report released today, 20 cities release billions of gallons of raw sewage into the lakes every year, enough to fill 37,000 Olympic-size pools. The report's authors say that's just a taste of the issue; the cities they assessed represent only a third of the region's 35 million residents, many of whom rely on the lakes for drinking water. "It's appalling," says report author Elaine MacDonald, a staff scientist with Sierra Legal Defense Fund. "I think countries as wealthy as Canada and the U.S. can do a hell of a lot better." In many cases, outdated systems can't handle both sewage and stormwater, so cities divert sewage when it rains. The worst offenders are Detroit ("quite a quagmire," says MacDonald), Cleveland, and Windsor, Ontario. Among the best: Ontario's Peel Region and Green Bay, Wisc. Which, sadly, renders our headline inaccurate.

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The logistics of cleaning up New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are almost beyond comprehension.

Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality says some 15,000 houses are slated to be torn down, and demolition is the likely fate of 80,000 more. As a result, DEQ estimates, the city will ultimately truck off and dispose of some 20 million cubic yards of waste.

Where will it go? To a number of landfills in the region, most of which are designed to handle hazardous materials. But to speed the process, the city converted a deep pit located amid the wetlands of eastern New Orleans into a landfill in April. The thinking was that using this close-in area -- called Chef Menteur, after an adjacent highway -- would speed the clearing of ruined homes, and blaze a faster road to the city's recovery.

Opening a new landfill at the edge of a major city would normally require elaborate permitting and public comment, but Mayor Ray Nagin signed an order bypassing the usual process. The Chef Menteur was slated to accept some 2.6 million cubic yards of waste; if that goal was reached, a mountain of debris would rise eight stories over the wetlands, as well as a nearby neighborhood of low-slung brick homes.

The landfill started accepting trucks filled with waste immediately. Reaction -- to Nagin's order and the dumping that followed -- was swift. The landfill sits across a canal from the largest urban wildlife refuge in the United States, the 23,000-acre Bayou Sauvage, provoking the ire of environmentalists in the region. And some 1,000 Vietnamese-American families who live in a nearby neighborhood called Versailles rallied opposition as well. Their community has been among the most active in rebuilding since the flood, yet those who returned found themselves coping not only with their own personal disasters, but with the prospect of toxins making their way from the landfill through their neighborhood.

Joel Waltzer, an attorney who worked with the Louisiana Environmental Action Network to oppose the landfill, puts it simply. The Chef Menteur, he says, has made "a second disaster out of the first one."

The Chef Menteur was never designed to be a landfill. It was an open pit created when construction companies excavated sand to use in their projects. It isn't lined with clay to prevent toxins from leaching out, nor was it set up with a system for detecting any leaching that might occur.

"Whatever you put in it leaks into the water table, which is hydraulically connected to the groundwater," says Wilma Subra, an environmental consultant and Superfund site expert based in New Iberia, La., 125 west of the Big Easy.

The DEQ claims that the landfill is intended only for non-toxic demolition debris, and that steps have been taken to keep hazardous materials out. But Subra says the wholesale demolition of homes in New Orleans leaves much to be desired when it comes to sorting.

The order creating the landfill allows everything within the four walls of a house to be deposited here. This includes not only decaying mattresses and rotting food, but "all the petroleum products you might have for your lawnmower, all the cleaners and the pesticides, the degreasing solvents, and toner," Subra says. All of these things have been observed in the waste stream destined for the landfill, she reports.

Subra has spoken with debris removal crews in the field. She says they've been instructed to set aside any hazardous material they see on the surface of a debris pile, but to not bother with anything within the piles. Hired spotters at the landfill perch on stands and watch as the debris is dumped, but can catch only a portion of hazardous waste going by. U.S. EPA officials told CNN last October that only 20 to 30 percent of the hazardous material would likely be diverted.

Sorting out toxins from more benign debris is "not happening, and we've done sampling to prove that's not happening," Subra adds. She notes that leachate was observed coming out of the face of the Chef Menteur landfill a month after it opened.

The city and the state DEQ maintain that the landfill doesn't pose an environmental hazard. But Waltzer disagrees. He says the environmental tests cited by officials are flawed -- they were conducted shortly after the dump opened, when less than one-tenth the intended waste had been deposited. What's more, these tests were conducted not at the main pit, but in a nearby excavation that had been diluted with rainwater. "I've never seen a worse case of junk science," he says. "I don't know how they can sleep at night."

The Vietnamese community in Versailles, where any toxins that leach out will eventually flow via canals, charge that the neighborhood was selected for a landfill because the city didn't think the residents had the political clout to stop it.

If so, the city has been proved wrong. Led by Rev. Nguyen The Vien, pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam Church, the neighborhood quickly rallied.

The Old Gentilly landfill may be an even
bigger problem.

Photo: Louisiana DEQ

"I believe that every community needs to shoulder the burden of the debris -- at least the amount we have generated," Rev. Vien told Heather Moyer of Disaster News Network in June. "The problem is that we are shouldering all the burden while the benefit goes to everyone else. ... It's a question of environmental justice." Protests drew media attention, which in turn shined a spotlight on the hasty opening of the landfill and its potential consequences.

In mid-July, the efforts to end the dumping appeared to pay off. Mayor Nagin abruptly reversed course on Chef Menteur, announcing that he would let expire his earlier order that opened the landfill. A backlash surfaced quickly. DEQ announced that closing the landfill would add six months to a year to the city's cleanup, a charge disputed by landfill opponents who say that bureaucracy has set the pace of debris removal, not the proximity of the landfills. And Waste Management Inc., Chef Menteur's operator, recently filed suit to keep the dump open. That case will be heard on Aug. 11 in Louisiana district court.

Assuming the courts uphold the closure, trucks will cease adding to this accidental monument to Hurricane Katrina on Monday, Aug. 14.

Will the story end if the trucks stop rolling in? That's not so clear.

Even assuming the Chef Menteur landfill closes as scheduled and remediation plans are launched -- highly uncertain given the more pressing needs regionwide -- the larger battle to avert a local environmental disaster is still far from over.

Another unlined landfill not far away, called Old Gentilly, was also hastily reopened in the wake of Katrina and is again accepting construction and demolition waste. In many ways, this presents a worse scenario than Chef Menteur, since it was never fully sealed after being shut down in 1986. Subra says that the new dumping is already squeezing out leachate from the older dump, which is now seeping into the adjacent wetlands.

"It's going to be a nightmare," she says.

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Dear Umbra,

I'm attempting to "green" my home, room by room. I've heard of low-flow toilets, but someone just told me about composting toilets. Do they smell bad? Will my grandmother use it or ask for an outhouse? Thanks for your wisdom!

Moira
Providence, R.I.

Dearest Moira,

Excellent, manageable room-by-room plan.

What in tarnation?!

Composting toilets are basically the technology we should have adopted instead of the water closet. Although there's a wide range of models, all of them compost human waste into a humus-like end product that can go back into the earth whence it came. Essentially a compost pile within the home. These toilets either contain the waste -- oh, I might as well use the cute term "humanure" -- just below the bowl or send it down a chute to a central holding container. The odors are vented outside. Water use is either low or none, electricity use is low or none, smell should be zero, conversational value quite high. Unfortunately, price can also be quite high, ranging from $1,000 to $5,000.

The smelliness and effectiveness of the toilet will depend on your ability to follow instructions. Do you remember our past discussions on anaerobic and aerobic composting? Aerobic composting integrates oxygen and moisture, and the microorganisms that thrive in this rotating, air-rich environment reduce smell, process raw materials quickly, and leave you an excellent final product, no matter what you are composting. It is essential that humanure composting use an aerobic process if it is to be anything more than an outhouse. Your toilet may require adding wood shavings or another "accelerator," and turning a handle or pressing a button. It certainly will require removing the humus, but hopefully not more than once or twice a year.

The tricky thing is that you become responsible for your body's waste, from start to finish. The EPA has put out a little primer [PDF] listing the pros and cons of composting toilets. The cons made me giggle, because they all boil down to: It's POOP. Human waste is stinky, carries dangerous pathogens, and is socially unacceptable -- dealing directly with adult poop is foreign to most contemporary Americans. Although composting toilets are supposed to remove pathogens, and humanure has a long tradition as a soil amendment -- it even has a special superhero name, Night Soil -- all officials advise caution in handling what could basically be a big pile of disease. Check your local solid-waste regulations for more guidance.

If you are intrigued but worried about grandma and other visitors, the scourge of being weird, or the strangeness of such a novel concept, perhaps you could find a local compost toilet to visit. The manufacturers can tell you who sells their product locally, and those dealers should be able to send you somewhere to view this paragon of common sense.

Poopily,
Umbra

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Lawmakers slash funding for Yucca Mountain nuke dump

In a season of setbacks for President Bush, Congress delivered yet another this week, cutting funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump well below the amount requested by the White House. House and Senate negotiators working on a funding bill for energy and water projects allotted $450 million for Yucca Mountain in 2006, not only below Bush's requested $650 million but far less than the project's $577 million budget for each of the past two fiscal years. Apparently ongoing delays at the Yucca site in Nevada have chilled estimations of the project's eventual success. "No matter what side of Yucca you're on," said Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), "the truth of the matter is Yucca is ... behind schedule." The Department of Energy responded via a spokesflack that it's still committed to opening the Yucca dump. Good lucka.

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Louisiana officials and enviros clash over disposal of hurricane debris

The pressure on regional officials to cleanse New Orleans of the trash and debris left by Hurricane Katrina is intense -- so intense that eco-groups say they're cutting corners, sending garbage to areas not equipped to handle it, and on the verge of creating a Superfund-sized toxic problem. Illegal dumping in the swampland east of residential New Orleans is already openly tolerated. Also, the state Department of Environmental Quality recently reopened a city-owned garbage dump in the same area that was shut down by federal regulators years ago. Yesterday, the Sierra Club and the Louisiana Environmental Action Network filed suit to stop most kinds of dumping in the landfill, charging that it wasn't constructed to prevent groundwater contamination. Said LEAN lawyer Robert Wiygul, "We don't want to respond to one disaster by creating another one." But the state claims the landfill meets "all the standards," and anyway, said a DEQ official, "the ultimate goal is speed."

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New Orleans garbage will fill at least 3.5 million truckloads

We'd hate to be the ones tasked with separating out the recycling: Cleaning up New Orleans will involve hauling 22 million tons of garbage and waste that have been moldering in the heat and damp since late August's Hurricane Katrina, including rotting food, ruined furniture, carpeting, metals, chemicals, and more. It's the largest, most complicated cleanup in U.S. history, involving enough refuse to fill the Empire State Building 40 times over -- and that doesn't even include an estimated 300,000 flood-ruined cars, over 1 million major appliances, or the many homes that will likely need to be demolished. Cleanup time estimates vary wildly, with the Army Corps of Engineers suggesting seven months and state environmental officials contemplating up to two years. Automotive advocacy groups and insurers are warning buyers to beware of used cars coming out of the region; they may be bacteria-laden biohazards that have had their titles scrubbed.

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Indiana burg to become "BioTown"

The small farming community of Reynolds, Ind., is gearing up to take advantage of its ripest renewable resource: vast amounts of stinky hog poop. Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) and the Indiana Department of Agriculture have designated the one-traffic-light burg as the world's first "BioTown." The plan is for its homes and businesses to run on electricity generated by the burning of methane released from hog waste. "The goal is to create a new use for the manure that's surrounding the town -- as a biofuel," says Deborah Abbott of the state Ag Department. Methane from the town sewer may eventually be tapped as well. Officials also want to get all the vehicles in town running on fuel with a high percentage of corn-derived ethanol or soy-derived biodiesel. "We're very excited," said Charlie Van Voorst, president of the Reynolds Town Board. "They're advertising us as a showcase for the world."

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Garbage Land:
On the Secret Trail
of Trash by Elizabeth
Royte, Little Brown
and Co., 320 pgs., 2005.

Our soda man delivers. He comes bounding up the steps, easily cradling an ancient-looking wooden crate under one arm. The contents are 24 seven-ounce bottles of cola and birch beer, for which we hand him $7, and last month's crate. The thick, wavy glass bottles bear an old-fashioned logo that reads, "Castle Soda: Food for Thirst."

Bottled in a declining industrial town in Connecticut, Castle is like some visitor from another time. The idea of returnable, refillable bottles seems quaint and archaic in the age of plastic. Indeed, the bottler tells us it's impossible to find anyone who makes seven-ounce glass bottles anymore, so the company's crates are dotted with outcasts from other local bottlers that went out of business in Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania.

I buy Castle not because it's better than Coke, but because I love seeing those empties taken back to their source. Like Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land, I've wondered and worried about what happens to all that non-returnable waste I generate. With me it's idle curiosity; with Royte -- who sets out to track down just where trash ends up -- it becomes an obsession.

It turns out that following your garbage wherever it leads is, like compost, darkly rich material. This is probably the best book ever about trash. Usually, garbage is too much "out of sight, out of mind" to make a lively subject, and what little coverage exists is dry and technical. But Royte, author of the much-lauded The Tapir's Morning Bath, knows how to orchestrate telling statistics and vivid description to illuminate every dirty corner of the business (though if you were expecting the gory details of mob infiltration, you might be disappointed).

Where do we go from here?

Americans generate more than four pounds of trash per person, each day -- more than twice the per capita rate of Oslo, Norway. We have gifted the world with Styrofoam, non-returnable soda bottles, and innumerable forms of redundant packaging, all of which now litters every corner of our planet and is found washed up on even the most remote beaches. And now here's Royte to tell us that even the most conscientiously managed landfills leak and leach and pollute.

The author lives in New York City, which for decades sent about 13,000 tons of trash a day to the largest landfill in the world, Fresh Kills on Staten Island. Intrepid to a fault, she refuses to be kept out of Fresh Kills -- closed to regular use since 2001 -- and ends up paddling around it in a boat. (Garbage Land is not for the squeamish, and you may not want to read it over dinner. Royte is very good at evoking the sights, sounds, and especially smells of the landfills and waste-processing plants she visits all over the New York metropolitan area, in rural Pennsylvania, and as far afield as San Francisco.)

Talking to an endless series of experts who seem glad that someone cares about what they do, she learns that the retaining walls in place at Fresh Kills can allow the daily release of one million gallons of toxic stew (a mixture of such chemicals as cyanide, arsenic, cadmium, chromium, and mercury) into New York Harbor.

Many of us assuage the guilt over our contributions to such planet-trashing by embracing curbside recycling programs, feeling virtuous every time we fill up the blue bin. But is it worth it? Royte sheds light on the process -- and the drawbacks -- of recycling everything from plastic bottles to electronic gadgets.

Ever feel a warm glow about hauling your old desktop down to electronics recycling day at the local high school? Did you imagine highly trained workers carefully disassembling your old components under surgical conditions? Think again. Imagine instead a Chinese village, where men, women, and children wearing no protective gear extract copper yokes from our exported monitors with chisels and hammers. "Squatting on the ground, they liberated chips and tossed them into plastic buckets while acrid black smoke rose from burning piles of wire," reads a report cited by Royte. After using a mix of hydrochloric and nitric acid to coax small amounts of gold out of the components, they "dumped the computer carcasses and the black sludge in nearby fields and streams." Many other recyclables are similarly shipped overseas, where their handling is unrestrained by environmental regulations.

If that's true, then what's the point? Garbage Land is a reporter's book; it's highly readable and exhaustively documented, but not very prescriptive. We're left with the distinct impression that there's no clean answer to the trash problem. Europe's wide-ranging recycling laws, bio-waste plants, and emphasis on manufacturer responsibility (all detailed within) offer one way forward, and the concept of zero waste (now a national aim in New Zealand and a publicly stated goal in San Francisco and Seattle) offers another.

But in the U.S. -- where only 11 states have bottle bills, and 95 percent of the 12 billion magazines produced every year are printed on virgin paper -- we have a long way to go. In fact, with her merciless revelations of the hard realities of garbage and its processing, Royte leaves the clear impression that there's only one real solution: use less stuff.

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Dealing with big-city garbage is big business for small towns

As landfills top off and shut down near big U.S. cities, taking in the trash is becoming a profitable enterprise for smaller towns hundreds of miles away from metropolises. Despite local concerns that landfills may cause long-term environmental problems, trash-industry execs insist communities are taking few risks when they accept big-city garbage. And many municipalities welcome the revenue. "We're rich," says a supervisor of Fox Township, Penn. (pop. under 4,000), which takes in 1,300 of the 50,000 tons of garbage exported every day from New York City -- and has millions of dollars in the bank as a result. Nearly a quarter of all municipal trash crossed state lines on its way to a final dumping ground in 2003, according to the Congressional Research Service, and the number of states importing at least one million tons of trash a year increased from two in 2001 to 10 in 2003.

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* Most recent year for which data are available.

Sources:
1. "Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950-2050," U.S. Census Bureau.
2. Statement of Energy Information Administration's Mary J. Hutzler [PDF], hearing on sources of energy and consumption before the Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures, U.S. House of Representatives, May 3, 2001.
3. "Short Term Energy Outlook -- April 2005," Energy Information Administration.
4. "Energy Consumption by Source, 1949-2003," Energy Information Administration.
5. "Petroleum: An Energy Profile 1999" [PDF], Energy Information Administration, pg 8, and "Petroleum Overview, 1949-2003," Energy Information Administration, Table 5.1.
6. "National Wilderness Preservation System and National Wild and Scenic River System, 1968-1999," Council on Environmental Quality, 1997 Environmental Quality report, Table 3.2.
7. "Wilderness Fast Facts" (data current as of Dec. 27, 2004), Wilderness.net.
8. Total municipal solid waste generated in U.S. in 1970: "EPA Municipal solid waste basic facts," and "Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2001 Facts and Figures" [PDF], Table ES-1, pg 2. 1970 U.S. population: "Demographic Trends in the 20th Century" [PDF], November 2002.
9. Total municipal solid waste to be generated in 2005 in the U.S., projected: "Characterization of Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 1998 Update" [PDF]. 2005 U.S. population, U.S. Census Bureau population clock.
10. "Housing Facts" [PDF], National Association of Homebuilders, January 2005, pg 8.
11. "National Transportation Statistics 2004," Bureau of Transportation Statistics, January 2005, Table 1-11.
12. "National Transportation Statistics 2004," Bureau of Transportation Statistics, January 2005, Table 1-4.
13. "Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S.," Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
14. Genetically engineered (GE) soybean varieties by State and United States, 2000-2004, "Adoption of Genetically Engineered Crops in the U.S.," Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
15. "World Urbanization Prospects, 2003" [PDF], United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, Table II.1, pg 14. (2005 stats are projected.)

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Like clean water? Then you'll love Rep. Bart Stupak.

Swimming in sewage just isn't this fun.

For the last year, Stupak has been fighting a U.S. EPA proposal that would allow inadequately treated sewage to be "blended" with fully treated waste during rain and snow events. The messy mix would then be released into the nation's rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. If blending is permitted, Stupak warns, people will get sick, beaches will close, and tourism and fishing will suffer. Not only that, taxpayers will bear the cost of cleanup down the road.

"It doesn't make sense," the Michigan Democrat says. He compares it to a questionable cup of water: "Three-fourths of it will be clean, but one-fourth of it is going to be dirty. But the whole glass isn't dirty; therefore, it's all right to consume."

Blending is currently allowed as an exception during extreme events like hurricanes, but is not practiced regularly across the country. The method bypasses the second and most important step in the water-treatment process -- the step that kills bacteria, viruses, and pathogens known to cause infectious disease. Such bypasses, prohibited under the Clean Water Act under all but the most outstanding circumstances, would now be allowed in every "wet-weather" event.

Last week, in a bid to block the EPA from implementing that policy, Stupak introduced the Save Our Waters From Sewage Act in the House with cosponsors Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), and E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.). The bill comes on the heels of a late-February letter of concern [PDF] sent to the EPA and signed by 135 House members.

Bart Stupak.

The EPA says it is simply responding to requests by municipalities and sewage treatment operators for a national policy. Under the Clean Water Act, any municipality or industrial operation that discharges wastewater must have a permit that establishes water-quality standards for the final product. Trouble is, some permit writers said blending was prohibited under the act, while others said it was legal. The result was an erratic enforcement policy.

"We're interpreting existing law and existing regulations" for the EPA's permit writers, says Jim Hanlon, director of the agency's Office of Wastewater Management. Hanlon is confident that blended sewage can be discharged into drinking-water sources because "our fundamental concept underlying the blending policy is that if you meet your permit, it is protective of human health and the environment."

But critics say this interpretation stinks. "This policy is designed to circumvent the regulations, not implement and enforce them," says Nancy Stoner, director of the Clean Water Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Stoner says the EPA is, in effect, creating a loophole in the Clean Water Act.

And Jack Ferguson, a former regional chief for EPA's Wastewater Permitting Program, finds the agency's reliance on permits worrisome. He points out that the agency has not conducted studies to assess health risks from blended sewage, nor has it evaluated the impact of untreated industrial waste that would be discharged if secondary treatment is bypassed.

One scientist who has focused on those health risks is Joan Rose. "When we allow untreated or partially treated wastewater to be mixed with treated wastewater, we're loading more pathogens into the system, into waterways," says Rose, a water researcher at Michigan State University. In 2003, Rose conducted a study that found swimmers were 100 times more likely to contract a waterborne illness in water where blended sewage had been discharged than in water containing fully treated sewage. (Two of the deadliest pathogens, giardia and cryptosporidium, are also among the hardiest.) Those most at risk for waterborne illness are children, the elderly, and people with impaired immune systems. According to a 2004 NRDC report, "Swimming in Sewage," this group accounts for 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. population, and is rapidly growing.

Environmental standards established under the Clean Water Act were put in place to protect human health. So why does the EPA seem to be backtracking? The answer lies in a murky stew of politics and money.

According to NRDC's Stoner, operators want permission to bypass because the nation's deteriorating sewer systems can't handle the increased flow when it rains. Blending, they say, is a better alternative than the raw overflows and leaks that sometimes occur during heavy rains. "The solution to that, in our view, is not to bypass, but to fix the leaky sewer systems," Stoner says.

Cities say fixing the system is a pipe dream.

But cities counter that they're trying to do just that. The Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, along with 20 municipal organizations including the National League of Cities, support blending in part because it saves money. Joanna Liberman Turner, NLC's senior policy analyst, says blending will allow municipalities to focus funds on pressing infrastructure needs. "Many cities have been increasing their water rates, and it just isn't meeting demand," she says.

Cities have pushed for federal funding to make up the difference, but the Bush administration cut nearly 40 percent from a wastewater loan program for fiscal year 2005. The EPA estimates that hundreds of billions of dollars are needed for wastewater-system repairs and upgrades; without federal leadership on this growing crisis, cities and towns are left to fend for themselves.

When "you've cut the money and there's no money for compliance," says Stupak, "then you have to change the policy. So that's what [the EPA has] done, without taking a look at the environmental and health risks involved." According to EPA's Hanlon, the agency has not made a final decision. While the agency ponders, Stupak is getting ready for a fight: "I'd love to sit down and have a debate with any EPA administrator who tells me [blending] is not weakening the Clean Water Act."

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Open-barrel trash burning becoming a hot issue for states

Not interested in paying the $1- or $2-per-bag fee for trash disposal? Just throw it all in a barrel in your backyard and burn it. That's what thousands of upstate New Yorkers -- and millions of rural Americans -- do, and it's making some environmental activists hot under the collar. But a bill to ban the practice has languished in the New York legislature for several years under fire (ahem) from state agricultural interests, which say that disposing of the waste any other way is cost prohibitive for farmers and rural residents. A number of states have banned backyard burning, and others -- including Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan -- are now at work on efforts to curb it. Trash burning releases cancer-causing dioxins into the atmosphere, along with arsenic, mercury, formaldehyde, and carbon monoxide. The U.S. EPA estimates that 20 million burn barrels across the U.S. produce some 13 million pounds of pollutants every year, making backyard burning the No. 1 quantified source of dioxin emissions in the country.

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Human compost boosts harvests in Mozambique

The more than 2,500 residents of Mozambique's impoverished village of Matimangwe have harnessed the power of their poo to fertilize their crops, and the village is now on the road to sustainable food production and development. Thanks to a human-waste compost latrine system called EcoSan, villagers have seen a major difference in the size of their harvests. Built with an investment of about $20, the EcoSan is essentially a pit latrine that gets covered with soil and ash once it's filled and is then left for up to eight months while a family moves to a new pit. As the waste is composted, harmful pathogens die off and a rich humus remains. Using this humus, farmers are able to produce enough crops for their families and sell the extra to raise money for clean drinking-water wells and school materials for their children. Says the village chief, "Our goal is more latrines -- no deaths, more food."

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Dear Umbra,

For years, I faithfully brought my canvas bags to the grocery store, leaving plastic bags for the environmentally uninformed. A few months ago, though, I adopted a dog, and I now find myself with a dilemma. I need to pick up all of his solid excrement, and having no compost or any other area for it to go (I live in the city), I need to use plastic bags to take care of it. I hope you have another suggestion for something I can use to pick up after my pup (and please don't say anything that would be disgusting).

Meghan
Baltimore, Md.

Dearest Meghan,

This is a family publication, and our well-known Grist motto, "All the environmental news that will amuse yet not repel," says it all about our approach to excremental discussions.

What's the best way to pick up where I leave off?

The simplest solution is to find friends with too many plastic bags and become the local bag reuse center. Doubtless you have pals or coworkers with stockpiles of plastic sacks who can start you on your collection. A ripe opportunity for bag-related education presents itself, in fact. While trolling for bag collectors, you can spread the anti-plastic sack doctrine by way of explaining your dilemma. Hopefully this will dry up many stockpiles, and you'll then need to move on to those people afflicted with a constant source of new plastic bags: newspaper subscribers. You certainly know at least one person who receives his or her newspaper wrapped in a plastic bag every day and would undoubtedly welcome your overtures. (You needn't worry about not having compost, as dog and cat feces should not be composted at home for use in the garden, anyway.)

Research compels me to mention another option: the biodegradable, flushable dog-poop bags on the market. Made of polyvinyl alcohol film, said bags are water soluble. The film dissolves in water, leaving polyvinyl and glycerol (and the bag contents), which should biodegrade in about 30 days. The general idea is that you take pup out for a stroll, pick up the poop, and then carry the filled bag back home to the toilet bowl. I have accompanied dogs on long urban walks, and in my experience the designated poop scooper can't find a trash can soon enough. Carrying the stuff all the way home sounds vile, but if these bags head for the landfill, their degradability will be wasted; they need to be submerged in water to dissolve.

It's hard to know which to recommend, given the cost of buying dog-poop-specific bags and the revulsion factor of carrying excrement around town, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that regular plastic bags degrade on a geologic time scale and gum up the works in landfills.

Your choice, but I think you may have to accept the facts: Your new family member requires using and disposing of plastic. Make up for it by driving less per week.

Woofily,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

San Francisco food-composting program is a hit

In 1996, a company called Norcal Waste found that 19 percent of landfill matter in San Francisco consisted of discarded food scraps -- and it sensed a market opportunity. Now the city boasts a popular and growing composting program, with discarded food collected and processed into organically certified "Four Course Compost," sold to organic farms and vineyards. Sales of the compost have increased by 23 percent in each of the last two years, but perhaps more importantly, the program is a hit with the city's residents and restaurateurs. "It's increased the morale in the kitchens. People feel they're not throwing things out, they're doing something good for the environment while they're working," says Jonathan Cook, who supervises operations at eight restaurants. Restaurants also save substantially on garbage charges. The program may serve as a national model.

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A Penny Saved Is…

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

Wastewater has lots of energy potential

The wastewater that courses down drains and into municipal water-treatment plants around the world contains a substantial amount of organic material, or "biosolids," or, well, "poop" and such. When this organic matter breaks down, it generates "biogas," a methane-rich fuel that some plants use to heat the water and buildings used in wastewater treatment. However, researchers say that the plants are capturing only a fraction of the available energy. According to engineering professor David Bagley, wastewater contains roughly nine times the energy most plants are now capturing from it. The water from three Toronto water-treatment plants, he says, contains enough organic material to produce up to 113 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small town for a year. Bagley recommends -- and many municipalities in the U.S. and Europe are investigating -- an anaerobic process to capture a higher percentage of the energy. Yes, okay, we covered this story just to use the headline "poo-poo power." What of it?

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As Philadelphia goes, so goes the nation

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Canadian Cities Dump Lots of Doo-Doo in Waterways

Port cities in Canada dump thousands of tons of virtually untreated sewage into bodies of water every year, according to a new report compiled by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund on behalf of three enviro groups. Montreal, it seems, dumps 950 million gallons of raw sewage into the St. Lawrence River every year. If you think that's gross, well ... you're right. It really is. But it's not so bad when you consider that Victoria dumps 9 billion gallons of entirely untreated sewage a year into the Pacific Ocean. Canada's sewage-disposal standards are far behind those in the U.S. and Europe, said Margot Venton of Sierra Legal. An Environment Canada spokesperson said that Ottawa (the seat of Canada's federal government, for all you clueless yanks) and the provinces are working together to develop a joint wastewater treatment program by 2006, with national standards -- standards that will presumably frown on dumping billions of gallons of untreated poop, along with oil, grease, cyanide, and who knows what else, into waterways.

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Dear Umbra,

What is thermal depolymerization?

Ann
Freehold, N.J.

Dearest Ann,

A polymer is a large group of linked molecules. We're made of polymers such as protein, eat polymers such as starch, and wear polymers such as leather and nylon. Thermal depolymerization is a heat-driven process that breaks down or transforms polymers into the shorter chains from whence they came: oil. Our planet's automatic transformation of dead dinosaurs and dead cavepeople and other organic matter into petroleum is thermal depolymerization -- the slow conversion of our ancestors into Dodge Caravan fuel.

Turning turkey into black gold.

Photo: Changing World Technologies.

People who understand science better than you and I are investigating the possibility of artificially speeding up the thermal depolymerization process to take advantage of our waste products and add to the oil supply. One company, Changing World Technologies, is currently refining the process of refining giant food conglomerate ConAgra's turkey offal into refined oil in a Missouri plant. Changing World churns up turkey leftovers, subjects them to high heat, and decants crude oil in far less time than Mother Earth takes to accomplish the same trick. Or at least that's the idea; all this is still under development. Other parties have experimented with swine waste, but in any case, you get the picture; the hope is to transform waste into oil.

To get to what I suspect is the heart of your rather succinct question: Alternative-fuel folks are keeping close tabs on the evolution of this process, which may someday provide one solution to our many waste and fuel problems. Or maybe not. Past attempts to speed up this side of nature have proven too energy intensive to be practical. The folks at CWT and other scientists working with swine waste think they've found a better technique that leverages water, heat, and pressure in an economical and efficient combination. Interested observers, including yourself, are eagerly waiting to see if their successes can be reproduced on a larger scale.

Monomerly,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Scientists Turn Excrement Into Electricity -- Really

Scientists in the U.S. have developed a method to convert raw human waste -- or as the scientists call it, "number two" -- into electricity, putting a brown spin on the green-power movement. Oops, did we say "movement"? Okay, okay, we'll try to be serious: The process works by feeding the ... material ... into a microbial fuel cell (MFC) that uses bacteria to break it down -- much as the human body does -- but diverts the resulting electrons, which would normally power respiratory reactions in the bacteria, into a power generator. Even better, harmful organic matter is broken down in the process, so the MFC can serve as a kind of sewage treatment plant. The technology promises extraordinary benefits, particularly to developing nations that desperately need both sewage treatment and inexpensive energy. But, says microbiologist Derek Lovley, large-scale use is a ways off: "One way to think of this technology is that it is currently at the state of development that solar power was 20 to 30 years ago -- the principle has been shown, but there is a lot of work to do before this is widely used."

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Dear Umbra,

Some time ago, the public radio program This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass, was about recycling. Glass reported, "Experts agree that we have plenty of landfill space for the foreseeable future." He proposed that recycling therefore did little more than make us feel good. The hapless person he interviewed came up with no better response to that than, "Well, what's wrong with feeling good?"

Glass pointed out that recycling paper costs less than using raw materials such as trees, but that was not true of other recyclables such as glass. Besides, he said, we are in no danger of running out of sand. He never mentioned rubber, metals, or that demon of all "disposables," plastic. Nor did he mention the jobs created by the industry or the long-term benefits of the Earth-stewardship mindset that recycling fosters.

What do you say to the idea that recycling is of little real benefit to the world?

Nancy
Cedar Bluffs, Neb.

Dearest Nancy,

Props on "hapless."

Ira Glass is correct: We have plenty of landfill space for the foreseeable future. The whole garbage crisis, instigated by an infamous -- and hapless -- trash barge, turns out to have been a misguided freakout. (We refer here to the Mobro, which set sail from Long Island, N.Y., in 1987, only to be turned away from several ports of call and left to wander the seas in a telegenic depiction of trash-disposal dilemmas.) But, unlike many misguided freakouts, it's had positive consequences. We now think about our trash. We may not think about it enough, and recycling might have the unwanted side effect of making us feel better about buying disposable containers, but at least we have a language for talking about the mounds of garbage we consume and the wrapping it comes in.

Recycling may be habit-forming.

And recycling does do more than make us feel good. It has confirmed environmental benefits: Manufacturing widgets, gizmos, and thingies using recycled materials is easier on the environment than doing so using new materials. Measurements such as financial costs or the quantity of landfill space are less important than the environmental and health impacts of sourcing, processing, and shipping raw materials. Our sand supplies may be infinite and inexpensive, as Glass reportedly reported. But used glass bottles are also infinite and inexpensive, with the added convenience of being cheaper to transform into new glass bottles. The debate is over, and recycling wins. Yippee!

From an environmental standpoint, recycling is vital. As our population and the prevalence of packaging rise, recycling does make a small dent (even while the other two cornerstones of the environmental troika, "reduce" and "reuse," are sadly ignored). And landfills themselves are no innocent wildflowers dotting the landscape. Piles of trash lying smushed together are fairly disgusting, seeping dubious goo and farting to beat an 8-year-old on a school bus. The leachate of our trash melange contains dangerous toxins. Diverting garbage of all sorts becomes increasingly urgent as electronics consumption (and thus disposal) rises. Recycling innocent tuna cans forms a habit that may eventually pave the way for recycling cell phones and car batteries.

As for the other benefits of recycling, you've succinctly stated them in your question. I can do no better. So to the idea that recycling is of little real benefit to the world, I say, "Pfaugh!"

Habitually,
Umbra

Related Links:

Ask Umbra’s video advice on composting

Turn your turkey carcass into a spectacular gumbo

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!