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Q. Dear Umbra,

Municipal and individual composting operations are gaining steam nationwide. Some obvious benefits include space-saving in landfills, and cheaper and (hopefully) "greener" fertilizer. While I am an avid supporter of composting, I am curious if municipalities with composting facilities could see decreased decomposition rates in their landfills. Do yard and plant scraps even play an integral role in landfill decomposition? Thank you.

Todd
Vancouver

A. Dearest Todd,

Give thanks -- then compost!Since this is Thanksgiving week here in the U.S., a time when we are at our most gluttonous, composting is a timely issue. In fact, I'm putting together a video with tips for getting started -- keep an eye out for it.

In the meantime, your question is an interesting one. Are yard and food scraps the key to quicker decomposition in landfills? The answer is no. In fact, such organic waste is the bane of a landfill operator's existence; it takes up a quarter of the space and is a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas that's twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide. Paper is also a problem: it's another major source of methane, and accounts for about a third of our municipal solid waste.

This is why composting and recycling are so important. Here in the U.S., we are better about "recovering" paper and yard waste than food waste: In 2007, according to the EPA, we recycled 54 percent of our paper and composted 62 percent of yard waste. When it comes to food waste, however, we compost only about 2-3 percent. In fact, we flat-out throw away more than 25 percent of the food we buy. Pigs.

Composting, as you say, frees up space and creates a nice rich fertilizer. Because it reduces methane, it's also a tool in the climate fight. In short, it's a win all around, and we'd be turkeys not to participate.

Caruncly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

We typically try to minimize the impact of our buying decisions. We carefully considered buying some Thai mats, handcrafted by a family the shopkeeper knows. Then she told us that all textiles and furniture, whether organic or not, are all fumigated with methyl bromide before entering the States. It seems no one is talking about this issue -- is it a problem? Are my mats messed up? What about all the cool hemp clothing, is it all contaminated?

(m)Ethyl M.
San Francisco, Calif.

A. Dearest (m)Ethyl,

This here is one of those good news, bad news situations. The good news is, methyl bromide has been banned under the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that seeks to stop the destruction of the ozone layer. The bad news is, the U.S. keeps getting exemptions that allow it to continue spraying the stuff, though it uses far less than in the past.

Methyl bromide, used primarily as a soil fumigant and on food imports, is toxic and will, as the EPA delicately puts it, "affect not only the target pests it is used against, but non-target organisms as well." That's us! The greatest danger, the agency says, is at the fumigation site itself. After that, the stuff wafts up and gets busy eating ozone.

I cannot say for sure whether your Thai mats and hemp pants have been sprayed with methyl bromide or one of the "safer" alternatives, because imports are subject to a labyrinth of federal regulations that depends upon where they come from, what they're made of, and whether the inspector got a good night's sleep. Sometimes a visual inspection is enough, and finished products are often treated less suspiciously than raw materials. I can tell you that the good people at the Pesticide Action Network are doing consistent, thorough, obsessive work on this topic, and you should definitely check them out.

Phytosanitarily,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am planning to reuse my boyfriend's old melamine chest of drawers for our baby's nursery. But since it's a bit low, I would like to build an additional module on top of it to make a changing table of the correct height. My in-laws are currently remodeling their kitchen and have dozens of cabinets I could reuse to build the changing table top. Now I know melamine and particleboard are evil, but is older melamine OK? If their kitchen cabinets are 20 years old, can we assume they have already off-gassed most or all of the formaldehyde they had to off-gas? It makes no sense to throw it all out in the garbage!

Raphaëlle
Montréal

A. Dearest Raphaëlle,

Congratulations on your impending arrival and your commitment to reuse. I can tell already that you are going to raise a wise child.

You're right that melamine, which combines with formaldehyde to make the plastic resin we know, is -- well, tricky, if not outright evil. For a long time it was hailed as the key to a sort of miracle plastic, even an eco-friendly-ish choice, and then it got into our pet food and our baby formula and some of our Halloween candy and it started to seem dangerous and creepy. And then we realized that, like any plastic, melamine could leach chemicals when heated -- in the microwave, for instance. More creepy.

Having said all that, however, I think your particular reuse is a fine idea. We know that you and your boyfriend and your baby are not going to heat or eat the chest of drawers. You are relieving your in-laws, and your landfill, of at least some of the waste from their kitchen-remodeling project. And you are being crafty! Any offgassing should have happened long ago -- it is generally most intense in the first year, and dwindles from there. I say go forth and modul-ify -- and let me know how it goes.

Awwwwly,
Umbra

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Q. Dear Umbra,

I've taken to washing my hair less and less often to keep it from drying out. Since I've switched to the "no-'poo" method (baking soda followed by a vinegar rinse) it stays cleaner longer. However, I still take a shower (brief and lukewarm) most days. To keep my curly hair from becoming totally frizzy in the humidity of the shower, I typically cover it with a shower cap. My current cap is wearing out and I'm going to need a new one soon -- but your simple rule of "no vinyl and that's final!" keeps resounding in my head. Every shower cap I've seen is made of vinyl, except for those cheap plastic ones in hotel rooms. What's a girl to do?

Curly Girl
Pittsburgh, Penn.

A. Dearest Curly Girl,

Or a nice felt hat always does the trick.Have you ever noticed that the hair is always greener on the other side of the fence? I know straight-haired gals who would kill to have your tress-related troubles, and I imagine there are days when you wouldn't mind a mane that's a bit more manageable.

I commend you on your shift away from conventional beauty products, which are so often toxic, and on your commitment to a vinyl-free lifestyle. How cockle-warming to see my message sinking in!

I've done a bit of scouring on your behalf, and I think I've found a couple of possible solutions, though they may be difficult to track down. You're certainly right that vinyl is the most common, but I also came across caps made from other, marginally better materials, including nylon and polypropylene. But here is my big discovery: cotton and silk! It seems counterintuitive, but according to reliable sources, these are lovely materials for shower caps. You can buy cute patterned varieties from various places online, with a little looking. Of course, cotton and silk have their own eco-impacts -- so, dearest readers, one of you should create an organic-cotton shower-cap business, stat.

I suppose your other option might be to ... wear a plastic grocery bag over your hair, securing it with clips or a headband? An ingenious reuse for a pesky object.

Tangly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I started a green team at my office and one of our initiatives is reducing energy consumption. The team had recommended turning off the computers at night and when not in use. Seems logical, right? Well, the IT department denied our efforts and recommends keeping computers on 24/7. I'm horrified! The rationale is that turning on and off your computer changes the internal temperature of the equipment and adds to the wear and tear. I need some data to back up our green claim that it is better and safe to shut down the computers. Can you please help?

Nervously awaiting,
Jennifer

A. Dearest Jennifer,

Little-known fact: I actually keep my computer turned off 24 hours a day. I just peek at my inbox over my editor's shoulder, scribble my answers on recycled paper, and make her type them in. Saves boatloads of energy.

Congratulations on the formation of your green team, and condolences on the fact that you have already been strongarmed. I suspect it will not be the last time, as earnest eco-efforts are not always welcomed by those whose habits and patterns they affect.

There are two answers to your question, as far as I see it: a factual one and a philosophical one. The factual answer is, reputable sources including the U.S. Department of Energy say it is A-OK to turn your computer off at night, and that the various "wear and tear" arguments are no longer accurate. (Here is a fact sheet from the Oregon DEQ that, while a bit dated, cites many useful resources you might peruse.) The philosophical answer is, don't ever, ever, ever alienate your IT department. Even for the sake of saving the planet.

I think there may be some middle ground here: more and more computers have a "hibernate" function, which is similar to a sleep function but even, well, sleepier. Talk to your IT people to find out if there's a way to send all the computers happily into hibernation at the end of the day. Yes, they will still use a bit of energy, but far less than if they were left in full on mode, humming along. Other key things to do: turn off your monitor whenever you won't be using it for 15 to 20 minutes. And remember that a screen saver is not an energy-saver; in fact, most screen savers are energy hogs.

Now go buy the IT guys some cookies, and keep up the good work.

RAMly,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I am so utterly sick of getting junk mail, is there anything we can do to stop it? In the age of the internet spam, is it really so impossible to just outlaw it? I can swallow deleting junkmail, but I can't swallow how much of it has to be tossed.

Carey S.
Missoula, Mont.

A. Dearest Carey,

In a sense, old-fashioned junk mail is less offensive than spam. After all, when was the last time an envelope arrived at your house promising to enlarge your manhood or sell you cheap Rolex watches?

On the other hand, the sheer mass of junk mail is offensive indeed: each of us in the U.S. receives about 560 pieces a year, according to Co-op America, and all that "direct mail" (that's the nice name for it) adds up to the equivalent of more than 100 million trees. While the bad economy has led to a steep decline in junk mail sent this year, "they" predict a comeback; real mail is still considered more effective for advertising than e-mail, which is too easy to delete.

The good news is, there are steps you can take to slow the stream of junk mail to your home. First of all, avoid entering contests, filling out warranties, and giving your address on forms -- if you must do so, write "do not rent or sell my information" alongside. Go to the Direct Marketing Assocation site to register your preferences, or use a service such as 41pounds.org (which charges $41 for five years of mail stoppage, but promises a more thorough excavation than DMA). To reduce the catalogues that come (and 'tis the season, 'tisn't it?), visit Catalog Choice or contact merchandisers directly. To be removed from the list for credit card offers, call 888-5-OPTOUT. And if you're a business, see this list of tips for junk-mail reduction from our friends here in King County, Washington.

As for outlawing junk mail entirely, it seems unlikely to happen. And various efforts to create a federal "Do Not Mail" list along the lines of the "Do Not Call" list haven't led to much (except for a suspicious industry-led imitation). If you're feeling feisty, and you believe in online petitions, you can sign this petition urging Congress to take action. Otherwise, take the steps above -- and recycle, recycle, recycle.

Papercutly,
Umbra

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

Ray Anderson set out to make his business sustainable long before green was the flavor of the month.  Reading Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce in 1994 literally changed his life, inspiring him to overhaul his carpet company, Interface, and aim for zero waste and zero environmental impact.  Now, with his new book Confessions of a Radical Industrialist, he wants to spur other business leaders to "climb Mount Sustainability." 

Anderson recently dropped by the Grist office and we asked him how his own ascent is going so far. 

-----

Q. You've been working for the last 15 years to make your company sustainable. What do you know that other companies need to know?

A. Well, it's hard. It's the work of a lifetime. It takes an awful lot of patience and stick-to-itiveness.

We're 15 years into a 26-year journey -- that's how long we calculate it will take us to get to a zero footprint, taking nothing from the earth that's not naturally, rampantly renewable and doing no harm to the biosphere.

Q. How long did it take your company to recoup the investment that you initially made?

A. No time. From day one, we were ahead of the game. Tackling waste -- that's where the low-hanging fruit is. We declared war on waste: only zero is acceptable. Doing everything right the first time, every time, including making no scrap and no off-quality. When we measured ourselves against that kind of perfection, we found 10 percent of the sales dollar going down the drain as waste, most of it considered allowable, expected.

Fifteen years later, we're only halfway there. But we've saved over $400 million, which has more than financed everything else that we've done -- the R&D, the capital expenditures, the process changes, employee training, the whole ball of wax.

Q. Is that a technique that's replicable?

A. Yes. We ought to be doing this anyway in business. When you set that bar at zero, that's a stretch, but it's easy to understand.

Q. Are there things you thought would be easy to do that have turned out to be really difficult?

A. The technologies didn't exist and we didn't know what it was going to take to create them. We couldn't have done it by ourselves. We didn't know how long it would take to get suppliers involved, or get new inventors inventing things that we'd never heard of. So there was a big mystery about it all.

But we had a clear vision and that was the main thing. Climb that mountain clear to the top.

Ray Anderson. 

Q. In the whole lifecycle of your products, what was the hardest aspect to get within that sustainable margin? Transportation?

A. No, transportation is miniscule in the grand scheme. The important thing is the technologies for recycling. Today they have been invented and we're increasing recycled content. Like 35 percent now of our raw material comes from used products, post-consumer recycling. At the time I wrote the book, I think it was 28 percent, so it's moved up since.

Q. You're not turning plastic bottles into carpet -- you're turning old carpet into new carpet, right?

A. Yeah, the ideal product is our own product from 20 years ago. And we're also recycling other carpet manufacturers' carpets too.

Q. As a business leader, what do you want to see Congress do about climate change?

A. Put a price on carbon. I'd prefer to see it done through tax shifts, taxing bad things instead of good things. A shift in those taxes even in a revenue-neutral way that just puts a price on carbon so that an honest market can then work. Today it's a dishonest market, blind as a bat, just stumbling around ignoring the externalities.

Q. As you've made sustainability core to your business, have you gotten new customers through that effort? 

A. Yes. There was a survey done of commercial interior designers three or four years ago, who very heavily influence our marketplace, and 91 percent said they preferred recycled content.  Not just accepted it, but preferred it. Today it's probably even higher than that.

It was that community, interior designers, who were asking us the question 15 years ago: "What's your company doing for the environment?"  So when we began to actually do something, they began to embrace us for what we were doing. The goodwill of the marketplace is amazing. 

If you had to state the pure dollar-and-cents business case for sustainability, our cost is down, not up -- the waste-elimination effort alone has more than paid for all the rest of this. Our products are the best they've ever been. Biomimicry has had a huge influence; it's a wellspring of innovation. Our people are galvanized around a shared higher purpose. You can't beat it for attracting people and motivating people. And the goodwill of the marketplace is just astonishing. What else is there that underlies shareholder value but cost and products and people and market? That's it. It's a better business model without doubt.

Q. Do you think the business community at large is capable of a shift to sustainability?

A. They will either do it or be superseded by those who do. The industrial system that operates today is undermining the basis of the industrial system; it's committing suicide because nature is that undergirding factor. There's no business that can operate without air and water and food and energy and materials and climate regulation and ultraviolet radiation shields and pollination and seed dispersal and distribution. All of those are supplied by nature. If we kill nature, we will certainly kill the economy. When somebody sits down and tries to figure out the value of nature, it's very simple: Whatever the economic GDP is today, that's the value of nature, because none of it would exist without that undergirding.

Q. Are there examples of other businesses you've influenced?

A. I claim some credit for Wal-Mart. They sent two teams to our factory in Lagrange, Ga. -- one lead by Mike Duke, who is the president/CEO now, and one lead by Doug McMillon, who is now the No. 2 man. Each of them came and spent the day there understanding what we were talking about and what we were doing. They went away satisfied that it's doable, which was a huge hurdle for them to get over before they went to 60,000 suppliers and said, "You gotta do this too." I think that was a hurdle that we helped them clear. Since then they've been going gangbusters.

Q. So what's next for you?

A. We've got the rest of this mountain to climb.

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Toxic suds want to watch you shower

We must save all the energy we can!At the broadest level, everything we can do to address climate change/national security/energy balance of trade and just about any other meaningful social question associated with our energy use falls into one of three categories:

1. Use less downstream energy.  Turn down the thermostat, ride your bike to work, move to a smaller home, etc.

2. Switch upstream fuels.  Favor coal in the name of national security.  Favor nuclear in the name of CO2.  Favor wind in the name of green jobs.  Etc.

3. Use less upstream energy.  Insulate your home, build CHP plants, recycle your plastic and aluminum waste, etc.

All three have a critical role to play, but note that only the third creates social benefits and can be guaranteed to increase our overall standard of living.  In the famous Amory Lovins-ism, no one gives a damn about how much coal, oil or gas they use - they care about how hot their shower is and how cold their beer. 

Ergo, we ought to make maximal use of anything that fits into that third bucket as a matter of public policy.  Which raises the question: how big is that third bucket?  Or, framed another way: how much energy does the U.S. currently waste?  Any increase in our efficiency of energy conversion (from upstream fuel to downstream energy) is implicitly a reduction in our energy waste.  Tell me how much we waste and you will tell me the maximum size of that third bucket.

How Much do we Consume?

As it turns out, there's very little good data on how much energy we waste.  DOE estimates that we use about 100 quadrillion btus ("quads") of primary energy per year.  But they too often present that data in charts like this one that seem to assume a perfectly efficient economy.  As that great philosopher Homer Simpson said, "In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"  And I'm pretty sure thermo says that you can't get 100 percent of the energy you put in out in a useful form. DOE charts to the contrary notwithstanding...

Nonetheless, this does bound our analysis.  If we put 100 quads of primary energy in, we must get 100 quads out somewhere. At the very least, it implies that there can't be more than 100 quads of wasted energy presently available in the system.

Solid Waste

EPA estimates that the average American produces 1,130 lbs of trash per year.  At 4,500 btu/lb and just over 307 million people, that's 1.6 quads of energy in our trash.  Add in 6.5 million metric tons of solid waste in our sewage per year at 10,000 btu/dry ton and that's another 0.1 quads.  So in total, all our solid waste is about 1.7 quads of total energy waste, or 1.7 percent of all our primary energy use. 

Industrial Waste

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has estimated that the US could produce 96 GW of electric power from energy that is currently wasted by the US industrial sector.  (This waste includes a host of different materials, from paper sludge to waste heat.)  RED's internal analysis suggests that this may be conservative, but let's use the LBNL data.  Assuming 25 percent fuel-to-power generation efficiency (and assuming further that this represents 100 percent of all energy wasted by the US industrial sector, and not simply the economically recoverable/LBNL-identifiable fraction) that works out to an additional 11.4 quads. 

Power Generation Waste

In 2008, we generated 3,806,611 GWh from fossil-fired thermal power plants.  Those plants, on average, operate at 33 percent fuel efficiency, meaning that for every 1 unit of electric power generated, 2 units of waste heat were thrown away in cooling towers, rivers and streams.  That's 2 x 3,806,611 GWh of wasted heat, or 26.4 quads up in smoke.

Transportation Waste

The total US transportation sector uses some 28.6 quads of fuel per year.  For rather obvious reasons, there's not a lot of good data on how much of that goes out the tailpipe vs. a more productive use.  But conservatively, let's assume that we get 30 percent of the useful energy out of that fuel (this is considerably higher than a passenger car over normal driving cycles, but probably low for rail, shipping and long-haul trucking on an efficiency per ton-mile basis.)  Clearly, this is the least accurate of the numbers, but even at 30 percent, that implies an additional waste of 0.7 x 28.6 or 20 quads of waste, going into tail pipe exhaust, hot brakes, burnt tires, etc.

Total Identifiable Waste

Add those all up and we've got 100 quads of primary energy and 60 quads of waste energy.  For all the reasons noted above, the waste energy is probably much higher, but even at this level, it is a massive opportunity.  Recovering just half of this total would reduce every issue associated with fossil fuel use by one third with no detriment to our standard of living.  Getting this waste out of the system ought to be a priority of our national energy and environmental policy.

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When was the last time you looked up something in the phone book? What did you do the last time you got a free phone book dropped off on your doorstep--did you recycle it? If you're like most people these days, your answers to those questions are probably "I don't remember" and "No."

WhitePages, an online directory service, recently released the results of a survey it conducted indicating that only 15.9 percent of U.S. adults recycle their old or unwanted phone books, and that U.S. citizens are largely unaware of the environmental impact of printing and delivering so many phone books (five million trees cut down every year!). WhitePages is sponsoring a "Ban the Phone Book" initiative to encourage the creation of "opt-in" programs, wherein citizens would only receive a phone book if they requested one. In the survey, 81 percent of respondents said they'd support such a program. Many states currently require phone companies to provide phone books to all landline subscribers, even as the internet threatens to make physical phone books obsolete.

Some states and phone companies already have "opt-out" programs, similar to do-not-call registries for telemarketers, allowing subscribers to indicate that they don't wish the receive the phone book. Proponents of "opt-in" programs, however, say that they're easier for consumers and more effective in reducing waste. Cincinnati Bell started an opt-in program earlier this year, bringing their White Pages online and only providing the printed version to customers who ask for it. In Florida, AT&T plans to test out an opt-in program for its White Pages in four cities this fall. The company is considering a similar program in Missouri's metropolitan areas as well.

If your area doesn't have opt-in or opt-out programs yet, you can lobby your local government or landline provider, while in the meantime making sure to recycle the unwanted phone books that get dumped on your doorstep.

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Ask Umbra on shower caps, computers, and junk mail

Photo: ceegee-ceegeeAdvocates of Seattle's Referendum 1, a proposal for a disposable-bag fee that was soundly defeated in Tuesday's primary election, may have lost a battle. But Brady Montz, chair of the local Sierra Club chapter and leader of the effort to pass the referendum, feels confident that the war against plastic bags is going well.

"We've never had a vote before where 42 percent* of people decided, ‘I want to pay for my plastic bags,'" he said. "How well did the first votes on gay marriage work? How well did the first votes on drug legalization work? These things, they build."

The American Chemistry Council dropped big bucks to fight the referendum--$1.4 million in total, compared to just $80,000 raised by the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups and volunteers who worked to pass the referendum. The ACC and plastic-bag manufacturers got a lot of traction with their arguments that the tax was unnecessary and would hurt low-income people, though of course their real motivation was to protect their own bottom lines. Montz said the ACC's paid signature-gatherers misled some pro-fee voters into signing a petition to put the fee on the ballot by implying that there wouldn't be a bag fee if there wasn't a vote. But the fee, originally an ordinance passed by the city council and signed into law by Mayor Greg Nickels, would have automatically taken effect at the beginning of 2009 if it weren't for the ACC's efforts.

Montz said he sees the ACC's aggressive fight against the bag fee as an example of how "the industrial political complex has perfected this strategy of doing deceptive astroturf campaigns." Without the resources to make massive television and radio ad buys, he said, efforts like the Seattle Green Bag Campaign face a huge uphill battle. In this summer of "death panels" and forged letters to members of Congress, progressive groups across the country are searching for new ways to overcome the profit-protection machine. "What we've got to do is figure out how to use what we've got, which is people and the truth," said Montz.

Voters are starting to dig for the real dirt beneath the astroturf, according to Montz. After the corporate campaign against it, many Seattleites who didn't like the bag fee don't like the ACC either, and that could affect similar fights in the future. "When cities can be punished by companies because we dare to make a law restricting one of their products, if people just understand that, that right there is a huge win," Montz said. "[Voters] now know the ACC spends money to overturn laws. So next time is not going to be so easy for them."

The ACC's involvement also raised awareness of the issue and turned it into a hot topic, getting Seattleites to at least think and talk about plastic, even if they aren't ready to bag it yet. "People now in Seattle know about the North Pacific [trash] gyre," Montz said. "If you just focus on [the fact that] this particular fee lost, OK, well, that's bad, but on the issue of how do we change how people behave, how do we make people think about their choices, that we've won."

Montz said the pro–bag fee camp plans to continue to dialogue with Seattle voters and gauge what the next step in the war against plastic should be. In the meantime, environmentalists have a lot to focus on in November's election, with Sierra Club activist Mike McGinn a potential frontrunner in the mayoral race, and fellow Sierra cohort Mike O'Brien leading his city-council race. While Montz said he doesn't think the bag fee will be a big issue in the mayoral race, he doesn't expect it to fall out of the public consciousness. "After this election is over, these bags are not going away," he said. "I'm sure the conversation is going to continue."

For now, Montz and all the other volunteers at the Seattle Green Bag Campaign have reason to get excited about being at the forefront of a growing debate over plastic's role in our world. Even though Seattleites can still get their plastic bags for free, they might think twice before they do.

"At the party [on election] night there were so many happy volunteers, getting drunk and happy," Montz said. "Because if you look at where we are now compared to where we were a year or two ago, it's amazing."

*UPDATE, 26 Aug 2009: As more ballots have been counted, the percentage of "yes" votes has gone up. The latest results have 47 percent voting in favor of Ref. 1 and 53 percent voting against.

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

Photo: Editor BThe stresses in our early twenty-first century civilization take many forms--social, economic, environmental, and political. One distinctly unhealthy and visible illustration of all four is the swelling flow of garbage associated with a throwaway economy. Throwaway products were first conceived following World War II as a convenience and as a way of creating jobs and sustaining economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the more jobs there would be.

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth's geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the throwaway economy beyond another generation or two. Assuming an annual 2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on economically recoverable reserves show the world has 17 years of reserves remaining for lead, 19 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 54 years for iron ore, and 68 years for bauxite.

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its locally available landfills was New York. When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New York's garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia--with some of the sites being 300 miles away.

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed to move garbage from New York City daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles long--impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York's garbage--if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza. State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs, traffic congestion, increased air pollution, potential water pollution from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

In 2001 Virginia's Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani to complain about the use of Virginia for New York City's trash. "I understand the problem New York faces," he noted, "but the home state of Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York's dumping ground."

Garbage travails are not limited to New York City. Toronto, Canada's largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now ships all its 750-thousand-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

In Athens, the capital of ancient and modern Greece, the one landfill available reached saturation at the end of 2006. With local governments in Greece unwilling to accept Athens's garbage, the city's daily output of 6,000 tons began accumulating on the streets, creating a garbage crisis. The country is finally beginning to pay attention to what European Union environment commissioner Stavros Dimas, himself a Greek, calls the waste hierarchy, where priority is given first to the prevention of waste and then to its reuse, recycling, and recovery.

One of the more recent garbage crises is unfolding in China, where, like everything else in the country, the amount of garbage generated is growing fast. Xinhua, a Chinese wire service, reports that a survey using an airborne remote sensor detected 7,000 garbage dumps, each larger than 50 square meters in the suburbs of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. A large share of China's garbage is recycled, burned, or composted, but an even larger share is dumped in landfills (where they are available) or simply heaped up in unoccupied areas.

These examples of China's waste problems are disturbing by themselves. But a broader analysis of potential consumption patterns in China in the near future shows why the existing western economic model as a whole will fail.

For almost as long as I can remember we have been saying that the United States, with 5 percent of the world's people, consumes a third or more of the earth's resources. That was true. It is no longer true. Today China consumes more basic resources than the United States does.

Among the key commodities such as grain, meat, oil, coal, and steel, China consumes more of each than the United States except for oil, where the United States still has a wide (though narrowing) lead. China uses a third more grain than the United States. Its meat consumption is nearly double that of the United States. It uses three times as much steel.

These numbers reflect national consumption, but what would happen if consumption per person in China were to catch up to that of the United States? If we assume that China‚s economy slows from the 10 percent annual growth of recent years to 8 percent, then before 2030 income per person in China will reach the level it is in the United States today.

If we also assume that the Chinese will spend their income more or less as Americans do today, then we can translate their income into consumption. If, for example, each person in China consumes paper at the current American rate, then in 2030 China's 1.46 billion people will consume more paper than the world produces today. There go the world's forests.

If we assume that in 2030 there are three cars for every four people in China, as there now are in the United States, China will have 1.1 billion cars. The world currently has 860 million cars. To provide the needed roads, highways, and parking lots, China would have to pave an area comparable to what it now plants in rice.

By 2030 China would need 98 million barrels of oil a day. The world is currently producing 85 million barrels a day and may never produce much more than that. There go the world's oil reserves.

What China is teaching us is that the western economic model--the fossil-fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy--is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2030 may have an even larger population than China. Nor will it work for the other 3 billion people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream." And in an increasingly integrated global economy, where we all depend on the same grain, oil, and steel, the western economic model will no longer work for the industrial countries either.

The overriding challenge for our generation is to build a new economy--one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a much more diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. We have the technology to build this new economy, an economy that will allow us to sustain economic progress. Can we build it fast enough to avoid a breakdown of social systems?

Adapted from Chapter 1, "Entering a New World," and Chapter 6, "Early Signs of Decline," in Lester R. Brown's Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available for free download and purchase from the Earth Policy Institute.

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Image: Tom Twigg/GristIn the end, elections always come down to numbers. In the case of Seattle's Aug. 18 primary -- a vote that would decide whether the city would adopt a 20-cent fee for paper and plastic bags at local stores -- the most important number turned out to be not the 20 cents nor the number of votes against, but the amount of money spent on the anti-fee campaign by plastic industry lobbyists.

That number is $1.4 million ... or about 7 million disposable bags at two dimes a piece. Enough, apparently, to defeat the measure by a hefty margin with more than half of the (all mail-in) ballots counted.

In comparison, the pro-bag camp raised just $80,000, and they knew they faced a tough fight, said Heather Trim of People for Puget Sound and the Green Bag Campaign.

Still, Trim is happy with the amount of media attention the issue garnered in the run-up to the vote and says it has inspired more people to bring their own bags. "We've had a huge surge of awareness," she said. "This is only going to help."

For more on the BYOBag debate, see our rundown of disposable-bag restrictions around the world and our list of alternatives from fanny packs to lunch tins.

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While Seattleites squabble over whether to impose a fee on disposable bags, we offer up alternatives for lugging your goods home from the store (and ideas for what to do with the plastic bags you've already accumulated).

Fantastic plastic alternatives

Nothing says cool like a Cap-sac.For smaller items:

For serious groceries:

For carrying your sack lunch: Remember that bitchin' tin lunch box you toted to first grade every day? When did that stop being cool again?

For wet items: Try a reusable, waterproof tote bag for wet clothes, dirty diapers, or any other damp items you might need to carry around. For a few more bucks, you can get one in a crazy pattern.

Umbra's got suggestions for lining your trash can and scooping pet poop, and there's also the option of biodegradable doggie-poop bags.

Uses for the plastic bags you already have sitting around

Yup, it’s a bag made of plastic bags.If you're like me, you save any plastic bag you acquire in a valiant effort to mitigate its harmful effects by reusing it as many times as possible, only to end up with a growing pile of plastic bags that you don't know what to do with.

Luckily there's already an informative list out there of creative uses for plastic bags. Number 1 -- "make a purse out of them by sewing a bunch of them together" -- is actually completely possible. My grandma used to crochet reusable tote bags out of strips of old plastic bags. I carried my stuff to swim practice in one every day -- not only was it durable and a little stretchy, the crocheted plastic made it ideal for a dripping bathing suit.

The list also suggests using plastic bags as mattress or pillow stuffing, packing materials (instead of foam peanuts), rubber gloves if you don't have the real thing, or "a solid white one tied onto a pole as a truce flag." (You never know when you might need to declare peace.) Oh, and regarding suggestion #47 -- please, only in an extreme emergency.

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Seattle voters will decide on Aug. 18 whether to impose a 20-cent fee on all paper and plastic bags from grocery, drug, and convenience stores. But it's not the first U.S. city to restrict disposable bags -- nor even the first in Washington state.

In Edmonds, Wash., north of Seattle, the city council voted in late July to ban disposable plastic bags at retail outlets (excluding those used for produce and bulk foods). The ban will go into effect next year.

Even green-leaning western Washington is behind the times in comparison with San Francisco, which enacted the nation's first ban on plastic bags at grocery and drug stores in 2007. The city council in Oakland, Calif., also voted in 2007 to impose a ban on the bags, but the plastic-bag industry has tied the measure up in court.

Other bag-hostile California cities include Palo Alto, Calif., where a plastic-bag ban is set to go into effect this September, and Los Angeles, which will begin banning plastic bags in July 2010.

Maui, Hawaii, will start banning plastic bags in 2011. A smattering of other cities around the U.S. are also considering bans.

But on the global stage, plastic-bag restrictions are hardly new.

In 1989, Italy took a look around its beaches and saw plastic bags cluttering the scenery and choking dolphins. To help clear up the mess, the Italian government began taxing plastic bags, and next year it will institute an all-out ban on them.

After bag-clogged drains led to prolonged flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1988 and 1998, the government banished disposable plastic bags from the city in 2002.

Lethal floods blamed on bag-clogged drains have also prompted a number of city and state governments in India to impose plastic-bag bans.

In 2002, Ireland became the first European nation to tackle the plastic-bag problem. It imposed a 15-cent PlasTax, revolutionizing the Irish shopping scene with reusable sacks and reducing the use of flimsy plastic ones by 90 percent within weeks.

In South Africa, plastic bags were such a ubiquitous scourge that they became known as the "national flower" until the nation banned them in 2003. Eritrea, Rwanda, and Somalia followed suit in 2005, and Tanzania in 2006.

In Kenya, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Mathaai blamed plastic bags for helping to spread malaria because discarded bags can fill with rainwater and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Her country banned thin plastic bags in 2007 and imposed fines on thicker ones. Uganda followed its lead.

In China, where up to 3 billion plastic bags were being used per day, the government in 2008 banned super-thin plastic bags and imposed fees on thicker ones.

South Australia hopped on the "ban" wagon this year, threatening fines of up to $5,000 for stores that don't comply. The rest of Australia is considering a similar ban.

Find out more about bag bans around the world from Planet Ark, the BBC, and National Geographic News.

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Image: Tom Twigg/Grist

UPDATED: 11 Aug 2009

When the Seattle City Council voted last summer to impose a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic bags, the Progressive Bag Affiliates (PBA) of the American Chemistry Council immediately sprang to action to block the move. The fee would have taken effect January 1, 2009, but the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax (funded by PBA, the Washington Food Industry, and 7-Eleven) collected enough voter signatures to put the measure on the August primary ballot.

Referendum 1, as it's now known, would require consumers to pay 20 cents for every disposable bag (paper or plastic) they get from grocery, drug, and convenience stores. Small businesses -- those with under $1 million in annual revenue -- would retain the entire 20-cent fee. Other businesses would get to keep five cents, with the rest going to Seattle Public Utilities to pay for implementation and oversight of the program, and to provide free reusable bags to low-income families, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.

Voters will cast their ballots on Aug. 18. Some polls have shown people closely split over the issue. A more recent poll [PDF] found the "no" side leading 55 percent to 41 percent; Democrats and young voters were more inclined to support the ballot measure, while Republicans, Independents, men, and minorities were inclined to oppose it.

The "yes" camp

The pro-bag-fee side has raised around $64,000 so far -- a tiny fraction of the million-plus dollars raised by the "no" side. The main organization supporting the measure is the Seattle Green Bag Campaign. Notable endorsements have come from The Seattle Times, The Stranger, Mayor Greg Nickels, five Seattle City Council members, the 43rd and 46th District Democrats, PCC Natural Markets, Central Co-op's Madison Market, and a host of environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation, People for Puget Sound, and the UW Sierra Student Coalition.  The campaign has also received support from Orin Smith, former president and CEO of Starbucks, and Reusablebags.com.

The fee was introduced as a simple way to change Seattleites' shopping habits, encouraging the use of reusable bags without banning disposable ones outright. Supporters point to Ireland's successful PlasTax measure, which, by imposing a similar fee, saw plastic bag use reduced by over 90 percent only a few weeks after it took effect. Plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and paper bags, while more easily recyclable, require far more energy and toxic chemicals to produce. A study by Seattle Public Utilities indicated that Referendum 1 could cut disposable-bag-related greenhouse-gas emissions by about 4,000 tons per year (the equivalent of taking 665 cars off the road). In 2002, Bangladesh became the first country to ban plastic bags, and dozens of other nations, from Botswana to Denmark to South Korea, have restrictions on disposable bags. Bag-fee supporters hope to make Seattle a model for other American cities on this issue, the same way the city set a precedent by introducing residential curbside recycling in 1988.

The "no" camp

Opposition to the measure has been largely driven by the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, which lists its members on its website. Most of its funding -- about $1.4 million so far -- comes from the American Chemistry Council, whose members include Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, and major plastic-bag producers. Coalitions such as the Korean American Grocers Association, Washington Association of Neighborhood Stores, and the Independent Business Association have also come out against Referendum 1.

Mayoral candidate Jan Drago opposes the bag fee, as do Seattle City Council candidates Jordan Royer and Sally Bagshaw. The Central Area Motivation Program has spoken out against the fee because it believes it will unfairly affect low-income people, and Real Change, Seattle's weekly activist paper sold by the homeless, recommended a "no" vote. A group of economists called the Northwest Economic Policy Seminar conducted an analysis [PDF] of the proposed fee and then published a letter to the Seattle City Council voicing their opposition.

Because the American Chemistry Council represents makers of plastics, many in the "yes" camp have come to see the effort to pass the referendum as a fight against big oil. But some in the "no" camp say they oppose the measure because it's costly and unnecessary in a city where 90 percent of citizens claim to already reuse their disposable bags. "We don't have a serious plastic bag litter problem," said Peter Nickerson in the Northwest Economic Policy Seminar's letter to the city council. Opponents have also said that the measure includes too many exemptions and loopholes to really be effective.

Opponents tend to refer to the measure as a "tax," not a fee, and by definition it could probably go either way, although the fact that revenues go specifically to bag-elimination efforts (instead of into a general fund) puts it more in the fee category.

The Seattle Times plans to publish its endorsement on Referendum 1 on Aug. 8. [UPDATE: The Times endorsed the referendum.] No endorsements yet from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Seattle Weekly.

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In December 2007, in "Junk Mail Box," I lauded ad-mail slayer Catalog Choice and argued for US and Canadian Do Not Mail registries.

Soon thereafter, I began using Catalog Choice assiduously at home. I also refreshed my subscription to the Direct Mail Association’s Mail Preference Service. I wrote to ValPak to plead for a reprieve from their thick wads of coupon mailers (my own letter carrier gave me the address). I was about to start calling other direct mailers myself, demanding they take me off their lists. First, though, before putting more of my own time or money into de-spamming my snail mail, I conceived an experiment. I decided to stockpile every bit of advertising mail I received for 365 days. I wanted to see what Catalog Choice and DMA’s program would do to stem the tide.

The answer, it turned out, was “not enough.” Despite all I did, I still received a two-foot-tall stack of junk mail that weighed 50 pounds.

As I said before, ad mail isn’t the biggest of Cascadia’s challenges, but it ought to be among the easiest to solve. In fact, it’s an opportunity for regional leadership. Unwanted mail wastes paper and all the trees, energy, and climate emissions it takes to manufacture and carry 50-pound piles of junk mail to each or us each year, then recycle it again, typically unopened. It also wastes advertisers’ money, driving up costs and prices and suppressing profits.

Enacting Do Not Mail registries in Cascadian states and provinces would likely spark imitation across North America. It might even stimulate national action.

In the interim, we can each trim the waste of paper and money individually, by de-junking our boxes. Here’s what I received at my door, and how I responded at year’s end:

15 pounds of phone books. The sheer mass of these—30 percent of the total—was the biggest surprise. I got six books (of which, five were yellow business listings) from three competing companies. Preferring online directories, I almost never use a phone book. They usually go straight from the porch to the green bin. Strictly speaking, phone books are not mail, because they’re delivered by phone company contractors, not the Post Office. Still, they’re unsolicited advertising brought to your door, with no easy way to decline. One of them, called Yellowbook, promotes itself as “an eco-friendly company” on the cover.

ACTION: I scanned the opening pages of each phone book, looking for information about how to stop getting them. I even looked up the purportedly eco-friendly Yellowbook online. No luck. An internet search found this useful site for how to opt-out of phone book delivery. In a few minutes, I was able to opt out of Qwest and Yellowbook but not Verizon directories.

5 pounds of neighborhood advertisers: 10 percent of the total. Savings Source weekly advertisers promised to be my “source for great deals and discounts,” but all they did was leave me with ink-smudged fingers 40 times over the year.

ACTION: I called the phone number listed on Savings Source (206)652-6578) for “questions.” I got a recording that said, “to remove your address from our mailing list, please leave your information at the tone.” I guess recipients’ main question is how to unsubscribe.

3 pounds of bleached-paper, full-color, glossy catalogs from Eddie Bauer. I tried to stop them through Catalog Choice to no avail. They sent me a catalog every month.

5 pounds of catalogs from Bike Nashbar and Performance Bicycle, two corporate cousins from which I’ve made exactly one purchase each. Both ignored Catalog Choice: Nashbar sent me 10 catalogs, Performance sent me 18 catalogs and flyers.

2 pounds of catalogs from Road Runner Sports, from which I bought shoes twice for my size 14.5 feet. They sent me 10 catalogs and 2 flyers after I asked them through Catalog Choice to call off the dogs.

ACTION: I called these retailers’ toll-free numbers. The operators assured me the deluge would stop.

2 pounds of—mostly—glossy, full-color, cardstock from info-tech companies. Comcast hawked cable TV and/or high-speed internet 13 times. Qwest piled on with 14 catalogs, flyers, and letters, trying to sell me digital TV, cellular service, or voice-over-internet. Verizon, meanwhile, attempted seven times to sell me a new cell phone.

1 pound of political mail from the primary and general elections.

1 pound—five editions—of a surprisingly thick, ad-packed tabloid from the state youth soccer association.

Miscellaneous other advertisers contributed the remaining 16 pounds of junk mail: course catalogs from the local community college, for example, and the usual newsletters from organizations I am affiliated with, such as my bike club, food coop, health coop Group Health, insurers, and alma mater. None of these mailings offended my sensibility, and several of them have since agreed to excise me from future mailings.

More irksome were the 17—17!—credit card offers United Airlines sent. They promised me as many as 45,000 bonus miles (“more than enough,” the letter declared, “for a roundtrip ticket”), if I would apply for a new Visa.

My insurance company USAA, meanwhile, sent me 16 invitations to buy other forms of insurance or other financial services from them—including lots of ways to borrow money (just exactly what our economy does not need more of)! It used a technique also favored by Qwest: making its ad-mail look like actual correspondence about my policies and accounts. (To its credit, USAA promised to stop sending me mail of any kind, when I called them about this.)

One somewhat pleasant surprise was how little direct mail I got from nonprofit charities. I got only sixteen direct-mail appeals from nonprofit charities to which I have donated in the past, plus five others from groups to which I’ve never donated. These fundraising appeals were insignificant beside the catalogs.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the whole year’s mail was the oversized postcard from Tourism British Columbia, which promotes the province as “Super, Natural.” The postcard, a thick slice of shimmering plastic, displays the stunning panorama you’d get from a canoe in Yoho National Park. The image changes depending on how you hold the card. It is one of the few mailers in the entire stack that’s not recyclable.

Stopping unwanted mail is not a particularly onerous task, but it is a hassle. Most people won’t bother. They’ll just keep transferring most of their mail from their post box to their recycling bin, unopened. Individual, voluntary action is a help, but more-effective solutions must operate on a larger scale. One heartening sign is that, in May of this year, Canada Post announced some new steps to stem junk mail. The US Postal Service has yet to follow suit.

So I'm going to keep calling retailers who stuff my mail box, but mostly, I'm going to keep speaking out. New laws that require mass-mailers to seek permission before inundating us with advertising would put the onus on the mailers, not normal citizens, to prevent waste. Regulations that ensure marketers respect third-party de-spammers such as Catalog Choice would simplify de-spamming dramatically for people like me: Eddie Bauer, Nashbar, Performance , and Road Runner sent me 10 pounds of unwanted catalogs after I sent them word through Catalog Choice to cease and desist. Best of all, national or state and provincial “Do Not Mail” registries would provide all postal patrons with a one-step way to de-spam their letter box, saving paper, energy, marketers’ money, and--the ultimate nonrenewable resource--time.

Notes: In case you want to try this experiment yourself, here are the rules I followed: To be junk mail, something has to be unsolicited. An REI catalog is junk; my Backpacker magazine is not. Similarly, the mail cannot be personal business: a credit card offer from my bank is junk, my bank statement is not. To be included in my tally, the item had to be addressed to me, or to “current resident.” If it was addressed to any of my kids, my ex-wife, or anyone else, I excluded it.

This post originally appeared at Sightline's Daily Score blog.

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Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

About a year ago I made the whole body switch to organic and all-natural shampoos, body lotions, makeup, etc. In an attempt to stop my packrat-like habits, I want to know, what do I do with all of my old chemical-laden bottles and tubes? I can't bare to just throw them in the garbage knowing that I could have recycled the plastic bottles, but if I recycle the bottles, that means I will have to pour the contents down the drain which flows into our lake affecting the wildlife--the reason why I switched to all natural in the first place! Please help!

Frettingly,
Carlee S.
Niagara Falls, ON

A. Dearest Carlee,

I'm supposed to be relaxing!Also Dearest Many Others with Confusing Trash Around the House. I have filled a 42-gallon trash bag with recent letters about vexing unwanted items: cosmetics, pill bottles, cookware, shampoo, floppy discs ... fortunately for me, my trash bag is digital, and seems to vaporize when I hit the happy button.

For non-virtual objects, however, I wish you all to follow some very basic steps. The first step is to admit that you are powerless to prevent accumulation of a certain amount of garbage, no matter how earnest your intentions. Then we get to skip the fearless moral inventory and go straight to making an inventory of which items it is possible to recycle or reuse.

There are two main substeps at this point. One is contacting your local trash management information source and finding out if your particular garbage is toxic, recyclable, collected by a local agency, etc. Many agencies have an annual or more-frequent household hazardous waste collection day, and some accept cosmetics and the like. The second thing you can do is search on the internet for people recycling your item; perhaps someone wants old VHS tapes, and if you are willing to ship them to Iowa, the problem is solved.

If you make these efforts and are thwarted, then feel free to move on to the next step: Throwing things out. In your case, Carlee, it is better to throw the tubes and bottles out than to pour their contents down the drain. Better still would be to use the products up. You could use them as intended (one more wash with the last dribs of your old shampoo will not be the end of the world), or find a new purpose for them at a site like AltUse. And then you can recycle your containers.

But people, listen: We will have garbage. Unless it is electronic, officially toxic or hazardous, or recyclable, we will need to throw it out. The only way to have fewer things to throw out is to bring fewer things into our lives. We must do the best we can at that, and accept that we are not perfect, or we will go insane. I am going to now model this behavior and throw out all the letters about throwing things out.

Valiantly,
Umbra

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When you hear the phrase "alternative energy," what comes to mind?

Solar power? Wind? Hydroelectric?

Not for West Virginia's political leaders. They think a little differently.

In the recent legislative session, Gov. Joe Manchin (D) championed and state lawmakers approved an energy portfolio standard bill requiring 25% of generation to come from "alternative and renewable" sources by 2025. But the new standard, which goes into effect this month, has defined "alternative" to include natural gas, old tires, coal gas and even waste coal -- energy sources that emit significant quantities of climate-warming greenhouse gases as well as toxic, health-damaging pollutants.

"It's Governor Humpty Dumpty occupying that nice mansion beside the Kanawha River (where he can admire the endless coal barges)," West Virginia Sierra Club Chair Jim Sconyers wrote about the new law. "After all, it was Humpty Dumpty who said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'"

SB 297 sets up a system of tradable credits for electricity produced by alternative and renewable sources. While it offers credits for traditional renewable sources including solar, wind, hydropower and geothermal, it also gives credits for what it calls "alternative" sources -- defining those as:

* advanced coal technology, a method of capturing emissions from burning coal that's still unproven on a large scale;

* coal bed methane, or natural gas extracted from coal beds, an energy source that has a serious impact on groundwater supplies;

* fuel produced by coal gasification or liquefaction, which emits toxic pollutants as well as greenhouse gases;

* synthetic gas made from coal, another hydrocarbon-intensive and polluting fuel;

* integrated gasification combined cycle technologies, which reduce but do not eliminate the emissions typically associated with coal plants;

* waste coal, the burning of which produces large amounts of greenhouse gases as well as toxic emissions;

* tire-derived fuel, another polluting, toxic fuel source;

* pumped storage hydroelectric projects, which are actually net consumers of energy;

* natural gas, the burning of which produces greenhouse gases and other pollution; and

* nuclear power, which releases radioactive pollution to the environment and also produces dangerous waste products.

The West Virginia Environmental Council head lobbyist Donald S. Garvin Jr. blasted the new standard in an op-ed:

No other state includes natural gas as a source of "alternative" energy. Nuclear energy is included by only a few, and they specify "advanced generation" nuclear facilities.  Most states that include "clean coal" specifically limit it to facilities that include carbon capture and sequestration, or require that they lead to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Some jurisdictions specifically exclude "pump-storage" hydropower facilities.

By listing all of these heavily polluting sources as "alternative," Garvin said, the standard undermines the original goal of reducing carbon emissions while creating a system that puts West Virginia "completely out of step" with the rest of the nation.

He also pointed out that by including natural gas and nuclear, the new law may enable West Virginia's utilities to meet the standard without building any renewable energy facilities at all. That because there's no requirement that the electricity provided actually be produced in West Virginia. And American Electric Power -- the Ohio-based utility that serves the state through its Appalachian Power unit -- already has enough nuclear and natural gas generation to meet the requirement through 2025.

A toxic standard for environmental health

The new law gives West Virginia the dubious distinction of being the first state to include tire burning in its alternative/renewable portfolio, observes Mike Ewall of the Energy Justice Network. While that helps dispose of the 290 million or so tires discarded in the U.S. every year, burning tires also release toxic chemicals including cancer-causing lead, benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and dioxin.

The new standard also makes West Virginia the only other state besides Pennsylvania to include in its energy portfolio standard waste coal  -- mining refuse originally cast aside during processing as too low-quality but which can now be burned thanks to the development of fluidized bed combustion technology.

As with burning tires, this provision helps disappear a big waste problem -- but the experience of the Pennsylvania communities with the nation's heaviest concentration of FBC waste coal burning power plants raises serious questions about waste coal's potential environmental health impact.

Last week, representatives of the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry held a public meeting in eastern Pennsylvania to discuss a planned $5.5 million research project into what may be causing a confirmed cluster of the rare blood cancer polycythemia vera in the coal mining communities of Schuylkill, Luzerne and Carbon counties. The area where the cancer was found to be occurring at an unusually high rate is home to toxic hotspots including numerous waste-coal burning plants, with five such facilities in Schuylkill County alone and three others just across its border in Northumberland, Carbon and Luzerne counties.

Plants using FBC technology operate at lower temperatures and oxygen levels than conventional coal-fired power plants and inject limestone during combustion to reduce sulfur oxide pollution. But lower temperatures and oxygen levels, low-quality fuels and limestone injection have all been found to contribute to increased emissions of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- toxic compounds known to cause genetic mutations and cancer. In fact, the specific genetic mutation involved in polycythemia vera has been linked to PAH exposure. And because radioactive elements are found in waste coal, FBC plants emit radioactive pollution, which has also been linked to an excess risk of polycythemia vera.

Today there are 18 FBC plants nationwide using waste coal as a primary fuel, according to the Energy Justice Network -- 14 in Pennsylvania, three in West Virginia and one in Utah. There are another 13 plants using waste coal as a secondary fuel -- four in Virginia, three each in Alabama and South Carolina, two in Pennsylvania and one in Mississippi.

The three existing waste coal burners in West Virginia include Dominion's North Branch plant in Grant County; the company's Morgantown Energy Facility in Monongalia County, which provides power to West Virginia University as well as other customers; and Edison International's Grant Town plant in Marion County, which also burns tires.

Looking at these three plants' emissions, it is clear that "alternative" does not mean non-polluting. Together these facilities released more than 89,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air alone in 2007, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory. That includes more than 38,000 pounds of hydrochloric acid, 11,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, more than 9,000 pounds of hydrogen fluoride, 183 pounds of mercury and 57 pounds of lead. The TRI does not include PAHs or radioactive emissions.

Three new waste coal burning plants have been proposed for West Virginia, according to the Energy Justice Network, and a big waste coal plant -- the nation's largest, in fact -- is slated for Wise County in southwestern Virginia, just three counties south of the West Virginia line. A coalition of environmental groups represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center is challenging the Wise County plant's air permits in court, with the trial scheduled to start July 31.

At the same time West Virginia is promoting dirty power through its energy standard, new evidence is emerging about the serious environmental health problems already afflicting residents of Appalachia's coalfields. A study released last month by West Virginia University Professor Michael Hendryx documented higher mortality rates in Appalachian coal counties, which it blamed in part on environmental pollution.

Unfortunately, rather than easing the problems associated with environmental pollution and poor environmental health, West Virginia's new energy standard ensure they will continue -- a big missed opportunity for the state to build a greener, cleaner future.

(A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.)

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John SoleyAfter a long struggle with cancer, my friend Mr. John Soley died at his home in Carbon County, Pa. on Saturday, June 20. He was only 62, which is too young to die of natural causes. But then, neither John nor I believe he got sick from natural causes. We believe he and many of his neighbors were poisoned by pollution, and that the perpetrators should be held to account.

Outspoken in the local grassroots struggle against environmental injustice, Mr. Soley was a resident of Quakake Road north of Hometown, the rural Appalachian village where I grew up and where my mom still lives. Located where Carbon, Schuylkill and Luzerne counties converge in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal mining region, Quakake Road is a continuation of Ben Titus Road, where residents have reported an unusual number of cases of the rare blood malignancy polycythemia vera as well as other cancers and chronic illnesses. Last year, researchers with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry confirmed a cluster of polycythemia vera in that area and believe it is caused by something in the environment.

Indeed, the valley where Mr. Soley lived lies below what may be the most toxic mountaintop in America. Broad Mountain is home to McAdoo Associates, a former Reading Co. coal mine that in the 1970s became an illegal chemical waste incinerator and dump used by some of the most prominent corporations in America, including BASF, Johnson & Johnson and a company that today is part of petroleum giant BP. The property is now a Superfund toxic waste site that was once considered one of the country's most dangerous. The first federal investigators on the scene reported finding massive sheets of cancer-causing benzene on the property and dead animals and birds scattered around chemical drums. The smell from the place was so sickening that we used to roll up the car windows and hold our breath when driving past.

Today that Superfund site sits next to the heavily polluting Northeastern Power cogeneration facility, one of seven such power plants in the tri-county area that burn waste coal and waste fuel. Adjacent to the cogeneration plant is what's known as the Big Gorilla -- an old strip mine that since 1997 has served as a dump for the toxic combustion waste created at the power plant. Click here for a photo I took of the cogeneration facility through the gates of the Superfund site.

To give you a sense of how close Mr. Soley lived to this toxic mess, click here for a Google Earth image, where his property is marked with the square in the upper right. The large water body in the center is the Still Creek Reservoir, which provides drinking water for Hometown and the nearby borough of Tamaqua; the black area in the upper left is the old mine site; the lighter-colored area to its right is the Big Gorilla; the white triangle between the black ash pit and the road is the Superfund site; and the industrial facility on the lower edge of the ash pit is the cogeneration plant. The road running along the left edge of the image is Pa. Route 309. The highway roughly follows the Little Schuylkill, the Schuylkill River's northernmost headwaters, which originate on the mountaintop.

The community also lies a a couple of miles northeast -- that is, downwind -- of the Air Products plant, a manufacturer of electronics specialty gases and one of the few domestic producers of toxic fluorine gases. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory, the facility reported emitting to the air in 2007 alone more than 3,400 pounds of toxic hydrogen fluoride as well as more than 2,300 pounds of dichloromethane or methylene chloride.

Methylene chloride is a solvent known to cause cancer in humans, and it has a characteristically sweet odor. Coincidentally, during my last visit with Mr. Soley at his home this past October, he noted a weird smell coming from Air Products that he likened to bubble gum.

Welcome to Cancer Valley

I first met John Soley several years ago at a borough council meeting we attended in Tamaqua. It turned out that he knew my father, Dan Sturgis, as they worked together at the former Atlas Powder Co., where Mr. Soley was an electrician. My dad, a draftsman by training and an explosives expert, was first diagnosed with kidney cancer in the mid-1980s and died from it in 1998. The experience of helping care for him in his final months and seeing how many of our neighbors were also sick inspired me to undertake a research project that eventually led me to start a blog called Hometown Hazards.

When I visited him last fall, Mr. Soley had been on kidney dialysis after years of suffering from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood plasma cells that are formed in bone marrow and that play an important role in immunity. He wanted to walk with me along the Still Creek Reservoir to show me the areas along the shore where the vegetation was dead. Those areas reportedly coincide with springs coming off the mountain, one of several pieces of evidence that suggest the toxic chemicals dumped into the mine on the top of the hill are seeping into the wider ecosystem. But he was too sick to go walking on that day, so instead we sat at his kitchen table and talked.

"We need our story to be told," he said. "Welcome to Cancer Valley."

Mr. Soley told me harrowing stories about his own long battle with cancer as well as the health problems of others in his community. One of his neighbors was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer at age of 18. In another nearby home, two people were both suffering from brain tumors. Another neighbor had stomach cancer. And Mr. Soley knew of at least one child in the area who had leukemia, and whose uncle lived nearby and died of leukemia as a teenager.

Mr. Soley first moved to Quakake Road in 1978 from Tamaqua's Dutch Hill neighborhood. An outdoorsman and hunter with a deep love for Brittany spaniels, he got a good deal on the land, where he soon opened a kennel. It was only a few years after Mr. Soley moved in that his young neighbor was diagnosed with the rare liver tumor. About a year after that, Mr. Soley's own health problems began.

Suffering from chronic fatigue that began soon after the move, Mr. Soley was being treated by his doctor for Epstein-Barr syndrome but wasn't getting any better.

He eventually saw an Epstein-Barr specialist who did additional testing and discovered problems with his T cells, key parts of the immune system. The tests also turned up serious problems with Mr. Soley's blood cells, which he described as looking like "tapeworms ... all stuck together."

It was in 1997 that Mr. Soley was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

After his diagnosis, he went through a four-month round of chemotherapy and later received a bone marrow transplant from his sister, Joan Yacobenas of Hometown. He was in the hospital at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a couple of months and then lived for a few more months in nearby lodgings for cancer patients so he could be close to his doctors.

Three days after he finally got home, he started bleeding from his bladder -- a reaction from one of his cancer drugs. This required operations to clear up blood clots.

When Mr. Soley returned home from that ordeal, he found he couldn't eat and started losing weight, dropping from 205 pounds to 145.

"I got so skinny when I looked in the mirror I cringed," he recalled. "I wanted to cry. I could only manage to eat one cookie a day."

As if that weren't awful enough, he then started bleeding from his rectum and had to be flown from the Lehigh Valley Medical Center to Johns Hopkins, where doctors diagnosed him with an infected bowel. They wanted to cut out a section but were afraid the operation would kill him. With no other options, they treated him with antibiotics but were not particularly hopeful about his chances.

He recalled how one morning three doctors came into his room and announced -- incredulously -- that somehow his bowel infection had cleared up.

"They told me I must have had a lot of people praying for me," Mr. Soley said. "They called it divine intervention."

After that ordeal, Mr. Soley was able to eat again, and his health gradually improved. But then in June of 1998, tests revealed there was still cancer in his body. He underwent an experimental therapy at Johns Hopkins that involved taking lymphocyte cells from his sister's body and infusing them into his own intravenously. When that treatment ended in January 1999, he finally felt good again for the first time in a long time.

"I was a completely different person," he said. "I felt 150 percent."

His relatively good health lasted until October 2006, when he woke up one morning with a strange feeling in his chest. A neighbor drove him to the hospital in Hazleton, where they found blockages necessitating heart surgery.

While Mr. Soley was undergoing rehab for the surgery, blood tests showed he had abnormally high creatine levels, indicating his kidneys were shutting down. In May 2007, he went on dialysis.

'This isn't normal'

When he first got sick, Mr. Soley told me, he figured it was just bad luck on his part. It was only later that he started noticing the patterns, with many neighbors all around him also sick -- with cancers of the liver, brain, prostate and blood, as well as thyroid disorders and other chronic illnesses. He lived not far from Betty and Lester Kester, a husband and wife who both died of polycythemia vera within the past two years.

"I said to myself, 'What in the hell is going on?' This isn't normal."

He soon began noticing strange things in the environment. The reddish-brown dust from the power plant that gathered on people's cars overnight. The strange chemical odors on the wind. The smell of sulfuric acid emanating from the hill leading up to the Superfund site. The thick white slime that coated the pump on his drinking water well.

A couple of years earlier, on the hillside close to his house, Mr. Soley also discovered what looked like spider webs of some sort of oily substance oozing out of the earth. He called his neighbor and friend, Ricky Johnson, who took photographs. They had a sample of the stuff analyzed at Wilkes University and found they were indeed petroleum products of some sort. The Pa. Department of Environmental Protection eventually sent out someone to take a look at the situation, but the person didn't even bring digging tools. Mr. Soley provided him with a spade to take samples, which according to DEP showed nothing unusual.

During our conversation, Mr. Soley expressed some bitterness toward local elected officials, who he felt failed to take adequate action to help area residents deal with the various environmental threats they're facing. For example, there's never been thorough independent testing of the water and sediment in the Still Creek Reservoir despite the obvious toxic threats. Nor has there been any widespread testing of people living along the reservoir for chemical exposures.

"It's been a joke," he said of official efforts to address the problems. "A farce."

Since Mr. Soley and I met, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) announced that he secured a $5.5 million federal grant to explore the cause of high rate of polycythemia vera in the area. But like me, Mr. Soley was already growing uneasy about officials' focus on polycythemia vera to the exclusion of all the other health problems suffered by local residents.

What about the people with multiple myeloma? Leukemia? Brain cancer? Prostate cancer? Thyroid disease? Would they be forgotten?

I know I won't forget my friend and what he went through. Perhaps the best way to honor yet another life lost too soon after great suffering would be to keep a question in mind as we continue our work seeking environmental truth and justice for the people of the Hometown area: What difference would our actions have made to John Soley?

(A version of this story originally appeared on the blog Hometown Hazards.)

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Eighteen million people live in Cairo. They produce 13,000 tons of garbage every day, and they have no waste disposal system. Ew.

Mai Iskander presents Al Gore with a drawing made by the children at The Recycling School in Cairo.Courtesy Garbage Dreams via FlickrBut the trash also presents an opportunity. For the past 50 years, one group of people in Cairo has made its living collecting and recycling one- to two-thirds of Cairo's residential waste. Profiled in Mai Iskander's new documentary film, "Garbage Dreams," the Zaballeen -- Arabic for garbage collectors -- daily whisk trash bags from doorsteps in Cairo's upper-class neighborhoods, bring the bags back to their own neighborhoods, and separate the recyclables from the rest of the waste. And at this task they are extraordinarily efficient.

Winner of the Al Gore Reel Current award for film, Garbage Dreams opens with jaw-dropping scenes of Mokottam, Cairo's largest trash village. Piles of food waste and two-story mountains of aluminum cans clutter the streets. Pigs dart between trucks hauling crates of plastic bottles. While we ogle at how the Zaballeen could possibly live under a leaning tower of pizza boxes, Iskander notes that of all the waste we see in that neighborhood, the Zaballeen recycle more than 80 percent of it. Point of reference: in the U.S. we're lucky to recycle one-third of household waste [PDF].

The film follows Adham, Nabil, and Osama, three teenage boys trying to make a living in the garbage trade, and Laila, a community social worker who liberally dispenses tetanus shots and tries to organize the Mokottam community into a more modern business operation. Laila's work becomes more and more critical in the film as the city of Cairo grants contracts to foreign multi-national waste haulers, thus depriving the Zaballeen of the trash that provides their income.

As trash disappears, tense community meetings take place. Many Zaballeen believe that they need to modernize and out-compete the waste-haulers, while others argue that the incursion of the foreign companies represents the end for their way of life. Iskander deftly balances these competing points of view with confessional-style interviews, and evocatively portrays the financial and personal crises squeezing the Zaballeen (not to mention environmental crisis brought on by the fact that the waste haulers were only contracted to recycle 20 percent of collected waste.)

But the film is not all gloom and doom. Spliced in between the scenes of combative community meetings, Iskander highlights the Recycling School in Mokottam where Zaballeen children learn to read, to break down plastic bottles, and to create Excel spreadsheets (maybe they can tutor me?). After the waste-haulers came to Cairo, the school organized a field trip to show the children the large landfills where the foreign companies dumped the waste -- recyclables and all.

To its detriment, Garbage Dreams begins with a touch of a sob-story sentiment. At one early point a young man sighs on a voiceover that he never wished to be born a Zaballeen. But after the introduction of the foreign waste haulers, the narrative of the film markedly shifts from a story about the stigma of being garbage collectors to a story about how to capitalize on the business opportunity that waste presents.

If you're not sold already on watching how a community disposes of a mountain of soda bottles, it's totally worth the $11 and 80 minutes to see Adham's reaction when he learns that the people of Wales (and most other places in the West, for that matter) recycle less than half of what the Zaballeen do.

Watch It: Garbage Dreams is showing at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 9 and 10. Check the SIFF schedule for details.

For readers outside of Seattle, check the Garbage Dreams website for details on other screenings.

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Q. Dear Umbra,

Is it better to use a gas-spewing grinder/chipper to mulch up yard waste for plant beds or just burn it? I am thinking you will be tempted to say do neither and let it rot in place, but many don't have a big enough yard to leave piles of leaves, sticks, and branches lying around for years.

Steve W.
Waynesville, N.C.

A. Dearest Steve,

Ah, it's not a simple as either/or. Your county or state may have rules prohibiting the burning of brush and yard waste. Look on the EPA Backyard Burning pages to get started on the rules in North Carolina or other states. Burning non-vegetative trash, I remind us all, is always a no-no.

If your only two choices are burning or gas-powered chipping, then I say go for gas-powered chipping. Today's column does not end there, however. We can think of a variety of ways to wiggle out of the rock and hard place.

Destroying the evidence.One is to rent or buy an electric chipper. These are generally smaller and less powerful than a gas-powered chipper, but in my brief research on the matter (i.e., do these things actually do the job? yes), I found that a decent one should shred leaves and chip branches up to 1.5 to 2 inches. Two brands seemed to rise to the top in internet chat: the McCullough and the Patriot. They are available for internet purchase, but whether you yourself will be able to find a rental one is unknown.

It's possible to reduce the amount of electricity/gas consumed by any shredder by reducing the amount of stuff needing chipping. You could, of course, achieve this by letting your yard go to the dogs and never pruning, raking, or tidying. But there are less drastic steps. Unchopped deciduous leaves make an excellent mulch for ornamental beds year-round and for vegetables during the winter. A machete is handy for chopping smaller, non-woody items; pile the stuff atop a tarp and hack away until everything is smaller or your blisters get bad. Then mound it all into a four-by-four compost pile, add water, and turn it over weekly for a month. Larger pieces of burnable wood can be set aside to cure for a woodstove, if you or a friend use one to heat your home (I know very little about life in North Carolina, in case that isn't already obvious).

What else ... sculpture? Woven fencing? Bean teepees? I welcome suggestions.

Mulchily,
Umbra

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In a bit of good news for the environment, work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York's Upper Hudson River.

But there's also some bad news -- which is that the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas.

"This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another," said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club's Lone Star chapter. "We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses."

The company that operates the landfill also recently won approval to dump radioactive waste there, intensifying the controversy surrounding the facility.

The $750 million Hudson River dredging project aims to scrape up almost 250,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, chemicals once used in electrical equipment that are known to build up in the body and cause cancer, damage the immune system and lead to reproductive disorders. The cleanup is being overseen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The start of Hudson River dredging is a symbol of victory for the environment and for its river communities," said acting EPA Regional Administrator George Pavlou. "Dredging will help restore the health of the river, and will one day allow people to eat fish that are caught between Fort Edward and Albany. This is an historic day for an historic river."

The sediment scraped up from the bottom of the Hudson will be carried by barge to a facility in Fort Edward, N.Y., where the water will be removed and treated. The contaminated soil will then be loaded onto a train and shipped some 2,000 miles to the Waste Control Specialists (WCS) landfill in Andrews County, along the Texas border with New Mexico.

While WCS officials have insisted that the landfill does not sit atop the Ogallala Aquifer, an investigation by TV news station KCBD confirmed that it actually does. Also known as the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala is one of the largest aquifers in the world, underlying about 174,000 square miles of land in eight states. It provides drinking water for many communities in West Texas, including the city of Lubbock.

The placement of the WCS dump on the Andrews County site has proven controversial. In fact, Glen Lewis -- a longtime official with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality who was involved in the investigation for the WCS facility -- was one of at least three TCEQ employees who quit their jobs after the agency granted the company permits to dump low-level radioactive waste there earlier this year, KCBD reports:

"All of our time has been wasted. We've all been played for suckers, we've all been pointless impediments to a process that resulted in issuing this license from the first day," Lewis explains.

Low-level radioactive waste is everything radioactive in a nuclear power plant except for the highly radioactive fuel. It includes pipes that carry radioactive water and even the entire reactor itself when it's dismantled, and contains the same radioactive elements present in high-level waste but at lower concentrations. The WCS facility is also licensed to take highly radioactive waste from weapons facilities, according to Sierra's Lone Star chapter.

Lewis found that that runoff from the dump drains into two groundwater sources, including the Ogallala. While WCS claims that hundreds of feet of red clay as well as man-made barriers sit between the dump and the water, Lewis maintains that the groundwater may in fact be as close as 14 feet from the bottom of the proposed dump. And as we reported recently in another story about landfills, the EPA has acknowledged that man-made barriers eventually fail.

Adding to the controversy over the dump, WCS will be using public money for its construction. This month the voters of Andrews County approved a $75 million bond to finance the dump. The bond issue passed by a mere three votes, with 642 people in favor of the project and 639 against it, a margin confirmed last week in a recount. The special election was paid for by WCS.

Among the groups opposing the deal was No Bonds for Billionaires, which points out that WCS is a subsidiary of Valhi Inc., a diversified Dallas-based company owned by billionaire businessman Harold Simmons. The grassroots group's website says:

...Simmons can’t find any investors. So, instead of reaching into his own pocket to finance his project, he wants to reach into yours for the $75 million he needs. This amount averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household.

That averages out to about $16,000 per Andrews County household -- slightly more than the county's per capita income of $15,916, according to the most recent census data. More than 46% of Andrews County's population is Latino, and more than 15% of its residents live in poverty.

In a 2006 interview with the Dallas Business Journal, Simmons discussed the hurdles he had to surmount to get the radioactive waste dump deal:

It took us six years to get legislation on this passed in Austin, but now we've got it all passed. We first had to change the law to where a private company can own a license (to handle radioactive waste), and we did that. Then we got another law passed that said they can only issue one license. Of course, we were the only ones that applied.

Speaking earlier this year at a press conference in Andrews County organized by environmental groups, Nuclear Information and Resource Service chemist Diane D'Arrigo warned of the dump's long-term risks to the community.

"Texas' waste dump in Andrews County calls for a private company to manage a low-level dump, but the company would only be licensed to operate it for 15 years," she said. "They could then renew their license or decide to close the dump and walk away, leaving a toxic mess to the state of Texas. This could also happen if the company just folds up and vanishes into the night."

And Valhi has been having its share of financial troubles lately. Earlier this year, for example, Standard & Poor's lowered its corporate credit ratings on the company from a B to a B- and placed the ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications.

Valhi recently reported a net loss of $20 million for the first quarter of 2009 along with a drop in sales for its waste management division. But it pointed to the approval of the radioactive waste dump in Andrews County as one way it hopes to cut the division's operating losses.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.)

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Capturing the massive social benefits of fuel efficiency requires regulation

Some of the more than 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash that spilled from an impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee last December is making its way to landfills in poor and black communities in Alabama and Georgia, as we reported last week at Facing South.

It turns out that TVA also looked into sending the waste to Pennsylvania for dumping into abandoned mines -- but that state's Department of Environmental Protection rejected the ash as substandard.

"This ash material was accidentally released from a disposal impoundment and mixed with unknown materials in the river water and bottom sediment," Pennsylvania DEP Secretary John Hanger announced last week. "DEP only certifies coal ash for mine reclamation in Pennsylvania that is not contaminated with other materials and can meet our stringent chemical requirements."

But experts say that Pennsylvania's toxicity standards for coal ash used in such projects are not particularly high -- at least not high enough to keep the ash from damaging water quality in the vicinity of the dump sites.

"PADEP is hurling boulders through their glass house with their public rejection of TVA ash as too contaminated for mine disposal," Earthjustice attorney Lisa Evans told Facing South.

Evans is one of the authors of a 2007 report that found widespread contamination of groundwater and surface water across Pennsylvania due to dumping of coal ash waste into abandoned mines as part of its land reclamation program. The report by the Clean Air Task Force found degraded water quality at two-thirds of the sites examined, with levels of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, nickel, zinc and other pollutants found to exceed drinking-water and other water-quality standards.

A Pennsylvania newspaper reports that the material was apparently being considered as fill for an amphitheater construction project underway on abandoned mine lands in Hazleton, a predominantly white community in the northeastern part of the state that gained fame in recent years for its controversial efforts to drive out illegal immigrants.

The Hazleton Standard-Speaker quoted a TVA spokesperson as saying the federal company decided on its own against sending the ash to Pennsylvania because the site where it was to be used lacked a liner to prevent the material from contaminating groundwater. Abandoned mines where coal ash waste is being dumped across Pennsylvania typically lack liners -- one of the reasons why CATF's report found such widespread water contamination.

Instead, TVA is sending the spilled coal ash waste from Tennessee to landfills in in Taylor County, Ga. and Perry County, Ala. The choice of these communities for disposal of the waste raises environmental justice concerns, since almost 41% of Taylor County's population is African-American and more than 24% of its residents live in poverty, while Alabama's Perry County is 69% African-American with more than 32% of its population in poverty, according to the latest census data. Residents had no voice in the decision-making process, given that there was no opportunity for public comment.

The landfill officials have pointed out that their facilities have synthetic liners and systems to collect and treat the liquid runoff known as leachate in order to help prevent groundwater contamination. But even lined landfills with leachate collection systems provide no guarantee that the materials dumped into them won't eventually impact groundwater.

In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency -- which is now overseeing cleanup of the TVA spill -- has acknowledged that all landfills eventually leak. The Environmental Research Foundation points to a Federal Register notice from EPA that states:

There is good theoretical and empircal evidence that the hazardous constituents that areplaced in land disposal facilities very likely will migrate from the facility into the broader environment. This may occur several years, even many decades, after placement of waste in the facility, but data and scientific prediction indicate that, in most cases, even with the applicaiton of best available land disposal technology, it will occur eventually.

Unlike many constituents of ordinary household garbage, the toxic elements in coal ash waste -- arsenic, lead and the like -- do not break down over time. That means that once the landfill liner deteriorates and springs a leak, those chemicals will be present to leach into the groundwater.

In addition, the leachate collection systems used in landfills are far from foolproof, ERF notes. For one thing, the systems have a tendency to clog up and/or corrode after a few decades. And as the fluid builds up and puts pressure on the bottom of the structure, it increases the likelihood of liner failure.

There's no doubt that TVA needs to clean up the spilled ash. The results of independent tests conducted on samples collected downstream from the spill that were released today found dangerous levels of toxic elements present in the water, sediment and fish, with some water samples showing arsenic levels 260 times and lead 16 times drinking water standards. The scientists also found fish with lesions and lost scales, which could be attributed to contaminated water.

But TVA's choice for disposing of the ash is not without its problems, either. Despite assurances by the company and government regulators that their plan is safe, the ash waste presents a very real risk to the communities where it's being sent for long-term storage.

At the very least, the authorities should acknowledge that fact.

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