Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (26 page)

Keller pinned his legal defense on nine scientific experts on ocean plastic pollution, marine plastic ingestion, life cycles of plastic bags and the plastic bag industry. According to Keller, their reports showed that, if anything, ChicoBag’s page of facts about plastic bags had only underestimated the true potential for environmental harm and costs.

Before a trial could settle the issues, and before even the deposition stage of the lawsuit, in which Keller and the plastic bag executives would have to submit to hours of questioning, Hilex Poly decided to settle. The other two companies had already dropped out of the case.

The settlement imposed conditions on both sides. Keller agreed to revise his facts page in order to attribute statistics to current reports and data rather than any archived or outdated reports. He also agreed to use the newer plastic bag recycling figures that combine bags with wraps and film, as well as reporting that the last recycling figure reported strictly for plastic bags was 1 percent. Hilex Poly likewise agreed to stick with the most current and clearly sourced statistics, and to make clear the nature of the mixed statistic on bags, wraps and films. The company also agreed to put the statement “Tie Bag in Knot Before Disposal” on its bags, and to discuss on its website how this simple precaution when throwing away plastic bags can prevent windblown litter.

ChicoBag’s insurer agreed to make a cash payment to Hilex Poly, the amount of which was kept secret under the terms of the settlement.

Both sides claimed victory. Hilex Poly’s press release on the settlement was muted and factual, emphasizing that the settlement would ensure a fair and open debate on plastic bags in the future, calling it “a win for consumers.” Its wording carefully stopped short of stating that the allegation of false statements by ChicoBag had been proved; instead, a vice president of the company was quoted as saying, “The use of false and misleading statements is injurious to the marketplace, and this settlement ensures that facts are accurate.”
¹⁴
But a press release from the other two plastic bag companies, Superbag and Advance Polybag, companies that dropped out of the case before it settled, bordered on the bizarre. Among other things, it accused ChicoBag of creating “an imitation EPA website to share false information,” something that was never alleged in the suit, much less admitted or proven.
¹⁵
This, according to Keller, was the very definition of false and misleading statements.

His own press release portrayed the lawsuit as “frivolous” and the settlement as a big win for his company and the environment, particularly the bag maker’s agreement to depart from its historical stance that “Bags don’t litter, people do.” Instead, Hilex Poly acknowledged that bags can become windblown litter even when properly disposed of. Telling consumers to tie their bags in knots was a huge shift and concession, Keller says, as was Hilex Poly’s agreement not to mislead the public with combined statistics that could make plastic bag recycling rates look better than they really are.

“What started as a bullying tactic,” his press release said, “has morphed into two wins for the environment.”

W
HETHER THEY
are the crinkly white sacks at the local supermarket, the clear sandwich bags in kids’ lunch bags, the flimsy baglets that protect newspapers even on sunny days or the bags for the carrots and celery in the produce aisle, plastic bags are ubiquitous. Frozen ravioli, cotton balls, socks, potatoes, jelly beans, pinto beans—you could fill a book with the items that come to us encased in plastic bags. The average American touches plastic bags multiple times a day, hundreds of bags a year, many thousands in a lifetime. Even when, as their makers argue, disposable bags serve a second purpose at home—as a trash bag or a pooper-scooper or to wrap a school project in on a wet day—most still end up in a landfill. Others find their way into storm drains, rivers, oceans. They are mostly not recycled despite decades of efforts. Even their biodegradable counterparts rarely make it to a facility that can actually recycle them.
¹⁶
Their environmental footprint and cost are greater than the simple expedient of a reusable bag. They are, as Andy Keller is quick to point out, a product with a useful life measured in hours and a waste life measured in centuries.

That said, plastic bags are a comparatively modest part of the waste stream. They are part of the marine pollution problem, but how much remains unclear. They take up room at landfills, but other packaging forms a bigger part of the 102-ton legacy. Why, then, are so many cities making bags a priority? Why is Andy Keller so passionate about it that he would put his company and livelihood at risk rather than abandon his efforts to undermine single-use plastic bags and persuade others to give them up for good?

Because, Keller says, as a symbol, few parts of our waste stream and our disposable plastic economy are more potent and visible in our daily lives. And few parts of the 102-ton legacy are easier for an ordinary person to change.

Keller believes that the single-use plastic bag habit—his bag monster—“is the poster child for unnecessary waste.” Breaking the habit of being a bag monster, he says, is the first step in moving our homes, our families and our communities into less wasteful, more reusable habits and consumer behavior. First get rid of the bags, then move on to other disposables that we don’t really need. At ChicoBag, he ditched paper towels next. Each employee was given a cloth towel with a hook to hang it on. It gets washed as often as necessary.

Keller next bought everybody a thermal container for drinks and a reusable clamshell for salads and sandwiches for casual meals and takeout at restaurants that usually serve on plastic, paper, foam or other single-use diningware. Restaurants that were willing to serve the zero-waste way got ChicoBag employees’ business. Others that refused lost those customers, though the ChicoBag workers made it clear they’d happily return if the management reconsidered its position. When it dawned on restaurant owners that they were losing paying customers for no better reason than habit and old thinking, that it was no harder to serve food without wasting paper and plastic—and, in fact, it saved packaging costs—several changed their minds.

These kinds of incremental changes add up, Keller says, altering the dynamic of the consumer culture, because each one gets easier than the last. According to the ChicoBag founder, the way to start that particular snowball rolling is with the plastic bag. It’s harder to accomplish without the obvious, clear benefit of the Irish-style bag tax—the plastic industry has for the most part fought off that sort of clear-cut incentive in America, dulling the message that consumers can simply skip the bag and save money. The industry also has a strong counter-message: Banning bags will cost jobs, fees will hurt the economy and consumer spending, and they’ll spawn a new government bureaucracy. Just using the word “tax” is a potent weapon. Never mind that we’re already paying an invisible bag tax, Keller says, because they’re not really free—consumers pay for them in the form of higher food prices at the market, about $30 a year per person. It’s not as if retailers are going to pay $4 billion a year for bags and not pass on the cost to customers. The lost jobs and economic harm arguments were raised decades ago by the paper industry in hopes of staving off competition from plastic. Then, as now, it was an instance of an entrenched but aging business model—paper—losing its revenues to the upstart—plastic. The paper bag companies complained of lost jobs, but what they were really fighting was the
shift
of jobs (and profits) to the plastic newcomers. One person’s job killer is another’s progress. Now plastic bag makers are marshaling the same old arguments, this time fighting a shift from the disposable economy to a reusable one. They have even become champions of recycling, which they initially resisted, because it’s a way to keep consumption rates high for disposable things. “The myth of recycling,” says Keller, “is that it’s okay to consume all we want as long as it has that little recycling symbol on it. But that’s completely false, and just perpetuates our wasteful, disposable ways.”

Keller talks about plastic bags and the disposable economy in terms of addiction. For him, the cure starts with the bag, because it has to start somewhere.

“Bags are kind of like the gateway drug to all the plastics,” Keller says, “and if we can kick that habit, all the rest of our single-use habits will start to fall like dominoes.”

PLASTIC BAG RESTRICTIONS, U.S JURISDICTIONS, BY YEAR OF ADOPTION

All entries are plastic bag bans unless bag fee is noted.

*
indicates bag ban approved but not yet effective or enjoined by lawsuit

11

GREEN CITIES AND GARBAGE DEATH RAYS

T
HERE’S ONE CITY IN
A
MERICA THAT CONSISTENTLY
rates at or near the top of every list and survey of sustainability, green buildings, recycling rates, clean transportation, energy efficiency and eco businesses. This city pioneered smart growth policies back in the 1970s and kept them in place through the deregulation fervor of the 1980s. This required considerable upstream swimming. The Reaganesque mantra at the time held sway elsewhere:
Government’s the problem, not the solution
. In most communities, that had been an era of unprecedented private exploitation of public lands, of endless strip mall construction, and of widespread hostility to the environmental protections set in place a decade earlier.

But as a result of its contrarian leaders and citizenry, this city ended up with ample green space, the largest wilderness park within city limits in America, walkable neighborhoods and a rich web of local farms that supply a famously locavore restaurant and farmers’ market scene. Yet it still has an urban core sufficiently prosperous that financial analysts have called it the “comeback city” for its job growth even during the recession.

This same city is so obsessed with green and zero-emissions transportation that some businesses offer more parking for bikes than cars, bicycle lanes are everywhere, many city intersections have green zones that allow bikes to cut in front of car traffic, and it’s a major destination for the increasingly popular “car-free vacation.” Fitness clubs use exercise bicycles and their own members to generate green power. The city’s public transit doesn’t stop with trolleys, trains and buses but also includes an aerial tramway that looks like it was beamed in from an Alpine chalet—a cable car that brings commuters up from the new south waterfront downtown development to a hilltop university campus and medical center, the city’s largest employer. It carried a million passengers by its tenth month in service, in a town with fewer than six hundred thousand residents. This city even adopted a climate change plan in 1993, five years before the famous Kyoto Protocols, and was the first (and only) American city to meet the Kyoto goals years ahead of schedule by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels beginning in 2008. It did this despite growing at a faster rate than most other cities.

In fact, Portland, Oregon, does so many green things right that its greener-than-thou sensibilities have spawned a sardonic cable TV show,
Portlandia
, which features such gems as a mayor who bicycles directly into his office at City Hall and dismounts onto a giant inflated ball that doubles as his desk chair. Of course, the real mayor, Sam Adams, who appears on the TV show as the fictional mayor’s aide, isn’t so different. Out in the real world, he has sung on the radio, “Bring your bag, bring your bag, bring your bag, bag, bag …” to the tune of the
William Tell Overture
—as a reminder to Portlanders to bring their reusable shopping bags to the grocery store.

There’s just one area where sustainable Portland lags, the big challenge any community with green aspirations must wrestle and beat: trash.

They make a lot of it in Portland. A shade more trash even than the average American’s 7.1 pounds a day, and a half pound more than the average Oregonian. The last time per capita waste statistics were released, residents of the Greater Portland Metropolitan Area—just “Metro,” as it’s referred to locally—generated more than 1.3 tons of trash a year. That’s 7.14 pounds a day per Portlander.

They do a good job of diverting much of that trash from the landfill—with about 59 percent recycled, composted or burned for energy in 2010 (that’s for the entire three-county, 2.3-million-person Metro area; within the city limits, the 586,000 urban residents of Portland do even better, hitting 67 percent). That’s still behind San Francisco’s official 77 percent rate, but well ahead of the national average of 24 percent. Yet even with all that landfill diversion, Metro Portland still sends sixty massive trucks every day laden with garbage to the Columbia Ridge Landfill in Arlington, on the border with Washington. That’s a truck of trash every twenty-four minutes, setting out on a 360-mile round-trip to the landfill and back. For a town so proud of its fleet of LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) sustainable buildings, and with a Port of Portland headquarters that is also a living water and waste treatment plant—a kind of man-made wetlands inside an office building—the trash issue is a painful shortcoming. Diesel trucks hauling garbage long distances, then depositing the trash in landfills—a major source of greenhouse gases—is a model Portland leaders want to change, which is why they began debating in 2011 what the future of trash would look like in 2020, the year current contracts for waste hauling and disposal lapse.

Future Portland may feature ramped-up composting plants, or generate electricity through anaerobic digesters—vats that speed up the decomposition of garbage, then use the resulting methane to make electricity or vehicle fuel. The trash futurists are also anticipating greater recycling rates and reductions in disposable plastic and paper consumption, perhaps by pushing for product stewardship rules under which manufacturers would have to take responsibility for the waste their products leave behind. This is a nascent movement at present, but some companies—Patagonia, the clothing and outdoor equipment maker, has been a leader in this—tell customers to send their purchases back for reuse or recycling when they are done with them, no questions asked. The question is, can a community encourage such a business model? Mandate it? If anyone would be willing to give it a go, it’s Portland.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the waste-management spectrum, a test facility is coming online at Portland’s primary landfill destination in Arlington to study the effectiveness of the experimental waste-treatment process known as plasma gasification—a technology that vaporizes garbage with arcs of electrical energy that heat matter inside their beam to 25,000 degrees. This is not burning trash. Indeed, the process takes place in the absence of oxygen, and so many of the normal, noxious byproducts of combustion are not produced. The process yields a synthetic gaseous fuel and a lump of shiny rock, not unlike volcanic glass, with toxins locked up inside in relative safety. This garbage death ray reduces trash volume by 99 percent, not even leaving ash behind. Just a hunk of obsidian, about twenty pounds’ worth for every ton of trash disintegrated.

Scaled up, if such a technology proves cost-effective, it could make big landfills obsolete. But it is the longest of long shots, and not just because the technology at the moment is prohibitively expensive. Getting energy from trash remains exceedingly unpopular among American environmentalists. It has a long and dirty history, marked by the heated sorts of battles that upended California’s big plans for a landfill-free future in the 1980s. New York City remains scarred by similar battles. Although the technology and its pollution controls have advanced since then, old objections and distrust remain. The Sierra Club, among other groups, adamantly opposes attempts to ramp up trash-to-energy projects, and that carries weight, especially in Portland.

There is also the question of reducing waste that none of these end-game strategies address—all the burning, landfilling, recycling and composting does is redirect our 102-ton legacy. How does a town like Portland stop making so much garbage in the first place? Like so many communities across America, Portland is not yet sure what magic mix of technology, technique, inducements, prohibitions and exhortations to consumers to change their behavior should be attempted in the hope of actually reducing the 102 tons we are destined to leave behind, rather than merely shuffling it to some other form of treatment. But uncertainty or not, the deadline to decide is approaching.

“We will have the next evolution in waste in place before 2020,” says Matt Korot, Metro’s director of resource conservation and recycling. “We know we can’t wait until the last minute. We’re just not sure yet what that’s going to look like.”

N
OW CONSIDER
another city. It, too, is routinely listed as one of the greenest cities on the planet, and also one of the most livable. Its parks are legendary, rich with history and plentiful, and they’re being aggressively expanded so that, by 2015, every resident will be within a fifteen-minute walk of park or beach. A world-beating 40 percent of workers commute each day by bicycle, from bankers in business suits to factory workers in hard hats. Workplace culture puts the CEO and the mailroom clerk and everyone in between on a first-name basis, allowing bonds and unity within companies that can be tough to match elsewhere in the world. This city’s central river and canals, once polluted, are now safe for swimming, a feat that earned a prestigious international environmental award in 2000. It is also the organic food capital of the world—45 percent of food purchased there is natural and chemical free. It is closing in on a goal of 90 percent organic food served in school cafeterias and retirement homes.

This city has led its entire country from foreign oil dependence to energy independence over the past three decades. It is on course to use zero fossil fuels by 2050. Since 1980, it has reduced energy consumption (and global warming emissions, though that was not the initial goal) while doubling its economy and offering a standard of living, health care (free to all), education (ditto) and amenities that match or exceed the best the U.S. has to offer. Taxes and energy costs are higher than in even the most expensive U.S. city. Yet polls of residents show a majority feels these burdens are more than offset by the absence of medical, insurance and tuition bills; by a more conservation-conscious culture when it comes to purchases, energy and fuel; and by the far lower incidence of crime, hunger and poverty than U.S. citizens experience. That’s worth some extra taxes, Peter Bach, a civil engineer for the national energy department, told the
Wall Street Journal
, echoing the sentiments of a majority of his countrymen. The
Journal
found itself writing admiringly
¹
about this country’s energy independence and conservation-embedded lifestyle, despite the fact that its success at achieving what has eluded America essentially defies every principle Wall Street holds dear. “You can’t just sit back and wait for markets to do this for you,” Bach told the financial newspaper.

On the garbage front, this city is so far ahead of its American counterparts that it’s like comparing laser surgery to leech craft. This city recycles trash at twice the U.S. average, its residents create less than half the household waste per capita, and the community philosophy holds that dealing with and solving the problem of trash must be a local concern, even a neighborhood concern. When it comes to waste, NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) is not a factor, as shipping trash off to some distant landfill—making it disappear for others to manage—is considered wasteful, costly and immoral. Not that such out-of-sight, out-of-mind garbage treatment is much of a consideration here: only 3 to 4 percent of this city’s waste ends up in landfills, compared to the U.S. average of 69 percent.

This is not some Shangri-la of past or future. It is the Copenhagen, Denmark, of today. And the secret sauce for that city and the entire nation of Denmark, at least on the waste disposal front, is its mastery of turning trash into a renewable energy source.

“They are the model, along with Japan and a number of other countries in Europe,” says Nickolas Themelis of Columbia University, America’s engineer-apostle of the untapped power of garbage. “They put these waste-to-energy plants right in their neighborhoods. They become part of the fabric of the community. There’s none of the fear and misinformation about waste energy that we have in the U.S. They are clean and efficient, and many of them are quite attractive. The people are
proud
of them.”

Denmark’s strategy has been to build trash-burning, power-generating plants on a relatively small scale. No behemoths burning 2,000, 5,000 or 10,000 tons of garbage a day, such as those proposed for Los Angeles in the seventies and eighties, only to be shot down by concerns over pollution and neighborhood impact. Instead, the Danes built a network of community-based plants that average in the 400- to 500-ton-a-day range throughout their small nation of 5.5 million inhabitants. The largest handles about 1,000 tons a day—the Amagerforbrænding plant on the outskirts of Copenhagen, dating back to the 1970s (and upgraded many times since, primarily with added layers of emission controls). Urban neighborhoods, suburban enclaves, upscale areas and working-class housing all are served by these plants. Keeping them local eliminates the cost and the emissions of having to haul trash long distances across the city or countryside, as often occurs in the U.S., where trash travels millions of miles every year just to get from municipal transfer stations (like The Pit in San Francisco) to landfills. Another benefit of the local Danish plants: They not only generate electricity in place of coal-fired power, they also pump heat through a vast network of underground pipes to keep houses and businesses warm, thereby doubling the efficiency of the plants while taking the place of less efficient home furnaces. Some American city centers use this type of heating, often called cogeneration or “district heating”—New York and Denver among them, where the systems date back to the 1880s—as do a number of large university campuses (notably the University of New Hampshire uses landfill gas to make all of its heat and energy). But Denmark has expanded the concept to the point where more than six out of ten Danish homes are heated this way. The system is credited for half of Denmark’s energy savings in the past quarter century. The larger of these waste-to-energy plants can generate up to 25 megawatts of electricity (enough for fifty thousand households) and district heating for 120,000 or more homes.
²