A Green Errand Gone Bad
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 12.14.07
While on my morning errand, I happened to catch a BBC radio interview with a fellow described as a "Climate Campaigner." When asked by the interviewer if doing small things like changing the light bulbs or recycling really do any good for the climate, no was was the essence of his very serious sounding answer.
The Campaigner, who had been granted his proverbial ten minutes of fame, went on to explain that among the several 'big things' we need to do to seriously mitigate our climate-banging habits, one of the top ones was to stop putting food waste into the landfill - actually some call it a "tip;" but, that's the same thing.
This no food-dumping change of habit was important, the Campaigner explained, 'because in the landfill, organic food waste generates methane' (pronounced with a long "e").
And the advice went unchallenged by the BBC interviewer. Or, at least the rest of the conversation, as they say in the business, ended up "on the cutting room floor". It seems this food waste management thinking is fairly common in the UK, per this link.
Wow.
Prospectively, millions of listeners are left to wonder if it's better to use a garbage disposal and flush food waste away?
The answer is, it depends on how good your poop works is designed and managed (if you live in a place that even has municipal wastewater treatment) and whether the river or lake receiving the wastewater effluent has enough assimilative capacity to avoid going anoxic, in which case it could most certainly liberate plenty of methane to the atmosphere.
Compost heaps and wet soils can host the same anaerobic bacteria which generate methane in a landfill, though perhaps not with the same intensity and thoroughness as a landfill or fetid pond would. While the Campaigner's advice might pump up sales of kitchen composters or line up more folks for a municipal composting service - and those would be fine for overall resource efficiency reasons - a question the interviewer might have asked for the international audience is: "Isn't a landfill little more than a giant compost heap?"
The answer is a conditional "Yes", depending, again, on how it is designed and managed!
The second follow up question the interviewer might have asked is this:- "Isn't it better to send food waste to the tip or to a community compost facility, and professionally capture the methane to generate electricity?"
We'll let our readers answer this one.
Take home points from the my "green errand".
I'll need to buy my cold cathode CFL's online, as the stores in my area do not yet stock them. Seems I wasted the gas or "petrol" on this errand.
Blogs have evolved an easy means for readers to hold interviewed "campaigners" of any sort accountable for mis-statements, inaccuracies, or flawed logic. And writers, too, for failing to ask critical questions that add cultural or technical context.
The world's broadcast and print media still are left unaccountable for such, or are challenged so belatedly by "letters to the editor" or call in complaints that the audience has moved on, propagating new species of green urban legends.
Note to self: if interviewed for radio, state the preferred green lifestyle choice, give technical justifications, and emphasize prospective exceptions to the rule.
The more volatile and unfamiliar the issue is (climate mitigation/adaptation for example) and the more the topic has moved out of the realm of scientific expertise and into broadcast media confabulation and popular culture, the greater the likelihood that we'll need to turn up our green bovine excrement detectors. Just to avoid the meeeeethane.
Image credit::Boston Menu Pages, Food Recycling Services
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Mario Molina Calls for Climate Action from Developing Countries in Interview
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I heard the same interview and I have rarely been so pissed off. There are certainly things that make a larger impact than others, but it all counts. You can't tell me that the can I recycle that is made into a new can is insignificant when it bypasses the mining and smelting process to produce raw aluminum (this fellow would have said "alluminium"). I can certainly understand making a list of priorities but he called most of the conservation efforts the interviewer mentioned "Virtually insignificant" as far as climate change was concerned (probably not an exact quote, though I would like to find a copy of the interview somewhere). I couldn't believe his attitude. If my goal is to save money (carbon emissions) I'm not going to throw out a $1 bill just because it isn't a $50 bill. I think I'm off to write the BBC.
Excuse me - what's your point? (Apart from your really deep and meaningful observations on pronunciation?)
The point is that people such as myself (and hopefully you) who consider themselves environmentalists do not want someone on an international news program telling people that they shouldn't bother with conservation unless they can make big changes to their lifestyle. I think its great that this fellow was encouraging composting, but he should not have been dismissing recycling as an insignificant contribution to conservation.
The pronunciation issue was just for fun. I used to live in Ireland and I got used to my aluminium cans with no blue coloured recycling bins to put them in.
The point is that people such as myself (and hopefully you) who consider themselves environmentalists do not want someone on an international news program telling people that they shouldn't bother with conservation unless they can make big changes to their lifestyle. I think its great that this fellow was encouraging composting, but he should not have been dismissing recycling as an insignificant contribution to conservation.
The pronunciation issue was just for fun. I used to live in Ireland and I got used to my aluminium cans with no blue coloured recycling bins to put them in.
Agreed, Nick. I don't even understand what this Climate Campaigner guy was trying to say.
Pat - don't be so sure that recycling that aluminum can is such a good dead. While it is slightly better than keeping it out of the landfill, aluminum is rarely made back into new cans, because when it is recycled it takes many other materials that aren't aluminum into the processing machines with it. This means that the product is an aluminum/plastic/other metals/ whatever you put in your recycling bin mix, and that the final product from a recycling plant is of lower quality than "freshly mined" aluminum. I'm not saying that you shouldn't recycle, but just don't think that it's the end-all be-all of environmental activities.
A far better way of reducing waste would be, ahem, composting, because it takes little energy to do (compared to recycling or filling a landfill)), helps nourish nature, and improves the quality of the soil which increases the amount of carbon the soil can absorb.
What's the deal with ridiculing correct pronunciation here? Sounds to me like you're no better than Mr Campaigner. After all, you're ignoring the relevant issue and pointing out crap.
Mr Campaigner is obviously wrong about small things not being significant. But he is right about wasting food.
And no, a landfill is NOT a big "compost heap". A landfill happens to be filled with all kinds of waste, including all sorts of lovely toxic goodies. But by all means, go ahead and put some toxic "compost" on your veggies. And do make sure to cook 10 times the amount you need, so you can send the rest back to that giant compost heap.
Again, I have to say: what's the deal here?
But sure, it would be good to send food waste to some sort of processing facility where it's turned into compost and/or greenish power. Sure. But it's still EVEN BETTER to avoid food waste as much as you can.
And for the last time: what's the deal here? Are you high on something? Methane perhaps? Do you have a problem with English speakers? Well, I'm offended. So I suggest you take your aloominum can and shove it. Learn some tolerance.
==== authors' response follows ====
I regret that you have taken offense at me having a little fun with European cultural imperialism and someone pretentiously giving the whole world bad advice.
This post was written in response to my own offense, taken at BBC shoveling poorly researched recommendations at a global audience that has no direct recourse Unlike with BBC, readers of this post can express dismay directly, and immediately, as you were able to in your comment. And I can apologize for offending you. That's the deal.
Perhaps my simile was not well drawn. As I wrote, I had made a green blunder myself, which, at the end of my small errand, only I knew of, and the impacts of which were only X 1.
That is quite a different matter than some person telling the whole world over BBC how best to behave, and implying that small individual efforts are trivial or of no help, where prospective impacts are X millions of people.
And I did mean it when I said "cultural imperialism." In the US, people rely extensively on landfills that are required, by USEPA, to contain and collect methane Landfill owners increasingly put that methane to economic use, preventing atmospheric release. In Europe, however, land is at a premium and, thus, incineration came to be more common for solid waste management. Incineration requires huge natural gas inputs. Explain to me why that is superior from a climate mitigation perspective will you?
Further, wastewater treatment standards in the US are among the most stringent in the world since the mid-1970's. Although much of the wastewater infrastructure in the US now needs updating, the habit of send food waste down the drain has been much less problematic for the US than elsehwere because of the history of reliable wastewater treatment. This has not been the case through much of Europe and is certainly not the case in the developing world.
To summarize: European municipal wastewater treatment capabilities generally lower than in the US, and European landfill capacities less; hence, the importance of composting is greater in Europe. I am not saying which system better, just saying they are fundamentally different.
I understand why Campaigner said what he did, but do not think the fit was good for a global audience. Moreover, belittling the little things people do, as you point out, is not constructive. The end result was to offend.
The problem is the concentration of pollutants. Methane produced in larger sums is much harder to absorb than the same amount produced in different sections of a country. It's the same reason air quality differs greatly from one city to the next, depending how many cars are guzzling around.
I would like to add a couple of points to the conversation:
1. I believe all individual actions count - changing CFL bulbs, recycle, composting, and many others.
2. I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning. The main topic was on paper vs. plastic bags. While plastic bags are obviously bad, using paper bags isn't all that environmentally friendly either. Contrary to the belief that paper bags decompose in the landfill, the news story mentioned that generally landfill as a composter was very inefficient. In fact, you can easily find intact carrot tops and avocado peel from 1970 in a landfill.
3. Current U.S. water treatment gets the toxic elements out of the water before discharging into rivers and oceans. But it does NO purge nutrients. The nutrients get discharged into the ocean and wreak serious havoc - causing the rapid growth of toxic algae and bacteria, which poison the marine lives. So no, flushing food down the disposal is not a better alternative. Please check out:
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-oceans-series,0,7842752.special
Very long and heart breaking, but most definitely worth the read.
best regards,
Cindy
Dear Author - You you say you understand why Campaigner said what he did, but "do not think the fit was good for a global audience." OK, but please remember that Treehugger is as global in its outreach as the BBC, and you have a similar duty of care.
The other day I heard a speaker on NPR who was incapable of differentiating "feudal/futile", or "inner-city/inter-city". As a US citizen resident in the UK, who is probably sensitized to such odd American homophones, I noted them, processed them accordingly, and then concentrated on the speaker's argument - not his pronunciation.
Please don't tease people's pronunciation in future. It just makes Treehugger look parochial.
Not all garden waste is coverted into methane. Methanogenic bacteria are one set of decomposers, but not the only one. Plus, its kind of one of the most essential elements of the global carbon cycle, and isn't gonna stop. Considering the tons and tons of natural biowaste that decompose daily all over the world, a familiy's garden trimmings aren't much. I can't imagine they're NOT mitigated by just ONE flourescent bulb!
That bieng said, as we all eat tons and tons of processed food every day. Food processors have a strong incentive to to use methanogenic digestors to capture methane from their wastes for recycling, which will delay greenhouse gas release for the duration of the methane storage and forestall the burning of otherwise available fossil fuels. The also have an energy-cost incentive to deal with the cow-burping and chicken and hog waste methane problems in the same way. Of course, an adult diet lower in animal protein will accelerate this process without hurting health.
I just WISH businesses didn't to WAIT for the short-term market incentive to kick in. It's always delayed way longer than common sense allows. Witness Detroit refusing to introduce seat-belts and airbags because of the cost.
1. I think the flame-war might have been avoided if the original article had tried less obviously to make "Climate Campaigner" sound like a loon. The phrase "When asked by the interviewer if doing small things like changing the light bulbs or recycling really do any good for the climate, no was was the essence of his very serious sounding answer". Not having heard the interview, like the majority of the TH fold, I have no way of knowing if the author's opinion of what was "the essence" of the argument was justifiable or not. Also re. the phrase "among the several 'big things' we need to do to seriously mitigate our climate-banging habits, one of the top ones was to stop putting food waste into the landfill" we're left in the dark about the other big things which might have been fantastic. The article thus presents a personal reaction to the interview and, not surprisingly, a number of people have taken issue with that.
2. The landfill vs compost debate: From a GHG point of view, its all the same, see pg 109 of Organic Waste Recycling: Technology and Management By Chongrak Polprasert http://books.google.com/books?id=owycqJMjoZoC&printsec=frontcover&sig=5hfYY7WjkWSJOWrv0mZ5buY-OUE#PPR6,M1 but from a land-management and good-stuff-from-waste point of view compost is the definite path to take.
3. The author wants to make a joke, hey lets not get excited. To (mis)quote Bram, "what's the deal here?". And to quote Bram again "So I suggest you take your aloominum can and shove it. Learn some tolerance.". Anyone else see a paradox in that phrase ? A beautiful example of the tendency of some to find themselves too clever, too pure, too sensitive and thus wilfully separating themselves from the "idiots" out there, the "idiots" being deserving targets of their insults . A tendency, I note, which is just as prevalent in the environmental movement as anywhere else. I suggest we all google for "hominem te esse memento" every so often.
4. Ross : Please don't diss aluminium-can recycling without so much as a reference to back up your "While it is slightly better than keeping it out of the landfill". Have a look at http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/greenhouse_gases.pdf or http://www.recyclemetals.org/whatis.php .
5. Author : Right on for your "Note to self".
=== author's response follows ====
Thanks for this thoughtful comment. JL
Your criticism of the "campaigner" seems to be based on a view that he should not be advising people against making positive changes just because their global impact is small.
I will tell you what difference it makes for me to compost at home, rather than send my old food to the landfill, despite the methane production being roughly the same.
Having my own, homemade compost, as a keen gardener, means that I do not use a car to drive to the garden centre, buy someone else's compost, wrapped in plastic, which has been transported by motor vehicle itself. I do not empty the bag and place the non-biodegradable plastic wrapper in my dustbin to be sent to the landfill, where it will have to be sorted from the recycleable waste before other people's food waste can be composted there.
My actions may have a tiny impact globally, but I still think they are worthwhile.