Recycling, Forestry and GM crops

The recycling conundrum: How your blue bin hurts the environment

Kevin Libin, National Post Published: Friday, December 04, 2009

The City of Calgary introduced its blue box, curbside recycling program this year, and there was rejoicing. Calgary, the last major Canadian city to offer it, had, until recently, asked citizens to deliver their own recyclables to green bins located every few blocks, or to hire, at $10 a month, a private pickup service. To those concerned about environmental appearances, it was embarrassing.

“It means something to me that we’re the last large city in Canada to implement curbside recycling,” said Druh Farrell, the alderman championing the program.

Approving the $50-million plan (plus another roughly $50-million a year recycling tax on homeowners) meant that Calgary had emerged from the “stone age,” sighed a columnist with the Calgary Herald, relieved of being “the laughingstock of the country” for living in a city of eco-barbarians.

If symbolism, and the urge to feel ecologically righteous, were the objective, then the blue box program – part of the city’s ambitious goal to divert 80% of trash from landfills by 2020 – succeeded the moment it began. But if the aim is to help the environment, Calgary, ironically, may have been just as well off in the Stone Age.

Before this year, Calgary was already diverting more than 20% of city waste from landfills through private arrangements. In terms of making an environmental difference, that’s getting close to what cities should aim for, says J. Winston Porter, who, as former assistant administrator for America’s Environmental Protection Agency, was the first to establish nationwide recycling targets in the United States in the 1980s. His target then was 25%, and it’s a number he largely sticks by. Diverting 35% of waste into recycling is about as a high as any city can justify, he says.

Trying to recycle more can be wasteful, if not harmful, he says, even though many major cities are setting targets at 70% or higher.

“People say you can’t recycle too much. It turns out you can,” says Mr. Porter, president of the environmental consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center, near Washington, D.C. “If you spend enough money, you can recycle anything. That doesn’t mean you should.”

While a blue bin out front makes us feel we’re helping the planet, recycling most household materials has either minimal environmental impact, or even a negative one. Homeowners dutifully put out their glass, plastic, steel and aluminum packaging. But the only really valuable item, Mr. Porter says, is the metal. That sounds like an economic assessment, but it’s a key environmental measure: resources to make metal are at a premium, and production is energy intensive. Recycling metal pays because it saves on limited resources and energy – in other words, it’s better for the environment. The trouble is that in the typical North American city’s solid waste stream (including trash and recyclables) aluminum and steel generally account for just 2% by weight. Glass sent to recycling facilities is heavier, making up 3 to 5% of typical city waste by weight. But although it demands more energy, there isn’t much use for it.

All the glass collected this year by Calgary’s new program ended up at the East Calgary Landfill, where it is piling up for want of a buyer. “It’s a product that there just isn’t any demand for,” Bill Stitt, general manager of Metro Waste Paper Recovery Inc., the city’s recycling contractor, told a local paper. Edmonton is stockpiling, too, as are a number of other Canadian cities. The price of sand is simply too cheap, and the impracticality of reusing bottles of varying quality and colour is too big a headache to make it marketable.

Glass is a “red herring when talking about recyclables,” a Recycling Council of BC spokeswoman conceded to the CBC this year; since it doesn’t break down, there’s no effect on air or water when it’s buried in landfills. A 2003 study by Enviros Environmental Consultants UK found that “from a global warming perspective, there is limited environmental benefit to using recycled glass” but continuing with the exercise of recycling was “an important part of the UK meeting its overall glass recycling targets.” That is, so politicians could meet their set goals, even if there was no environmental point to it.

Unfortunately, recycling plastic often doesn’t make much more sense. Germany has stockpiled millions of tonnes of recyclable plastics in rural fields, like above-ground dumps. “These cheap plastic bottles, it depends on the price of oil, but the market is not worth much,” says Daniel Benjamin, an economist at South Carolina’s Clemson University who studies recycling. Though it makes up roughly 5%, by weight, of a typical North American garbage stream, applications for used, mixed plastic are limited. “We’re talking about a few dollars a tonne,” Professor Benjamin says.

San Francisco’s Department of Waste recently calculated it paid $4,000 a tonne to recycle plastic bags. Its resale price for the recycled product? $32. “Nobody wants it. There’s no value. It doesn’t make sense,” says Joseph Gho, CEO of EPI Environmental Products Inc., a Vancouver manufacturer of biodegradable plastics. “Besides the financial, the economic cost, you’ve got the environmental cost” of recycling unwanted material. “The trucks running out there, burning fuel … you have to use energy, you’ve got CO2 emissions.”

That’s why curbside recycling requires, wherever it’s implemented, millions of tax dollars to stay afloat: the inputs required are greater than the savings. Even in New York City, where area land is some of the most expensive on the continent, it costs $240 to deal with a ton of recyclables, compared to the $130 a ton of landfills, says Angela Logomasini, Director of Risk and Environmental Policy at Washington, D.C.’s Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Often the effects of aggressive residential recycling programs harm environmental goals. Citywide blue box programs typically mean a whole new fleet of trucks: Calgary now has 64 more diesel-burning rigs retracing the same tracks its garbage trucks did just a few days earlier, roughly doubling carbon dioxide emissions and other pollutants.

A 2000 study by the London-based environmental group Friends of the Earth found that collecting yard waste for recycling (ie, making mulch) emitted 264 more pounds of CO2 than burying it in a landfill. In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it. The promise of environmentalists of a “flourishing recycling market” where reused goods would find ready buyers “was already a dream 40 years ago and is, unfortunately, still a dream,” they conceded. Better, they wrote, that most materials be incinerated at waste-to-energy plants, which is easier to do, and generates electricity, offsetting the need for fossil fuels. “We believe that incineration of household waste including disposable packaging and food waste, with energy recovery, is best for the environment, economy and management of natural resources,” wrote Valfrid Paulsson, former head of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, and Sorren Norby, former president of Keep Sweden Tidy.

The approach is catching on. Britain is building 50 new waste-to-energy incinerators; Denmark’s environmental protection agency recommended in a 2002 report that the country would be best to reroute parts of its recycling program to incinerators instead. With pollutants having been cut dramatically from the process, and a smaller CO2 footprint for power than coal, converting waste-to-energy makes as much sense to Europeans as does growing grain to burn for bio-fuels.

“It’s done in Japan, in Europe, in Russia, all over the world, and we’re actually way behind on waste-to-energy in North America,” says Patrick Moore, chairman of Vancouver environmental communications firm, GreenSpirit Strategies, and a co-founder of Greenpeace. “Wherever there’s diminishing returns [on recycling], that’s where we should be converting waste to energy.”

Here in spacious North America, incineration can’t usually compete with cheap landfills. In the late-eighties, Americans panicked over landfill shortages after a media scare set off when a garbage barge, the Mobro 4000, floated for months off the U.S. east cost seeking a ready landfill. Its owners’ bad management was the real culprit, not landfill scarcity: In fact, the U.S. and Canada both have more cheap space for landfill than anyone could ever need. “The only problem is will,” says Ms. Logomasini. A study out of Washington’s Gonzaga University calculated that all the garbage produced by Americans over the next 1,000 years would fit into a landfill just 44 miles square and 100 feet deep-less than one-tenth of one-percent of American real estate.

The idea of burying garbage in the earth instinctively turns off some people, Mr. Porter admits. But, unless we adopt European levels of incineration, landfills are the final destination for pretty well everything we produce. “Landfills are always going to be with us,” Mr. Porter says. “If I leave a foam cup resting in a landfill, I don’t see why that’s a problem.”

A certain amount of recycling will always be with us, too. It has been for ages, wherever the value of useful materials – paper, aluminum, copper, etc. – created businesses eager to reprocess the products at their own cost. For cities determined to do their part, or, likelier, looking to seize the profitable part of the recycling business, Mr. Porter argues that there are easier, more environmentally friendly options than immense, mandatory blue box programs. First, cities should drop the ridiculously high targets to recycle 70, 80 or 90% of waste. And instead, have homeowners bundle their paper, cardboard and aluminum – the worthwhile stuff – into special coloured bags alongside their regular trash pickup. Those bags can then be separated at the landfill, and the rest trashed. That would eliminate all the extra trucks, energy and cost that so many cities incur so that green-posturing politicians can delude citizens into believing they’re helping the environment, when really, they could be making things worse.

Solution to forestry problem? Buy wood

‘Grow more trees, use more wood, in that order’

Kevin Libin, National Post Published: Saturday, December 05, 2009

Anti-logging activists have taken some radical steps to save forests from the chain-saw: shackling themselves to trees; blockading logging roads; “spiking” trees by driving metal stakes into trunks to break saw blades; and bombing logging trucks. Two years ago, 28 Greenpeace activists seized an ocean freighter in Quebec, blocking it from leaving for Europe laden with pulp.

But Patrick Moore, who cofounded Greenpeace and served for nine years as its Canadian president, says that anyone wanting to help the environment should do exactly the opposite: promote forestry by using as much wood as possible. “Greenpeace and the others have misled the whole world on this subject,” says Mr. Moore, chairman of Vancouver environmental communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. “Their anti-forestry campaign is an anti-environmental campaign.”

From 1990 to 2005, Canada’s forests absorbed nearly 900 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, according to the Canadian Forest Service — the equivalent of taking nearly a quarter of the world’s cars off the road. So if reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the objective, growing trees is a big part of the solution. The way to make that happen in Canada is by cutting them down, Mr. Moore says, since forestry firms, with an incentive to increase their supply and following regulations, regenerate more trees than they fell.

“We should grow more trees, and use more wood, in that order,” he says. Over the last century, despite harvesting billions worth of pulp and paper products, Canada’s forest cover has actually increased, according to OECD data. And foresters ensure that, unlike unmanaged forests, their trees don’t burn, reducing CO2 emitted by wild fires. Besides, when opponents of forestry, such as Greenpeace, dissuade consumers from using wood, they tacitly promote more harmful alternatives.

The Athena Sustainable Materials Institute, which promotes sustainable construction products, reports that manufacturing concrete takes 1.7 the energy, and steel, 2.4 times the energy, than producing the equivalent amount of wood for construction. Wood buildings account for fewer GHGs, less pollution and less waste. Groups like Greenpeace know everyone loves trees, so pretending to “save” them helps fundraising. But forests aren’t museums: all trees eventually succumb to something. If Canadians love trees, Mr. Moore says, the best way to show it is by encouraging forestry firms to continue chopping them down.

From sci-fi tech, food for the masses

Rethinking Green

Kevin Libin, National Post Published: Monday, December 07, 2009

South of Alberta’s Badlands, where rainfall averages are lower than parts of Ethiopia, Nicholas Savidov’s self-contained ecosystem has grown literally tons of fish, vegetables and fruit, for years, all with hardly adding any water.

Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he’s recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated. “Just one square metre,” of this operation, he says, “gives you more yield than in one acre of land.” The equipment pays for itself from food sales. All it requires is a little power, and fish food.

The all-in-one food-making contraption could one day feed humans in poor regions where water and potent agricultural materials are not always easy to come by.

“That’s an ideal system for a developing country,” Dr. Savidov says, pointing to a refrigerator-sized version he says might cost as little as $1,000. “[It] will produce up to 300 cucumbers a year…. A system like that can supply a family with fresh vegetables and with vitamins and also with protein” from the dozens of fish, he says.

While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.

“Intensive agricultural production is the key,” says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. “It’s simple arithmetic: The more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it.”

The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.

“We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn’t be productive in the long run. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests,” he once told Reason Magazine. With advances in agriculture, farmers instead doubled output in 30 years, using 25 million fewer acres. Mr. Borlaug, in addition to being credited for saving a billion lives by introducing fertilizers, pesticides, and seed genetics to Latin America and Asia (he won a Nobel peace prize for it,) spared millions of hectares of forests from being razed for farmland.

At November’s UN World Summit on Food Security, economists estimated that world must double current food output by 2050 to feed a population of 9 billion, many increasingly demanding Western-quality diets. For developing countries, using farming methods circa 1860, never mind 1960, this means more than doubling farmland. Scientists who believe in man-made global warming estimate that tropical deforestation is responsible for 20% of effects, “more than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world combined,” reports environmental group, RARE Conservation. Sustenance agriculture — Third World farmers typically farm an acre or less — caused up to 45% of deforestation between 2000 and 2005. Africa was responsible for 50% of the world’s deforestation between 1990 and 2000, compared to Asia’s meager 4% contribution.

“What Borlaug and the Green Revolution did was very positive for the environment, because a lot of land and forest were left untouched,” says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell University. But in Africa, he says, such destruction is worsening, as primitive farming methods, and fertilizer deficiencies, degrade soil of nutrients. “The erosion gets worse, and it’s a downward spiral,” as farmers abandon exhausted fields for new land, says Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute.

Both men believe that modern technology already offers the means to sate global appetites now and in 40 years, without devastating oceans or forests. But using it requires ignoring environmental NGOs, and letting the beneficial products of private industry play a bigger role. David Suzuki rhapsodizes about Cuba’s “sustainable” archaic ox-ploughed farms, but that country imports 85% of its food.

An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov’s laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He’s just getting started. When he’s fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly — a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. “We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists,” Mr. Tremblay says. “If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere.”

Pound for pound, acre for acre, fish farms output more food, with fewer inputs and emissions, than land farms, without ravaging oceans or clearing land. “What most people don’t realize is that fish are so much more efficient at converting into food,” says Mr. Moore: their cold blood and not having to fight gravity makes seafood emit less than half the greenhouse gases of equivalent amounts of land-based meat.

Just as man evolved from hunter-gatherer to domesticating livestock, it only makes sense to evolve our seafood cultivation, says Sebastian Belle, president of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Sea conservation groups say bottom-trawling is devastating millions of miles of aquatic ecosystems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates over 70% of fish species are either maximally exploited or depleted.

While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What’s astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.

Last month, scientists at them Genome Center at St. Louis’ Washington University announced a breakthrough with potential to alter the fate of billions: they decoded the genetics of corn.

Corn, or maize, is the most common crop on the planet. The ability to artificially tinker with its genetics ” make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions,” explained the centre’s director, Richard Wilson.

Monsanto is already engineering drought-tolerant breeds. Corn tailor-made for the most challenging growing conditions could bring bumper crops to perennially undernourished African regions. Only, as things stand, it won’t: Genetically modified (GM) crops are not legal most everywhere in Africa.

If there is anywhere desperate for better crops, it is Africa, where grain yields per acre, according to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, are one-fifth that of those in Europe and the United States.

As Western harvests improve, Africa’s are shrinking: the World Resources Institute reported in 2006 that, per capita, African farms produced 19% less in 2005 than in 1970. Where the typical farmer devotes at least 90% of her small plot of land to simply feeding her family, the growth in Africa’s population, expected to nearly double by 2050 to 1.7 billion, will, without modern, high-yield agriculture techniques, mean vast wilderness lost to crude farms.

With access to engineered seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, the Center for Global Food Issues calculates Africa can produce twice the food as it does now. Yet, so degraded is that region’s soil that the UN’s Institute for Natural Resources predicts that using current methods, there could be only enough arable land by 2025 to grow food sufficient for 25% of Africans.

The West shoulders blame for this fiasco. Left-wing groups launched campaigns against the Green Revolution, opposing everything from its synthetic, commercial pesticides and fertilizers to the cultural cleansing of native farming traditions. Mr. Borlaug’s nervous sponsors, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, cancelled his African project funding.

Until the mid-1990s, some African governments were preparing to introduce the same genetically modified, pest-resistant, high-yield crops Americans and Canadians were adopting, when, again, environmental NGOs interfered, campaigning against what they branded Frankenfoods.

“Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn’t a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There’s been no environmental catastrophes,” Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.

Still, the European Union’s bans on GM imports, and Africa’s reliance on EU aid, makes it too economically risky for most African nations to try GM — a sin of the well-fed West against the starving that Robert Paarlberg, author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa, calls “an imperialism of rich tastes.”

Redirecting Africa from a dustbowl destiny to one of limited deforestation and increasing food output is no simple affair. When Mr. Borlaug finally located funding from Japanese benefactors to try his advances in sub-Saharan Africa — work that continues with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates, and the Howard Buffet Foundations — he found ways to double yields, but only in developed areas: lack of transportation and irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa added unique complications. The cost of transporting a tonne of goods one kilometre in Africa averages as much US$0.14, compared to a $0.03 average in other developing regions, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa reported in November. It concluded that US$50-billion annual spending on road, water and power is necessary over the next decade to bring Sub-Saharan Africa into the 21st century — still cheaper than the Copenhagen climate treaty’s estimated cost to participating nations, which now tops US$300-billion a year.

Western funds, or loans, to deliver modern farming methods and materials to slash-and-burn regions is not only more likely to dramatically cut atmospheric carbon levels and preserve vital ecosystems than empty international emission pledges, it has actually been proven to work. If ecoconscious Westerners won’t redirect money from untested global cap-and-trade schemes and “green” funds to stop the spread of destructive farming, at the very least the West can push to reverse the bans we prompted on the GM crops that must be part of the solution. While we’re at it, we can shut down campaigns against chemically intensive agriculture and fish farms. And if, in the process, we end up not just helping the planet, but saving millions of lives, even better.