Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)On On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years.
Cleverly titled the “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act” (PDF), it would provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey (not coincidentally, Nos. 1 and 2 in installed solar in the U.S.). It also includes measures to insure that those who receive assistance get information on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.
Sanders currently has nine co-sponsors: Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).
The bill would accelerate what is already a fairly rapid pace of growth for distributed solar power. Distributed energy has a number of advantages over its central-plant competitors (both clean and dirty): it’s faster to build, avoids the need for expensive transmission lines, can use already developed land, and enhances community resilience and self-reliance. It’s also labor-intensive, creating more jobs per dollar of investment than its competitors — a feature that may make it more attractive during a recession, when Democrats are turning their attention to unemployment.
I chatted with Sen. Sanders about the bill, the growth of solar, and his colleagues’ peculiar fixation on nuclear power:
Q. How much would your program cost?
A. We think this will cost between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, and at the end of a 10-year period we are going to be producing 30,000 new megawatts of energy — the equivalent of what 30 nuclear power plants produce. This is a very cost effective way of producing that energy.
Q. Even if you take half the price off a solar system, it still has relatively high upfront capital costs. Are you looking into ways for people to find financing?
A. Remember that there are already a lot of tax credits, federal and in many states. The federal tax credit would be up to 30 percent off the cost of a project. That’s a lot. Let’s say hypothetically you wanted to spend $40,000 on solar. If you take 30 percent off that, you’re down to $28,000. If you get state help you’re down to $25,000. Then the federal government would pay half of that.
That’s a pretty good deal! It could be a major incentive for people to use photovoltaics. And the more photovoltaics we use, the more will be built; the more that are built, the cheaper it becomes.
Q. What about the objection that it’s a subsidy that advantages some states (the sunny ones) over others?
A. The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar. [Sanders' press release cites ISLR's report on Energy Self-Reliant States.] In Vermont, we’re moving on solar. New Jersey is one of the leading producers of solar energy in America. It’ll obviously work better in Florida and California — that’s true, and that’s great — but this is for all 50 states.
For people who are complaining about subsidies to energy, well, they’ve got to take a deep breath: huge amounts of money into nuclear, huge amounts of money into coal, huge amounts of money into oil. It is time that we begin to subsidize those technologies that are cutting greenhouse gas emissions and in the long run will be more cost-effective.
Q. Do you get the sense that your Senate colleagues appreciate the power of renewable energy, particularly distributed renewables?
A. No, they don’t. I’m a member of both the Environment Committee and the Energy Committee, and it just astounds me how little discussion there has been about the potential of sustainable energy in general and solar in particular. If you go to an Energy Committee meeting, it’s about nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. The general assumption is that nuclear is time-tested, it’s cheap, it’s reliable; solar is experimental, it’s fringe, maybe someday.
Roughly speaking, a new nuclear power plant will cost you about $10 billion. Then at some point you’ve got to decommission it and get rid of the waste — a great expense. The average nuclear power plant will produce about 1,000 megawatts for that $10 billion dollars. We can produce 30,000 megawatts for $30 billion and they’re going to produce it for $300 billion.
Now, theirs is baseload ours is intermittent, that is true. But having said that, our form of production is far more cost effective than nuclear. Have you ever heard anybody talk about that outside of the environmental community? You have not heard that discussion on the floor of the House or the Senate. And the reason you’re not hearing about this is the solar industry doesn’t quite have the clout that the coal industry, the oil industry, or the nuclear industry has.
Now, you asked me [about distributed energy]. We need to push solar, in all of its forms, as aggressively as we can. I’m not very sympathetic to people who tell us, “If we don’t move aggressively to cut greenhouse gas emissions the world will collapse, but I don’t like wind because a bird got killed.” According to the secretary of the interior, we can produce almost 30 percent of the electricity for homes in this country through solar thermal in the Southwest. That is extraordinary. We should begin building those things tomorrow.
It’s not a question of either/or. It’s both. It’s those, wind, geothermal, biomass versus coal and oil and nuclear. Our main job is to cut back greenhouse gas emissions in a fundamental way, and to transform our energy system. So people should be putting their shoulders to the wheel.
Q. Is anyone in Congress talking about the barriers to distributed energy posed by America’s complex regime of utility regulations?
A. Yeah, they are. Many of us like what Germany has done — feed-in tariffs. In Vermont, without state regulations, one of our major utilities has unilaterally instituted those with good results. A lot of the utilities are tied into coal and to gas, and they will be resistant. There’s always resistance to change. But I think we have the wind at our backs, or the sun in our faces, or whatever. We are making progress.
Q. What’s the road forward for the bill? Any chance it will be part of the upcoming jobs bill?
A. It’s certainly something I would like to see. In any vehicle, any venue we can get, we’re going to push it.
“Reducing Unsustainability is not the same thing as creating Sustainability”- John Ehrenfeld
We all know we are supposed to recycle. For many, if not most people, recycling is all they do to help the planet, and it leaves us with a feeling of self satisfaction that we’ve done our part. But what really happens once you put that can or bottle inside the “black hole” of your local recycling bin?
A lot depends on the material. Many materials streams that are recaptured don’t actually get recycled- at least not the way we think of a glass bottle becoming a new glass bottle. A lot of recycled material gets “down-cycled” into a lower grade, poorer quality material that is used once more and then landfilled. And unless more of us buy products made from recycled materials – like the paper in my printer which is 100% recycled- the market is weak for recapturing and reusing our stuff. Let’s look at the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Aluminum: Roughly 50% of all aluminum cans are recycled. A 75% rate in “bottle bill “states with deposits, only 35% in other states. That’s down from 65% a few years ago. But most aluminum recaptured is recycled into new cans or other aluminum products. And it saves a ton of energy. Recycling one aluminum can will save over 2000 watts of energy, enough to power a 10 watt CFL light bulb for 200 hours.
Steel is one of the most recycled materials around. About 70% of all steel is recycled material. So keep those steel cans coming back in folks. One of the most successful and profitable steel companies in the US, Nucor, uses 100% recycled steel in its products- nothing from the mine.
Plastics: The most commonly recycled plastics are #1, PET; and #2 HDPE. #1 is your soda or water bottle, #2 is your milk jug. About 27% of #1 PET gets recycled, 45% in bottle bill states, 14% elsewhere. But the number is climbing. It’s very recyclable, nearly infinitely, and brands like ReSource water and Anvil Knitwear offer products made from recycled material, which drives demand for more recycled PET. Recycling one PET bottle will save 360 watts- enough to power that 13 watt CFL light bulb for 20 hours. Plastics like #5 polypropylene are very recyclable and are collected in many places. But despite being a great material, used in yogurt and cottage cheese tubs, high performance clothing and reusable water bottles, very little gets recycled. One great exception is Preserve, which makes utensils, kitchenware and toothbrushes from yogurt containers. Unfortunately, a lot of plastic is just bundled up and sent to China or other places, where it may come back to us as a “happy meal toy” covered in lead paint. We can do a lot better.
Glass: Despite being easy to recycle, only about 28% of glass is recycled currently. In non bottle bill states and for products without deposits, like wine bottles it’s less than 15%. But here is where it gets tricky. Because very little glass “recycled “actually makes it into a new bottle or product. Why? Too heavy, costly and “fuelish” to ship long distances to glass manufacturers. So much of the glass we “recycle” actually ends up in landfills as top cover, or in roads as underlayment or pavement. We either need to use and remanufacture it locally or switch to lighter materials like aluminum and plastics. Fortunately glass is very safe, so burying it won’t poison us, just prevents it from ever being used again.
Paper: Most cardboard and paper collected is recycled and 100% recycled paper is readily available, so buy it instead of the other stuff. In 2008, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 340 pounds for every person in the U.S., and a record-high 57.4 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling. By 2012, the paper industry’s goal is to recover 60 percent of all the paper Americans consume for recycling, which is approximately 60 million tons of paper. That’s enough recovered paper to fill more than 840,000 railroad cars. More than 37 percent of the fiber used to make new paper products in the United States comes from recycled sources. Some companies, like Erving Paper near my home, use 100% recycled feedstock, and discharge water that is cleaner than when they took it in.
Electronics: I need separate blog for this one. E-waste is a huge issue, given all the computers, stereos, phones and hundreds of other gadgets we toss every day. There are a lot of precious metals to recover, plastics to reuse and energy and materials to be saved by reducing the gadgets we acquire, reusing the ones we already have and recycling the ones that just break or wear out. Some places, Like the WM Recycle America MRF near my home- do a great, clean job of separation and recycling. Some places just ship stuff to developing nations where workers with little safety in place get exposed to toxic materials. Use your stuff as long as you can, and make sure it gets recycled properly.
Waste to Energy: Sometimes what we think is going to wind up as another product winds up at a waste to energy plant instead, where it’s combusted and converted to electricity. The process is pretty clean and efficient, and we gain valuable energy from the process- but it’s not recycling. Waste to energy is a better use of most materials than landfilling them, and provides electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes, but a lot of material currently combusted could be recaptured and reused a few more times before we extract the energy from it.
So buy recycled content products whenever you can, check with your local recycler to find out just where your stuff goes, and use retail recycling facilities like our Greenopolis kiosks- where we can track the bottle from cradle to cradle and back again. It’s time to shed some light into the black hole of recycling.
How many times have you heard that or said it yourself ?
It must be one of the most common phrases in our language. We think it so often that it has become ‘normalised’ in our minds. Rubbish is something useless, something we don’t want, something to be thrown away…
Did you ever stop to think where or what ‘away‘ is? Is it just a term like ‘get rid of…’ or ‘throw out‘?
What it really means is;
‘I don’t want this and I’m not responsible for it any more’
It’s a word about separation of what you have, but what you don’t want.
There is a problem here. Away is always somewhere else, it is not a magical black hole that takes all the stuff we want to be free of and somehow finds a new happy home for it. When we ‘throw our rubbish away’ it usually means it goes somewhere else that is anything but happy and certainly not a good home.
At best when we throw our rubbish away, it ends up in the waste bin, but then it gets collected and probably dumped into the earth to rot and contaminate. Worse still the waste is collected and incinerated and potentially produces other toxic contamination for the environment. Even worse, we throw our rubbish away onto the ground as litter that is at the mercy of winds, water and the scattering process of peoples carelessness. Ultimately, all our waste ends up contaminating something or some creature, including ourselves.
Every time you throw something ‘Away’ it goes to a place that is usually worse than when you had it.
In the UK we throw away 30 million tonnes of rubbish a year – that’s half a tonne each. How many times did you ‘throw it away’ to accumulate all that? Much of this rubbish is thrown away needlessly. This wastes valuable resources like glass, paper, aluminium and tin, and pollutes the environment as harmful chemicals leach into the ground around landfill sites. 30 million tonnes of waste gone somewhere else, out-of-sight, out-of-mind and secretly infecting the planet.
There’s no such place as away, it’s always somewhere else.
And yet we continue to manufacture and consume products that have
built in obsolescence,
perceived obsolescence
non-recyclable packaging.
We continue to indulge our wants and self-serving agendas oblivious to the environmental impact of our choices. Tucked away in our comfortable walled up environments, we don’t see and don’t care about where our waste goes. Out-of-sight sight … out-of-mind serves us well. Blinkers on and the sound turned down, we neither see, nor hear the plight of the natural world that is literally heaving with the weight and devastation of what we are doing. The millions of tons of waste that we are relentlessly pumping into the sea, the Earth and atmosphere are accumulating, mutating and creating a vast cancer of seething chemicals that only create harm and death as they spread mercilessly across the planet.
If waste was dumped in your garden, what would you think?
No-one has the right to do that and someone would have to pay the cost of polluting your property. We all think we have rights, because we are human, we are special, we are civilised people. The planet and the creatures that inhabit the earth appear to have NO RIGHTS at all. They have no voice of protest when we dump millions of tonnes of rubbish in their feeding grounds. When we tear down their habitats and pollute their waters, no-one breaths a word about their rights. It’s ok, because we are the superior species and we can do what we like. We’ve been dumping waste relentlessly since the industrial revolution. That seems like a short period in history starting just over 100 years ago, a mere blink in evolutionary history and yet in that short period we have significantly destabilised the natural balance of the eco-system to an alarming level.
Somehow, we just don’t believe it, we call it ’scaremongering’
And that helps to relegate the seriousness and sooth our conscience. Or maybe we do see the shadow of what is coming and ignore the consequences, hoping that science and policy makers will magically come up with a solution. We viewed a program by the Discovery Team that was showing a proposed project to pump cold water from 1000 feet in the oceans to the surface in order to create co2 eating diatoms. These scientists seriously see this as a potential ‘answer’ to our co2 emissions. Despite the potential to imbalance the ocean’s eco-system and disrupt the already delicate plankton environments. And that’s the way we see things now; solution engineering takes over from prevention engineering. It’s just like modern medicine, we look for ways to alleviate the symptoms, rather than prevent the illness in the first place.
The horse has already bolted and we are turning all our attention to catching the beast, while the faulty gate is still wide open for others to follow.
If this kind of ‘fix-it’ mentality prevails …
We are set to see some pretty horrendous actions in the next few years. The whole waste incineration issue is built on solution engineering and not prevention engineering. Manufacturers are still offer placating excuses for their greed marketing and profit campaigns. Oil producers still hold us in a stranglehold by shielding developments in alternative technologies until they have exhausted their oil supplies. Government and local councils make lame choices to placate us with half-hearted proposals to improve waste management, but only if it secures votes in the ballot box. Very few people and organisations are fully committed to preventing the problem of waste, outside of a profit benefit for themselves.
Does all that seem too harsh, is it scathing and negative?
If it does, it’s because the answer to all our problems is starring us in the mirror everyday. All the while we talk in big political and corporation language, we are still chasing the escaping beast and our eyes are way off the ball. The answer is, as Occams’ razor points out- the most simple and obvious; One person… you, multiplied millions of times over. You are the sole and collective answer to the Earth’s environmental siege. You, me, us, together provide the single most effective prevention and solution engineering impact to the world’s problem of waste, global warming and environmental catastrophe.
Every consumer choice and purchase decision you make is a vote of confidence for the producer of the product or service.
The more votes they get, the more they produce. It’s a simple equation of demand creates supply. Every time you buy something you add a vote for that item and say “That’s what I want, you are making it right and I agree with your values” These consumer votes are responsible for the vast corporations we see today. They are responsible for political actions and policies and all the way down to the taste in your food and the colour of your soaps. Collectively, we drive the market the way we want it.
The process of consumer choices is very carefully monitored by manufacturers and advertising.
Don’t believe for a moment they don’t see your actions to buy red apples over green apples. Big brother IS watching but not the way we imagine from George Orwell’s predictions. The probelm is we don’t see or believe in our personal power any more. We think ‘my single choice will never be seen or make a difference’. That is the first trick of the shadows that we need to get over. We have gradually been weaned to surrender our power in the belief that decisions are always made by someone else, whether that’s by doctors to look after our health or politicians to govern our lives. In all walks of life we have abdicated responsibility for making our own choices in favour of believing that going with the flow is the best, safest decision. We call it democracy, fashion, trends, popularity and a whole culture of following the crowd is now acceptable and secure in modern life
So what do we do about this?
It really is time for action as individuals, but we need a collective force of many people working together to make changes that get noticed and send a clear message back to manufacturers and policy makers.
How do we do it?
As consumers we need to take back our power, that means understanding that as individuals we constantly have choices that need to be influenced by truthful information and not propaganda. We need clear thinking followed by proactive responses. It also means we may need to step outside of our personal comfort zone and become an individual in the crowd, instead of blindly following everyone else.
If there is a plan to change packaging and waste management from the grass roots upwards, We also need clear guidelines to understand our objectives and targets
Prevention engineering
Usually we look at the end product and centre our attention on waste, rubbish and pollution. This is giving attention to solution based problem solving and not looking at prevention. We need to go back to the source and see that as a consumer, we control what is wasted by our purchasing choices. We are accountable for the life cycle of every item we buy. Let’s look at a basic check list of how we purchase:
Can we justify its purchase, do we need it ?
Can we recycle compost, or reuse the packaging ?
Does it have a reasonable shelf life without going off or spoiling?
Is it a convenience food that could be avoided?
In addition to the question on food you may also consider these questions for other consumer goods
Is it ethically made and fairly traded?
Is it made from non-sustainable materials?
Does the manufacturing process involve mining?
Does it have a short life expectancy?
Does it have built in obsolescence or perceived out dating?
These questions should strongly influence all our purchasing decisions.
In addition, we must also be prepared to make a stand to let retailers know about our views. This next step can be a somewhat daunting, as it involves being outspoken in shops.
If you buy something and it is a real need, then you should not have to suffer the task of disposing of careless packaging, especially if it is not recyclable. One of the best ways to send a clear message to retailers and manufacturers is to do something radical like removing the packaging at the point of sale and telling the retailer to either send it back to the producer or recycle/ reuse it themselves responsibly. Another less intimidating option is to return un-recyclable packaging to the retailer another time.
Other actions you can take is to ask the retailer what facilities they have to take back packaging. Some large retailers already offer recycling banks, although these may not include all the plastics that they sell in the store. They may try to refer you to the local council, but you have to make a strong stand that although it may be uncomfortable to them, they have to take responsibility and pass that message back to the producers.
All of these add up to one important end result:
We consume according to our needs and the needs of the environment we live in
We only consume goods that have recyclable, compost-able or reusable packaging
We only consume goods that we need and reduce waste to a minimum
We send a strong message to producers that we won’t be responsible for their waste.
We shop seasonally and locally, supporting local trade and fresh foodstuffs.
We reject all convenience items with packaging that cannot be reused or recycled.
We finally get the message, that there is no such place as AWAY!
Transitions Towns, Social Entrepreneurship and Ways to Change Community
Changing a community requires system change. Social entrepreneurship is taking shape with variations across the globe and you can be part of these change-agent systems.
Systems….change is all about systems. I learned this in gardening, and in business, and in nonprofits. And in family. Systems provide a structure with a shared purpose and the motivation and skills of the members to make something “good” happen.
I discovered the “Transition Town Santa Barbara” website and was delighted to see that they have become part of a worldwide movement of caring scientists and professionals and caring adults who are putting together a working system for better communities and better business concepts that are truly the productive arm of the community, which I believe should be the honorable mission of EVERY business.
Transition Towns
A “transition town” starts when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?
They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model (explained here) with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative. Transition Towns are formed as a process… a comprehensive and creative process of:
awareness raising around peak oil, climate change and the need to undertake a community lead process to rebuild resilience and reduce carbon
connecting with existing groups in the community
building bridges to local government
connecting with other transition initiatives
forming groups to look at all the key areas of life (food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods, etc)
kicking off projects aimed at building people’s understanding of resilience and carbon issues and community engagement
eventually launching a community defined, community implemented “Energy Descent Action Plan” over a 15 to 20 year timescale
Examples of Transition Towns
The Transition Network includes hubs in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Japan. Santa Barbara, CA
A related concept to the Transition Town is the “Community Interest Company”…a UK term that is much like the American “cooperative” or “not for profit” organization.
Community Interest Company
The Transition Town movement has created a legal structure called a “Community Interest Company” that could be used to transfer property into co-operative status, create permaculture homesteads, and thus give access to land.
A CIC can be “for the use of people who want to conduct a business or other activity for community benefit, and not purely for private advantage. This is achieved by a ‘community interest test’ and an ‘asset lock’, which ensure that the CIC is established for community purposes and the assets and profits are dedicated to these purposes.”
Community interest companies (CIC) are a new type of limited company in the UK designed specifically for those wishing to operate for the benefit of the community rather than for the benefit of the owners of the company. This means that a CIC cannot be formed or used solely for the personal gain of a particular person, or group of people.
CICs can be limited by shares, or by guarantee, and will have a statutory “Asset Lock” to prevent the assets and profits being distributed, except as permitted by legislation. This ensures the assets and profits are retained within the CIC for community purposes, or transferred to another asset-locked organisation, such as another CIC or charity.
A CIC cannot be formed to support political activities and a company that is a charity cannot be a CIC, unless it gives up its charitable status. However, a charity may apply to register a CIC as a subsidiary company.
The Social Enterprise Coalition (SEC) is another coalition in the UK which represents a wide range of social enterprises, regional and national support networks and other related organisations.[6]
Social Entrepreneurship…a US Version
Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors. The main aim of a social entrepreneurship as well as social enterprise is to further social and environmental goals.
Socially motivated business entities vary widely across the globe. North American organizations tend to have a strongly individualistic stance focused on a handful of exceptional leaders, while others in Asia and Europe emphasize more how social entrepreneurs work within teams, networks and movements for change. But that is changing in North America with the changing economy and our recognition of global citizenship.
According to Wikipedia’s overview of social entrepreneurship: The terms social entrepreneur and social entrepreneurship were first used in the literature on social change in the 1960 and 1970s.
Social entrepreneurship strategies came into widespread use in the 1980s and 1990s, promoted by Bill Drayton the founder of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, and others such as Charles Leadbeater. Michael Young was a leading promoter of social enterprise (1950s to the 1990s) and in the 1980s was described by Professor Daniel Bell at Harvard as ‘the world’s most successful entrepreneur of social enterprises’ because of his role in creating over 60 new organizations worldwide, including a series of Schools for Social Entrepreneurs in the UK. One well known contemporary social entrepreneur is Muhammad Yunus, founder and manager of Grameen Bank and its growing family of social venture businesses, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
Today, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, governments and individuals promote, fund, and advise social entrepreneurs around the planet. A growing number of colleges and universities are establishing programs focused on educating and training social entrepreneurs.
Organizations include:
Ashoka: Innovators for the Public
Skoll Foundation
Omidyar Network
Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship
Root Cause
Canadian Social Entrepreneurship Foundation
New Profit Inc.
Echoing Green
One example of a successful social entrepreneurial program is Ashoka’s Changemakers “open sourcing social solutions” initiative uses an online platform for what it calls collaborative competitions to build communities of practice around pressing issues.
Joining the International Community
The International Network of Social Entrepreneurs’ [INSE] vision is to have different stakeholders combining their expertise, skills, talents and passion, working in a highly collaborative fashion toward the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) signed by 191 U.N nations back in 2002.
INSE’s main objective is to increase Global Social Responsibility (GSR) worldwide and inspire the largest possible number of entrepreneurs to become social entrepreneurs for the betterment of humanity and an increased protection of planet Earth.
Created in 2007 by Christophe Poizat, INSE has grown into a community of 4,700+ members from five continents: seasoned CEOs, serial entrepreneurs, senior business executives, IT experts, senior recruiters, top artists from many countries around the world, all determined to make the world a more positive place now, and for generations to come…
This site provides INSE members with a Global Web 2.0 Communication Platform, shared calendar, discussion forums, files & media gallery and member profiles. New members can learn the basics from the INSE Starter Kit to ensure your journey starts on the right foot.
Imagine I was trying to sell you a sandwich. It’s shrink wrapped in plastic that may leach toxic chemicals, but don’t worry about that. Mine’s still healthier than a sandwich you could make at home, what with all those impurities in your fridge. Now, I’ve got no proof of that, and actually, some people have tested my sandwiches and found that sometimes they have more bad stuff in them than the ones from your own kitchen. But never mind that. Mine’s more convenient. Tastes better too. I swear.
So here you go: one plastic-wrapped, waste-producing sandwich that isn’t any healthier and doesn’t taste any better than the one from your own kitchen. That’ll be $10,000, please.
That preposterous pitch is the truth behind the marketing campaigns that turned bottled water into a $5 billion-a-year industry in the United States alone. Today is World Water Day–a good day to pause and consider the insanity of a global economy where 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water while other people spend billions on a bottled product that’s no cleaner, harms people and the environment and costs up to 2,000 times the price of tap water.
To mark the occasion, I’m joining with a bunch of North America’s leading environmental groups to release our new film: The Story of Bottled Water. It’s a seven-minute animated film that, like The Story of Stuff, uses simple images and words to explain a complex problem caused by what I call the ‘take-make-waste’ economy. In this case, we explain how you get Americans to buy half a billion bottles of water a week when most can get it almost free from the tap in their kitchen.
The answer, of course, is you manufacture demand–make people think they need to spend money on something they don’t actually need or already have.
In the last few decades, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle and other big beverage companies have spent untold millions making us afraid of tap water. They’ve told us that if we want to be sure what we drink is pure and clean–not to mention hip and fashionable–we should buy bottled water. After all, nobody cool or environmentally conscious drinks tap water, right?
The thing is, there are a lot of inconvenient truths the bottled water ads don’t mention:
• Bottled water is subject to fewer health regulations than tap water. In 2006, Fiji Water ran ads bragging that their product doesn’t come from Cleveland, only to have tests show a glass of Fiji water is lower quality than Cleveland tap. Oops!
• Up to 40 percent of bottled water is filtered tap water. In other words, if you’re concerned about what’s in your tap water, just cut out the middleman and buy a home water filter.
• Each year, according to the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick, making the plastic water bottles used in the U.S. takes enough oil and energy to fuel a million cars. And that doesn’t even include the fuel required to ship, fly or truck water across continents and state lines.
• Three-fourths of the half-a-billion plastic water bottles sold in the U.S. every week go to the landfill or to incinerators. It costs our cities more than $70 million to landfill water bottles alone each year, according to Corporate Accountability International.
But there’s good news: People are getting the message. Last year, for the first time this decade, bottled water sales fell–not that much, but they went down. Restaurants are proudly serving tap water, adding carbonization on site for customers who want something fizzy. Consumers who want economy, portability and convenience are switching to refillable metal bottles.
Still, we’ve got a ways to go until everyone realizes that bottled water makes as much sense as a $10,000 sandwich.
So, if you haven’t already, you can get started by making a personal commitment to drink from the tap.
Then join a campaign for investment in clean tap water for everyone, like those sponsored by Food & Water Watch, Environmental Working Group or Canada’s Polaris Institute. Work to ban the purchase of bottled water by your school, company or city–Corporate Accountability is helping states kick the bottled water habit–and lobby local officials to bring back drinking fountains.
Together, we can send Coke, Pepsi and the rest of the industry a message as clear as a glass of crystal-clean tap water: We’re not buying into your manufactured demand anymore. We’ll choose our own demands, thank you very much, and we’re demanding clean safe water for all!
Annie Leonard is the author of The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession With Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, Our Health – and a Vision for Change. Her latest film, The Story of Bottled Water, was produced by Free Range Studios and can be found at www.storyofbottledwater.org
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)On On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years.
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Aluminum: Roughly 50% of all aluminum cans are recycled. A 75% rate in “bottle bill “states with deposits, only 35% in other states. That’s down from 65% a few years ago. But most aluminum recaptured is recycled into new cans or other aluminum products. And it saves a ton of energy. Recycling one aluminum can will save over 2000 watts of energy, enough to power a 10 watt CFL light bulb for 200 hours.![C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\D4M1RCQX\MP910216551[1].jpg](http://greenopolis.com/files/images/black_hole_0clip_image008.png)
Plastics: The most commonly recycled plastics are #1, PET; and #2 HDPE. #1 is your soda or water bottle, #2 is your milk jug. About 27% of #1 PET gets recycled, 45% in bottle bill states, 14% elsewhere. But the number is climbing. It’s very recyclable, nearly infinitely, and brands like ![C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\55XDOTHB\MC900014531[1].wmf](http://greenopolis.com/files/images/black_hole_0clip_image010.png)
Glass: Despite being easy to recycle, only about 28% of glass is recycled currently. In non bottle bill states and for products without deposits, like wine bottles it’s less than 15%. But here is where it gets tricky. Because very little glass “recycled “actually makes it into a new bottle or product. Why? Too heavy, costly and “fuelish” to ship long distances to glass manufacturers. So much of the glass we “recycle” actually ends up in landfills as top cover, or in roads as underlayment or pavement. We either need to use and remanufacture it locally or switch to lighter materials like aluminum and plastics. Fortunately glass is very safe, so burying it won’t poison us, just prevents it from ever being used again.![C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\LIZDHE8K\MC900089838[1].wmf](http://greenopolis.com/files/images/black_hole_0clip_image012.png)
Paper: Most cardboard and paper collected is recycled and 100% recycled paper is readily available, so buy it instead of the other stuff. In 2008, the amount of paper recovered for recycling averaged 340 pounds for every person in the U.S., and a record-high 57.4 percent of the paper consumed in the U.S. was recovered for recycling. By 2012, the paper industry’s goal is to recover 60 percent of all the paper Americans consume for recycling, which is approximately 60 million tons of paper. That’s enough recovered paper to fill more than 840,000 railroad cars. More than 37 percent of the fiber used to make new paper products in the United States comes from recycled sources. Some companies, like Erving Paper near my home, use 100% recycled feedstock, and discharge water that is cleaner than when they took it in.![C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\LIZDHE8K\MP900408830[1].jpg](http://greenopolis.com/files/images/black_hole_0clip_image014.png)
Electronics: I need separate blog for this one. E-waste is a huge issue, given all the computers, stereos, phones and hundreds of other gadgets we toss every day. There are a lot of precious metals to recover, plastics to reuse and energy and materials to be saved by reducing the gadgets we acquire, reusing the ones we already have and recycling the ones that just break or wear out. Some places, Like the WM Recycle America MRF near my home- do a great, clean job of separation and recycling. Some places just ship stuff to developing nations where workers with little safety in place get exposed to toxic materials. Use your stuff as long as you can, and make sure it gets recycled properly.
Waste to Energy: Sometimes what we think is going to wind up as another product winds up at a ![C:\Documents and Settings\User\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\0CDEI6LO\MP900437236[1].jpg](http://greenopolis.com/files/images/black_hole_0clip_image018.preview.jpg)
