Green Options

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The Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing environmental health harms caused by chemical threats, recently released a report stating that shower curtains made with PVC contain numerous harmful chemicals including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), phthalates (think CA toys), and organotins. These ubiquitous shower curtains are likely to have adverse effects on the nervous, respiratory and reproductive systems.

I don’t have enough hands to count the number of those shower curtains I’ve used in my brief 23 years, but it’s a lot. I’m happy to say I switched to cloth a few months ago after having a conversation about the possible effects of continued exposure to these shower curtains with my friend John Laumer of treehugger.com. I’m glad to see our fears were not confounded. The smell you most often associate with the excitement of a new product is actually a sign of off-gassing, a process by which harmful toxins become airborne through evaporation. There should be no rejoicing when this smell is encountered.

Some interesting findings from the study:

Come out Monday, March 10 at 7 pm to the Green Renter lecture series held at the Solar One house on the East River. This week’s lecture will feature Charles Komanoff, a renowned energy-policy analyst and environmental activist, speaking about Ted Kheel’s policy approach to NYC’s congestion problem: 100% free mass transportation.

I’ll admit—sheepishly—some days when I’m extremely tired from a long day at work, head bouncing to some tune on my ipod, I often walk into the subway and without thinking, try to walk through the turnstile without swiping my card. After I’m jolted out of my stupor by the immovable metal bar at my crouch, I realize I’m entering, not exiting the station and I must pay. I often dream about free subway rides—my dream could come true if New York City adopted Ted Kheel’s plan.

Texas is numero uno when it comes to wind power generation. The Lone Star state has installed wind power close to 5,000 megawatts which translates to enough electricity to power a million homes. The huge turbines, scattered across wide open spaces, conjure up more progressive feelings compared to those generated at the sight of oil rigs or smoke stacks; they are feelings of a changing world, a cleaner world.

Because of the increased demand for wind power installation, the economies of some small locales in Texas are growing and welcoming the change. But this changing tide in the energy industry isn’t without some bumps in the road. Recently, when an unanticipated cold front killed 80% of the wind power in Texas, electricity for some offices and factories had to be cut.

In 2007, an enjoyable summer and fall pastime for me was sitting, newspaper in hand, on the bank of New York City’s East River in Brooklyn, looking out over the water and staring awestruck at the Manhattan cityscape. Never did I imagine that spinning somewhere in the water were hydroelectric turbines generating enough tidal energy to supply nearly a third of the power needed to run a parking garage and supermarket on Roosevelt Island. I found out about this project in a February 11 Wall Street Journal article entitled Nine Cities, Nine Ideas.

Mister Bloomberg helped jumpstart this “green” project on June 11, 2007 in an effort to move forward in his goal of cutting Gotham’s green-house-gas emissions by 30%. This goal is part of a larger list of goals outlined in PLANYC 2030, a most ambitious plan to change the city’s urban environment in some big ways.

I volunteered this year, on behalf of the O2 NYC, Green Options and my firm J. Ottman Consulting, at the inaugural Greener Gadgets conference on Friday, February 1st. On this raining day in midtown Manhattan I was happy to be inside the McGraw-Hill Conference Center on 49th Street. The conference was presented by research firm Marc Alt & Partners and design blog Inhabitat and brought out quite the group of designers, engineers, students, press and environmentalists. The speakers included the Head of Environment for North America at Nokia, Director of Product Take Back and Recycling at HP, and the Director of Corporate Environment, Safety, and Health at Sony, just to name a few.

I arrived at the conference about 9:30 am and was happy to notice as I walked in the doors, three disposal cans labeled “Waste, Recycling and Compost” and someone monitoring them. After I grabbed a stiff cup of coffee, in a mug as opposed to a paper cup, and checked my coat, I picked up my volunteer badge and headed in to hear the opening keynote speech. This speech, by artist and digital photographer Chris Jordan, was my absolute favorite of the day and I feel served to kick start the conference with the correct perspective of American mass consumption (something we all need in large daily doses).

The Humane Society of the United States just released a new video documenting the horrible truths behind America’s factory farming industry and our incessant hunger for meat (I know, only some of us). The video, narrated by James Cromwell, is certainly an eye-opener.

The video begins with some dissonant piano notes backing up images of pigs, cows and chickens with no room to move inside of their cages, side by side with thousands of other animals who will live the same horrible lives and find the same horrible deaths. Cromwell’s voice, all scratchy and wise, is the perfect pitch for this narration. The realization is immediate that the video will be a bit coarse, but nonetheless moving.

I eat meat. I always have. I think I always will. Yet this doesn’t change my disgust for the cruelty and disregard of the Factory Farming Industry. I didn’t really learn about industrialized farming until my Junior year in college. I had never really thought much about it. When I was growing up, my father raised cattle on my grandparent’s farm in rural Virginia—so a lot of the meat in our freezer was raised just down the road and if it wasn’t I always assumed it was raised somewhere else in a similar fashion— ahhh, the beauty of naivete.

Will a recession—or the prospect of a recession—curb consumer desire for green products? In the shadow of flat growth, will corporations slow their corporate social and environmental initiatives? Will we see a decrease in the burgeoning world of green marketing? The word “recession” has been splattered upon every newspaper and on the tongues of anyone with some knowledge of the lending crisis and skyrocketing price of petroleum. The question on my mind is whether an economic downturn will play a factor when consumers shop. Will green products take a backseat again?

According to the big-poppa of all securities firms, Goldman Sachs, consumer spending will continue to slow as the sickly housing markets have made it difficult for people to tap into their home equity. Another interesting thing to think about is how this will cause the unemployment rate (currently 5 %) to increase — economists predict it will increase to 6.5% by the end of 2008. Fewer jobs equals less money to be mixed in the economic batter and one more reason why consumers may opt for less expensive non-green goods.

Three large electronics manufacturers are taking a proactive step in an industry screaming for action. Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba have established an electronic product recycling management company, Electronic Manufacturers Recycling Management Company, LLC (MRM), to spearhead electronics recycling and collection in the United States. This dream team was formed to provide a recycling service to electronics manufacturers and others, including state and local governments, and to meet recent Minnesota requirements on recycling electronics.

“We believe that forming an independent company to manage collective electronic recycling programs is the best way to achieve the economies of scale and efficiencies to create a sustainable recycling system for used electronics products.” Said David Thompson, MRM president.  

One very important thing the new company is striving for is to provide convenient recycling opportunities for consumers. There’s no question most people have an old TV or computer lying around that they would like to throw away but are too conscious to just toss in a landfill or dumpster. So with the work of MRM, that conundrum is solved. It already seems MRM is making some waves. According to Brad Moore, the commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency:

“In the first five months since Minnesota’s new electronic recycling law took effect, MRM collected approximately 750 tons of used products - a significant amount.”

In my last post, Recycling Misconceptions part 1, I touched on the uncertainties of recycling, plastics in particular, that I think perplex many of us. Well last week I attended a Green Renter lecture here in NYC and found out some more interesting things about recycling that I didn’t know. The evening’s lecturer, Samantha MacBride of NYC bureau of waste prevention, reuse and recycling was able to put many things into perspective, the most interesting being the amount of paper we consume and the amount that ends up in our landfills.

She got me thinking. Since recycling has been on my radar lately, I have been more aware of my habits and the habits of the people around me. I noticed that I am much more diligent in getting my plastic and glass bottles in the correct place for recycling than I am with all my paper products. It wasn’t until I attended the lecture that I realized how much less of a guessing game paper recycling is, just how important it really is — more important than the resin code mystery in my last post — and how much I neglect the privilege. According to Samantha Macbride, if you want to make a difference, recycle more paper. She explained to us that paper is the most under recycled material. According to the EPA, 35% of total U.S. municipal solid waste generated in 2006 was paper and paperboard (graph source: EPA report).

Recycling may be the easiest way to do your part when it comes to being “green,” right? Well, it does seem that a few trashcans around the house and conditioning oneself to differentiate throw-a-ways based on that ubiquitous chasing arrows logo is an easy way to get started and do some good, but are you really helping? Does that logo really mean what most people think it means (this is recyclable)? Chances are only some of the plastic containers you throw out are actually being recycled, and the rest are being pulled from the stream and discarded in the landfill.

This is the case in my current “hometown,” New York City. I spoke with the Director of the NYC bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling a couple weeks ago while doing some research for a client, and he informed me that if I throw, for example, a plastic sandwich container, top of a tic-tac container or any other non-typical plastic container into my municipal recycling stream it won’t get recycled. Why? Well, the infrastructure is just not there yet; currently the only plastic containers that NYC will recycle are plastic bottles and jugs where the neck is smaller than the body. According to the NYCWasteLe$$ website, this is because 90% of all plastic bottles and jugs are made of #1 PETE and #2 HDPE, two plastics with strong market demand. Other less popular plastics can contaminate the batch of recycled plastic. This was news to me, as I had been dropping anything plastic that contained the mobius loop into my recycling bin, and I had been encouraging my roommates to do the same.

So here’s the rub:
Since the recycling logo isn’t a government-mandated symbol, manufacturers are allowed to put it on their products even if that product is only recyclable in some places. The mobius loop or chasing arrows logo along with resin codes (e.g. 1 for PETE), which were developed by the Society of the Plastic Industry, only denote the type of plastic and not its recyclability. As more and more companies are forced to outfit their products or packaging with something “green,” ill-informed consumers will continue to drop those products into their municipal recycling streams; thus increasing the man power needed to pull them out of the stream before the recycling process begins and ship them to the landfill, using more energy than if they had just thrown it in the trash. Like The Big Lebowski said, “That’s a bummer man.”