George Washington was a pretty prudent President—certainly the greenest of our chief executives if you consider the number of portraits spawned by the US Treasury Department—so I’m certain he’d be as interested as I in knowing just how much carbon is released into the atmosphere by the industry involved in the creation of the bill’s presumed value.
Just to throw something out to jump-start the discussion, I’m going to propose that every dollar carries with it a 20-cent environmental burden, but I wouldn’t argue with estimates of either half or double the amount. The point I want to establish is that of the baggage itself…we’ll save haggling the amount for later.
What brought this line of thinking to the fore once again was a recent conference in which one presenter after another wore out the term “sustainability” with an assumed familiarity that eventually brought me to the uncomfortable realization that I was probably the only person in the room who was lost as to the meaning of the term within the context of waste management. Part of my confusion lay in terms of definition as it applies to our use of resources. Sustainability where some semblance of a stable environment is concerned is one thing, but in the present context, with growth both in population and productivity proceeding exponentially, it is quite another. While indeed I think we are obliged to do our part in lessening our burden on limited resources as effectively and efficiently as possible, it is important that we weigh carefully what measures are meaningful within this context, and which are, in fact, counterproductive.
Here, let me set the stage with a few observations…the first of which is that I am an editor, not a sustainability expert, diversion expert, waste expert, landfill expert, or anything expert, whose only notable qualification for anything is an IQ—in my case this stands for Ignorance Quotient—that grows stronger with age. So with my qualifications plainly on the table, allow me to continue with some other observations.
For starters, people who deal with waste, whether we’re talking about MSW, liquid effluents, combustion residue, or any other detritus resulting from the leftovers of thousands of human-spawned activities—are the real environmentalists of our society, not the ones who preach on the subject of saving the planet. This leads to my next belief…that waste per se is not what waste management is about. From the MSW standpoint, waste represents the shared failures of producers and consumers in their selections of materials, processes, and activities that form the basis for the residues that then become the responsibility of the waste management establishment.
So how do those on the dark side of the materials equation deal with these residuals? In contrast to the enormity of the task—the volume and complexity of the materials involved—the management options boil down to a fairly constrained few: reuse, reprocess, convert, ship off to the antipodes, or bury.
In each of these can be found opportunities and pitfalls that lead waste managers inevitably to economic, environmental, and political consequences for which there are no clear-cut rules or guidelines to signal success…only tradeoffs and compromises.
We could just as well drill down into the yings and yangs of recycling or conversion or off-shoring materials to an uncertain fate, but today’s issue of concern is sustainability.
Conversion and Recycling: Friends or foes?
This is a question many have asked, particularly over the past decade as the concern for energy resources again reared its ugly head. Given the continuing opposition to energy-from-waste practices by those claiming to speak on behalf of the “environmental community,” those favoring the development of alternative practices to accompany recycling efforts have looked at a variety of waste conversion technologies (CTs) to carry them toward the goal of greater diversion rates. The effort has been laborious, painful, and fraught with failure on both the technological and political side, but in the past year progress is being made on both fronts.
After decades marked by inadequately funded full-scale operating programs, a number of CTs have begun to show commercialization promise. At the same time the political climate has changed with the emerging recognition that markets have matured thanks to the diligence of those involved in the success of recycling programs. The largest boost, however, has come from the marketplace, where fuel prices have risen to reflect the realities of international politics and the realities of supply-and-demand driven by the emergence of a truly global economy. With the cost of feedstock more than covered by typical tip fees, appearance of governmental incentives to reduce dependence on foreign resources, an improving price-competitive situation, the ability to preserve landfill airspace at the outset, and the opportunity to drive diversion into the upper third of the wastestream renders opposition to CTs an increasingly untenable political position.
Carbon, Productivity, and Efficiency
There’s an argument against energy from waste that says that by prohibiting it, there will be less energy for us to use. I don’t buy it, since energy, productivity, and population are inextricably linked, and, therefore, we’re going to employ the energy it takes to achieve the productivity necessary to maintain whatever population or population growth rate we’re hoping to sustain.
We in the waste industry are not in business to decide how much population the planet can hold or how much industry should be allowed to provide for it. We’re not in a position to affect the productivity or the efficient use of resources on the front end of the materials equation. What we can and must do, however, is become as efficient and productive in the management of materials on our side of that equation by subjecting all of our diversion practices to critical and honest scrutiny. If we do so, it will lead us to the balance point between recycling and conversion.