By John E. Weare, Keep Alliance Beautiful
Keep Alliance Beautiful accepts recycling at 107 ½ Cheyenne Avenue. The City of Alliance accepts trash at 1441 East Kansas Street. More than a few people would say it is all garbage.
As spring settles in and the grass, leaves and flowers clash with local litter, I keep thinking of the man who wrote the books on garbage. Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Garbology”, spoke at the Keep America Beautiful summit in New Orleans earlier this year. His session, entitled “Seeing What We Leave Behind”, was an encouraging view of several environmental successes by individuals and communities throughout America. I bought Hume’s latest book a couple days later at the table outside the ballroom where he spoke, eager to read the complete stories. I have only cracked open his latest – “Total Garbage: How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World”, written 12 years after “Garbology” – yet it is already clear that the “world and world of waste has changed. The entire recycling picture has changed” as Humes told Keep America Beautiful CEO and President Jenny Lawson.
Comparing the author’s conversation on stage to his book, both grab your attention. In person he reminded the audience that waste goes beyond what we throw away, mentioning a list. The prologue in “Total Garbage” links your stomach and billfold. Specifically data from the World Wildlife Fund and Australia's University of Newcastle which estimates Americans have an average daily intake of 285 bits of plastic or between five grams of plastic a week or five grams of plastic a year – the weight of a credit card. Add that to the dirt we ingest, 36.5 grams a year for Americans age 1-20 according to the EPA and perhaps the odd bug or two while running or cycling. The thing is plastics don’t occur naturally.
America is the most wasteful nation on the planet, Humes emphasized. That’s a fact few would dispute. “It’s about doing something about our waste and succeeding,” he added while introducing Ridwell, a social impact company (a term that was new to me). Its origin story starts with a kid who took a bag of old batteries out of the drawer and asked his dad what they could do with them. They made it a weekly project to recycle things that weren’t getting done in Seattle. Today, Ridwell is in eight cities, including Denver, running on a subscription model.
In spite of individual successes, Lawson asked, “How do we get more systemic solutions?” Humes replied, “My argument is replace wasteful options with more frugal ones.” He mentioned viable options that hands down are more energy efficient such as electric (90 percent) versus internal combustion vehicles (20 percent) and electric (specifically when powering magnetic field-based induction) versus cooking with natural gas.
Entire communities have transformed to “greener” options. Humes lauded Morris, a town of 5,000 in Minnesota. “They do things like making ammonia with renewable energy. It’s incredibly carbon-intensive to make...They don’t have to get it by train anymore, cost is much lower.
Also, in solar, buses are all electric. . . . There are places where confronting wasteful choices are prospering, in Red and Blue states.” He later mentioned Peach Tree, Georgia, which has more than 100 miles of narrow gauge roads for golf carts. “People are catching up with friends while driving,” he said, of the slower pace.
Wasteful choices by no means translates into only blaming the consumer. Humes discussed the history of Extended Producer Responsibility and how history shows the shift from durable reusable products to “convenient” one-use products.
As I finish the book I expect to align a typically optimistic point of view with the author’s. Until then another tidbit from the prologue is something I’ll go back to. Consider these new 8 Rs – Rethink, Repower, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle and Rot. I guess when it comes to Earth-saving alliteration R is where it’s at.