Solid Waste Recovery Since “The Summer of Love”

I didn’t make it to 1967’s “Summer of Love.”  I was a little more than 700 miles east of the “Haight” that summer following my first year of college working on the back of a county garbage truck, trying my best to pick up and empty cans like the one shown in the image in this blog without dismounting or the truck stopping.

Forty-five years later, it seems that I’m still in the solid waste business, as I try to juggle various items that remain ineligible for curbside pickup, such as batteries, paint and plastic bags. My options are to either drop them off to retailers who recycle them or take them myself to various collection points when pickups are scheduled 3 to 4 times each year.

Since distributing 95 lb. roll-out recycling carts to each household a few years ago, Durham, NC, where I live, has nearly tripled its City recycling rate which is now 360% higher than the worldwide average for urban areas and more than 260% above the national average.

My friends among the 11,000 households in unincorporated portions of Durham, 80% of which also have curbside recycling contracted for by the County, were eager to trade in their old 18 lb. carry-out-bin versions this year when they learned the big roll-out carts were included in the Durham County strategic plan only to learn the larger carts were nixed by management at the last minute.

Administrators are now working feverishly to find ways to get the big roll-out carts back into the next budget so they can meet the pent-up demand and triple the recycling rate in that part of the county, as well as realize the savings that will result from diverting an additional 652 tons of recyclables away from landfills each year, which probably didn’t figure into the decision to cut them out of the budget this year.

Next month, November 15th is America Recycles Day and as a single-person household I’ve been conducting a personal assessment of how much recyclable plastic wrap I generate.  I’m talking about the wrappers for dry cleaning, shopping bags, shipping bubbles etc.

My curiosity was peaked several months ago when I noticed that Regency/White Star Dry Cleaners and retailers such as Target now offer to recycle this type of plastic, probably in part because it is not yet eligible for curbside recycling in Durham.

It turns out that every four days, I fill one of those very large carry-out bags used by places such as Target and Bed Bath and Beyond with recyclable plastic wrap, far more than the amount of trash I generate each week.

Years ago I realized that I was segregating batteries and handheld electronics from the trash but never seemed to remember to take them to quarterly collection events sponsored by the City.

So I use a postage paid iRecycle Kit from Battery Solutions.  I get the one that holds 12 lbs. and it lasts me a year.  Businesses use trash-can- size versions and some facilities such as American Tobacco Complex, in downtown Durham, have the sleeve of the container branded for their facility.

One might wonder why I spend $34.95 to recycle 12 lbs. of batteries each year.  One reason is that it is convenient.  A more important reason is that I assumed this expense when I purchased devises that require batteries with the understanding that the manufacturer and retailer are neglecting to incorporate this cost in the price to me or the eventual cost to the environment.

In a truly effective free market, the cost of disposing of the batteries would have been incorporated into the cost I paid for the device; but in our current marketplace, these costs are passed on as externalities to consumers and ultimately taxpayers.

This is the justification behind the market-oriented, beverage container deposits that began to emerge in many states in the early 1970s about the time I graduated from college.

The companies that bottle and retailers that sell the beverages whined that the deposit requirement would lower sales and disrupt the free market while avoiding mention that the market neglected to incorporate the costs the containers ring up on society.

Those that complained hoped that consumers wouldn’t realize they were paying anyway in the form of taxes to fund litter clean up, solid waste removal and landfills.

Studies conducted in the decades that followed revealed that the impact on sales was nil but the deposit laws reduced the volume of beverage container litter between 79% and 83% and the overall amount of solid waste by 8%.  The deposit laws also spawned the innovation of reverse vending machines such as those I saw on a recent cross-country trip, manufactured by Tomra.  Click here to see how it works.

While the lobbyists for manufacturers and retailers for beverages still resisted taking responsibility, much as they are doing today with limitations on portion sizes to curb obesity, the beverage container deposit laws turned these businesses into major advocates for curbside recycling which has expanded more than 500% nationwide from just 6.6% participation in 1970.

We all need to become more aware, especially those who are so opposed to taxes, that the size of government is driven in part by the failure of the private sector to account for the full cost of the goods and services it produces as well as our failure as consumers to accept accountability for what we purchase.

Now about those aircraft carriers being used free of charge to keep shipping lanes open?

The Market Recovery Dilemma of Trash

What I am about to write, reminds me of something a friend whispered in my ear many years ago during a public meeting here in Durham, where I live, as the then-Mayor of another city took a personal “cheap shot” at me:

“Some people seem to think there is only room for one person at a time to stand on principle.”

Those of us who believe in the free market, as I do, and this usually includes other moderates, liberals and conservatives, but especially anyone who also denigrates government, must admit that as miraculous as the market is, it fails to account for many costs that are passed on to the public at large.

In fact, if the market did absorb what economists call externalities, we’d pay even less in taxes than we currently do, but we’d also pay much more for products and services and would most likely reap less in stock dividends.

Consider all that stuff we buy.  In fact, lets just take the 3% to 5% of waste created by that stuff, the portion that makes it into the world’s municipal waste stream and put aside industrial and hazardous waste such as what an aluminum company dumped into Badin Lake here in North Carolina (image shown in this blog) or the asbestos tailings used as fill under residential homes in Libby, Montana. Just two diverse examples.

For those of us who live in urban areas in the United States “that stuff” generates 4.43 pounds of municipal solid waste per person per year, according to data collected by the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s a full ton every 15 months.

That’s also 65% more per person than in 1960 when I made the seventh grade football practice squad for the famed Green Acres JH Cubs and 49% more than when I worked as a summer replacement on the back of a garbage truck one summer before college.  It is also 36% more than when I graduated from college in the early 1970s, but it is 3% less that when I moved to Durham in mid-1989 and 6% less than the fist year of this millennium.

According to Worldwatch Institute, a quarter of the world’s urban solid waste is now being “diverted into recycling, composting or digestion.”  In the US, recycling reached 34.1% in 2010, up more than 500% over 1960 and up 200% since the time I moved to Durham at the end of the 1980s.  Interestingly and coincidentally, 34% is about the same amount of Americans who recycle.

Today in the US, local governments are rerouting 85.1 million tons of trash back into the marketplace through recycling, including 96.2% of auto batteries, 71.6% of newspapers, 67% of steel cans, 57.5% of yard trimmings, 49.6% of aluminum beer and soda cans, 35.5% of tires, 33.4% of glass containers, 29.2% of plastic bottles.

This is a remarkable transformation, but in the US we still discard 54.2% of urban waste into landfills, many times more per capita than some other western, developed countries and we recycle far less than countries such as Switzerland.

Recycling is not only hampered by those who do not yet connect the dots.  It is hampered by the intermittent reliability of that same free market to accept back the waste it failed to account for in the beginning.

To learn more about the worldwide solid waste dilemma, click here for a report by the World Bank but remember that these stats are metric.

Compensating For The Cutting Of A Tree

The head of the association for billboard companies ended the extended remarks he was allowed to make at the end of a recent hearing held in Asheville NC by castigating trees as the cause of global warming.

Ironically, according to myriad facts found in a new book by Jim Robbins, trees sequester half of all terrestrial stores of carbon, “more than any other single source on land” and only release it into the atmosphere if they die or are poisoned or clear-cut by billboard companies, such as is newly permitted here in North Carolina.

I’m sure glad that some of the stupid things I may have said over the years aren’t captured in tapes of public hearings.  Some readers probably think I get to put them in this blog instead (smile.)

I blogged recently that trees could be better protected if it were deemed more expensive to cut them down based both on their value and the harm brought to others than by prohibiting the same practice, a belief shaped during my reading of a book by economist Robert H. Frank during my recently completed cross-country road trip.

Some people may have mistaken this comment to mean that I was only advocating taxation when, in fact I was pointing to the fact that the two legislators who pushed through the legislation granting clear-cutting to billboard companies (one now indicted for other reasons) not only stripped out local protections at the last minute, despite reassurances during deliberations but erased the fiscal note detailing the tens of millions of dollars in destruction of public property enabled under the legislation long with elimination of any requirement to pay for this public property or to replant.

Billboard companies may represent one of the most egregious examples of unwarranted and destructive tree-cutting but they are hardly the only culprits, most of whom do it in violation of local ordinances and other laws and then claim “inadvertence” risking only a slap on the wrist or the requirement to replant trees that are worth a pittance compared to the value of the trees that were cut.

According to Robbins’ book, “over a fifty-year lifetime, a tree provides $162,000 in ecosystem services, including $62,000 in air pollution control and $31,250 in soil erosion.”  This doesn’t factor in other benefits benefits from trees such as atmospheric cooling, facilitation of rainfall, protection from radiation, reduction in crime including domestic abuse or increases to property values.

Needless tree-cutting could be dramatically curbed by placing an assessment in the amount of the true value of the trees or, in the case of a development, a reinvestment equal to the value of the trees cut back into reforestation or afforestation (places where they have not recently grown) either at the same location or very nearby.

A decade ago, The Streets at Southpoint in Durham NC, where I live, transplanted four huge trees at a cost of $10,000 each to give the then-new and now-acclaimed retail complex added value and aesthetics.  Three have survived.

Coupled with inflation, that value provides a gauge for compensatory value of reforestation or afforestation equal to the value of the trees that are eliminated either through either illegal-cutting or for development.

Here is a recent example:  After North Carolina’s new legislation a billboard company rushed under temporary regulatory rules to clear cut three dozen or so large trees along Erwin Creek in Charlotte NC where it runs along I 77.  It even reportedly had to pay $1,700 to chop down one tree because it was particularly large, probably more than 50 inches in diameter.

The cutting has greatly exacerbated soil erosion along the creek and threatens businesses and homeowners because the trees aren't there to capture and slow run off.  The billboard pays less than a hundred dollars in property taxes based only on the value of construction materials not the value charged to advertisers.

Obviously, the State should have listened to Charlotte officials and declined the permit in the first place.  The billboard company has been asked to do some replanting and I can only imagine what size those trees will be.

Truly conservative restitution using the value Robbins noted should be over $5 million.  But using just the value related to curbing soil erosion control, it should be at a minimum $1.1 million.

Only when the cost of cutting trees, legally or illegally, requires compensating the public for the detriment it brings to others will tree-cutting be inhibited and the free market be fully able to work its magic.

Infographic - Skyscraper Externalities

Part of what I've always liked about Durham, North Carolina is that while it is a midsize city and the core city for a midsized metro area, it has a small town, Main Street feel.  It also seems that too many cities once they go skyscraper become a bit too pretentious or turn into bullies.

But I’ve repeatedly kept coming back to the infographic shown below since first seeing it in my November 2011, issue of Wired Magazine.  It is a great illustration of the externalities, both positive and negative, that result from land-use decisions.

Click on the image for larger view in on this link for the original article.

 

The Role of Regulations in the Free Marketplace!

I smiled to myself when I heard a so-called political Independent and small business owner comment on a national television newscast that he just wanted government out of ours lives.  I think he was nervous and just parroted an empty political slogan.  More disappointing still was that the interviewer didn't probe.  Most newscasters doesn’t these days.

In regular surveys to determine why businesses lay off workers, only 13% cite regulations as a major factor. The percentage has not increased in the past few years, according to a column last month by conservative David Brooks.  He notes that only 0.18 percent of the mass layoffs last year were attributable to regulations.

Even free-market zealots admit that many businesses, thanks in part to strong lobbies, do not charge the true price for their products.  For example, long-haul trucking does not pay the true cost of the public highways they chew up.  Utility and cable companies claim it is too expensive to bury power lines, but they don't factor into their expenses the cost to the public of things like hacking street trees to death.  Outdoor billboard companies, whose only value is parasitic on public roadsides, chop down publicly owned trees (or illegally poison them) without paying the true value or replanting and never shoulder the cost of the scenic easements they destroy.

Regulations, if done properly and evenly enforced, are merely a means of adding what economists call corrective pricing or market value to compensate for spillover effects like these which are called externalities.  Coal-fired power plants don't pay the true cost they levy on the public because conservatives have blocked putting a price on carbon.  Automobile companies became conscious about safety and fuel efficiency because regulations made them realize that by failing to do so they were levying a huge spillover cost on the public.

The gentleman I noted at the beginning of this blog wanted government out of his life but I assume that didn't mean he wanted the air he and his customers and his grandchildren breathe or the water they drink or the food they eat to be unsafe.  I assume he didn't want to go without roads or streets or public safety or consumer protection from loan sharks.

Ultraconservatives argue that the votes individual consumers make in the free marketplace are a better way to make decisions about these things than might be made by representative democracies prone to winner-take-all decisions largely controlled now by special interests.

But the reason we have a mixed economy is that few of us want to wait for good roads, national defense, public safety, consumer and environmental protection and good public health until businesses react to the votes consumers make with their purchases.  And few of us are naïve enough to believe that we still wouldn't be subject bottom feeders.

As Brooks wrote in his column, as a reminder to other conservatives, especially those prone to hyperbole:

“There are two large lessons here. First, Republican candidates can say they will deregulate and, in some areas, that would be a good thing. But it will not produce a short-term economic rebound because regulations are not a big factor in our short-term problems.

Second, it is easy to be cynical about politics and to say that Washington is a polarized cesspool. It’s true that the interest groups and the fund-raisers make every disagreement seem like a life-or-death struggle. But, in reality, most people in government are trying to find a balance between difficult trade-offs. Whether it’s antiterrorism policy or regulatory policy, most substantive disagreements are within the 40 yard lines.”

And as far as fearing the person Newt Gingrich loves to mischaracterize as a socialist and the most dangerous President ever?

Conservative Brooks points out in his column that “Nineteen-eighty-eight, under Ronald Reagan, 1992, under George H.W. Bush and 2008, under George W. Bush, were monster years for new regulations. In his first years, Obama has not increased regulatory costs more than Reagan and the Bushes did in their final years.”