Beach garbage recycled as vacuum cleaners
Company hopes to stimulate discussion of plastic pollution

By AUDREY McAVOY / AP

HONOLULU — There’s a story behind the blue, white and green plastic covering the surface of the Pacific Ocean vacuum cleaner. They’re tiny bits of plastic collected from one of Hawaii’s dirtiest beaches, Kahuku, where waves dump trash from the Pacific all day long.

The machine made by Electrolux AB is fully functional and can suck up dirt from a rug like any other vacuum. But the company said it wants the device to serve as an object that provokes a conversation about the large volumes of plastic trash that are polluting the world’s oceans.

The Stockholm-based company has also made four other vacuums, each from plastic trash collected in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, North and Baltic seas. None of the five are for commercial sale.

Cecilia Nord, vice president for sustainability and environmental affairs at Electrolux’s floor care and small appliances division, said many groups are doing their best to clean the ocean and beaches of plastic.

But the problem keeps growing because people continue to consume more plastic without recycling it afterward, she said.

“We — as a big manufacturer with a global reach — can start a debate and hopefully can contribute to addressing the root cause,” Nord said.

Electrolux received its Pacific Ocean plastic from a Hawaii-based volunteer group that cleans up Kahuku beach once a week. The remote shoreline is one of Oahu’s dirtiest, in part because current flows tend to deposit trash on that side of the island.

“We can be there on any day and see it coming in on each wave,” said Suzanne Frazer, president and co-founder of Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii.

Garbage also quickly accumulates at Kahuku because the beach is behind two private properties and can’t be easily visited by beachgoers who pick up trash on Hawaii’s more populated shorelines every day.

Plastic breaks down into smaller pieces slowly over time but doesn’t ever completely disappear. In the ocean, currents carry the small bits to areas where massive gyres of plastic garbage have formed.

One spot between Hawaii and California the size of Texas has been dubbed the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” Researchers recently found a similar plastic trash gyre in the Atlantic between Bermuda and Portugal’s Azores islands.

Seabirds eat the plastic bits — particularly ones that are a bright red or orange — thinking they’re squid, fish eggs or other food.

Some Laysan albatross, a seabird that nests at Midway atoll northwest of the main Hawaiian islands, die of starvation with their stomachs full of plastic.

Electrolux’s Pacific vacuum has only a few red or orange pieces because marine animals have eaten most of the brightly colored plastic trash pieces before they wash ashore.

Carey Morishige, outreach coordinator for the marine debris program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said people should use less plastic and reuse and recycle what they do use.

“If it’s still going in, we’re still going to have to clean it up,” Morishige said. “The ultimate solution is going to be in stopping this stuff from getting into the ocean in the first place.”

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Whopper of a wind farm opens off Britain
World’s largest offshore project has 100 turbines — so far

LONDON — The world’s largest offshore wind farm had its grand opening Thursday — and its location on the estuary of the Thames River makes it a showcase for Britain’s push to move beyond fossil fuels.

So far, 100 wind turbines have been planted in waters up to 80 feet deep across the estuary in southern England. The idea is to produce enough electricity, 300 megawatts, to power the equivalent of 200,000 homes.

Each turbine is nearly as tall as a 40-story building and the blades are at least 65 feet above the water for clearance with vessels. No turbine is closer than 1,600 feet to another and the entire “farm” covers an area of 22 square miles.

Up to 341 turbines will be installed over the next four years.

With Thursday’s opening, which tops a 91-turbine farm off Denmark, Britain now has more offshore wind capacity than the rest of the world combined.

“We are in a unique position to become a world leader in this industry,” British Energy and Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne said in a statement before he attended the grand opening. “We are an island nation and I firmly believe we should be harnessing our wind, wave and tidal resources to the maximum.”

Britain now gets three percent of its electricity from renewables but aims to get 15 percent by 2020. As part of that, the government this year awarded licenses to wind farm developers in a program that could deliver up to 32 gigawatts of generation capacity and require investment of more than $117 billion.

Critics of the $1.4 billion wind farm include some nearby residents who object to the sight of the giant towers, some visible from shore. The farm starts about seven miles from shore.

Environmental groups tend to back wind power as long as projects are not in areas of significant bird flight paths.

The new wind farm met that standard. It’s an “important stride forward,” said Craig Bennett of the British chapter of Friends of the Earth.

But the group also wants Britain to guarantee funding of at least $3 billion a year for the recently created and government-funded Green Investment Bank, which aims to boost private-sector spending on low-carbon technology.

“I know that there is still more to do to bring forward the large sums of investment we want to see in low-carbon energy in the U.K.,” Huhne said, “and we as government are committed to playing our part.”

One embarrassment to the government is that only 20 percent of the investment in the new wind farm has gone to British firms. The farm is owned and operated by Swedish energy company Vattenfall, and the largest chunk of expenditure has been to Denmark’s Vestas for the wind turbines.

Global interest
The promised vast expansion of Britain’s offshore wind resources is proving to be a powerful lure for companies not normally associated with renewables but keen to generate eco-friendly and reliable sources of revenue.

Engineers, consultants and oil rig makers around the world are setting up new divisions and partnerships in order to get a foothold in the market, which offers secure returns to those building and running the turbines.

“It’s attractive for a lot of companies that are looking for contracts,” said Ian Simm, chief executive of green fund firm Impax Asset Management, which has holdings in companies such as Vestas.

“The fundamental point that makes it attractive is scale and government commitment, and the fact that industrial companies can learn the facts of success in one offshore environment and be able to transfer the majority, if not all, of those skills to other countries,” he said.

However, clearer statements from the government on renewables incentives are still needed to support wind farm developers and really kick-start the market, according to Sarwjit Sambhi, managing director of power generation at Centrica, which has won the rights to develop up to 4.2 gigawatts of offshore windpower in the Irish Sea.

“There is a general theme across this in that we haven’t passed the tipping point yet where the industry is confident enough that there is a long-term pipeline of projects.”

Britain’s potential
The Offshore Valuation Group, made up of government and industry organizations, estimates if Britain were to develop just 29 percent of its potential offshore resource, this could deliver 169 gigawatts of capacity by 2050 and turn Britain into a net exporter of electricity.

This would involve installing 7.2 gigawatts a year — roughly equivalent to 1,000 7.5 megawatt turbines — with fixed offshore wind accounting for 5.4 gigawatts of the average annual build rate needed.

The supply chain needed for this would have annual revenues of nearly $100 billion in 2050 and employ around 145,000 people directly, according to the Offshore Valuation report.

As a result shipbuilders and companies that specialize in making oil rigs are also entering the wind market.

SeaEnergy Executive Chairman Steve Remp, who has worked in the offshore oil and gas market for 30 years, expects the market for equipment vessels to take off at the beginning of 2012.

“I foresee a sizeable industry evolving that calls on the engineering expertise in working offshore in deep water,” he said.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Scientist: ‘Human-induced global warming’ killing corals

Coral reefs are dying around the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia at rates that may be the worst ever recorded, scientists said this week.

Death rates as high as 80 percent have been recorded for some species, according to the study performed by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

“It is certainly the worst coral die-off we have seen since 1998. It may prove to be the worst such event known to science,” said Andrew Baird, a principal research fellow for James Cook University in Australia.

The coral bleaching extends from the Seychelles in the middle of the Indian Ocean to the Philippines in Southeast Asia and encompasses much of the Coral Triangle, an area scientists refer to as the “Amazon rainforest of the seas” or the most diverse marine ecosystem on Earth.

A mass of abnormally hot water which moved into the Indian Ocean several months ago is behind the bleaching, according to the ARC report. The hot water caused the corals to shed microscopic algae which help nourish them. The algae also give color to the corals, so when the algae are gone, the corals starve and appear white or bleached.

Dive operators reported water temperatures were 4 degrees Centigrade higher than average during the die-off, according to the ARC report.

The scientists said coral coverage in the affected areas could drop from 50 percent to 10 percent, hurting fishing and tourist industries over the long term as dead reefs support less marine life than live ones. And with that loss of diversity, they attract fewer fishermen and fewer divers.

“While it may take up to two years for some fish species to be affected by the loss of coral habitat, fisheries yields will decline and this combined with a drop in the number of scuba divers visiting could have major long-term effects on the local economy,” Baird said in a statement.

Baird blamed “human-induced global warming” for the decline of the corals and said action must be taken to reduce carbon emissions that help retain heat in the atmosphere.

“This is not just about warmer temperatures: it is also threatening the livelihoods of tens of millions of people and potentially the stability of our region,” Baird said in a statement.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

I know it’s not Thursday but remember what I said last week…..
Blogging will be sporadic and out of normal order for the rest of the year!

‘Ecological catastrophe’: Toxic sludge kills 3
State of emergency declared after red wave sweeps through Hungarian towns

BUDAPEST — The Hungarian government declared a state of emergency on Tuesday after a toxic sludge spill killed at least three people, news agency MTI reported.

The state of emergency affected Veszprem, Gyor-Moson-Sopron and Vas counties. Six people were missing on Tuesday and 120 injured in what officials said was an ecological disaster.

The contaminated mud poured through Kolontar and two other villages on Monday after bursting out of an open containment pond at the nearby Ajkai Timfoldgyar Zrt plant, owned by MAL Zrt.

The sludge, a waste product in aluminum production, contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested. Many of the injured sustained burns as the sludge seeped through their clothes. Two of the injured were in life threatening condition. An elderly woman, a young man and a 3-year-old child were killed in the flooding.

The chemical burns caused by the sludge could take days to reveal themselves and what may seem like superficial injuries could later cause damage to deeper tissue, Peter Jakabos, a doctor on duty at a hospital in Gyor where several of the injured were taken, said on state television.

Several hundred tons of plaster were being poured into the Marcal river to bind the toxic sludge and prevent it from flowing on, the National Disaster Management Directorate said.

So far, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge has leaked from the reservoir and affected an estimated area of 15.4 square miles, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes told MTI.

Illes said the incident was an “ecological catastrophe” and it was feared that the sludge could reach the Raba and Danube rivers.

Seven towns, including Kolontal, Devecser and Somlovasarhely, were affected near the Ajkai Timfoldgyar plant in the town of Ajka, 100 miles southwest of Budapest, the capital.

‘Burned him to the bone’
On Tuesday morning, the sludge in Tunde Erdelyi’s house in Devecser was still five feet high and rescue workers used an ax to cut through her living room door to let the red liquid flow out.

“When I heard the rumble of the flood, all the time I had was to jump out the window and run to higher ground,” said a tearful Erdelyi, still shocked by the events but grateful that she had been able to save a family rabbit and that her cat was found wet and shivering in the attic.

Robert Kis, Erdelyi’s husband, said his uncle had been taken to Budapest, the capital, by helicopter after the sludge “burned him to the bone.”

The flood overturned Erdelyi’s car and pushed it some 30 yards to the back of the garden while her husband’s van was lifted on to a fence.

“We still have some copper in the garage that we could sell to make a living for a while,” Kis said as he attempted to appraise the damage to his house and belongings. Erdelyi, a seamstress, was hoping the flood has spared the shop in town where she worked, her family’s main source of income.

The disaster agency said 390 residents had to be temporarily relocated and 110 were rescued from the flooded towns, where firefighters and soldiers were carrying out cleanup tasks.

Local environmentalists said that for years they had been calling the government’s attention to the risks of red sludge, which in a 2003 report they estimated at 30 million tons.

“Accumulated during decades … red sludge is, by volume, the largest amount of toxic waste in Hungary,” the Clear Air Action Group said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

First National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day Sept. 25

Over-prescribed and under-consumed, prescription drugs are generating both environmental and law enforcement problems. A national take-back day September 25 is intended to heighten awareness of this important issue.

The growing national volume of unused prescription drugs is prompting the nation’s first drug take-back day September 25. When flushed down toilets — the usual management choice for many health care facilities and households — the drugs can pollute drinking water and may affect fish and other aquatic life. But national drug policies and regulations have thwarted many community take-back efforts.

The U.S. EPA and Fish and Wildlife Service oppose the flushing of prescription medication based on studies showing many of the nation’s waters are contaminated by personal care products, including prescription drugs. Endocrine disruptors in some medicines have been associated with altering the sex characteristics of fish. But both the Food and Drug Administration and the Office of National Drug Control Policy recommend flushing some drugs.

“Odds are that many of us have half empty bottles of medicine lying around our houses. Some of us may have thought we were doing the right thing by flushing them down the toilet, or throwing them away with our trash. But these disposal methods can have a damaging effect on our environment,” said U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging Chairman Herb Kohl (D-WI), who is calling for a new federal guideline on prescription drug disposal, at a July 1 Congressional hearing.

Tough Drug Enforcement Administration guidelines require law enforcement personnel be present at take-back events and drop-off facilities. The returned drugs are frequently incinerated at high temperatures.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar has introduced a proposed Secure and Responsible Drug Disposal Act that would facilitate unused drug take back programs. Although primarily intended to keep potent drugs like Vicodin out of the hands of young people, the measure would also have environmental benefits.

Take-back programs are popular with many communities. Almost 180 pounds of pills have been dropped off at the Longview, Washington Police Department disposal site since the program began last September. In Chisago County, Minnesota, the sheriff’s office collects an average of five pounds of medicines every day.

More information on plans for the drug take-back event, supported by the National Association of Attorneys General, is here.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Companies, hospitals move away from toxic material
By David S. Martin, CNN Senior Medical Producer

(CNN) — Worried about toxic waste and chemical exposure, more and more companies and hospitals are moving away from polyvinyl chloride.

PVC is used in everything from home siding, pipes and flooring to school supplies, car interiors and packaging, electrical cords and medical tubing. But making or burning PVC waste produces dioxins, cancer-causing chemicals that are among the most toxic substances known.

“Our concerns about the ways in which PVC can be disposed of, burned for example … caused us to begin eliminating PVC from our products,” Hewlett-Packard’s Tony Prophet said. The computer giant launched its first PVC-free notebook computer last year.

Microsoft, Honda, Wal-Mart, Target and Nike are among other large corporations moving away from polyvinyl chloride, said Mike Schade, the PVC campaign coordinator for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice.

“There’s been a major market shift away from PVC in just about every major sector of the economy,” Schade said.

Allen Blakey of the Vinyl Institute, an industry trade group, said the move to other plastics is misguided.

“Some of them may feel they can find a better material than PVC. What we find is, they often don’t go very far before coming back and finding PVC was the best material after all,” Blakey said.

More than 12 billion pounds of PVC are produced in the United States annually, according to Blakey.

The Center for Health, Environment and Justice and other environmental groups are trying to persuade companies to find alternatives to PVC because of dioxins.

Dioxins are a family of chemicals now thought to be toxic at parts per trillion, which is less than a single drop in a backyard pool.

The risks of dioxin became known after Vietnam, where dioxin was an unwanted impurity in the chemical defoliant known as Agent Orange. In the decades after the war, soldiers who handled Agent Orange were more likely to develop a range of cancers and, possibly, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Blakey of the Vinyl Institute said dioxin emissions in PVC production are way down.

“You know, dioxin is actually a great success story. Dioxin emissions in this country have gone down since the ’60s. They’re at very low levels. Even since the late ’80s, they’re down 90 percent or so,” Blakey said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began requiring companies to report dioxin emissions only in 2000. Since then, EPA figures show dioxin emissions have declined 66 percent, from 218 pounds to 74 pounds in 2008, the most recent figures available.

Worries about the health effects of phthalates, a chemical additive that makes PVC flexible, prompted Kaiser Permanente hospitals to begin working with suppliers to find alternatives more than 10 years ago, said Kathy Gerwig, senior vice president and environmental stewardship officer.

“The first place we looked to get rid of PVC was in the neonatal unit. And that’s because PVC medical products often contain a plasticizer called DEHP, and that can disrupt hormones,” Gerwig said.

DEHP is in the phthalate family. Some research has found that phthalates mimic the hormone estrogen and could disrupt reproductive development and cause other health problems.

A study of 54 newborns in neonatal intensive care units found a connection between the use of flexible tubing and other medical products containing phthalates and exposure to DEHP. The study did not show that the exposure caused any ill health effects.

Last year, the United States banned or restricted the sale of children toys and children’s products containing DEHP and five other phthalates.

On its website, the American Chemistry Council says phthalates “have a long history of safe use.”

But Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest nonprofit health plan with 35 medical facility and more than 14,000 doctors, has replaced phthalate-containing PVC in intravenous tubing, catheters and other medical equipment.

The hospital has also replaced PVC in flooring, baseboards, wall guards — even the plastic backing on carpets.

“Typically, the products that we’ve replaced, it does not cost more. We found that the majority are cost-neutral. In many cases, they cost less,” Gerwig said.

Despite the move away from polyvinyl chloride, Schade said, there’s still plenty of vinyl waste. About 500 million to 600 million pounds of PVC are burned each year, he said.

Schade said the Center for Health, Environment and Justice is focused on getting schools to stop using PVC in construction.

“Phthalates are banned in toys, but phthalates are widespread in schools,” Schade said.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Las Vegas Bars Recycle Glass Bottles Into Building Material
by Trey Granger

Have you ever ordered a drink at a bar or restaurant and wondered what happened to the bottle it came in?

On the Las Vegas Strip, these bottles may end up as the facade for buildings when mixed with recycled cement, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The material is known as Green Stone, and currently 200,000 pounds of it are being applied to the headquarters of Realm of Design, which manufactures Green Stone.

The other key players are Luxor and Mandalay Bay, which provide glass bottles from their bars and restaurants, and Evergreen Recycling, which collects and transports the glass.

While Green Stone actually costs more to manufacture than raw building materials, it provides a reuse for glass bottles that would otherwise need to be landfilled or shipped to recycling centers in other states.

According to the Review-Journal, Evergreen Recycling hopes that finding a local demand for the material would increase the likelihood that a glass processing plant is built in the area.

One of the other advantages of this process is that the glass bottles are essentially downcycled into sand, so there’s not as much of a concern about the condition of the glass. While glass bottles can be recycled into new bottles in about a month, this process requires color separation and removal of any broken pieces, since you can’t make new clear glass bottles with brown or green glass. That places more responsibility on recyclers and collectors of the material.

It’s estimated that only 25 percent of glass is recycled in the U.S., and of that material 60 percent is downcycled instead of recycled into new glass bottles. A main obstacle toward increasing the amount of recycled glass is the availability of processing plants that will purchase the material from recycling programs.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

America’s Dirty Beaches

Tar balls? A sheen of crude? Oil mousse? Amateur hour. The real villains of America’s beaches are not the scattered and dissipating messes from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but the nationwide and relentless releases of disease-causing pathogens—human and animal feces—that reach the shorelines from storm runoff and sewage overflows. In its 20th annual report on the water quality at America’s beaches, the Natural Resources Defense Council finds that “from stomach-turning pathogens to dangerous oil slicks, America’s beaches continue to suffer from pollution that can make people sick, harm marine life and destroy coastal economies,” said the NRDC’s David Beckman.

Before heading to a beach this weekend—on the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Great Lakes—be sure to check how it fares on measures of bacteria in the water (which come from human and animal waste), on testing that water (some beaches take water samples more frequently than others), and on posting advisories so that people can decide that a day swimming in fecal matter isn’t quite the weekend outing they had in mind. The ratings of popular beaches, arranged by state, are here.

All the data come from government records from 3,000 beaches, including water samples and beach closings or advisories (the latter being issued when bacterial levels in the water are high enough to warn the public about but do not exceed state or federal limits). In 2009, there were 18,682 closing and advisory days. That compares with 2,239 such days in the gulf region from the BP gusher.

The full NRDC report, available here, also includes a five-star rating for 200 of the most popular beaches, based on water quality, monitoring frequency, and public notification of contamination. The best beaches in 2009 were in Minnesota (Lafayette Community Club Beach and Franklin Park at 13th Street on Park Point), New Hampshire (Hampton Beach State Park and Wallis Sands Beach at Wallis Road), California (Bolsa Chica State Beach, Huntington City Beach at the Beach Hut, Newport Beach, Salt Creek Beach at Dana Strands, and portions of Cardiff State Beach and Laguna Beach), and Alabama (Gulf Shores Public Beach). Unfortunately, Gulf Shores has now been closed for 53 days due to the BP spill.

The worst of the popular beaches were in Florida (Ben T. Davis North, Dixie Belle Beach, Monument Beach, Navarre Park, Quietwater Beach, Simmons Park and Treasure Island Beach), Maine (Old Orchard Beach, Long Sands Beach and Short Sands Beach), Mississippi (Courthouse Road Beach, Edgewater Beach and Front Beach), North Carolina (one section of Nags Head), New York (Hamlin Beach State Park, Orchard Beach, Robert Moses State Park Beach, and sections of Rockaway Beach and Coney Island), Rhode Island (Narragansett Town Beach), and South Carolina (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina State Park and Campground, Springmaid Beach and Surfside Beach).

With 7 percent of beachwater samples in violation of health standards for bacterial levels, there was no improvement from 2008 and 2007. The most contaminated beachwater is in the Great Lakes, where 13 percent of water samples violated health standards. The cleanest water is in the Southeast and the Delmarva Peninsula, but there is significant variation state-by-state: the most reported contamination in 2009 was in Louisiana (25 percent of samples exceeding acceptable levels of bacteria), Rhode Island (20 percent), and Illinois (16 percent). Beaches with the least contamination were in New Hampshire (1 percent of samples above allowable contamination levels), Delaware (2 percent), and Oregon (2 percent).

Good news: 2009 saw an 8 percent decrease in closing and advisory days at U.S. beaches (though most of the East Coast and the entire Gulf Coast experienced more closings and advisories). Bad news: much of that can be attributed to the fact that budget cuts have forced beaches in southern California to cut back on water-quality monitoring. What you don’t know about can’t hurt you?

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

For recyclers, one (complicated) word: Plastics
Reducing oil dependency through plastic recycling is not so easy
by Allison Linn

Just as America is addicted to oil, it’s positively hooked on plastic.

Americans rely on plastic made from crude oil and natural gas in virtually every aspect of our lives — from soda bottles to car parts to toys. And yet even as the Gulf Coast oil disaster is causing more Americans to rethink their dependency on petroleum, we’re doing a poor job of reusing the plastic we already have.

Only 7.1 percent of our plastic waste was recycled in 2008, according to the latest data from the Environmental Protection Agency.

By weight, that means that out of 30.05 million tons of plastic waste generated that year, nearly 28 million tons ended up in the trash heap. That’s the equivalent of 366,000 Boeing 737s, according to calculations by Waste Management.

The recycling rate for plastic goods is far lower than many other common household items, such as cardboard or aluminum, and it’s also significantly less than the overall waste recovery rate. In 2008, 33.2 percent of all waste generated was recycled or composted, according to the EPA.

Why are we so bad at recycling plastics?
Many Americans simply don’t have a convenient way do it. About 40 percent of the U.S. population has no access to curbside recycling programs, according to the EPA, and even among those with curbside recycling not all programs accept all types of plastics.

And the very qualities that make plastic so popular — it is light, durable and portable — also mean that it is often used on the go, where it is all too easy to just toss the items in the trash.

“The material’s there. It’s just not being routed into recycling. It’s being routed into landfill,” said Keefe Harrison, director of communications for the Association of Postconsumer Plastics Recyclers, a trade group.

The countless varieties of plastics out there also can cause complications for recyclers and confusion for consumers who want to recycle. Unlike cardboard or aluminum cans, which generally get lumped together for recycling purposes, plastic detergent jugs, water bottles and yogurt containers may need to be sorted and processed separately.

Many plastic items also contain paint, metal or other components that can be difficult to cost-effectively remove for recycling.

“We have to design plastics with recycling in mind,” said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, who has worked for years to get companies and government groups to step up plastic recycling efforts in order to reduce dependence on oil and natural gas.

Hope for the future
Despite these roadblocks, many in the industry say they are seeing a growing awareness of the economic and environmental value of recycling plastic.

“It’s becoming part of our culture,” said Carl Rush, a senior vice president for organic growth with the refuse hauler Waste Management, which is placing a major focus on plastic recycling as a way to expand its business. “As I tell folks around here, if you don’t believe this, just talk to your kids.”

Improvements have been slow so far. From 2000 to 2008, the recycling rate for plastic inched up from 5.8 percent to 7.1 percent, while the overall waste recycling and composting rate increased from 29 percent to 33.2 percent.

Meanwhile, many expect plastic use to increase. At Waste Management, executives say they have noticed significantly more plastic containers, and fewer glass ones, showing up in the waste stream.

Not all plastic recycled equally
Experts say there is a relatively robust market for recycled plastic resin made from things like soda bottles and detergent or milk jugs, typically numbered 1 and 2, which are recycled at a much higher rate than other plastic items. That type of recycled resin can be reborn as new plastic bottles, carpet fiber, fleece jackets and outdoor decking.

The far thornier problem is what to do with the type of plastics found in things such as medicine bottles, toys and butter tubs, which are typically numbered 3 through 7. These plastics can be more difficult to sort, and the relatively small volumes can makes it hard to compete in price against new plastic.

“There are so many different types, and so much of it really can’t be recovered because either volumes aren’t sufficient or it really doesn’t have a lot of value in terms of the marketplace,” said Rush, of Waste Management.

His company has been trying to encourage companies to focus more on the types of plastic used for soda bottles and jugs in the hope that coalescing around a smaller group of plastics will make the plastic recycling market more efficient.

Improving recycling operations
Meanwhile, some recycling haulers are working to make recycling easier for consumers. Instead of asking people to look at the number on a plastic item to determine whether or where to recycle it, many now offer guidance based on the item itself, such as bags or bottles. Others have moved to a “single-stream” model where consumers can lump all their recycling together and leave the sorting to the hauling company.

There are also moves to put plastic recycling drop boxes in more convenient locations, such as in sports arenas, and to expand the types of plastics drop-off locations will accept. For example, some grocery stores now will accept grocery, dry cleaning and newspaper bags in their bins.

Some consumer companies also have gotten more involved in plastic recycling in recent years. Beverage giant Coca-Cola has invested in bottle-to-bottle recycling facilities and recently won industry accolades for a recyclable bottle that is partly made from plant-based materials. Nestle, whose brands include Arrowhead and Poland Spring, recently introduced bottles made with 25 percent recycled plastic. Some smaller-scale manufacturers are also starting to recycle more of their own product for reuse.

Others are focused more heavily on reducing the amount of oil-based plastic. Hershkowitz, of the NRDC, said he is seeing big companies finding ways to use less plastic in each container, and also is starting to notice a bigger push toward plastics made out of something other than petroleum or natural gas, such as plants.

“The move on plastics is to get out of petroleum,” he said.

While such efforts help, he thinks consumer products companies should be required to help pay for the collection of the plastics they produce.

Bias toward new plastic
Despite the recycling industry’s efforts, it’s still difficult to compete against low cost and readily available new plastic resin, of which the U.S. is a major producer and a net exporter. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that 4.6 percent of total U.S. petroleum consumption, or 331 million barrels of liquid petroleum gases and natural gas liquids, was used to manufacture plastic resin in 2006, the latest data available.

“Many manufacturers still like using virgin,” said Jonathan Levy, director of state and local programs for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group that includes about 230 members who handle plastics.

In some cases, he said, recycled resin can be less appealing because it is discolored or not as clean as new resin. For example, he said it may work very well on a plastic part that is inside a car door, but a manufacturer may still choose to use virgin resin for a part the consumer will see.

Long-term view
Levy sees a similarity between the state of plastic recycling now and the state of rubber tire recycling 25 years ago, when piles of used tires were strewn throughout the country and there seemed little use for them. These days, he said, improvements in recycling technology have made it cost-effective to reuse a large chunk of those tires for everything from landscape mulch to rubberized asphalt. The recovery rate for rubber tires was 35.4 percent in 2008, up from 12.2 percent in 1990, according to the EPA.

“It is expanding and it is increasing, but I would think that we might have to take a long-term view on this,” Levy said of plastics recycling.

But Hershkowitz, of the NRDC, notes that plastic recycling may be more challenging than something like tires, because plastic bags, containers and toys can be both smaller and more ubiquitous.

He also notes that environmental advocates have been pushing major corporations to get more serious about plastic recycling for decades.

“They’ve had their 25 years,” he said.

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Garbage islands threaten Three Gorges Dam
Official: Trash is two feet deep, so compacted people can walk on it

BEIJING — Thousands of tons of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so thick people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.

Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that more than 3,000 tons of trash was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up.

“The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

The river is a crucial commercial artery for the upstream city of Chongqing and other areas in China’s less-developed western interior provinces.

Pictures showed a huge swathe of the waters by the dam crammed full of debris, with cranes brought in to fish out a tangled mess, including shoes, bottles, branches and Styrofoam.

‘Decaying’
Some more than half a million square feet had been covered by trash washed down since the start of the rainy season in July, the report said. The trash is around two feet deep, and in some parts so compacted people can walk on it, the Hubei Daily added.

“Such a large amount of debris could damage the propellers and bottoms of passing boats,” Chen said. “The decaying garbage could also harm the scenery and the water quality.”

The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydropower project, and was built partly to tame flooding along the Yangtze, which killed over 4,000 people in 1998 and countless more over the centuries.

Enormously expensive and disruptive, the dam has cost over 254 billion yuan ($37.5 billion) and forced the relocation of 1.3 million people to make way for the reservoir. Towns, fields and historical and archaeological sites have been submerged.

Environmentalists have warned for years that the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals backing onto nearby Chongqing city, and feared that silt trapped behind the dam could cause erosion downstream.

China has made scant progress on schemes drawn up nearly a decade ago to limit pollution in and around the reservoir.

Chen said about 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) is spent each year clearing floating waste by the dam.

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