YOU reduce,
reuse and recycle. You turn down plastic and paper.
You avoid out-of-season
grapes. You do all the right things.
Good.
Just know that it won’t save the tuna, protect the rain forest or stop global
warming. The changes necessary are so large and profound that they are beyond
the reach of individual action.
You refuse the plastic bag at the register, believing this one gesture somehow
makes a difference, and then carry your takeout meal back to your car for a
carbon-emitting trip home.
Say you’re willing to make real sacrifices. Sell your car. Forsake your
air-conditioner in the summer, turn down the heat in the winter. Try to become
no-impact man. You would, in fact, have no impact on the planet. Americans would
continue to emit an average of 20 tons of carbon dioxide a year; Europeans,
about 10 tons.
What about going bigger? You are the pope with a billion followers, and let’s
say all of them take your advice to heart. If all Catholics decreased their
emissions to zero overnight, the planet would surely notice, but pollution would
still be rising. Of course, a billion people, whether they’re Catholic or
adherents of any other religion or creed, will do no such thing. Two weeks of
silence in a Buddhist yoga retreat in the Himalayas with your BlackBerry checked
at the door? Sure. An entire life voluntarily lived off the grid? No thanks.
And that focuses only on those who can decrease their emissions. When your
average is 20 tons per year, going down to 18 tons is as easy as taking a
staycation. But if you are among the four billion on the planet who each emit
one ton a year, you have nowhere to go but up.
Leading scientific groups and most climate scientists say we need to decrease
global annual greenhouse gas emissions by at least half of current levels by
2050 and much further by the end of the century. And that will still mean rising
temperatures and sea levels for generations.
So why bother recycling or riding your bike to the store? Because we all want to
do something, anything. Call it “action bias.” But, sadly, individual action
does not work. It distracts us from the need for collective action, and it
doesn’t add up to enough. Self-interest, not self-sacrifice, is what induces
noticeable change. Only the right economic policies will enable us as
individuals to be guided by self-interest and still do the right thing for the
planet.
Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies,
ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per
American per year. That’s not damage you’re going to do in the distant future;
that’s damage each of us is doing right now. Who pays for it?
We pay as a society. My cross-country flight adds fractions of a penny to
everyone else’s cost. That knowledge leads some of us to voluntarily chip in a
few bucks to “offset” our emissions. But none of these payments motivate anyone
to fly less. It doesn’t lead airlines to switch to more fuel-efficient planes or
routes. If anything, airlines by now use voluntary offsets as a marketing ploy
to make green-conscious passengers feel better. The result is planetary
socialism at its worst: we all pay the price because individuals don’t.
It won’t change until a regulatory system compels us to pay our fair share to
limit pollution accordingly. Limit, of course, is code for “cap and trade,” the
system that helped phase out lead in gasoline in the 1980s, slashed acid rain
pollution in the 1990s and is now bringing entire fisheries back from the brink.
“Cap and trade” for carbon is beginning to decrease carbon pollution in Europe,
and similar models are slated to do the same from California to China.
Alas, this approach has been declared dead in Washington, ironically by
self-styled free-marketers. Another solution, a carbon tax, is also off the
table because, well, it’s a tax.
Never mind that markets are truly free only when everyone pays the full price
for his or her actions. Anything else is socialism. The reality is that we
cannot overcome the global threats posed by greenhouse gases without speaking
the ultimate inconvenient truth: getting people excited about making individual
environmental sacrifices is doomed to fail.
High school science tells us that global warming is real. And economics teaches
us that humanity must have the right incentives if it is to stop this terrible
trend.
Don’t stop recycling. Don’t stop buying local. But add mastering some basic
economics to your to-do list. Our future will be largely determined by our
ability to admit the need to end planetary socialism. That’s the most
fundamental of economics lessons and one any serious environmentalist ought to
heed.
October 20, 2009
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
At Yellowstone National Park, the clear soda cups and white utensils are not
your typical cafe-counter garbage. Made of plant-based plastics, they dissolve
magically when heated for more than a few minutes.
At Ecco, a popular restaurant in Atlanta, waiters no longer scrape food scraps
into the trash bin. Uneaten morsels are dumped into five-gallon pails and taken
to a compost heap out back.
And at eight of its North American plants, Honda is recycling so diligently that
the factories have gotten rid of their trash Dumpsters altogether.
Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from
the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks,
restaurants, stadiums and corporations.
The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less
waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not
biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.
Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering
realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and
an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm
the earth’s atmosphere.
“Nobody wants a landfill sited anywhere near them, including in rural areas,”
said Jon D. Johnston, a materials management branch chief for the Environmental
Protection Agency who is helping to lead the zero-waste movement in the
Southeast. “We’ve come to this realization that landfill is valuable and we
can’t bury things that don’t need to be buried.”
Americans are still the undisputed champions of trash, dumping 4.6 pounds per
person per day, according to the E.P.A.’s most recent figures. More than half of
that ends up in landfills or is incinerated.
But places like the island resort community of Nantucket offer a glimpse of the
future. Running out of landfill space and worried about the cost of shipping
trash 30 miles to the mainland, it moved to a strict trash policy more than a
decade ago, said Jeffrey Willett, director of public works on the island.
The town, with the blessing of residents concerned about tax increases, mandates
the recycling of not only commonly reprocessed items like aluminum, glass and
paper but also tires, batteries and household appliances.
Jim Lentowski, executive director of the nonprofit Nantucket Conservation
Foundation and a year-round resident since 1971, said that sorting trash and
delivering it to the local recycling and disposal complex had become a matter of
course for most residents.
The complex also has a garagelike structure where residents can drop off books
and clothing and other reusable items for others to take home.
The 100-car parking lot at the landfill is a lively meeting place for locals,
Mr. Lentowski added. “Saturday morning during election season, politicians hang
out there and hand out campaign buttons,” he said. “If you want to get a pulse
on the community, that is a great spot to go.”
Mr. Willett said that while the amount of trash that island residents carted to
the dump had remained steady, the proportion going into the landfill had
plummeted to 8 percent.
By contrast, Massachusetts residents as a whole send an average of 66 percent of
their trash to a landfill or incinerator. Although Mr. Willett has lectured
about the Nantucket model around the country, most communities still lack the
infrastructure to set a zero-waste target.
Aside from the difficulty of persuading residents and businesses to divide their
trash, many towns and municipalities have been unwilling to make the significant
capital investments in machines like composters that can process food and yard
waste. Yet attitudes are shifting, and cities like San Francisco and Seattle are
at the forefront of the changeover. Both of those cities have adopted plans for
a shift to zero-waste practices and are collecting organic waste curbside in
residential areas for composting.
Food waste, which the E.P.A. says accounts for about 13 percent of total trash
nationally — and much more when recyclables are factored out of the total — is
viewed as the next big frontier.
When apple cores, stale bread and last week’s leftovers go to landfills, they do
not return the nutrients they pulled from the soil while growing. What is more,
when sealed in landfills without oxygen, organic materials release methane, a
potent heat-trapping gas, as they decompose. If composted, however, the food can
be broken down and returned to the earth as a nonchemical fertilizer with no
methane by-product.
Green Foodservice Alliance, a division of the Georgia Restaurant Association,
has been adding restaurants throughout Atlanta and its suburbs to its so-called
zero-waste zones. And companies are springing up to meet the growth in demand
from restaurants for recycling and compost haulers.
Steve Simon, a partner in Fifth Group, a company that owns Ecco and four other
restaurants in the Atlanta area, said that the hardest part of participating in
the alliance’s zero-waste-zone program was not training his staff but finding
reliable haulers.
“There are now two in town, and neither is a year old, so it is a very tentative
situation,” Mr. Simon said.
Still, he said he had little doubt that the hauling sector would grow and that
all five of the restaurants would eventually be waste-free.
Packaging is also quickly evolving as part of the zero-waste movement.
Bioplastics like the forks at Yellowstone, made from plant materials like
cornstarch that mimic plastic, are used to manufacture a growing number of items
that are compostable.
Steve Mojo, executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute, a
nonprofit organization that certifies such products, said that the number of
companies making compostable products for food service providers had doubled
since 2006 and that many had moved on to items like shopping bags and food
packaging.
The transition to zero waste, however, has its pitfalls.
Josephine Miller, an environmental official for the city of Santa Monica,
Calif., which bans the use of polystyrene foam containers, said that some
citizens had unwittingly put the plant-based alternatives into cans for
recycling, where they had melted and had gummed up the works. Yellowstone and
some institutions have asked manufacturers to mark some biodegradable items with
a brown or green stripe.
Yet even with these clearer design cues, customers will have to be taught to
think about the destination of every throwaway if the zero-waste philosophy is
to prevail, environmental officials say.
“Technology exists, but a lot of education still needs to be done,” said Mr.
Johnston of the E.P.A.
He expects private companies and businesses to move faster than private citizens
because momentum can be driven by one person at the top.
“It will take a lot longer to get average Americans to compost,” Mr. Johnston
said. “Reaching down to my household and yours is the greatest challenge.”
