THROWAWAY ECONOMY IN TROUBLE

[Guest guest]

THROWAWAY

ECONOMY IN TROUBLE

Lester R. Brown

One of the distinctly unhealthy economic trends over

the last half-century has been the emergence of a throwaway economy. First

conceived following World War II as a way of providing consumers with products,

it soon came to be seen also as a vehicle for creating jobs and sustaining

economic growth. The more goods produced and discarded, the reasoning went, the

more jobs there would be.

 

What sold throwaways was their convenience. For example, rather than washing

cloth towels or napkins, consumers welcomed disposable paper versions. Thus we

have substituted facial tissues for handkerchiefs, disposable paper towels for

hand towels, disposable table napkins for cloth ones, and throwaway beverage

containers for refillable ones. Even the shopping bags we use to carry home

throwaway products become part of the garbage flow.

 

This one-way economy depends on cheap energy. It is also facilitated by what

are known in the United

States as municipal solid waste management

systems. Helen Spiegelman and Bill Sheehan of the Product Policy Institute

write that these “have become a perverse public subsidy for the Throwaway

Society. More and better waste management at public expense is giving unlimited

license to proliferate discards. Today these systems collect 3.4 pounds of

product waste a day for each American man, woman, and child—twice as much

as in 1960 and ten times as much as 100 years ago. It is time to revamp the

system so that it no longer supports the throwaway habit.”

 

The throwaway economy is on a collision course with the earth’s

geological limits. Aside from running out of landfills near cities, the world

is also fast running out of the cheap oil that is used to manufacture and

transport throwaway products. Perhaps more fundamentally, there is not enough

readily accessible lead, tin, copper, iron ore, or bauxite to sustain the

throwaway economy beyond another two or three generations. Assuming an annual

2-percent growth in extraction, U.S. Geological Survey data on current

economically recoverable reserves show the world has 18 years of reserves

remaining for lead, 20 years for tin, 25 years for copper, 64 years for iron

ore, and 69 years for bauxite.

 

The cost of hauling garbage from cities is rising as nearby landfills fill up

and the price of oil climbs. One of the first major cities to exhaust its

locally available landfills was New York.

When the Fresh Kills landfill, the local destination for New

York’s garbage, was permanently closed in March 2001, the

city found itself hauling garbage to landfill sites in New

Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Virginia—with some

of the sites being 300 miles away.

 

Given the 12,000 tons of garbage produced each day in New

York and assuming a load of 20 tons of garbage for each of the

tractor-trailers used for the long-distance hauling, some 600 rigs are needed

to move garbage from New York City

daily. These tractor-trailers form a convoy nearly nine miles

long—impeding traffic, polluting the air, and raising carbon emissions.

This daily convoy led Deputy Mayor Joseph J. Lhota, who supervised the Fresh

Kills shutdown, to observe that getting rid of the city’s trash is now

“like a military-style operation on a daily basis.”

 

Fiscally strapped local communities in other states are willing to take New York’s

garbage—if they are paid enough. Some see it as an economic bonanza.

State governments, however, are saddled with increased road maintenance costs,

traffic congestion, increased air pollution, noise, potential water pollution

from landfill leakage, and complaints from nearby communities.

 

Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore wrote to Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2001 complaining

about the use of Virginia

as a dumping ground. “I understand the problem New

York faces,” he noted, “but the home state of

Washington, Jefferson and Madison has no intention of becoming New York’s dumping

ground.”

 

Garbage travails are not limited to New

York City. Toronto,

Canada’s

largest city, closed its last remaining landfill on December 31, 2002, and now

ships all its 1.1-million-ton-per-year garbage to Wayne County, Michigan.

Ironically, the state of New Jersey, the

recipient of some of New York’s waste,

is now shipping up to 1,000 tons of demolition debris 600 miles—also to Wayne County

in Michigan.

 

The challenge is to replace the throwaway economy with a reduce-reuse-recycle

economy. For cities like New York,

the challenge should be less what to do with the garbage and more of how to

avoid producing it in the first place.

A

NEW MATERIALS ECONOMY

Lester R. Brown

In nature, one-way linear flows do not long survive.

Nor, by extension, can they long survive in the expanding economy that is a

part of the earth’s ecosystem. The challenge is to redesign the materials

economy so that it is compatible with nature. The throwaway economy that has

been evolving over the last half-century is an aberration, now itself headed

for the junk heap of history.

 

The potential for reducing materials use has been examined over the last decade

in three specific studies. The first—Factor

Four, by Ernst von Weizsäcker, an environmentalist and leader

in the German Bundestag—argued that modern industrial economies could

function very effectively with a level of virgin raw material use only one

fourth that of today. This was followed a few years later by research from the

Factor Ten Institute organized in France under the leadership of

Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek. It concluded that resource productivity can be raised

by a factor of 10, which is well within the reach of existing technology and

management, given the appropriate policy incentives.

 

In 2002, American architect William McDonough and German chemist Michael Braungart

teamed up to coauthor a book entitled Cradle

to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. Waste and pollution

are to be avoided at any cost. “Pollution,” says McDonough,

“is a symbol of design failure.”

 

One of the keys to reducing materials use is recycling steel, the use of which

dwarfs that of all other metals combined. Steel use is dominated by the

automobile, household appliance, and construction industries. Among steel-based

products in the United

States, automobiles are the most highly

recycled. Cars today are simply too valuable to be left to rust in

out-of-the-way junkyards.

 

The recycling rate for household appliances is estimated at 90 percent. For

steel cans, the U.S.

recycling rate in 2003 of 60 percent can be traced in part to municipal recycling

campaigns launched in the late 1980s.

 

In the United States,

roughly 71 percent of all steel produced in 2003 was from scrap, leaving 29

percent to be produced from virgin ore. Steel recycling started climbing more

than a generation ago with the advent of the electric arc furnace, a method of

producing steel from scrap that uses only one third the energy of that produced

from virgin ore. And since it does not require any mining, it completely

eliminates one source of environmental disruption. In the United States, Italy,

and Spain,

electric arc furnaces used for recycling now account for half or more of all

steel production.

 

It is easier for mature industrial economies with stable populations to get

most of their steel from recycled scrap, simply because the amount of steel

embedded in the economy is essentially fixed. The number of household

appliances, the fleet of automobiles, and the stock of buildings is increasing

little or not at all. For countries in the early stages of industrialization,

however, the creation of infrastructure—whether factories, bridges,

high-rise buildings, or transportation, including automobiles, buses, and rail

cars—leaves little steel for recycling.

 

In the new economy, electric arc steel minimills that efficiently convert scrap

steel into finished steel will largely replace iron mines. Advanced industrial

economies will come to rely primarily on the stock of materials already in the

economy rather than on virgin raw materials. For metals such as steel and

aluminum, the losses through use will be minimal. With the appropriate

policies, metal can be used and reused indefinitely.

 

In recent years, the construction industry has begun deconstructing old

buildings, breaking them down into their component parts so they can be recycled

and reused. For example, when PNC Financial Services in Pittsburgh took down a seven-story downtown

building, the principal products were 2,500 tons of concrete, 350 tons of

steel, 9 tons of aluminum, and foam ceiling tiles. The concrete was pulverized

and used to fill in the site, which is to become a park. The steel and aluminum

were recycled. And the ceiling tiles went back to the manufacturer to be

recycled. This recycling saved some $200,000 in dump fees. By deconstructing a

building instead of simply demolishing it, most of the material in it can be

recycled.

 

Germany and, more recently, Japan are

requiring that products such as automobiles, household appliances, and office

equipment be designed so that they can be easily disassembled and their component

parts recycled. In May 2001, the Japanese Diet enacted a tough appliance

recycling law, one that prohibits discarding household appliances, such as

washing machines, televisions, or air conditioners. With consumers bearing the

cost of disassembling appliances in the form of a disposal fee to recycling

firms, which can come to $60 for a refrigerator or $35 for a washing machine,

the pressure to design appliances so they can be more easily and cheaply

disassembled is strong.

 

With computers becoming obsolete every few years as technology advances, the

need to be able to quickly disassemble and recycle them is a paramount

challenge in building an eco-economy.

 

In addition to measures that encourage the recycling of materials are those

that encourage the reuse of products such as beverage containers. Finland, for

example, has banned the use of one-way soft drink containers. Canada’s Prince Edward Island has adopted a similar

ban on all nonrefillable beverage containers. The result in both cases is a

sharply reduced flow of garbage to landfills.

 

A refillable glass bottle used over and over requires about 10 percent as much

energy per use as an aluminum can that is recycled. Cleaning, sterilizing, and

relabeling a used bottle requires little energy, but recycling cans made from

aluminum, which has a melting point of 660 degrees Celsius (1,220 degrees

Fahrenheit), is an energy-intensive process. Banning nonrefillables is a

win-win-win option—cutting material and energy use, garbage flow, and air

and water pollution.

 

There are also transport fuel savings, since the containers are simply

back-hauled to the original bottling plants or breweries. If nonrefillable

containers are used, whether glass or aluminum, and they are recycled, then

they must be transported to a manufacturing facility where they can be melted

down, refashioned into containers, and transported back to the bottling plant

or brewery.

 

Even more fundamental than the design of products is the redesign of

manufacturing processes to eliminate the discharge of pollutants entirely. Many

of today’s manufacturing processes evolved at a time when the economy was

much smaller and when the volume of pollutants was not overwhelming the

ecosystem. More and more companies are now realizing that this cannot continue

and some, such as Dupont, have adopted zero emissions as a goal.

 

Another way to reduce waste is to systematically cluster factories so that the

waste from one process can be used as the raw material for another. NEC, the

large Japanese electronics firm, is one of the first multinationals to adopt

this approach for its various production facilities. In effect, industrial

parks are being designed, both by corporations and governments, specifically to

combine factories that have usable waste products. Now in industry, as in

nature, one firm’s waste becomes another’s sustenance.

 

Government procurement policies can be used to dramatically boost recycling.

For example, when the Clinton

administration issued an Executive Order in 1993 requiring that all government-purchased

paper contain 20 percent or more post-consumer waste by 1995 (increasing to 25

percent by 2000), it created a strong incentive for paper manufacturers to

incorporate wastepaper in their manufacturing process. Since the U.S. government

is the world’s largest paper buyer, this provided a burgeoning market for

recycled paper.

 

New technologies that are less material-dependent also reduce materials use.

Cellular phones, which rely on widely dispersed towers or on satellites for

signal transmission, now totally dominate telephone use in developing

countries, thus sparing them investment in the millions of miles of copper

wires that the industrial countries made.

 

One industry whose value to society is being questioned by the environmental

community is the bottled water industry. The World Wide Fund for Nature, an

organization with 5.2 million members, released a study in 2001 urging

consumers in industrial countries to forgo bottled water, observing that it was

no safer or healthier than tap water, even though it can cost 1,000 times as

much.

 

WWF notes that in the United States

and Europe there are more standards regulating

the quality of tap water than of bottled water. Although clever marketing in

industrial countries has convinced many consumers that bottled water is

healthier, the WWF study could not find any support for this claim. For those

living where water is unsafe, as in some Third World

cities, it is far cheaper to boil or filter water than to buy it in bottles.

 

Phasing out the use of bottled water would eliminate the need for billions of

plastic bottles and the fleets of trucks that haul and distribute the water.

This in turn would eliminate the traffic congestion, air pollution, and rising

carbon dioxide levels from operating the trucks.

 

A brief review of the environmental effects of gold mining raises doubts about

whether the industry is a net benefit to society. In addition to the extensive

release of mercury and cyanide into the environment, annual gold production of

2,500 tons requires the processing of 750 million tons of ore—second only

to the 2.5 billion tons of ore processed to produce 1 billion tons of raw

steel.

 

Over 80 percent of all the gold mined each year is used to produce jewelry that

is often worn as a status symbol, a way of displaying wealth by a tiny affluent

minority of the world’s people. Birsel Lemke, a widely respected Turkish

environmentalist, questions the future of gold mining, wondering whether it is

worth turning large areas into what she calls “a lunar landscape.”

She is not against gold per se, but against the deadly chemicals—cyanide

and mercury—that are released in processing the gold ore.

 

To get an honest market price for gold means imposing a tax on it that would

cover the cost of cleaning up the mercury and cyanide pollution from mining

plus the costs of landscape restoration in mining regions. Such a tax, which

would enable the price of this precious metal to reflect its full cost to

society, would likely raise its price severalfold.

 

Another option for reducing the use of raw materials would be to eliminate

subsidies that encourage their use. Nowhere are these greater than in the

aluminum industry. For example, a study by the Australia Institute reports that

smelters in Australia

buy electricity at an astoundingly low subsidized rate of 0.7–1.4¢ per

kilowatt-hour, while other industries pay 2.6–3.1¢. Without this huge

subsidy, we might not have nonrefillable aluminum beverage containers. This

subsidy to aluminum indirectly subsidizes both airlines and automobiles, thus

encouraging travel, an energy-intensive activity.

 

The most pervasive policy initiative to dematerialize the economy is the

proposed tax on the burning of fossil fuels, a tax that would reflect the full

cost to society of mining coal and pumping oil, of the air pollution associated

with their use, and of climate disruption. A carbon tax will lead to a more

realistic energy price, one that will permeate the energy-intensive materials

economy and reduce materials use.

 

The challenge in building an eco-economy materials sector is to ensure that the

market is sending honest signals. In the words of Ernst von Weizsäcker,

“The challenge is to get the market to tell the ecological truth.”

To help the market to tell the truth, we need not only a carbon tax, but also a

landfill tax so that those generating garbage pay the full cost of getting rid

of it.