(08/31/2008 06:37 PM)
The Green Mistake About Plastic Bags Is the Same as
the Progressive Mistake About Spitting.
Daniel Burnstein seems to have a rather naive understanding of
spitting. Spitting, even spitting on someone, has very little to
do with the spread of epidemic disease. Of course, spitting on
someone has always been an assault at law, and the point of
dispute in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth
century would have been the act of spitting on the
floor. Such spitting does not form an aerosol with any efficiency.
Normal breathing, however, does form an aerosol, which lends
itself to being easily inhaled. The main factor driving
tuberculosis in the age of Jacob Riis was the number of
people living five and ten to a room. Nowadays, Tuberculosis
is mostly found when men are housed in barracks conditions,
typically in prisons. Airliners, likewise, are a problem,
because of the degree of overcrowding, and the tendency of
the airplane's pressurization system to dehydrate and
recirculate air. Spitting is primarily about cultural
defiance, a visual gesture of contempt, worth a fight
with broken bottles in all the more authentic workingman's
taverns. The whole point of spitting in a streetcar
was to force a fine gentleman to back down from a fight, and
eventually to make the streetcar a "gentleman-free zone."
One can find other comparable forms of regulation from that date,
designed to restrict the outspokenness of the
underclass. One sometimes encounters ordinances such as the French
one that required prostitutes to ply their trade in side streets,
and not to solicit men in the presence of the mens' wives and
children. Obviously, the likelihood of making a sale
under those circumstances must have been minimal, but
Judy O'Grady got a certain pardonable pleasure out of embarrassing
the Colonel's Lady. By contrast, no one gets particularly upset
about a dog saluting a fire hydrant, because a dog's place in the
social order is firmly fixed. The littler the dog, the broader the
liberties it is allowed, and there are some really spoiled-rotten
poodles, Yorkshire Terriers, etc.
Burnstein's understanding of the issues involving plastic
bags is equally limited. The Seattle bag law reminds me of the
"bottle bills" of about thirty years ago, combinations of good
intentions and naivety. The five-cent deposit on a soda bottle did
not cause the man in the street to become a fanatical recycler. He
simply treated it as a tax, and went on his way. The deposit
did, however, make it worthwhile for bums to tip over public
trash cans on the public sidewalk in order to "prospect" for
bottles and cans. The soft drink bottlers continued to phase out
glass bottles, which were well adapted to direct recycling, in
favor of plastic bottles, which were not. In many
public venues such as stadiums, glass bottles are not even
permitted, on account of the well justified fear that
they might be used as weapons. The bag law is likely to be
similarly inconsequential. At a very rough average, a bag of
groceries costs ten or twenty dollars. A charge of twenty cents
for a bag will simply be ignored, treated as a tax. I presume that
under the Seattle law, there will be no refunds for
used plastic bags, so at least the bums will not
be invading peoples' back yards in order to tip over their garbage
cans. What's more, it is all quite pointless.
The average American uses about three tons of coal per year,
practically all in the form of electricity, about six
hundred gallons of gasoline-- nearly two tons, and a considerable
quantity of natural gas and/or fuel oil, perhaps a couple of
tons, depending on region, for heating, perhaps seven or eight
tons in all. This dwarfs the consumption of every other raw
material. On this scale, a couple of hundred pounds or less of
paper and plastic per capita, including not just plastic bags but
assorted food wrappings as well, is not all that
significant. Furthermore, plastic and paper for
packaging materials are quite sensibly made from residues or
byproducts. An oil refinery is run to produce the maximum possible
fraction of gasoline. Cheap plastic is typically made from the
low-grade hydrocarbon gases which unavoidably develop during the
refining process. It is very much the same principle as making
glue from slaughterhouse offal, not from sirloin steaks. If these
gases were not made into plastic, they would most likely be used
as boiler fuel. Similarly, the forest products industry's major
high value product is dimension lumber, such as two-by-fours.
Paper is made from the incidental scrap and sawdust. When
packaging trash is burned to make steam and then
electricity, it is simply reverting to its original
destiny.
In the real world, Americans are not eco-saints. If they go to the
grocery store more frequently, they will do so in automobiles, and
use correspondingly more gasoline. Eco-freaks make a sharp
distinction between the things they handle and touch, and
the things they do not handle and touch, as if the latter were
somehow not there. Gasoline and electricity are out of sight, and
out of mind. The "fussbudget green" mentality
which obsesses about personal purity, and therefore becomes
obsessed with packaging materials is really a kind of
environmental Madonna-whore complex. The fussbudgets are
essentially trying to exploit public confusion to legislate their
own religious beliefs. Just as an Orthodox Jew believes that it is
sinful to eat a cheeseburger (though not to eat beef and cheese at
separate meals), the Eco-freaks believe that it is sinful to eat
singly. This is of course an old idea, going back to St. Thomas
More's Utopia, the idea that it is wrong to eat, save in an
act of communion. Its modern embodiment is the so-called "Slow
Food" movement. I do not propose to discuss whether this
religious belief is right or wrong, but merely to observe
that the vast majority of the population do not adhere to it. The
proponents of this idea are trying to bury it under a
pretext of energy. This kind of licensed fussbudgeting does
substantial damage. It injures the credibility of people who are
pushing for important and sensible measures, such as greater
energy efficiency.
===============================================================
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/372566_bags29.html
July 28, 2008 11:59 p.m. PT, City OKs 20-cent fee on plastic,
paper bags. Council also outlaws foam food and drink containers,
By Kathy Mulady, P-I Reporter
http://www.seattlecrimeblog.com/tags/bag_tax/
http://seattlebagtax.org/
http://seattlebagtax.org/RuckerReport.pdf
==================================================
(09/01/2008 10:58 AM)
Plastic Recycling is a Great Charade.
The Oregon Bottle Bill went through in 1971. When I lived there,
in the late 1980's, bums were still tipping over
trash cans. The bill prescribed a fixed rate, of two cents for a
standard refillable container or five cents for other types, a
rate which has of course been largely repudiated by inflation.
The useful virtue of inflation is that it functions as a kind of
statute of limitations on financial obligations, which have to
be periodically renegotiated, or else they practically
cease to exist. However, long after the bottle bill had ceased
to motivate consumers, it was still motivating bums. It is
difficult to understand the mindset of someone who will
spend a couple of hours collecting, say, a hundred bottles, to
get the price of a bottle of "Mad Dog" (Mogen-David MD
20-20).
http://www.bottlebill.org/legislation/usa/oregon.htm
What did happen was that people began guarding trash cans,
dumpsters, etc., with barbed wire, and even the odd junkyard
dog. I'm going to tell you a little story which admittedly
happened in a non-bottle-bill state, but which indicates
the ultimate folly of trash-guarding. When I lived in
Philadelphia in the early 1990's, my neighbor kept a
junkyard dog to go with his freelance junkyard. The first one
was killed by a University of Pennsylvania police
officer in ambiguous circumstances (it may or may not have been
attacking a little old lady). Correction, the dog, a Doberman,
was shot by the police officer, retreated into the debris of the
junkyard while collapsing, and was eventually dragged out
by a city dogcatcher armed with a long pole with a noose at
the end. The dogcatcher finished the beast off
by garroting it with the noose. As there had been a
discharge of firearms by a peace officer, we had the City
of Philadelphia police in, interviewing witnesses and all. At
any rate, the neighbor soon got a new junkyard dog. Process
servers left their bills on my doorstep because they didn't dare
to approach the neighbor's.
Parenthetically, in the years after the bottle bills went
through, the soda bottlers shifted to selling soda in big
plastic one-liter or two-liter bottles, so that anyone who
wanted to save a bit of money had obvious incentives to buy the
bigger bottle, and the occasions of throwing it away
were correspondingly less frequent. Most states do not
have bottle bills, and there is not exactly an epidemic of
throwing bottles out of car windows.
You are correct that grocery stores accept bottles back in those
states which have bottle bills. They pay you for the bottle,
crush it-- and then they throw the crushed bottles in the trash,
and pay someone to haul them away. It is simply a tax on doing
business. The dirty little secret about post-consumer plastics
recycling is that it usually doesn't work. A post consumer
plastic container such as a soda bottle will commonly be made of
two different kinds of plastics, will very often contain paper,
ink, food residues, etc. It is not suitable for making new
bottles of the same type, because all these different
materials are comminated. A basic principle of recycling is that
materials are almost always recycled downwards. The exception is
factory scrap, typically sheets of plastic from which objects
have been cut out. All the cut-out sheets in the debris
bin of one cutting machine are of the same type of plastic, and
they can often conveniently be used to make new plastic sheets
of the same type, which come back to the cutting
machine. The claimed recycling figures on various plastic
objects are generally based on factory scrap, not on
post-consumer plastic. The uses of post-consumer plastic are
fairly limited, things like plastic siding for houses. Beyond
that limited market, the highest and best use of post-consumer
plastic is for fuel.
Recycling of tin cans is a bit more attractive, because the
steelmaking process involves melting them at more than two
thousand degrees, and at that temperature, all carbon-based
chemicals simply burn off. Steel scrap can be separated from raw
garbage by giant magnets, so there is no justification for
deposit fees on tin cans. Even so, recycled steel contains
unpredictable combinations of alloying metals, and therefore is
used for structural steel, not for the higher grades of sheet
steel used in automaking.
==================================================
(09/03/2008 08:42 AM)
Possible
Interesting Source on Disease in the Gilded Age.
Amusing thought: I was weeding out the old book catalogs and
similar junk mail which were threatening to drive me out of
house and home, when I ran across this:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10509.php
Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in
Los Angeles, 1879-1939
"Natalia Molina illustrates the many ways local health
officials used complexly constructed concerns about public
health to demean, diminish, discipline, and ultimately define
racial groups. She shows how the racialization of Mexican
Americans was not simply a matter of legal exclusion or labor
exploitation, but rather that scientific discourses and public
health practices played a key role in assigning negative
racial characteristics to the group."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have not read this book, and cannot speak to its
qualities, but it does look rather interesting,
yes? This sort of thing is what social historians are supposed
to do in the aftermath of Eugene Genovese.
HNN Post, Carl Zimring, The Economic Crisis is an Environmental
Crisis: Trash Has Crashed
02/13/2009 02:10 AM
http://hnn.us/articles/59711.html
http://hnn.us/board.php?id=59711
Curbside Recycling is a Dead End.
Large numbers of newspapers are on the verge of ceasing to
distribute
paper editions, if they do not cease publication altogether.
The
internet broke down a lot of local monopolies which were
keeping the
local newspapers precariously afloat, eg. local publication of
national
news from the wire services, grocery and discount store
advertising,
classified advertising, television schedules, etc. A
consensus is
emerging to the effect that if local newspapers are to survive,
they
are going to have to get their costs down to very low
levels. This
tends to include greater use of websites, and reduction in
both the
size and frequency of paper distribution. There is no point in
bombarding the prospective customer, the advertising audience,
with so
much paper that it almost
immediately becomes trash. At this level, the major implication of
the
economic downturn has been to force advertisers to take a hard
look at
what their advertising money buys, and what it does not, and to
act
accordingly. The volume of old newspapers is likely to
drop to a tenth or so of former levels. Newspaper recycling was
one of
the visible successes of domestic recycling. Newspapers, not being
contaminated with food residues, could simply be accumulated, and
recycled in quantity. As I will develop below, newsprint is about
the
only nonmetallic curbside recyclable which sells for a premium
over its
fuel price.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081121/0306092914.shtml
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090116/0341223429.shtml
http://www.journalismprofessor.com/2007/05/readers-to-rescue.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090204/0155043639.shtml
Food packaging is a different case. In the 1920's and
1930's, there
were, no doubt, men who went around to the back door
and bought old
kitchen
grease, bones, etc., the kind of stuff which now goes down
the
disposal. However, compared to the 1930's, there is
very little home-processing of food. By the time food is
sold to the
consumer, the non-edible portions have generally been cut
away. This
is an inevitable consequence of most women being in the workforce.
Food
packaging is made as ephemeral as it can be, and still do its job.
We
had a similar discussion several months ago, dealing with
soft-drinks
and "bottle bills." My
comments about soft-drink bottles apply to food packaging in
general.
It is mere circumstance that the soft-drink makers reached this
level
of sophisticated packaging first.
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/53317.html#comment
In the first place, the dominant form of food packaging is
freezing or
refrigeration. Glass is obviously unsuitable for packaging frozen
foods, and metal is being driven out from niches such as TV dinner
trays because it is not microwave-safe. Most refrigerated foods
come in
simple transparent plastic wrappers which allows the buyer to
visually
inspect the condition of the food. Common "refrigerate after
opening"
condiments such as mustard, catsup, and salad dressing now
come in
plastic bottles.Certain "status" condiments, which do not
differ
appreciably in acidity and sugar content, are still in glass
bottles,
eg. seafood cocktail sauce.
As a packaging material, glass has the obvious disadvantage
of being
breakable, and is useful only where this is outweighed by its
resistance to solvents, or its amenability to being washed
(sterilized)
at high temperature. Practically speaking, the necessary use of
glass
packaging seems
largely confined to alcoholic beverages, and vinegar (and of
course,
certain types of flavored vinegar, such as Worcestershire or
Tabasco
sauce, which one does not have to refrigerate after
opening). Even
pickles now come in individual plastic pouches which do not
require
refrigeration. Of course, it is not impossible that at some point,
special coatings might be developed, eg. a plastic wine bottle
which
has an inner layer of glass a thousandth of an inch thick,
this layer
being highly flexible and bonded to the plastic.
The functional layer of a tin can, the lining, is increasingly
likely
to be plastic instead of tin. The metal has been reduced in
function to
a mere structural support, and for that purpose, steel is
overkill.
Where the properties of metal are required for a lining, a thin
layer
of aluminum, say a thousandth or a ten-thousandth of an inch
thick, can
be applied to a plastic or paper substrate. Irradiation of sealed
plastic
packages has certain advantages over traditional canning methods,
ie.
it makes it possible to pasteurize foods without overcooking them
to
anything like the same extent as is required with metal or glass
containers. Irradiation is of course not very satisfactory for
salad
vegetables or fruit, where there is no real substitute for
freshness.
However, it does work fairly well for meat dishes. As
mentioned, tin
cans are not compatible with microwave ovens. Prepared meat dishes
tend
increasingly to come in plastic dishes with sealed plastic covers,
enclosed in cardboard wrappers.
This tends to leave only a relatively limited range of
foodstuffs for which the tin can, or the glass bottle or jar, is
still
the packaging method of
choice. The domestic kitchen waste stream will tend to consist
more and
more exclusively of soiled paper and plastic, often combined in
single packages, eg. a paper milk carton with a plastic cap
and a
plastic lining. The highest and best use of
that sort of stuff is as feedstock for a synfuel plant. It is
possible,
without undue difficulty, to use magnets and a
flotation-separation
process to recover glass and metals from a synfuel plant's
input
stream. The effect will be to render conventional curbside
domestic recycling even more of a farce. The whole point of
curbside
recycling was never to recover useful materials, but
to force the
public to participate in an ecological morality play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_irradiation
http://www.extension.iastate.edu/foodsafety/irradiation/
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug03/6763
Just to keep matters in perspective, the wholesale delivered
price of
coal, based on the trainload of, say, 10-20,000 tons
is something
like $30/ton, and coal in small quantities of a few tons
goes for as
much as a couple of hundred dollars per ton (a typical
customer being
a tourist railroad with an antique steam locomotive). Paper has
about
half the heat value of coal, more if it has a wax or plastic
coating,
so its cash fuel value would be at least $15/ton. Oil is
presently at
about $40/bbl, which would work out to about $300/ton. Plastics
are
comparatively easy to recycle into oil. One can simply
combine them
with small quantities of hydrogen at a sufficiently high
temperature
and pressure, and that will cause the long chain molecules
of plastic
to break down into the short chain molecules characteristic of
liquid
hydrocarbons, eg. diesel oil. As for paper, when it is simply left
in
the waste stream, it is carried to a landfill, an
incinerator or
synfuel plant in the normal way. This does not occasion additional
trucking costs because everything goes in one big efficient truck.
Of
course, landfills will eventually be mined, so putting something
in a
landfill does not amount to throwing it away. You can build a
multistage synfuel refinery. In successive stages,
more hydrogen is
added, and at each stage, the more hydrogen-rich components of the
trash become liquid, and separate out. If you
separate out paper or
plastic from trash, you diminish the total heat value of
the raw
trash, which requires the burning or reduction of more coal.
So,
effectively, for paper recycling to be profitable, recycled paper
has
to command a price of at least $15/ton, and recycled plastic
has to
command a price of $300/ton.
There are large numbers of recycled material prices which do
not
achieve this criterion. Old magazines command very low
prices, on the
order of three dollars per ton, because of the clay coating used
to
achieve acceptable image quality for photographs. Likewise, waxed
cardboard commands a very low price, on the order of five dollars
per
ton. At this level recycling really means paying to possess
the
external appearance of recycling.
http://www.scrapindex.com/paper/usa/loose_paper/index.html
http://www.scrapindex.com/index.html
http://www.scrapindex.com/municipal/usa/curbside/index.html
It is worth reading John Barth's _The Floating
Opera House_. Barth
is one of the great Southern practitioners of broad farce, in the
tradition of Augustus Baldwin Longstreet. In _The Floating Opera
House_, Barth's lawyer-hero litigates the will of a
millionaire who
died insane. It emerges that for years the millionaire has caused
his
bodily wastes to be packed up in a series of glass jars,
which are
neatly labeled and stored in the basement of his mansion. In
the terms
of the man's will, the heirs are required to
reverentially preserve
these jars, and their contents, on pain of
disinheritance. The lawyer
is therefore obliged to inquire what has become of
these jars... Once
one has read _The Floating Opera House_, one has
an insight into
the mentality of the more extreme kinds of Green activists.