EnviroBinz Blog

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report on May 4 detailing the costs and benefits of various policies to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The report, part of a series by IPCC on climate change, discusses that future emissions could be controlled using current technology with reasonable costs. This includes more fuel efficient cars, improving energy efficiency and increases in recycling and waste minimization. BBC News reports.

The growth in greenhouse gas emissions can be curbed at reasonable cost, experts at a major UN climate change conference in Bangkok have agreed.

Boosting renewable energy, reducing deforestation and improving energy efficiency can all help, they said…

The report suggests that if major climate impacts are to be avoided, global emissions should peak and begin declining within one or two decades.

Read article here>>

Read the IPCC Report

In California AB 1109 (Huffman) would encourage the use of more efficient lighting technologies and help reduce energy use, while also increasing recycling opportunities for hazardous lighting. Reducing energy demand will eliminate the associated pollution, which include SOX, NOX, CO2 and mercury emissions from coal-fired and other energy plants. A preliminary analysis suggests that achievement of the AB 1109 energy efficiency goals can reduce CO2 emissions by more than 6,000,000 tons.

AB 548 (Levine) would expand recycling to multi-family dwellings, which in turn could divert up to an additional 329,000 tons of recyclable materials. This increased recycling will help in reducing GHG emissions by nearly one million tons.

What You Can Do

• TAKE Action and write letters in support of AB 1109 and AB 548.
• Read more about what CAW is doing to reduce GHG emissions.
• Start making a difference by learning to live green!

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page

To help prevent the public health and environmental threats posed by Global Warming, California has committed to an aggressive series of green house gas (GHG) emission reduction goals. Every sector of the state will be called upon to reduce their GHG emissions, including the waste management sector.

Garbage is a major contributor to Global Warming. Solid waste landfills are the single largest man-made source of methane gas in the United States. Methane (CH4) is a powerful greenhouse gas that is 23 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than the most prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). Every time you “throw away,” you are contributing to global warming.

Ton for ton, recycling reduces more pollution, saves more energy and reduces GHG emissions more than any other activity besides source reduction. Californians currently throw away millions of tons of recyclable materials every year. According to the California Integrated Waste Management Board, over 60 percent of the “garbage” in California landfills can be composted or recycled. Increasing recycling should be California’s priority strategy for reducing global warming effects associated with solid waste management.

Waste and Greenhouse Gas:

• Why Recycling?
• A Plan for California

Global Warming and You:

• Out now on DVD! Watch An Inconvenient Truth to learn more about the effects of global warming.
• Take action to stop global warming.
• Concerned about your greenhouse gas output? Measure your carbon footprint.

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page

The LA Times’ 5-part series chronicling the increasing problem of marine debris has won a Pulitzer for explanatory reporting. The series details, among other things, the deluge of plastics that have entered our oceans. Scientists have seen as much as as ten-fold increase in the amounts of plastics in our world’s oceans, and right in our own backyard—the mid-Pacific garbage patch—plastic outweighs plankton by a factor of six. California, with the largest ocean economy in the US, contributes greatly to this pollution. Furthermore, despite a successful bottle bill program, the amount of plastics being recovered for recycling has actually decreased in recent years due to the proliferation of new plastic products, such as bottled water.

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page

New York City is at a pivotal point in its recycling program, and fresh initiatives, lofty goals and new personnel could finally lead to a trifecta of reduced costs, more jobs and a minimized impact on the environment.

That is if all goes well - which has not always been the case with recycling in New York.

The city’s 8.2 million residents disgorge a daily mountain of 12,500 tons of residential trash, and the recycling rate for all that detritus is stalled at around 16 percent. This year’s target bumps the residential rate up to 25 percent. And by 2015, the city aims for a 70 percent reduction in its total waste stream, residential, commercial and otherwise.

The 70 percent is a stretch, but I’m optimistic: The city has appointed recycling coordinators for each of the five boroughs and has adopted a 20-year Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan. David Hurd, director of the newly created Office of Recycling Outreach and Education, is brimming with energy and ideas, and his staff, in the Council on the Environment for New York City, will have a close working relationship with the mayor’s office. And the city recently has launched announced a pilot program for recycling in selected public places, including some parks.

SOURCE: Gotham Gazette

EnviroBinz Home Page

This measure will, for the first time, require all CA grocery stores to take back and recycle plastic grocery bags. The bill also requires retailers to provide consumers with a bag reuse opportunity. Retailers and manufactures will be required to implement a public education program, and all bags must be labeled ‘Please Return to a Participating Store for Recycling.’

AB 2449 was signed by the Governor on September 30 and its provisions will go into effect July 1.

Effective July 1, 2007, AB 2449 will establish a 6 year pilot program requiring most large grocery stores and other retailers to create an in-store recycling program for the collection and recycling of plastic ‘carry out’ bags. The program will include:

• Labeling bags to return to the store for recycling.
• Placing recycling bins in visible and accessible locations for customers.
• The provision of reusable bags for customers to potentially purchase and use in lieu of disposable ones.

In addition, plastic bag manufacturers would be required to work with the grocery stores on their programs to help ensure the proper collection, transportation and recycling of the plastic bags.

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page

The Container Recycling Institute (CRI) estimates that in 2005, an estimated 144 billion containers were wasted in the United States. Wasted means not recycled: sent to landfills or incinerators, or littered along our country’s roads and parks, fields and streams, and rivers and beaches. This includes approximately 54 billion aluminum cans, 52 billion plastic bottles and jugs, 30 billion glass bottles, and about 10 billion pouches, cartons, and drink boxes.

Almost two thirds, or 37 billion, of the 58 billion non-carbonated, non-alcoholic beverages purchased in 2005 were packaged in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles. A full 96% of the bottled water was sold in PET bottles, the vast majority being “single serve” sizes, including the 10-12 oz., 16 oz, 20-24 oz, and 1 liter sizes. These bottles are prone to being littered, and have a lower recycling rate than any of the most common packaging materials. In 2005, 23.1% of the 5 billion lbs of PET sold in the U.S. were recycled, or 1,170 million lbs – up from 775 million lbs recycled in 1995. But the amount recycled only tells part of the story. In 1995, the nationwide recycling rate for PET was almost 40%, and the amount of PET wasted (sent to landfills) was 1,175 million lbs. By 2005, wasting had nearly tripled to 3,900 million lbs (or almost 2 million tons).

It is also important to note that the 23.1% PET recycling rate in 2005 includes plastic carbonated soft drinks (CSD) bottles which are recycled at a higher rate than water and other non-carbonated beverages, due to the high recovery rates in eleven states where they have a 5 or 10-cent refund value. In 2005, the American Chemistry Council did not break out CSD as they have done for the past 16 years, but in 2004 the CSD recycling rate was 33.7% and the recycling rate for all other PET bottles was 14.5%. It is reasonable to assume that the rate for noncarbonated beverages was below 20% in 2005.

PET plastic is a petroleum product. Because it is presently recycled at such low rates, tens of billions of new plastic bottles must be manufactured each year from virgin materials – fossil fuels – to replace those bottles that were not recycled. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that approximately 18 million barrels of crude oil equivalent were consumed in 2005 to replace the 2 million tons of PET bottles that were wasted instead of recycled.

When PET plastic bottles are made from virgin materials rather than used bottle resin, more greenhouse gases are produced as well. An estimated 800 thousand metric tons of carbon equivalent (MTCE) were released in the process of making approximately 50 billion new PET bottles from virgin rather than recycled materials. When the 54 billion wasted aluminum cans, 7 billion wasted HDPE bottles and jugs, and 29 billion glass bottles are considered, the total emissions of greenhouse gasses from new (“replacement”) container manufacturing comes to about 4.8 million tons, and the unnecessary expenditure of energy comes to 53.5 million barrels of crude oil equivalent.

There are a host of other environmental impacts too numerous to catalog here, but they include damage to wildlife and marine life, and air and water pollution associated with raw materials extraction, processing, and industrial container production; as well as landfilling and incineration.

SOURCE: The Container Recycling Institute

EnviroBinz Home Page

There was a resounding victory in the battle against global warming yesterday, with the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency has the right to regulate greenhouse gases emitted from cars. The ruling is a strong rebuke to the Administration’s inaction on the issue and will pave the way for reductions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Environmental advocates won on all three issues before the court. The first issue was whether states have standing to challenge an EPA decision in court. The high court clearly affirmed the rights of the states to sue. The second question was whether the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars under the Clean Air Act. The court agreed that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Act’s capacious definition of ‘air pollutant’” and went on to say that the “EPA has statutory authority to regulate emission of such gases from new motor vehicles”.

The final question before the court was whether the EPA has discretion on whether to regulate the emissions. The court held that the reasons provided by the agency for refusing to regulate these gases (including foreign policy concerns) were not adequate. Justice Stevens, who authored theThe majority opinion, stated the “EPA has offered no reasoned explanation” for its refusal and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its position in the scope of the Clean Air Act.

This case will also offer a significant boost to California’s efforts to curtail global warming. The state is being sued by automobile manufacturers over its attempts to impose stricter regulations over greenhouse gases. The manufacturers’ claim that carbon dioxide isn’t an air pollutant under the Clean Air Act will be undermined by today’s Supreme Court ruling.

Although the ruling doesn’t require greenhouse gas regulation, it adds to the mounting pressure on the Bush Administration to address the issue. Business leaders and each of the presidential frontrunners (both Democratic and Republican) have acknowledged that action needs to be taken to curb global warming. It is time to act to slow global warming.

Massachusetts v. EPA Decision

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page

Chris Jordan has created some amazing art. He looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics in his latest work. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. He hopes that the images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. He points out, and I think it is true, statistics tend to feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

These prints really must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. Please take a look for yourself the series is amazing. It can be found at www.ChrisJordan.com

EnviroBinz Home Page

The City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works is registering multifamily residential buildings for a free recycling program that will begin early this summer, Board of Public Works President Cynthia Ruiz announced.

Multifamily residential buildings of five units or more, that’s apartments, condominiums, cooperatives, and mobile home parks, are eligible.

Program participants will receive free weekly recycling services, blue bins for storage of recyclables, and educational information about materials accepted in the blue bins.

The Bureau of Sanitation also offers a Question and Answer Fact Sheet about the Multifamily Residential Program, a Multifamily Recycling Guide, the Put it to Good Re-Use LA booklet, as well as other recycling service publications available online for multifamily residential building tenants and owners.

For General Information about the program call (800) 773-CITY, (800) 773-2489 or visit the website: www.lacity.org/

SOURCE: Recycling Today

EnviroBinz Home Page

When California’s first in the nation e-waste recycling law was adopted in 2003, an often-touted statistic was an extrapolation from a National Safety Council study which placed the numbers of PC’s discarded in California daily at 6,000. New Data from the high tech research firm Gartner places the number of PC’s discarded by Californians at more than 16,000 daily. The Good News? Thanks to California’s SB 20 (Sher) recycling law, it appears that California is far outpacing the rest of the nation in e-waste actually recycled. Preliminary data for 2006 suggests that one of every five pounds of e-waste recycled in the US is recycled in California. And California remains the only state with restrictions on the export of e-waste for recycling. Not surprisingly, two state legislators have introduced bills this year to expand the state’s successful e-waste law.

SOURCE: Californians Against Waste

EnviroBinz Home Page