Recently in Landfills & Alternatives Category

African dust is making it across the ocean.

Increasing quantities of African dust have blown across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean and Americas over the past few decades. During that time, the dust's composition has changed.

In this study, African dust air masses in Africa and the Caribbean were analyzed for persistent organic contaminants and metals.  These potentially toxic contaminants can originate from the burning of plastics, biomass and waste; widespread use of pesticides, plastics, and pharmaceuticals; and increased industrialization.

Multiple pesticides and other contaminants, including carcinogens, suppressors of immune systems, disruptors of endocrine systems, and nervous system or liver toxins were identified from all sample sites.  All are known to persist in the environment, accumulate in organisms, and are toxic at very low concentrations.

This study, "Chasing clouds of dust: transoceanic transport of synthetic organic pollutants and trace metals with African dust," is from USGS at the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. 

The GrassRoots Recycling Network has a vision of the world where waste is not waste - it is a resource. 

GRRN is the leading voice calling for Zero Waste (ZW) in the United States by promoting the message that we must go "beyond recycling" and go upstream to the headwaters of the waste stream which is the industrial designer's desk. 

Zero Waste means not only 100% recovery of society's discards, but also a redesign of the products and packaging of our lives such that everything produced for our consumer economy is non-toxic and designed to be recovered for re-use, recycling or composting.

GrassRoots Recycling Network is a national network of waste reduction activists and recycling professionals. GRRN sets ambitious standards for Zero Waste goals and policies. They provide opportunities for on-going  participation in campaigns and build coalitions to achieve zero waste policies, businesses and communities. They have a valuable website and an active email listserve (called GreenYes) of many hundreds of knowledgeable experts in both downstream recovery and upstream clean production issues.

What is Zero Waste?

GRRN developed the core message of Zero Waste in the mid-1990's as the new vision of the grassroots recycling movement, and has been successful in using that theme to connect recyclers, innovative corporate leaders, activists, and others both nationally and globally.

GRRN's Zero Waste message combines visionary thinking with real-world practice to go beyond recycling, and in the process have described some simple, important solutions to many pressing issues, such as

• corporate accountability
• local economic development
• air and water pollution
• resource depletion

CONTACT INFO:

GrassRoots Recycling Network
PO Box 282
Cotati, CA 94931

http://www.grrn.org

Transportation costs can be reduced on the wheel and in the landfill when quality retread tires are used on fleets of trucks, cars and other equipment.

Retread Tire Solutions for Public Sector Fleet Managers in Cities, Counties and States

With the worldwide downturn in the economy facing cities, towns, counties, states, provinces and even villages everywhere, it is more important than ever for fleet managers to manage their tire costs, a significant part of the transportation budget.

Retreads can be the cost saving, and green answer.

Not only are retreaded tires very environmentally friendly, they are far more economical than comparable new tires. The larger the tire size the greater the savings. In fact, for most tire sizes retreads can cut your tire costs by 50% and sometimes even more!

Retread Tire Safety and Reliability

The safety and reliability of today's top quality retreads (quality matters!) has been proven by millions of vehicles throughout the world over billions of miles.

All major commercial and military airlines use retreads - even on the largest planes flying - as do fire engines and other emergency vehicles, school and municipal buses, taxi fleets, race cars, small package delivery services such as FED EX, UPS and even the U.S. Postal Service, along with all types of other commercial and passenger vehicles.

U.S. Federal Executive Order (13149) even MANDATES the use of retreaded tires on selected federal fleet vehicles.

Objective information is available for fleet managers who wish to evaluate the benefits retreads have to offer and much of it can be found on the Tire Retreat & Repair Information Bureau web site, www.retread.org.

Take a look at their extensive information about the true causes of tire debris (also known as rubber on the road & road alligators).

The Tire Retread & Repair Information Bureau is a worldwide association and our materials are all non-commercial and available at no cost to interested readers everywhere.

Information about Retread Tire Solutions

They will send a CD and two DVDs to those who wish to learn more. Their latest DVD, "Reputable Retreading," contains a virtual retread plant tour, along with testimonials from public sector fleet managers and is very convincing to those who are not certain about retreads.

This nonprofit retread organization will also arrange a tour of an actual retread plant in your area. They encourage "doubters" to take a tour because it is very convincing to see how much care goes into the retread process.

You can do get the attention of taxpayers and the environmentalists in your area by using retreaded tires on your public sector fleet vehicles. Your agency can do well and good at the same time by making the switch to this recycled solution of tires -- definitely a problem for communities that must deal with the millions of discarded tires that end up in landfills!

To order the retread tire information CD and DVDs, or to arrange for a retread plant tour or for more specific information contact the organization:

Tire Retread & Repair Information Bureau
www.retread.org
info@retread.org,
Toll-free: 888-473-8732. From other parts of the world call +831-372-1917

Waste is our nemesis -- and solid waste is filling our cities not only with trashy debris, but it also causes water pollution, air pollution and land contamination.  Prevention would be nice!  But in a consumables society, that's not a robust answer to the problem of excess packaging, throw-away product design and planned obsolescence. How we handle solid waste is a critical issue for our decade.  Here's an overview of how Minnesota and The Netherlands differ...and are finding solutions to this community quality of life issue.

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) recently (Feb 2008) issued a "2007 Solid Waste Policy Report"
(DOWNLOAD HERE: www.pca.state.mn.us/publications/reports/lrw-sw-1sy08.pdf )

Some points:

• Incineration is unhealthy and makes global warming worse;
• Incineration is not a source of "green" or "renewable" energy;
• incineration is very expensive and diverts investment from better options such as "zero waste;"

The MPCA agrees that it cannot be silent on such a high-profile issue, particularly following the Supreme Court's decision in Oneida and following landmark legislation in 2007 on the urgency of building up renewable energy sources and cutting down greenhouse gases. In fact, MPCA believes that Minnesotans can no longer afford to discard the energy embodied in solid waste.

Impact on recycling and organics recovery: The MPCA looked into concerns about WTE plants interfering with Minnesota's recycling and organics potential. The stated concern was that such plants usually require some form of "put or pay" commitments that guarantee a given daily tonnage of garbage to the WTE plants, before investors will commit capital; and that the locked-in tonnages will discourage materials that are burnable from going to recycling or composting. While the concern is reasonable and must be addressed, it is not inevitable that WTE hinders the recycling effort. Rather, residential recycling rates have typically been higher in communities with contractual commitments to WTE facilities than those without WTE. It is worthy of note that the highest waste-diversion achiever in the European Union is the Netherlands, which recycles and composts 65 percent of its waste but also sends 30 percent of its waste to combustion.

One reason for this counter-intuitive state of affairs may be that committing to WTE plants has persuaded those communities to pay attention to their waste rather than relying on distant landfills that are "out of sight, and out of mind." For example, those that operate WTE plants look for ways to keep metal and glass out of combustion chambers, because metals, such as aluminum that melts to slag steal heat from the furnace, interfere with furnace equipment and then add to the tonnage of ash that must be managed at considerable expense. One proven way to divert that metal and glass is source-separated recycling, which keeps the materials out of mixed municipal solid waste, maintaining its value as a marketable commodity.

The MPCA has benchmarked with the world's best achievers in solid waste management and does not find an inherent conflict between WTE and recycling, even at the highest rates of recycling achieved by states and nations.

Minnesota has included WTE in its waste-management mix since the 1980s and its recycling performance is well above average for the United States and is on par with Germany.

The Netherlands is the Pace Setter in Solid Waste  Solutions

The pace-setter is the Netherlands, which landfills only 5 percent of its waste, compared to Minnesota, which landfills 36 percent.

If the Netherlands is taken as one example of how a region with both rural and urban populations allocated efforts within its waste management hierarchy, Minnesota still has good opportunities to move waste up from landfilling. (The Netherlands adopted its hierarchy in 1979, called Lansink's Ladder.)

Lansink's Ladder has these rungs, in order of decreasing preference:

1. Prevention
2. Design for prevention and design for beneficial use
3. Product recycling (reuse)
4. Material recycling
5. Recovery for use as fuel
6. Disposal by incineration