Green Materrs: Urban Legends and Illusions

Published with the permission of the American Women's Club of Zurich

When Switzerland introduced the trash bag tax in the early 90s, an urban legend calling on householders to put paper in their trash bags achieved amazing popularity. Rumor had it that incineration plants need paper in their trash mix in order to heat up to the required temperature. Ultimately, the operator of a major incineration plant was given full-page newspaper space to explain why “it just ain’t so.” Now another urban legend is making the rounds.

Let me set things straight: whatever you may have heard, incineration plants do not need to burn glass to achieve efficient burning temperatures. The explanation for this is the same as for the earlier rumor—incineration plants don’t need to burn any of the materials we can sort and recycle. We don’t need to worry about the burning temperature either. Plastic waste has replaced paper as a heat source for the furnaces. In fact, plastic waste is such a large percentage of household garbage that, instead of being an aid to efficient burning, these large amounts of plastic produce extremely high furnace temperatures and increase incinerator wear-and-tear. Recycling paper and glass is certainly cheaper than paying trash bag tax unnecessarily, and recycling helps the environment by reducing pollution and lowering our energy and resource consumption. Please put empty glass jars and bottles--you may leave the paper labels on them--in your town’s recycling bins.

Battery recycling is another subject that often needs clarifying. Contrary to a current misconception, battery recycling consumes energy rather than saving it. This is because batteries, whether they are being manufactured, used, or recycled, consume more energy than they give out. They are convenience items and should only be used when it is impossible to draw current directly from the electric outlet for your purposes. Recycling batteries is important because the recycling process enables reuse of important materials such as iron, nickel, manganese, and zinc and also keeps toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium out of the environment. Recycling also means less mining and transport of these materials and thus lowers batteries’ environmental impact. Avoid buying Nickel-Cadmium batteries whenever possible. These contain large amounts of toxins, as do many button batteries, which often contain mercury. “Buttons” are particularly dangerous because they can be easily swallowed by small children. Recycling batteries is simple. Every store that sells batteries, including grocery stores, is required to provide recycling containers for customer convenience.

“Yes, Virginia,”….recycling plants really do recycle. The suggestion that they don’t is an urban legend in its own right. The lesson I learned from researching these urban legends is that we can trust the Swiss recycling system. It has been tested and proven practical, environmentally desirable, and economically sound. The technology is reliable and up-to-date, and towns do their best to make recycling as straightforward and convenient as possible. I spent quite a few mornings last year attending citizens’ advisory committee meetings in our town. Our committee was asked to help with the revision of local disposal and recycling infrastructure and procedures. Newcomers may find these procedures complicated at first, but I confidently affirm that every effort was made to simplify them as much as possible.

Illusions of another ilk have to do with us humans. How many times have you heard someone say that an environmentally helpful activity, such as using public transport or recycling, is “only a drop in the bucket?” To say that is to suggest that our contribution (in this case to the environment) doesn’t matter and implies that we are powerless. Whenever we begin to think about global problems, most of us feel pretty small. We aren’t.

A psychologist friend of mine counsels many people who suffer from personal difficulties. When I asked her how their pain affected her, she said something I will never forget: “Yes, it’s hard, but I don’t give up or feel discouraged because I can always do something to help.” Each of us can always do something to help even if what we do seems small to us. As a matter of fact, students of history often tell us that big changes happened because so-called “ordinary” courageous people worked for and supported them. Margaret Mead’s profound insight still rings true: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Women are good at seeing what needs to be changed. We care for (and about) future generations and the world they will inherit. All of us can play a part in building a better world. <

Technology and Sustainable Resources

Floating Windmills with Umbilical Cords

Norway is putting windmills on floats and setting them out to sea. Norway’s experience with offshore drilling ensures that the windmills won’t go too far; the windmills have long shifting anchors, similar to those used with oil rigs. To transport the collected energy back to shore for storage and onward transportation, engineers have added a reverse umbilical cord of sorts, a cable which carries the nourishing energy back to the motherland.

The Global Concerns group spent an intense afternoon crawling through the nooks and crannies of energy-related technologies. Our speaker was Gina Domanig, Managing Director of Emerald Technologies; Gina is a venture capitalist in the area known as ‘Cleantech’, a term used to describe energy technologies and services which focus on improvements in process efficiency, pollution reduction, or the use of renewable resources such as sun, wind, and waves.

In the world of venture capitalists, the emphasis today, we learned, is on sun, wind and waves. For those who missed the lecture, bio-fuels are out. The challenges and the opportunities are many, but they always come back to collection, transportation, and storage. Collecting solar energy in a dessert seems like a good idea. But the collected energy must be transported to the consumer, i.e. fed into an electricity grid, which can then move and store electricity until the consumer needs it. Many of the world’s deserts are simply too far away from the consumer markets and their grids.
Not so with Portugal; this country enjoys sunny skies and is a part of Europe’s dense integrated electricity grid. And Portugal has a green energy vision. By the end of 2011, Portugal will be equipped with a network of electric-car recharging stations and a fleet of battery-powered vehicles to make use of them. To meet the energy demand, Portugal is in the process of building what will be the largest solar photovoltaic plant on the planet. Looking at the details, we learn about a novel way to counter-balance the consumption peaks that might be caused when too many cars ‘tank up’ at the same time: the cars will not only store energy, they will also sell back energy to Portugal’s power-grid.
After and during a well thought-out talk, Gina fielded many questions, a few of which are repeated here:

• Could Portugal become a net energy exporter? What impact might that have on nuclear power sellers in other countries?
• Will robots resolve the problems of cleaning solar collectors and repairing offshore windmills?
• Switzerland has little sun, no sea, and its wind will not be easy to capture. Which are the technologies that Switzerland might pursue to take advantage of the rising green tide? Hint: membrane technologies, geo-thermal processes, bio-tech areas such as fermentation.
  

DISINFORMATION

What Is Disinformation?

According to Wikipedia, 'Disinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. It may include the distribution of forged documents, manuscripts, and photographs, or propagation of malicious rumors and fabricated intelligence. Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation

Disinformation is part of our life – in what we read, hear, or see. It can make people feel insecure and doubtful, make people believe that a matter is clear when it is not. Areas where disinformation is commonplace:

• Economics and finance
• Media
• Science
• Education
• Governments
• Environmentalists
• Medicine
• Real Estate
• Politics
• Companies
• Marketing

In summary - everywhere!!!!

How can we find out if our information is genuine, i.e. not a deliberate clouding of the facts? How can we know if and when an information is presenting only one side of a multifaceted issue? Some simple measures include:

• Talking to people of varied educational backgrounds, cultures and countries.
• Reading on the topic in as many different magazines out of as many different countries, with varied political interests, and in as many languages as possible.
• In the area of science, look for peer reviews and comments
• Rely on people one trusts out of personal experience.
• Use the web, but discriminately. Not everything on the web is true.
• While reading, look for certain phrasings in the text that may carry a hint that what sounds clear-cut and firm is actually anything but.

The following article, Detecting disinformation without radar, by Gregory Sinaisky and published in the Asia Times, is a helpful starting point.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ED03Ak02.html

Our Energy Future

This topic was addressed at a recent meeting of the Global Concerns Group by guest speaker Dr. H. Zulliger. Did you know, for example, that

• the average consumption of a world citizen is 2000 Watt, or 2 kW, which iscontinuously drawn all the time. The energy used is 2 kW times 8760 hours ayear or 17520 kWh a year. The average Swiss consumes between 5000-6000 Watts continuously.
• some countries are encouraging the private use of renewable energy by allowing individuals to sell surplus energy into the public network. There it can be stored or made available to other consumers. Switzerland is a country well positioned to store energy; its alpine lakes are excellent storage vehicles. The laws surrounding the sale of energy to the public utility companies remains, however, very restricted.

Read the full report summary at http://www.ziwa.com/new/reports65.html

Help Alleviate World Hunger

Vocabulary Game to Help the Hungry

Did you know that playing a vocabulary game - and just knowing what a word means – could help feed hungry people around the world?

The innovative philanthropic website, freerice.com does this while offering global awareness and fun through learning to young and old. For each word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to the World Food Program. Click on the right answer and the game continues with the gift of rice and a harder question. If you get it wrong, you get an easier question.

Warning; this game may make you smarter.

It may improve your speaking, writing, thinking, grades, job performance...as well as help feed the hungry of our world.

You can choose the level, the subject, (art, geography, math, language learning, vocabulary, chemistry etc. ..

play the game at www.freerice.com and Pass on this link to all your friends, family, schools.

Hunger on the rise - Soaring prices add 75 million people to global hunger rolls

From the UN Food and Agriculture Department

Rising prices have plunged an additional 75 million people below the hunger threshold, bringing the estimated number of undernourished people worldwide to 923 million in 2007. High food prices have reversed the previously positive trend towards achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by half the proportion of people suffering from hunger worldwide by 2015, according to new figures just released by the UN agency in advance of next week’s General Assembly session on the MDGs.

FAO estimates had put the number of people suffering from chronic hunger worldwide in 2003-05 at 848 million, an increase of 6 million from the 842 million in 1990-92, the World Food Summit baseline period. Soaring food, fuel and fertilizer prices have exacerbated the problem, the organization said. Food prices rose 52 percent between 2007 and 2008, and fertilizer prices have nearly doubled over the past year.

Worrisome trends

“The devastating effects of high food prices on the number of hungry people compound already worrisome long-term trends,” said Hafez Ghanem, FAO Assistant Director-General for Economic and Social Development. “Hunger increased as the world grew richer and produced more food than ever during the last decade.

”For net food buyers – which includes nearly all urban and a large share of rural households, there has been a negative short-term impact of high food prices on household income and welfare. The poorest, the landless and female-headed households have been hardest hit. These negative trends in the fight against hunger imperil efforts to realize many of the other MDGs, according to Ghanem.

In addition to the devastating social cost of hunger on human lives, empirical evidence points to the negative impact of hunger and malnutrition on labor productivity, health and education, which ultimately causes lower levels of overall economic growth. “Hunger is a cause of poverty, not just a consequence of it,” says FAO economist Kostas Stamoulis.

“The economic cost of hunger in terms of both resources needed to deal with its effects and the value of productivity and income losses is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars a year.” The debilitating effect of hunger on human productivity and income leads to a hunger trap, Stamoulis says, with extreme poverty causing hunger which then perpetuates poverty.

Breaking the hunger-poverty trap

“Reducing the number of hungry people by 500 million in the remaining 7 years to 2015 will require an enormous and resolute global effort and concrete actions,” said Ghanem. To break the hunger-poverty trap, action is urgently needed on two fronts, FAO says – making food accessible to the most vulnerable, and helping small producers raise their output and earn more. “Urgent, broad-based and large-scale investments are needed to address in a sustainable manner the growing food insecurity problems affecting the poor and hungry,” Ghanem said. “No single country or institution will be able to resolve this crisis on its own.”

High returns

According to FAO, the countries hardest hit by the current crisis, most of them in Africa, will need at least US$30 billion annually to ensure food security and revive long-neglected agricultural systems. But hunger reduction has big payoffs and should be a top development priority, says Stamoulis.

“Reducing the incidence of hunger worldwide will greatly improve the chances of meeting the MDGs related to poverty reduction, education, child mortality, maternal health and disease,” he said. “Public spending on reducing hunger is an investment with very high returns.”

Oil: Friend or Foe

This was the subject of a presentation to our group by
Dr. Robert Habiger, who has worked in the oil and gas industry for 30 years.

Dr. Habiger led us through the world’s oil status quo, a large task. He made us think hard along the way – about our dependency upon oil, its part in the building up of today’s first-world nations, the understandable demand that comes from all those nations that wish to follow this path, and the consequences of mishandling this resource. (See below to add your knowledge and questions on this subject)

We can choose!
Either we prepare as a global community for "peak oil" - that time when maximum rate of global petroleum production is reached, after which the rate of production enters decline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
Or we compete for a natural resource that becomes more and more stretched by growing world demand.

What are the facts? How serious is the situation? Can we do anything about it? We discussed, amongst other things:

• oil consumption versus world oil reserves
• oil as a percentage of total energy supply
• potential for environmental accidents and how private companies have realized that it is good business to promote sound environmental practices
• most of the world's oil reserves are held by national, rather than by private companies: what are the implications?

Dr. Habiger passed along the following link to Roel Sneider's home page. This gives you background information on Roel and his work on global warming and a comprehensive PowerPoint, 'The Global Energy Challenge'. Visit http://www.mines.edu/~rsnieder/

The site is in the public domain, and you will find there the conditions for linking to and/or using the information to be found on this site.

Call to Action

We cannot recap the entire presentation, nor can we summarize our discussions. Instead we invite you to post to this blog to add your ideas and questions on this subject. Together we can increase awareness and create a vision, if only for ourselves, about what must be done.

• If you were at the presentation – please post here the information which most surprised you or which you think others should know.
• If you were not at this presentation – please join us on this blog and share with us your insights.