Off Hours: Cleaning up our act for nature’s sake

Driving through northern Canada and Alaska some years ago, I was struck by the amount of litter and trash I encountered. The striking terrain and natural beauty all around made such clueless disregard seem particularly onerous.
Most of us have become much more conscientious about things like littering and recycling, but I have since learned that what I noted anecdotally is empirically true, as well. The more we are surrounded by nature, the more remote and removed from the collective conscience of cities and towns, the less scrupulous humans are about care and maintenance of the environment. It is the peer pressure and school programs and trash separation requirements of our community that help us do the right thing when it comes to waste.
Communities also have the benefit of what’s called economy of scale — they generate waste in sufficient volumes to make recycling of certain components profitable. The downside is that communities produce more than twice as much waste per person as do populations that live more remotely. Nearly all of the difference is attributable to packaging. It accounts for nearly half of all household trash.
Paper and cardboard are the most common packaging materials, used for 25 percent of all goods and making up about 10 percent of our individual waste. The downside of paper products as packaging is the deforestation required to make it; the upside is that many paper products are easily recycled, and in a landfill or as litter, most of it will biodegrade within days.
Glass packaging is used for about 10 percent of all goods, most often as a food and beverage container, and it is easily sterilized for reuse. Well-established collection and recycling systems exist for glass, giving it a recycling rate above 75 percent.
Aluminum is also widely used to package food and beverages. It, too, has a scrap value that makes recycling economically viable. Aluminum use in foils and laminates is growing, however, and these applications are virtually unrecyclable, which drags the overall recycling rate down to roughly 40 percent.
Steel containers are used to package a wide range of products, including food, paint and beverages, as well as aerosols. Because of steel’s high scrap value, as many as one in four new steel cans is made from recycled metal. It’s easy to separate from other trash through magnetic extraction, making it the world’s most commonly recycled material.
Plastic is another matter altogether. Half of all goods are packaged in plastics, and when discarded, many of the configurations pose a serious threat to the lives of both human babies and wildlife. Our ever-increasing use of plastic packaging is a serious problem in a number of ways, not least of which is the oil required to make it and the other toxic chemicals mixed in that allow it to stretch or harden or be molded to shape. These materials can leach out in landfills, though the plastic itself does not decompose, and most plastics are not suitable for recycling
What about the leftovers?
OK, we’re agreed about the frivolous use of packaging and the need to recycle as much as possible, but what about food? What about leftover Chinese takeout and other kitchen scraps, which make up about 30 percent of our residential garbage stream?
For the most part, food scraps and food’s natural packaging (orange peels, corn husks, and so on) go directly to landfill. Although food scraps will decompose and “return to the Earth” when buried in a landfill, they pose a growing problem.
As it breaks down in a landfill environment, food produces methane, a greenhouse gas that has a warming effect 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Global methane emissions from garbage are estimated to be as high as 70 million metric tons a year, and pressure is being applied to landfill operators to reduce their contribution. If they are designed for it, landfill facilities can capture the methane and use it to generate electricity, but it is expensive to do and not always practical.
On an individual level, we can reduce our food waste by composting, which creates fantastic soil enriching material — but that’s neither practical nor possible for everyone. It is, however, the method by which many landfill operations now recycle food waste.
San Francisco, for example, offers curbside recycling of food scraps in much the same way our local service recycles glass, metals and paper products. Collected food waste is shipped to industrial-scale composting facilities, which process tons of organic waste a day and sell the resulting compost to commercial growers. By recycling organic waste — composting it rather than burying it in landfills — methane emissions are eliminated.
Reducing landfills and addressing global warming are not issues we can ignore. That’s essentially what our human predecessors did, but now, in our lifetime, it has come back to bite us. If we don’t begin to make the changes necessary, it will burden our successors much more significantly.
Expecting businesses to change is fine, and we do need to push our legislators into tighter regulation of the very industries in whose pocket they rest, but we also need to do the right thing individually.
It doesn’t have to be life-changing. Each of us just needs to do what we can, as often as we can.
• Steve Bailey of Boulder Creek has spent plenty of time in recreational activities. Contact him at sb*****@cr****.com.