8. Our Waste

Out of order.......
I've been compelled to write my next post at a different point in the intended order, both because of recent news articles and also in response to the virtual dialogue following post 7.

It is not as fully researched as I would like, so please pitch in, as always, if you see flaws.

Waste is an inevitable consequence of life. Before the industrial revolution waste was mainly bio waste and was manageable although not well managed. In other words, biologically produced waste materials could be handled by biological processes, and give or take a few urban excesses were kept in balance. Much of today's highly organised effluent processing relies upon these self same processes in sewage farms, septic tanks and digesters.

Today's challenges are very much greater for the two reasons mentioned in previous posts.
Firstly the level of activity and consumption, populations in the West, and increasingly the East, feel the need for, is increasing the level of waste they also produce. This results in, for example, at the UK domestic level in;

• less time to cook and therefore the need for pre-prepared, pre-packed, near instant meals,


• the need to be slaves to fashion and throw out perfectly functional garments or gadgets within months of purchasing them?

Secondly the global population is higher than ever before and continuing to rise very fast at 200,000 per day. These incremental new populations aspire to the needs of the established cultures and add to the demand for goods and services and their associated waste.

Waste
I am going to avoid the cliché of how many earths we would need to manage the waste stream of the world if the world consumed at the same rate as the EU?, but it is more than one. The developed world is profligate and its current habits are not sustainable. However from my blog’s perspective I’m concerned about what this is doing to the climate. The carbon cycle keeps the consideration very simple. If we consume carbon from the biosphere and process it into useful things and/or waste within the biosphere then it is neutral, as it has always been. If we dig up subterranean carbon and introduce that to the biosphere then every atom is a net increase to the biosphere. Every time each atom cycles through the carbon cycle and spends time as a greenhouse gas it is making the climate warmer. So, given the fact that we are currently still extracting carbon from the subterranean layer what is the wisest thing to do? The waste hierarchy helps, as it shows where the most benefit comes from. If we can have an effect at level 1, then it has obviates the need for work at the lower levels. There is also an article in the Financial Times (26/04/08), which placed an acute eye upon the plastics and packaging industry, and shows how they can be considered at the various parts of the hierarchy. There will be an analysis of the article in the context of the hierarchy below in my next major post. The waste hierarchy is becoming more complex as novel technologies blur the edges of neighbouring levels, but it is still a useful way of looking at waste.

The Waste Hierarchy
1. Reduction.
is probably the most fertile ground, and yet is the most difficult as waste reduction returns us to the question of what we really want and involves changing habits which are in themselves on a fast path towards ever greater excess (see post 4). For example, my children’s generation can easily become heavily influenced by ‘cheap chic’ fashion from shops like Primark and H&M which turn over ranges and ‘seasons’ remarkably rapidly. They may only wear a garment once before disposing of it. At best that garment gets reused in the UK and eventually through a ‘clothing recycling bank’ gets sent to the third world, probably whence it came, which is an irony in itself. For baby-boomers, who were brought up with post war rationing still having an effect, this is very difficult to understand and accept. The current western life is full of desire and the need for instant satisfaction – “I want it, and I want it now. If I’d wanted it yesterday, I would have told you yesterday….” Where does moderation, temperance, ‘make do and mend’ and self-sacrifice fit into this? In the words of Harold MacMillan in 1957, who was urging for restraint and common sense, “most of our people have never had it so good”. Is this not today’s problem too but magnified by another 51 years of increasing wealth, expectation and consumption? The material world has expanded enormously and made ‘once in a lifetime’ type purchases, mere commodities which get consumed and disposed of in rapid succession. This concept of succession will be referred to again in a later post. All this is fired by a national need for increased economic growth. In the book ‘Do good lives have to cost the earth?’ Adair Turner puts a strong case for a change of thinking here. Again a later post will look at my take on his very interesting thoughts. If we can’t manage to reduce our need for goods then we must drop down to reuse where the overall gain is less but the ease of implementation might be easier.

2. Reuse.
has great virtue and many of us from the UK babyboomer generation still have an instinct to use it, if we can. The clearest example of it was the pinta - a glass one pint bottle sealed with an aluminium lid containing one pint of fresh milk delivered to our doorstep from an electrically powered milk float. An unwritten rule of the dairy was that each customer left their 'empties', washed out emptied bottles, ready for collection by the milkman at the same time as he delivered. So in theory if he started his run with 1000 'pintas' he would return with 1000 'empties'. The dairies would then clean and sterilise the bottles and reuse them to distribute more pintas to peoples doorsteps, and so the cycle continued. I'm not sure what the attrition rate of bottles was, but despite there being no financial benefit to make the bottles available for reuse, most did get preserved and recycled out of a sense of duty and a desire to keep the process economical.
This process is reflected in northern Continental Europe where many carbonated drinks are bought in strong reusable bottles for which there is a significant charge made. There are both financial and legal incentives to bring the bottles back to a shop for eventual return to the bottler to reuse.
No doubt there are arguments to suggest that today's milk supply chain allows a far better, long lived product to be sold and so less milk is wasted and the consequent carbon footprint is less, and these may well be right. However it is unarguable that if we still had the pinta delivered in glass bottles it would seem ludicrous for the perfectly serviceable empties to be smashed into pieces in a bottle bank. At best, this is what we in the UK are doing with our glass containers, whether it is wine and beer bottles or jam jars. In other words we are needlessly dropping down a level in the waste hierarchy and 'recycling' glass which, with enough imagination, could be reused. A consequence of moving our waste down the waste hierarchy is that it becomes less useful, less valuable and more likely to be dumped at level 6 in the hierarchy.

3. Recycling and composting
The term for broken glass is cullet. It has virtually no utility at all except perhaps as deterrent to intruders when embedded in a cement topping to a wall. In order for it to be recycled to make it useful it has to be worked on. If ground down, it apparently can be mixed with sand, which has does a have an absurd irony to it, if you think about it. Ground glass can also be dispersed within other building materials to provide some functional advantage but this is all pretty low grade in comparison to the shiny, fully serviceable receptacle from which it was derived. To make useful glass receptacles again, the cullet has to be sorted by colour, have impurities removed, and then heated to very high temperatures to melt and remould it. This does seem absurd too. I have read at http://www.glasscullet.com/ that part of the rationale for recycling cullet (level 3) to make glass containers is that it requires less energy than producing new glass. I don't disagree with that narrow view, but is that the only alternative? Why not preserve that glass container and reuse it (level 2), and only resort to level 3 when the receptacle has lost its utility?
Returning to the pinta. Many a jam jar was 'reused' (level 2) as a receptacle to collect the aluminium caps to the milk bottles which were then ultimately recycled (level 3) back into the aluminium supply chain. The motivation for this purely financial - it was a fund-rasier for our school.
Composting, in my opinion, has been elevated above its station. Yes, it produces a useful natural fertiliser and mulch, but it also produces CO2 and some methane, which contribute to greenhouse gas emissions for relatively little gain. Energy recovery can be a better option for the biosphere if the vegetable waste does not have to be transported too far.

4. Energy recovery
This is a posh way of saying incinerate rubbish and use the heat it produces in some way. Starting at the smallest scale first: garden waste often ends up on a bonfire where it is partially burned to produce ash, half burnt wood, lots of smoke, water, CO2 and some clear space where the bonfire pile was. On an individual scale this does little harm but a community's waste disposed of in this way does a lot of harm and, more importantly for this analysis, misses a major opportunity to recover the energy provided to the biosphere by photosynthesis in the plant life being burned. If the gardener were to put a kettle on the bonfire he might eventually boil enough water to make a thirst quenching cup of tea, which would have recovered a small part of the energy locked up in the garden rubbish and avoided him boiling an electric kettle.
The real problem however is that the bonfire produces low grade heat which is very difficult to harness. There was a special design of mini-stove marketed that could recover the energy from one newspaper which would be sufficient to boil that kettle in a few minutes. This combination of good design matched with excellently prepared fuel was best described to me by an expert supplier of logs for use in Swedish wood-burning stoves. If the stove was stoked with logs which had been split and allowed to dry out completely the natural temperature of combustion was so high that they were self cleaning and the combustion so complete that a smoke flue was not required. This 'clean burning' recovers the most amount of heat possible and makes the most use of the carbon within the biomass burned. If you return to post 7, you will see that this is the near perfect means for energy recovery of biomass. It is this matching of the fuel to the method of incineration which is so importannt.
Unfortunately the incineration and energy recovery of the general waste stream is not so easy - the waste is far less well defined and contains materials which do not burn cleanly. Much is made of the threat posed by dioxins which are a very harmful byproduct, but recent technology advances are ingeniously minimising this.

5. Landfill with energy
Taking most of the general waste stream and burying it in the ground is unsightly and space intensive and is an obvious sign of man polluting the biosphere and makes landfill look 'unenvironmental'. Nonetheless microbial and chemical processes within the rubbish do eventually break much of the waste down into simpler products which eventually settle and produce a base upon which topsoil can be placed. For example a local landfill site close to us is now a park with playing fields.
From an energy point of view however, the heat released from breaking down the waste (the warmth naturally produced in a compost heap for example) is not recovered - it is effectively wasted. Of even greater significance is the by-products of this partial degradation of the waste - these are hydrocarbon gases such as methane and CO2. Methane is highly combustible and could provide plenty of energy if harnessed. This is not easy, as the gas is volatile and dilute and would escape easily - it is therefore not widely applied.
A variant of this which is far more promising is the controlled biological digestion of waste streams in purpose built self-contained units.
A further variant of this which is a hybrid with energy recovery (level 4) utilises two sequential chemical processes, pyrolysis and hydrolysis, to breakdown carboniferous material partially into higher molecular weight hydrocarbons which can substitute for gasoline - ie biofuels.

6. Landfill
If all else fails waste, as has always been the case, can be buried in the ground or dumped into water, both of which look terrible and have major negative consequences on the biosphere. Whilst I have seen how domestic waste is disposed of on the idyllic Greek island of Trizonia - simply pushed over and down a cliff eventually tumbling towards the sea only for some of it to reappear on the appropriately named 'Bottle Beach' soon after - of greater significance is the gases produced by landfill sites. These were mentioned in level 5, where at least they were captured and made use of. In a simple landfill site these will be CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and methane which is also a greenhouse gas with 500 times the initial effect of CO2. So not only are we not using the calorific content of the methane we are wantonly allowing it to increase global warming.

In summary:

1. In considering the waste hierarchy, a focus on the framework with the carbon cycle at its centre, does provide incisive insights into how best we should manage the waste borne of ever increasing consumption.


2. The higher the level, the easier it is to practice the wise thing, if we really want to, and achieve the greatest gains. How hard do we want to do the right thing?


3. It is very tempting for us to drop down a level to make the practice easier and pass on the responsibility to someone else, but can we really continue to offset our responsibilities?


4. We have got very confused between recycling and reuse and a return to 1950's thinking may well straighten this out.


5. Energy recovery could be a highly beneficial way of reducing how much new carbon we introduce into the biosphere.
   

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7. The Carbon Cycle - how it can help our understanding

Natural CO2 emissions as part of a closed ecosystem.
The main product, along with CO2, from the right hand side of the cycle is energy. If we consider ourselves, Homo sapiens, 'being alive' means our bodies are respiring and producing energy. To do this carbohydrates are effectively being burned in a very regulated way. The energy produced keeps the body functioning, acting and moving. That's life. By living we therefore cause CO2 emissions - all six billion of us within the biosphere. The same applies to every other living being in the biosphere. CO2 emissions are therefore an inevitable consequence of life. However the carbon cycle makes good use of the CO2 as we have discussed previously and maintains an equilibrium. It has worked well as a 'closed ecosystem' - an ecosystem that can regulate itself.

Extra-ordinary emissions in an inflating closed ecosystem
The increasing activity of our increasing population is challenging this closed and self regulating equilibrium. Our population is expanding at 200,000 per day; on top of this our increasing activity requires more energy and raw material consumption per capita. Let's take this issue in two parts:

1. A human community with an increasing population can continue to grow as long as it has a food supply and has a means of dealing with its waste. (This is leaving to one side the other biological and sociological needs such as a place to breed, room to function and some form of governance.) Both of the food supply and the waste treatment require complementary communities of organisms living within the ecosystem being sufficiently active to keep the ecosystem in balance. Left to Nature, once these complementary activities fail to keep up the population growth will be restrained by starvation or pollution - both these are tough options and immensely challenging for the leaders of a human community.
   
2. Even a static human community with an increasing activity level consumes more energy and raw materials and produces more waste. In our search for ever greater well-being this is exactly what is happening in the West. Again this only remains sustainable if the complementary communities of other organisms, through the carbon cycle, can become more industrious and keep providing us with the food, raw materials and energy to give us the goods and services we desire, as well as dealing with the waste we are producing.

Faced with these two forces, increasing population and the desire for greater well-being through increased consumption, the highly resourceful human race has spent the last two centuries exploiting non-biological means to generate the energy we need - we have been digging up fossil fuels, which contain carbon from outside today's biosphere. The biosphere therefore is no longer an entirely closed system. There is carbon being introduced with no complementary process for getting it out of the system. It is introduced as dense, tangible and measurable fossil fuels but is converted into an invisible and elusive waste problem - carbon dioxide. The fact that the level of CO2 is rising in the atmosphere is clear evidence that neither we nor nature is coping with this waste stream.

What is the carbon cycle suggesting we can do?

There are four new features on the carbon cycle diagram - three sets of orange dots reflecting where the regulation of carbon consumption could be applied and a green arrow depicting a shift from the biological process to the chemical process.

1. Changing the masses.
   The upper set of orange dots on the biological and chemical processes. These represent each of the 6 billion human carbon emitters, with 200,000 more each day - from people at only subsistence living through to powerful large consumers, such as most of the western world. Pretend you are the Prime Minister. How difficult do you think it would be for you to stop emitting so much? How easy would it be to persuade your children to reduce? How easy would it be to make your friends and neighbours reduce? How easy would it be to make your constituents change their habits? How easy would it be to change the habits of your country? How easy would it be for your close allies to change? How easy would it be for your past and present enemies to go with you on an emissions reduction campaign? And how easy would it be to persuade a subsistence farmer not to have the level of well-being we have in the West? Looked at this way most people would think this approach is nearly impossible and yet this is what the West is attempting to do. I think there is a novel glimmer of hope and I will return to this in a later post.
   
2. Changing the many.
   A set of three orange dots on the chemical process. This represents the big 'institutional' consumers of fossil fuels - the utilities, heavy industry, transport and so on. At least there is a finite number of these, they are organisations, they can be spoken to, they are regulated to some extent. If there were a global need to apply restraint it would easier to achieve using this option. There is currently considerable hope for carbon dioxide capture at these points but I think there are major drawbacks and limitations for this approach but we have been investigating other ways of reducing carbon consumption and CO2 emissions in this area by looking again at the old technologies of wood gas and charcoal production. This will be dealt with in a later post.
   
3. Changing the few.
   An orange dot on the arrow depicting fossil fuel extraction from the subterranean. There are definitely a finite number of coal mines, oil-fields and gas rigs, run by a small number of energy companies and these are large and visible sites. Yes, they are powerful now, but for how long? Yes, their interests need to be respected. If you were Secretary General of the UN, with an urgent mandate to reduce emissions, where would you start - at 1,2 or 3?


4. Making the most of our emissions.
   The green arrow depicting a shift from the biological process to the chemical process. At first sight this may appear counter-intuitive - you would probably consider me mad to suggest that you should burn your compost heap rather than let it moulder away. However this choice needs looking at carefully in the context of the diagram. A well managed compost heap takes biomass and produces mulch, carbon dioxide and heat. The heat is not made use of, other than to accelerate composting, so your mulch has caused CO2 emissions. If that same biomass was naturally dried and then effectively incinerated or processed into fuel, then mankind debatably would gain more benefit from your compost.
   There are considerable efforts going into processing biomass, specifically grown for bio-fuel.
   There is less but very interesting research into how to process large scale agricultural waste biomass into fuel.
   There are also valuable initiatives to rid landfill sites of biomass. In a landfill site biomass does not produce usable compost but produces methane which is a greenhouse gas of fifty times more power than CO2.

To summarise the argument, thus far, we will return to the Framework Diagram from post 4.

The biosphere
Life on earth takes place in a delicate and isolated ecosystem called the biosphere which relies entirely upon the unique chemistry of carbon. This biosphere is no more than a film on a tiny planet and extremely delicate. It is in constant movement and supports various cyclical processes which are highly balanced and interrelated.
The carbon cycle and the energy cycle
The carbon cycle is life's provider and the framework puts a renewed understanding of the carbon cycle at its very centre. Mankind needs sources of energy to exist and to be well (well-being) In its recent proliferation and increased activity levels it has found carbon-bearing fuel outside the biosphere to meet its energy needs. In burning these fuels the carbon cycle is no longer in balance. This is leading to the biosphere increasing in overall temperature due to the greenhouse effect. By understanding the carbon cycle it is possible to evaluate which measures are likely to be the most efficacious.
Economics and Politics, Philosophy and Moral Values
The ownership of energy production bestows enormous power on the few - however this situation can be seen as potentially our saviour. The framework finally recognises that all this energy fuelled activity is dedicated to what we really want - our desires and aspirations and what we are prepared to sacrifice.

The next two posts look at some secondary threats to the carbon cycle involving oceanography, climate science and demographics. That will then complete the initial analysis and from this a framework for effective action will be proposed which will draw upon, in part, the findings we discovered along the way.

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