I’m really starting to question if there is nearly any part of my life isn’t slowly killing myself, my generation, my children’s generations or their children’s generations. If you had asked me a month ago if eating fish from the Hudson River was a good idea I’d probably be sensible enough to guess that it probably isn’t, but the thought that even taking the subway is doing my body damage seems beyond what I could have imagined possible. New York, and maybe even just first world culture altogether, seems so filled with peril around every bend that it makes me question if anything can really be done. It seems that all of the foundation to which we built our society atop was faulty, and as it slowly disintegrates those particles are building up, giving us cancer and slowly killing us right under our noses. Our every day lives function because of how effortless it is to ignore these problems and in part it probably is a factor to why our society has been so successful. We don’t worry about our trash, energy, cars or food, and because of that we have more time for other matters; even if caring about these issues will impact the rest of our lives and the lives of those long after us.

I’m starting to think change isn’t even worth striving for because the scale of the change necessary to truly fix things seems so utterly impossible. Some of the most basic ideology our country was founded on, steadfast doctrines we Americans swear by such as private property, and consumerism and capitalism simply don’t seem to be achievable in a world that truly addresses all the dangers to the environment present in our society. While the 99% can continue their lives blissfully ignorant of the damage that is being done to them there will always be someone there to take an advantage of them and the environment. The simple truth is that unless an issue can so impact a person that it changes their daily life, the average person will simply go about their day without dealing with it. The only way for things to really change would be from a universal change of attitude across the population or an acceptance that these issues are not simply the ramblings of radicals and intellectuals, but rather serious dangers to everyone; neither however seems even remotely likely.

I do feel privileged taking this class knowing that I am less ignorant than the masses but my complete lack of ability to make any difference leaves me just frustrated and disheartened. I’ve tried explaining some of the issues discussed in class to friends, and when I bring up brownfields, air pollutants or PCBs, their response is nearly always a resounding “…so?” People my age would rather discuss nearly anything than these matters, and in the twitter generation I am a part of that is becoming the absolute norm. When I brought these issues up to my parents and older relatives they at least knew what I was talking about, but even then I doubt any of them ever took action to stop these problems and truthfully they came from a different era where attention spans could last longer than 10 seconds. In 2012 if you ever don’t want to address a problem and clear your head, it’s as simple as jumping on your smart phone and seeing what 140 characters your favorite celebrity felt the need to broadcast to the planet; that is not a mindset to tackle these kinds of issues with. I can’t seem to find any audience in my friends over these issues and I’m still yet to find a way that I can make an impact beyond signing an occasional petition I see online and trying to be more conscious of my power usage and recycling. I just feel like my hands are tied. Truly I can’t wait for the later part of the course where I can try to figure out how to make an impact because right now I just feel really quite powerless.

In the previous class, we left off wondering what the possible source of Central Park’s lead levels was. Since it was not the leaded gasoline, as originally thought, researchers pinpointed it to New York City’s use of incinerators. As elated as they might have felt in finding the source of NYC’s lead pollution, what was the point? Incinerators were stopped years ago. This research didn’t solve any problems of today, so what was the idea behind trying to find out why? This requires a small digression into NYC’s trash management and the New Bedford case study.

Getting rid of our waste and garbage has been a ubiquitous and constant problem for cities and villages alike. As cities grow, they sought cheap and effective means of getting rid of the garbage. Rivers were used to dump sewage until reports in the mid-19^th century showed that waste would build up downstream. Then incinerators were used to burn any trash that could be burned until reports showed that airborne pollutants are released when trash is burned. Now landfills are used but research has shown that some plastics are leeched into the ground and could contaminate ground soil.

What is important about NYC’s trash management records is how accurate they are. They have recorded how much and what kinds of trash are thrown out annually. Over the course of decades, the introduction, drop off, and general flux in consumption of goods can be seen in what is thrown out. The introduction of breakout products (the nylon stocking, the disposable diaper, etc.) can be seen in the landfills like layers of sediment at the bottom of a lakebed. But again, there is question, why does it matter?

The New Bedford case study illuminates a number of key points to understand. History is important, and this cannot be emphasized enough. Before any action can be taken to undergo treatment of the environment, it is important to understand how the present state of the environment came to be. The case study of New Bedford shows us how damage to the environment is rarely caused by a one-time incident. New Bedford, like many American cities, underwent a number of changes over the course of time. From agriculture, to whaling, to textiles, to industry, each phase of New Bedford presented another new problem to the environment. An environmental issue is rarely an “accident” in the strictest sense of the word but a result of continuous, lasting, and detrimental actions. By pleading ignorance, it is easier for us to call them “accidents.” The inability to fish in New Bedford was not the result of a singular cause, but the result of a combination of sewage, PCBs, and industrial waste.

The Central Park study, the NYC waste management records, and the New Bedford case study show the importance of knowledge and history. History provides context for the issues of today; it allows us to make informed decisions of what does and what does not work; lastly, it shows just how fragile our environment is. Every action we have taken can still be seen within the layers beneath.

Now after seeing what happens when companies are given the freedom to do what they want without significant penalties, we’ve moved on to policy with regards to public services and the public itself.

We began the discussion with an overview of trash incinerators. I hadn’t realized that this type of waste disposal was at one point so common, but it makes sense. Incinerators are evidently small and cheap enough to install in every apartment building, and conveniently decrease the quantity of waste for ultimate disposal in a landfill. In addition, ash doesn’t attract rats or other pets.

But over the last half century, health standards have risen, requiring expensive new air filters for them to remain operational. As a result, incinerators have fallen out of favor (and of course this explains the historical drop in lead levels, not the end of leaded gasoline).

But not all of them have been closed – the largest in the US continues to operate under the guise of being a power plant. From the video we watched, it seems that the Detroit incinerator survived due to the side-benefit of power production, as well as being cheaper in the short run for the city. Although a long-run alternative to the incinerator might be cheaper and more productive for Detroit, it would require setting up landfills and recycling programs, and generally disrupt the status quo for a city with few resources.

In addition, the operators of the incinerator certainly stand to lose if it is shut down – and they’ve had twenty years to influence members of the city government. This seems like a situation where the state or federal government should provide loans to invest in a greener form of disposal, but nothing will be done unless the city government decides it wants to make the change.

In a similar vein, the MTA makes little note of studies suggesting a link between time in subway platforms and steel particle exposure. The administrators of the MTA know that even if they convince the NYC government to give them money to improve health standards, announcing this new-found risk of riding the subway could decrease ridership. Such an event , even if it wasn’t economically bad for the city, would decrease revenues to the MTA and ultimately might force them to reduce pay or downsize. So employees to the institution have a vested interest in keeping ridership high.

So government as well as business is susceptible to corruption and short-sightedness, but only because both of these institutions are made up of people. Most people are much more focused on their day-to-day existence than in saving the earth. Even more than that, because each person contributes such in such a small way to the whole of human waste production, it’s incredibly hard to assign personal responsibility to the decision to throw out a soda can or hold onto it the entire walk home.

So the can/bottle deposit is an example of good government. It presents an incentive to recycle, where before it was a matter of personal satisfaction. Although the value of the deposit has gone down with inflation, it is still high enough to be economically viable. We talked about how the destitute collect recyclables from trash cans, but I know from personal experience that some businesses do recycling explicitly for the deposit as well. Something I’m going to look into soon is how much the proportion of cans and bottles that are turned in for a deposit has changed over time.

            We never really think about what happens to our garbage; we just throw it into the garbage bins and it gets taken away.I remember one of the earliest times that I ever considered what happens with what we throw away. It was when my father took me to a local landfill on Long Island that had been partially converted into a park. We used to go crabbing there and I had always thought that it was incredible that the big hill I was standing on was made of garbage. In retrospect, it seems almost ironic that they used a landfill to create something that promotes environmental awareness like a park does. However putting a nice little park over the landfill does little to alleviate the growing problem of our garbage accumulation.

In my personal family, we try to limit our garbage use. My dad lives by the philosophy that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. He not only saves our own junk to refurbish and reuse but also gathers what other people are throwing out. All of my family’s bicycles are bicycles that my dad recovered from other people’s trash. My dad also always had my sisters and I gather our family’s glass bottles and aluminum cans and return them at our grocery store so we could get the deposit back. My grandparents would have a compost and save their food garbage to use to make soil for their plants. There are many different ways to try and reuse items to limit our consumption of goods and creation of garbage.

At work I see the other end of the spectrum. I work at two different jobs in the food service industry and it is apparent that ridiculous amounts of garbage are generated in this industry. Not only is all half-eaten food thrown out, but all food that is made by mistake, left out, old, or tainted is as well. At the end of night I am left taking out bag after bag of garbage. Also neither of my jobs has an adequate recycling program. I am always left throwing out numerous bottles and cans. Also at each of jobs, one employee has tried to collect the recyclables themselves but it has been unfeasible for one person to collect that many bottles and cans and they have given up. On a related note, my mother works as a nurse in the neonatal ICU ward and can confirm the sheer amount of diapers that are thrown out each day. She also says that she has witnessed many parents swear they are going to use cloth diapers either for environmental reasons or to save money, only to give up later once they realized what exactly cloth diapers entail and how often newborns have to go to the bathroom. She has yet to see anyone stick with cloth diapers yet.

I think that the biggest issue when it comes to environment is what to do with our wastes. We have learned that our toxic wastes pollute or breathing air and drinking water, while our material wastes are taking up and dirtying our space. As our population grows, the amount of waste we generate will only grow as well. I think more should be done to encourage recycling or even composting so food and other waste that would decompose easily can be dealt with in a more environmentally sound way. It seems strange that if New York City is able to keep detailed accounts of what garbage was thrown out that they couldn’t then separate this garbage to recycle what could be recycled.

I like how the last lectures were about the issue of trash. I feel this issue directly relates to us then the PCBs in the Hudson River issue did, for instance, because we are the ones generating the trash. We are the ones contributing to the issue. Of course, we have no choice. What would we do with all of our wastes, then? Right now there are the two options: the landfills or the incinerators.

I would like to say thank God for no more incinerators! The 12,000 tons of particulate matter released every year during the 1930s-1970s would have surely given us all cancer by now if it was allowed to continue. It’s interesting though that incinerators are still around in some areas. Well in actuality, Detroit doesn’t call it an incinerator, but what else would it be? They’re burning trash the same way incinerators did decades ago. Detroit is in debt and the “incinerator” is a good way to make some profit for the city, but the city should take more responsibility of its people and think of new ways for waste disposal. It is known that particulate matter can be an immediate danger to people when exposed.

Which is why I found the case study of particulate emissions in NYC so very interesting. They were trying to determine the Fe/Mn ratio, and instead found a ratio of 104- for steel. So everyday I take the train in order to go to class and I am consistently exposed to steel thanks to the train braking, causing friction and releasing steel dust. But honestly this is not going to stop me from taking the train. How else would I go from the very tip of Manhattan to the Upper East Side every morning? I already walk a few train stops in order to get exercise, but to walk the whole ride would be outrageous.

Speaking of the tip of Manhattan, though, I always loved the fact that I live on garbage! I just hope it’s not diapers. And I am still stunned at the fact that almost 15% of refuse composition in homes are made up of diapers. I would like to think that maybe we can decrease that number, but what are we going to make the mothers do? Go back to cloth? We released them from that burden and as mothers they shouldn’t be given more burdens to deal with- raising a child is enough! But diapers are quite difficult to get rid of due to their chemical complexity, and that is the problem with the majority of waste today. Through time, a lot of our products are chemically complex in order to give us instant gratification, and of course that results in a huge issue with waste disposal. No more ash thanks to a switch in fuel means we don’t know how to build out land, but can we try out plastic? I actually like the sound of that, but I just find it difficult to imagine. There was so much ash (80%) leftover to make land out of it, and there isn’t as much plastic nowadays compared to that number (10%). But let’s just say we keep all of the wastes at landfills. The one shown in the video at Florida seemed very close to the city: what effects will that have on it? There must be issues already, especially for those who are working there directly, like the truck drivers. I would assume if it ever reached its peak of 193 feet high, the wastes at the bottom must have dug into the soil and reached water, causing quite an effect on the city and everyone in it. But that’s not going to stop the use of landfills. I can only think of one sure-fire way to get rid of our wastes: send it off into space! If only.

Ben Flikshteyn, MHC 200, Professor Alexandratos, 9.29.12, Weekly Response 4

It seems as if out of sight and out of mind is a common attitude when it comes to waste disposal. We have seen dredged soil from the Hudson buried in Texas. We have seen incinerators that put garbage into the air versus leaving it visible. Even landfills are not without problems. It is impossible to predict if they will leak, or hold. For example, an earthquake near San Francisco easily toppled the buildings on landfills. However, because these waste products are hidden from our sight we do not feel pressure to deal with them. Unfortunately, there is a limit to how much we can hide and bury and launching things into space is not yet viable. Fortunately, by analyzing what we throw away we can avert, or at least delay, the problems with our waste management strategies.

My favorite part of class this week was tracing the technological advances New York has made, by digging through its trash. Across the years 1905, 1939, 1971, and 1989 much has changed and much has stayed the same in the city’s trash. Food has made up a steady percentage of waste but ash has fallen form a colossal 80% to almost nothing. Conversely, paper, plastic, and metal compose growing amounts. The most staggering shift, however, is the appearance of a miscellaneous category in 1989 that takes up almost 15% of trash found in landfills. Disposable diapers, a luxury item, make up a tremendous amount of waste that must be dealt with. They are hardly the most necessary or most useful things we throw away and yet they are discarded en masse.

It so baffled me that we could allow so much waste to be generated for a product that used to be made of reusable cloth that I began trying to invent an alternative. I was toying with designs that have a layered diaper so that most of it can be reused, only disposing of the dirtied portion. I watch a show called “Shark Tank” in which inventors try to sell their business ideas to a group of “sharks”, or investors. This week, the episode featured a brand called FuzziBunz. A woman cited the same facts about the miscellaneous category that we learned in class and had the same reaction that I did. She invented a diaper that is extremely easy to wash (parents do not have to touch the soiled portion at all) and has priced it so that it actually saves parents an average of 2,500 dollars in diaper costs. Her product, along with imitations from competitors, has sold $40,000,000 in the last twelve years and is catching on.

This is an example where humans are overcoming the tendency to ignore what they bury. Diapers may be a dirty little secret, hidden under the title miscellaneous, but by studying what goes in to landfills solutions are uncovered.

This type of problem solving can be applied to many of the other things we throw away as well. Glass and plastic have become more mainstream materials, adding to the chemical complexity of landfills. It would be excellent to remove these from the equation. The five-cent deposit on plastic bottles is a good idea but it is out of date. Five cents was worth a larger percent of the total price of the drink when the return policy was implemented. If it were to be adjusted for inflation, many more people would save their bottles. Although it may seem to raise the price of drinks, causing concern among beverage companies, if the deposit were larger people would be sure to return the bottles and, knowing this, be unbothered by the extra cost as it is only temporary.

On an unrelated note I am thinking about starting to wear a mask on the subway or at least shelling out $200 dollars to get my bike fixed. Between the  steel in the air and what I’ve heard about the tuberculosis outbreak, the subway is becoming a scary place.

Reva McAulay

MHC 200 Weekly Writeup #4

10.1.12

Learning about the history of New York City’s waste was oddly enough the hands down coolest thing we’ve learned about so far.  There were so many weird historical events that could be seen in the trash records, not to mention the amusing idea that somebody has been keeping quite detailed records of what New Yorkers throw out for an absurdly long period of time.

The experiment about the air quality was also very interesting.  It shows how the results of a study can be so unexpected, considering that it seemed to be aimed towards comparing the air quality of two different neighborhoods but instead discovered that subways put dangerous steel dust in the air.  I can’t say I’m outraged either, this is not a case of blatant disregard for environmental consequences or government regulations like the Exxon Mobil thing.  Steel dust coming from steel on steel friction while braking is not exactly a crazy idea, nor is the idea that said steel dust would make its way into people’s lungs.  It’s impossible to eliminate pollution, and the MTA is only polluting subway tunnels, so only people who choose to take the subway are affected.  It’s just one of the risks inherent in every life activity, like the risk of getting hearing damage from the loud noises or falling off a platform.  If people care enough to kick up a fuss, the MTA will undoubtedly fix it, albeit probably in the cheapest and easiest manner even if it is less effective or flawed.  My guess though, is that, like the hearing damage, even if people knew they wouldn’t so much as pay a few bucks or take a few delays to get it fixed.

With a little bit of digging I was able to come up with some anecdotal information about the old-school soda bottles that had a deposit from the bottling company to encourage consumers to return the bottles so they could be washed and reused.  Apparently using plastic bottles and aluminum cans is cheaper, which is a shame since they are not reusable and often not recycled either.   The voluntary recycling of glass bottles paid 2 cents on a 5-cent bottle.  (http://voices.yahoo.com/coca-cola-cost-then-now-7162898.html?cat=37).  When the first deposit law was passed in 1972, a six pack of Coke cans cost $0.69.  That’s eleven and a half cents per can, meaning a five cent deposit would get you back close to half the cost of the soda.

Obviously, the deposit carries a lot more weight when its half the price of a beverage rather then a tenth or 1/20 of the price.  The additional fact that Michigan, of the ten-cent bottle deposits, has a near 100% recycling rate (compared to New York’s 75%, http://www.bottlebill.org/about/benefits/waste.htm) indicates that lawmakers should consider upping the deposit.  Not to mention putting in deposits in the 39 states that don’t have any at all.   On the plus side, New York added water and non-carbonated drinks to the deposit bill in 2009 in spite of stores complaining about having to accept cans, and bottles and drink companies complaining that the deposit raised prices and would reduce sales.

In the meantime, at least the mayor excluded incineration from the list of possible new waste-to-energy propositions, so we don’t have to worry about ending up in a Detroit-like situation.   Because basically every goal of the city is to avoid being like Detroit in any way.  But that still leaves somebody to figure out a cost-effective way to turn garbage into energy, one that is preferably still cost-effective after recycling and composting remove lots of NYC’s garbage.