Judith Petts on Garbage Mining

So, to continue on, I just figured I had to better explain what GARBAGE MINING is because it's so amazing!!! For my one reader (Thanks for reading this, Jane):

"Management of MSW raises questions about the capacity of future generations to reduce some of the intergenerational risk sources. For example, will future generations be able to find more benign ways to treat waste, come up with methods to make land safe for any future use, or develop recycling technologies that can expand the range of materials treated? Landfill mining -- whereby waste is abstracted from closed landfills for recycling, usually to extend void space capacity -- is already a reality. If such an argument can be sustained, basic storage of present waste might become an acceptable option, although this does not prevent intragenerational risks in the even of storage failure, institutional failure, or both." (Petts 2000:825)

ACADEMIC CRUSH: Judith Petts

Alright, I know I'm a complete dork, but I think I'm in love with a new scholar in my field. Meet Judith Petts - she's a scholar in the field of risk management. I'm slowing becoming better acquainted with risk assessment as I do more and more readings. It's pretty interesting stuff.

In her article written in 2000 titled "Municipal Waste Management: Inequities and the Role of Deliberation" she discusses Environmental Justice and the process of siting a waste facility. She dips into optimising profitability, functionality, safety and legality, but doesn't even brush up against anything Robert Bullard would associate siting a landfill with. It's absolutely astounding! I'm so happy to have found contrasting ideas in this field. I was getting a little down about the social justice field, thinking it was so idealistic and cynical at the same time. Perhaps I'm just sick of Ro Bull. He's is actually kind of passe in this field!!! No disrespect thought because he did start the whole social justice movement in the eighties and nineties and he isn't white and bearded like the other civil rights folk that started it out (John Muir...etc.)

But back to Petts - she also talks about GARBAGE MINING in this 2000 article. When I visited New York a month ago, I started talking to a guy who lived with my friends that I was staying with. He suggested garbage mining as a feasible economic opportunity in the future. I kind of shrugged him off because the idea was completely new to me and I remember him looking at me saying "Kim, this has been studied, I didn't make this up." I was floored, I had been schooled in my own field. I thought he was the coolest and I had a big hate for the guy to. I am however incredibly proud to say that I have found an article that talks about garbage mining (for potentially recyclable resources) and I have to send all my love and praise towards the powerhouse garbage queen Judith Petts.

MORE FAB ACRONYMS!

AHP Analytic Hierarchy Process
ASSURRE Association for the Sustainable Use and Recovery of Resources in Europe
BANANA Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything
BPEO Best Practicable Environmental Option
CBA Cost Benefit Analysis
EIA Environmental Impact Assessment
EEWC European Energy from waste coalition
ELECTRE Elimination and Choice Translating Reality (multicriteria method)
EPA Environmental Protection Agency
ERRA European Recovery and Recycling Association
EUROPEN European Organisation for Packaging and the Environment

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I just found the article that has all the elements that I like about waste management. Trouble is my degree is a Masters in Geography, this seems a little more anthropological. I hope I can make this work. You can even read this article from where ever you are for free! It's ten years old, but I think it really tackles issues that are still of great interest to bringing people to recycle more often and better.

There are really two elements to recycling (of many!) that stick out to me:

1. Participation and Program Involvement (Getting people to recycle)
2. Recycling properly 

The second point I strongly believe is often abolished to make way for public participation. 

The article I just linked you to raises a really good point and that's "recylcing, as a structured activity, is undertaken on a more frequent basis than waste reuse or reduction." Plain and simple, perhaps that's where we need to devote more of our effort!!!

Robin Nagle on the "San Men" of New York

This is my first post as a Masters student. It's odd, as I put together all these brilliant ideas that I've held very close to me in the past year, I really struggle to articulate them in a scholarly way. I mean, there's just so much I could possibly touch on to make sense of waste in Toronto.

I just watched the most inspiring 20 minute lecture delivered by NYU Anthropologist Robin Nagle. If you've read anything on my blog so far, you'll understand my big love for this woman. She's studying an element of waste that I really wish I had the breadth to dive into - the role of the sanitation worker. This lecture touches on the role and presence of the sanitation worker. Nagle, a New York Anthropologist with her PhD, worked as "garbage man" for a brief period of time. This lecture touches on her experiences and learnings on this job.

Nagle departs with two sentiments. First, is a little something than a sanitation worker of seventeen years told her when she first started on the job. As she recited his words, she struggled to give the santitation worker a gender -

"If you're lucky you'll go your whole life and never have to call a cop. You're also, if you're lucky, will never have to call a fireman. You need a garbage man every single day."

The second thing she said is that the next time you see someone taking care of your trash, you very politely say Thanks.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/5842234?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="400" height="230" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/5842234%22%3ERobin Nagle at Gel 2009</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/gelconference%22%3EGel Conference</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com%22%3evimeo%3c/a%3E.%3C/p>

Waste Privatisation in Toronto: Good or Bad?

Hot news in Garbage in Toronto these days is the privitisation of waste management in Toronto.

I'm not completely swayed that this is a bad thing, but with Rob Ford's records on issues concerning the environment, I'm getting a little wry.

Maybe another strike's on the way...

This is a fabulous article put together by the The Environmental Alliance (TEA) for a digestible summary of what's been going on in the last few weeks.

Waste Management - Frederick Kaufman

This is a brilliant article I stumbled upon while looking into waste management in New York.

Steve Askew, the man being interviewed, is clearly one who is absolutely very knowledgeable and well-versed in the ethics and purpose of waste management. I adore the final bit where he states his job and the functions of human waste treatment plants as returning the environment to the way God intended. Bold.

2008 / New York City

Waste Management

TAGS:

 

disease,

 

garbage,

 

journalism,

 

New York,

 

parasites,

 

science

For thousands of years, Homo sapiens flocked across continents in pursuit of bird, beast, and fresh water, leaving behind him a trail of gnawed bones and steaming waste. The moment we stopped removing ourselves from that waste, it had to be removed from us. Thus the origins of civilization, thus the glories of Rome, Paris, and Philadelphia. A civilization that cannot escape its own fecal matter is a civilization in trouble—unless, of course, the uneasy relationship between man and his effluents can evolve.

“The first regulations with respect to waste go back to the code of Hammurabi,” said Steve Askew, superintendent of New York’s North River Wastewater Treatment Plant, one of the world’s largest. “You have to bury your waste far from where you sleep.” And he gave me the look. Steve Askew never finished college, but that look had seen to the bottom of things. It was both spooky and intimidating, that particular look of pity and loathing the wise bestow upon the ignorant. He knew something I wanted to know: the ultimate fate of our waste.

“People wake up in the morning, they brush their teeth, flush the toilet,” said Askew. “They think it goes to the center of the earth.”

If you happen to live within one particular 5,100-acre patch of the West Side of Manhattan, instead of going to the center of the earth, your waste flows to Askew’s extraordinary concrete cesspit: twenty-eight concrete acres suspended above more than two thousand concrete caissons sunk into the shallows between the West Side Highway and the Hudson River. Constructed in the 1970s, topped by three swimming pools, a skating rink, and a carousel, North River cost the city a billion dollars, 100 million of which went straight into odor control.

North River is just one of New York City’s fourteen wastewater treatment plants, the first of which opened in 1886, along with the Statue of Liberty. These plants handle every conceivable kind of sewerable waste from the city’s eight million permanent residents, not to mention anything a commuter or a tourist might care to add. They separate the material that comes their way into solid, liquid, and gaseous parts, which they further subdivide into that which must be discarded, that which may be consumed, and that which someone, somewhere, might eventually be able to sell.

The substance that enters North River is mostly water, and the vast majority of that water leaves the plant after not much more than six hours, disinfected to the extent that it can merge inoffensively with the Hudson River. One flush on the Upper West Side at seven in the morning, and by three in the afternoon the water is back on the street, so to speak. What’s left over is a half-million gallons of concentrated daily waste, now known as sludge.

I followed Askew into an enormous room of computers, controls, workstations, and switches. Behind us flashed a wall-size diagrammatic panel, the great computerized brain of waste. Next to us stood the oiler, who had been at North River twenty years.

“Right now we’re at 135 million gallons per day,” said the oiler.

The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when the city’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven A.M., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.

He led me across the concrete floor, through a concrete warehouse, and to the concrete screening room, where he began to extol the virtue and beauty of his eleven-mile-long sewage interceptor. By the time the morning flush finally rolls into North River, it has joined the downstream flow of all the other morning flushes from all the other sewage lines from Bank Street to the Upper West Side, and sunk fifty-four feet below sea level. It is here, at the extreme low point of this immense underground current, that North River gets to work. In the Stygian depths, its mighty diameter swollen to sixteen feet, the dark torrent branches into six channels, each of which must be pumped to the top floor of the plant, where gravity can once again take hold and set the outcast on a new journey.

Askew gazed into the inky pool of untreated wastewater and began to describe some of the marvels the interceptor had disclosed. Aside from the daily take of leaves, sticks, cans, and paper, the great rake had brought up quite a few vials of cocaine. When cops bang on the door, the toilet is a drug dealer’s best friend. Ditto for the professional forger: a good deal of counterfeit money has floated into Steve Askew’s hands. Twenty years ago a dog showed up, a living dog that became the mascot of a Brooklyn plant.

As we walked away from the pool, I asked about the wind. No matter what the weather is outside, no matter where we traveled inside, the thick concrete walls of North River generated bracing gusts. Askew explained that every minute, titanic blowing machines inhaled 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air and exhaled 750,000 cubic feet of carbon-filtered, bleach-scrubbed exhaust—six to twelve complete air changes per hour.
But the scouring of North River’s halitosis, while essential to community relations, has nothing to do with the plant’s core mission. The alchemy of purgative transformation starts in the warmth and humidity of the next chamber we visited, where submerged chemical mixers combine the waste with custom-made bacteria. “It’s volatizing off!” Askew yelled above the din of engines and bubbling brown water. Undeterred by the general uproar, Askew detailed the technical intricacies of fecal breakdown and development, but I’m afraid the cacophony blunted the nuances. So Askew dumbed down the lecture. “This looks really good!” he hollered. “Tan water! Light brown froth! Small bubbles! Musty smell! If the foam looks like chocolate mousse, that’s an indication of a bacteriological process!”

We headed to a low-ceilinged room so huge it did not appear to have walls. Here were the settling tanks, the final stop before the water returned to the world. Peace held sway among these last lagoons, and indistinct reservoirs misted into a concrete vanishing point hundreds of yards away. “On a cold morning, you will see the water vaporing off,” Askew said. “And it will rain inside the plant.”

He gave me the look. “When it is really cold, it snows inside the plant.”

At that moment, two square football fields of submerged jets spumed into the shadows and the bronze liquid arced, more sublime and terrifying than the fountains of Trevi or Versailles. Soon these waters would sluice down concrete courses to mix with the mighty Hudson. As for the remaining sludge, it also would depart, but by an altogether different route.

When the froth finally settled back into silence, Steve Askew backtracked through the concrete dungeons until we arrived at a perfectly normal conference room and a nice surprise—someone had ordered pizza!

Despite the skating rink and swimming pool, despite the bleach, the carbon filters, the white hard hats and the spotless lab coats of the technicians, despite the banks of UNIX computers and the sober talk of asymptotes and oxygen demand, despite the boardroom-size wood-veneer table and the well-upholstered ergonomic chairs and the rush of twenty thousand cubic feet of air per second, and despite, to put it bluntly, one of the most extraordinary concealments in all of human history, North River still managed to evoke unappetizing associations. But as I gazed at the cheese and red sauce and blackened crust, I recalled the words of one of the many wastewater professionals I had met that morning. “One of the things about the job—you still have to eat.”

So I sat down to lunch and learned about the glorious future of waste. Now that biochemists could scour the particles on the atomic level, the plant could recover ibuprofen, acetaminophen, endocrine disrupters, DEET, Prozac, and Chanel No. 5. Even caffeine could be extracted from the mix, and I had a hunch the citizens of New York excreted boatloads of stimulant. Perhaps Starbucks would be interested. The technology was there.

“Twenty years from now we will be removing things we have no idea about,” said Askew. “Penicillin, mercury, heroin. Will this be a pharm business? An energy business? An agribusiness?”

He took another bite and delivered the look.

“A bear goes in the woods and it takes two years to decompose. We do it in six hours. In six hours, we imitate all of nature—from the big bang to the big chill. We’re trying to put it back the way that God intended.”

© 2008 by Frederick Kaufman. Used with permission of Frederick Kaufman.