RAG newsletter 2007 Mar Oct

							      R.A.G. TIMES                                                                             Mar – Oct
                                                                                                 2007
 Web site: www.guam.net/pub/rag/                                    Recycling Assoc. of Guam
  Editor: Paul Tobiason, 477-7579     e-mail: tobiasonp@kuentos.guam.net           Interim President: Paul Tobiason

What is Zero Waste?                                        waste by November 2001. The dramatic improvement
                                                           has been driven by the vision of total waste elimination
The following article should be a real eye-opener for
                                                           and achieved through higher landfilling charges,
island residents.
                                                           processing of greenwaste, recovery of recyclable
                                                           materials, and continuing community education. He
Dear RAG members,
                                                           says the low value of the New Zealand dollar has
We are so used to hearing that recycling isn’t
                                                           created strong export markets as well as domestic
economicically feasible; that we can’t divert any more
                                                           reprocessing opportunities.
than 25%; etc. If that were true, then our New Zealander
neighbors must be having hallucinations! A critical
                                                          In Kaitaia, 67 per cent of all material arriving through
component to a solution seems to be attitude.... that is,
                                                          transfer stations is recovered. Recycling Centre
the way folks feel about the environment. Read it for
                                                          manager Cliff Colquhoun says it has become clear that
yourself....
                                                          waste can easily be reduced by 50 per cent through the
                                                          diversion of greenwaste and a basic collection system
Here's a couple press releases from our allies in New
                                                          for recyclables.
Zealand. Lots of good quotes and a very succinct
summary of the paradigm shift that we have to make
                                                          "What we are seeing around the country is that there is
away from landfilling/incineration and towards zero
                                                          no excuse for communities not to cut waste by 50 per
waste. Also cast an eye on the success stories in New
                                                          cent immediately," he says. "Reducing waste from 50
Zealand already: in just a few years, towns are up to
                                                          per cent to 70 per cent becomes a little more
65% diversion rates and heading for 80%!
                                                          challenging, but the final 30 per cent is likely to be
                                                          easier because communities will no longer tolerate
Neil Tangi, Media Release, 10 December 2000
                                                          goods that aren't designed for reuse and recovery."
Councils Slash Rubbish Problem with "Zero Waste"
                                                          London-based resource economist Dr Robin Murray,
Strategy, Up to two-thirds of "waste" recovered and sold
                                                          author of "Creating Wealth from Waste" says there is
                                                          no reason why New Zealand can not cut municipal
New Zealand local authorities are making major
                                                          waste landfilling by 80 per cent in the next three years,
progress towards a goal of zero waste-to-landfill through
                                                          with potentially huge gains in foreign exchange savings
an ambitious plan to correct the country's chronic waste
                                                          and job creation.
problem. Delegates at the 2nd annual Zero Waste
Conference, in Kaitaia, have described dramatic
                                                          The Zero Waste Conference is an opportunity for zero
improvements in the amount of waste being sent to
                                                          waste councils to share information and compare
landfills through recovery of materials and anti-rubbish
                                                          progress. Their tactics include reducing the size of
education. Some are already retrieving more than 65
                                                          household collection bags, reducing the maximum
per cent of the waste stream as commodities, and
                                                          weight of bags, promoting greenwaste collection,
expect further gains as new waste recovery
                                                          collecting a levy on trailer-loads at landfills, and
technologies and processes are developed.
                                                          introducing a penalty payment for unsorted loads. In
                                                          Kaikoura District the council has withdrawn its
The conference agenda included international
                                                          household rubbish collection, a move it says is one of
specialists in resource economics and urban ecology,
                                                          the most well-supported decisions it has ever made.
sponsored by The British Council, United States
Embassy and the New Zealand Council for Sustainable
                                                          Recycling specialists say the recovered materials
Business.
                                                          industry is now radically different to five or 10 years ago
                                                          when operators tried to exist from the commodities
Opotiki mayor Don Reisterer, whose council was the
                                                          markets for paper, glass, aluminium and steel. During
first to aim for zero waste, says his district has cut
                                                          this period many went broke. Councils now understand
landfilling from 10,000 tonnes to 3500 tonnes per year
                                                          that paying for a recycling service is far cheaper, and
and expects to recover 80 per cent of all municipal
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better for the environment and local economy, than          a provision mentioned for medical and municipal waste
filling valuable landfill space.                            incineration.

Zero Waste New Zealand Trust was established in             The other thing the rules say is - ' anything pretreated
1997 to help communities and local authorities to set at    with chlorine cannot be incinerated' “
target of zero waste to landfill by 2015. It provides a
$25,000 grant to each, to help develop and implement        (The reason that this point is important is that
waste-elimination strategies. There are now 26              combustion in the presence of the chemical chlorine
communities whose councils have made the                    produces DIOXIN. The less of it on our planet, the
commitment to aim for zero waste - - in effect to get as    better off we will be. )
close to zero as possible - - in the next 14 years. Trust
spokesman Warren Snow says the target has been set          11 December 2000
at zero to encourage the best results.
                                                            NZ Urged to Develop Secondary Materials Industry
He says the progress made with waste minimisation so        Economist Warns of Non-tariff Barriers for Disposable
far demonstrates a groundswell in favour of a society       Goods
that does not waste resources . "In New Zealand we
have been a waste-hiding society for a long time. We        Dogged by political back-sliding and claims that
have paid for people for take our waste and hide it         recycling doesn't "pay for itself", promoters of waste
somewhere, usually in a whole in the ground. After          elimination continue to present evidence that recovering
decades of wasting our resources, people are realising      resources from "rubbish" is a huge opportunity for the
that it can't go on. We are in effect borrowing capital     economy.
from the environment with no intention of ever paying it
back," he says.                                             Nick Early reports on the second annual Zero Waste
                                                            Conference.
"Communities are realising that we need to take a
whole-systems approach to waste. It's no good trying to     For years the stalwarts of New Zealand's recovered
deal with what pours out of the waste pipeline into the     materials industry have endured claims that recycling is
landfill. Communities are demanding a say in what           an unaffordable waste management "option" and a
happens to the waste stream and have shown that they        source of artificial jobs. Promoters of the Zero Waste
are very effective at placing their hand over the end of    movement have heard it all, and often, from politicians,
the pipe - to preserve landfill space, create jobs from     engineers and business people grounded in
waste and protect their environment. The next phase         conventional, short-run economics. All the while
towards Zero Waste will be to look up the pipeline to the   evidence has been mounting that not only can a
source of waste and encourage a design philosophy           recovered materials industry save precious landfill
within business that prevents waste from being created      space, it can also create meaningful jobs, save foreign
in the first place."                                        exchange and generate huge economic opportunities.

"Many overseas manufacturers are already designing          Traditional economists are now acknowledging what the
products for disassembly and reprocessing. It is only       social and industrial ecologists have been saying for
matter of time before this becomes standard practice,       years. There is a mountain of wealth to be made from
as communities reject the mentality of disposable           firstly diverting waste from landfills and, ultimately,
goods.                                                      ensuring that waste becomes a redundant concept in
                                                            business.
"It is clear from the conference that we are rapidly
moving away from a concept of waste management and The line-up for the recent Zero Waste Conference, in
disposal, to a notion that waste should not exist."        Kaitaia, shows the calibre of the specialists who now
                                                           advocate a global secondary materials industry.
//end//                                                    Keynote speakers included the former head of one of
                                                           Japan's biggest producers of consumer goods, a
                                                           heavyweight economist from the United Kingdom and
                                                           several United States specialists in resource policy
From Waste-Not-Asia comes this from Mr. Anu of India: development. They have been sponsored to come here
                                                           by The British Council, the United States Embassy, and
“Indian Rules ban the incineration of PVC. 'The rules      the New Zealand Council for Sustainable Business. The
say- No chlorinated plastics shall be incinerated' This is common message is simple: Resource recovery works.
  3                                                                                           R.A.G. TIMES
Not only does it work, it is absolutely essential that we      London-based economist Robin Murray, head of the
eliminate the concept of waste and disposability from          Centre of Global Governance at the London School of
the psyche of industrialised economies.                        economics, advances the same arguments from a
                                                               different angle. Trained in conventional economics he is
"We have reached the limits of the environment," says          happy to be described as one who has "seen the light."
Taichi Kiuchi, former managing director and now
counsellor to Mitsubishi Electric. If we fail to emulate London, he says, has become an urban forest and an
nature's ability to reprocess what it produces, then we  urban mine, chock-full of paper and metals which are
have no chance of sustaining a global population which   there for the taking. Reprocessing industries will create
is increasing out of control.                            thousands of jobs and save billions in foreign exchange.
                                                         He says New Zealand, like other developed countries,
Kiuchi, whose passion for sustainability has transformed will have to become as skilled at processing secondary
Mitsubishi's design philosophy, is a master of elegant   materials as it is in producing and processing primary
simplicity. In a delicious irony, he urges constraint.   materials.
Consumption is not necessarily a virtue. We must learn
to know how much is enough, he says, and that the        And he says New Zealand manufacturers will face
planet can't get any bigger to accommodate all our       increasingly strict criteria on the use of materials.
consumer wants. We need to live within the planet's      Products with inefficient resource use are likely to face
limits, understand that we can not dominate nature and trade barriers. "If it can't be disassembled and
accept that the economy operates within the              processed, the European market won't want it. The time
environment, not the other round.                        to adapt to these requirements is now,"

His is not a lone crusade. Others, like visionary              The environmental gains from a secondary materials
business Paul Hawken, and Interface Carpet's Ray               industry are forecast to match the economic benefits.
Anderson, are challenging the foundation of twentieth          Murray says a 70 per cent reduction in landfilling in the
century business practices. Kiuchi warns of the scale of       United Kingdom would have the same greenhouse gas
environmental change - of the disappearance of the             benefits as taking 5.4 million cars off the road. Murray is
Arctic ice cap and the desert marching towards Bejing          staggered at the response to resource use studies in
at the rate of 3.5km per year. (It is now only 70kms from      the United Kingdom. "All the evidence of huge
the city's edge, closing the airport for around seven          economic gains from waste elimination, and there has
days each month, and authorities a planning a complete         been study after study, has cut absolutely no ice. The
relocation of the capital.)                                    efforts to reduce waste in Britain remain focused on
                                                               incineration, even though it has been shown time and
Kuichi, who is also chair of the Future 500 group of           again that incineration has huge problems with ash
corporates, says we have to accept that some of the            disposal, dioxin emissions and providing the right mix of
underlying assumptions of business are wrong. We               waste to achieve combustion."
have to move away from the concept of perpetual
growth, in favour of better products that don't degrade        New Zealand, he warns, needs to grasp the
the environment. We have become overly focused on              opportunities, adding that incineration in New Zealand
money as a measure of value, and besotted with                 would be seriously strain the credibility of our "clean-
technology. We have neglected to take into account the         green" marketing image.
genuine cost of the products we demand in terms of
resource depletion, greenhouse gas emissions and               A trustee of Zero Waste New Zealand Trust, Warren
pollution. He calls Gross Domestic Product a hopelessly        Snow, says the progress made with waste minimisation
outdated measure, "invented in the 1930s and no longer         so far demonstrates a groundswell in favour of a society
relevant." He wants more democracy, long-life stable           that does not waste resources. Currently there are 26
products and a consumer ethic that thinks carefully            communities whose council's have made a commitment
before each purchase.                                          to zero waste-to-landfill by 2015. He says the target has
                                                               been set at zero to achieve the biggest gains, and a
"Businesses must take resources from cradle-to-cradle,         number of councils are recovering and selling more
not from cradle-to-grave," he says. They should offset         than 65 per cent of their municipal solid waste. The
their environmental impacts without the need for               implications for business and the economy are
legislative sticks. A small levy on an international airfare   profound, he says. "In New Zealand we have been a
would be enough to establish an airline-owned forest to        waste-hiding society for a long time. We have paid for
balance greenhouse gas emissions.                              people to take our waste and hide it somewhere, usually
                                                               in a whole in the ground. After decades of wasting our
  4                                                          R.A.G. TIMES
resources, people are realising that it can't go on. We
are in effect borrowing capital from the environment and
our children with no intention of ever paying it back," he
says.

"Communities are realising that we need to take a
whole-systems approach to waste. It's no good trying to
deal with what pours out of the waste pipeline into the
landfill. Communities are demanding a say in what
happens to the waste stream and have shown that they
are very effective at placing their hand over the end of
the pipe - to preserve landfill space, create jobs from
waste and protect their environment. The next phase
towards Zero Waste will be to look up the pipeline to the
source of waste and encourage a design philosophy
within business that prevents waste from being created
in the first place."

"Many overseas manufacturers are already designing
products for disassembly and reprocessing. It is only
matter of time before this becomes standard practice,
as communities reject the mentality of disposable
goods. "It is clear that we are steadily moving away from
a concept of waste management and disposal, to a
notion that waste should not exist."




Now that you have read the above and can see what
others have achieved, what can (will) you do about it
??? Perhaps our lawmakers (senators & Executive
Branch) need to hear how you feel about things. Some
folks have asked... “Where can we take this or that ?”...
Well, if recycling companies could be sucessful (make a
good $$ profit) they could accept many items. And they
could probably locate drop-off bins at convenient places
(eg: schools) around our island. Our leadership needs a
push from you.



A question to ponder. . .
“Nature recycles everything! Why do we find it so hard
to follow that excellent example?”