Flow Of The River

So long, and thanks for all the fish

So long...

Well, this is the final post for our Great Lakes Earth Day Challenge blog. I hoped I'd have some more statistics to report on how much our participants collected at their e-cycling and unwanted medicine events around the Great Lakes, but the data is coming in gradually and will continue to do so for a few more weeks.

I'd like to leave you with a few places where you can get more information. I hope you'll continue to think about conservation and recycling long after Earth Day is past.

• The Great Lakes Earth Day Challenge web site will remain up and report the challenge results
• Earth 911 has ongoing information about recycling and a blog, too.   You can find recycling resources in your area there.
• EPA has info on eCycling and proper disposal of medications
• IL/IN Sea Grant has a whole toolkit about disposing of unwanted medicines
• EPA's ongoing blog "Greenversations" is written by EPA staff

... and thanks

Thank you to the many EPA staff who worked very hard on the Earth Day Challenge, and most importantly to the people all around the Great Lakes who organized events and participated in them. You have made a difference.

Thank you to everyone who wrote for this blog, provided photos, and left comments.

• Earth Keepers: Natasha Koss
• Great Lakes Surfers: Vince Deur, Ingrid Lindfors
• IL/IN Sea Grant: Jackie Adams, Susan Boehme
• EPA: Phillippa Cannon, Cynthia Faur, Mary Gade, John Haugland, Melissa Hulting, Beth Murphy, Chris Newman, Karen Reshkin

And a special thank you to Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock and his staff in the Office of Web Communications for setting up this blog for us and giving us the opportunity to join the choir.

Karen Reshkin manages the EPA Chicago regional Web site and edited the Earth Day Challenge blog.

Waste Management in Switzerland: Recycle, or Else! (Part 2)

Yesterday I described a community recycling center in Chavornay, Switzerland , what they accept, and how it's illegal to throw recyclables into the garbage. And yes, if you're caught filling your garbage with recyclable materials, you get might fined by the municipality. My sister, who lives there, knows of cases where garbage bags have been opened and checked, with fines resulting from what was discovered.

Swiss municipalities vary in their ordinances, like in the US, but the differences are mostly in the financial systems and incentives. Incentives go beyond the risk of a fine. In some places, residents are charged for garbage by weight, in others they pay for the number of bags. In either case, the more you recycle, the less you pay for garbage.

So, what's left for the garbage when so much is recycled? There's a fairly quick answer. Very little. And that's the entire point. The soiled papers, animal-based food wastes, plastic-paper mixes, and such, make for a pretty small amount that gets picked up by the garbage collectors on their weekly rounds.

The more interesting question is: Where do all the materials go from the center? Well, sometimes people will scrounge for things. (Indeed, I looked around for a Rolex, but finding none, I lamented not buying that one I was offered on the street in Naples.)

Otherwise, the materials are picked up by a public utility for waste management and transported to a regional center for further sorting. Some materials are actually incinerated and not recycled, for example, pieces of broken furniture that can't be restored or re-used. The vast remainder, however, is distributed to recycling businesses.

Medicines left at the center are protected from weather and locked away until they are transported for treatment "in accordance with their environmental threat" (I'm not sure what that means, but most is incinerated).

But I learned that the first priority for disposing of any kind of medicines is for the consumer to bring them to any pharmacy, which by law is required to accept them and convey them for proper destruction (I believe that means incineration). Take-back laws like this are more popular in Europe than the US as a way to handle several kinds of wastes. Electronics are similar to medicines – businesses must accept them back, then either recycle or refurbish them.

Even though economic incentives have proven time and again to be an effective way to change behavior, I don't see residential fines catching on here anytime soon. But I suspect my neighbor would put more recycling to the curb if he knew he would be fined for mixing it with his garbage, or better yet, if he was simply charged for garbage pick-up on a volume basis.

Waste Management in Switzerland: Recycle, or Else! (Part 1)

What if you got fined for putting your old computer in the trash? That could happen in Switzerland. I found this out while visiting my sister, who lives in Chavornay. This small village near Lausanne is perched on an ancient plateau between the Alps and the Jura Mountains. Humans have been living here for 14,000 years. I wonder what the place would look like if they’d been throwing out today’s trash all that time!

Minimizing household inconvenience is not this community’s goal. No curbside recycling here; residents bring their recyclables to a central waste and recycling center for sorting. Success requires economic incentives, hence the fines for non-compliance.

I accompanied my brother-in-law with his recyclables to Chavornay’s recycling center. We drove a load of paper, plastic and glass down a small hill, past a few old houses and farm buildings, some hiding walls originally built around the 1200s, and passed through an open gate into what looked like an outdoor warehouse next to railroad tracks.

There in the open air, I saw dumpsters so large they reminded me of the cargo containers we see stacked in the US as a reminder of our international trade deficit. One dumpster held old broken furniture. Another had branches and logs. A third had old carpet. There were smaller dumpsters for glass, plastic, compostable materials, and a slew of other stuff. Under a small roof stood barrels and bins for people to throw out all sorts of things -- batteries, household appliances, tools, cell phones, computers, and yes, right in the middle of all this was a half-filled barrel of unwanted medicines. I looked around for a law enforcement presence, but found none.

It's remarkable what this community recycles. I visited their website to see what they say about it. There's predictable stuff like:

• Paper
• Glass
• Plastics
• Metals

Then there's less obvious stuff:

• Large items, like skis, furniture – tables, couches, carpeting, mattresses, box springs, treated wood.
• Household appliances – lighting fixtures, mixers, drills.
• Clothes.
• Oils – vegetable, mineral, motor and machine oils.
• Compostable materials – food scraps, plants, kitty litter, ashes, sawdust, turfgrass leaves, branches, etc.
• Inert household materials such as rocks, stone, porcelain.

And then there's a whole category of materials that may be dropped off at the recycling center, but businesses are also required to accept them back:

• Light bulbs
• Batteries
• Electronics – TVs, stereos, computers, telephones, etc.
• Stoves, washers, refrigerators, freezers
• Household hazardous wastes
• Expired medicines
• Tires

Next time: So what's left for the garbage can? What happens to the materials once they leave the center?

John Haugland works in the U.S. EPA Great Lakes National Program Office.

Earth Day in Chicago

Earth Day at Daley Plaza in Chicago.

EPA Regional Administrator Mary Gade encourages participation in the Earth Day Challenge. (She's a blogger, too.)

EPA bloggers Chris Newman and Beth Murphy work at the EPA booth in Daley Plaza.

EPA's Todd Nettesheim wants you to recycle your old cell phone.

With grant money from US EPA, the City of Chicago has purchased pharmaceutical collection boxes like this one.

Meanwhile, back at the Metcalfe Federal Building, the unwanted medicines collection continues under the supervision of two plainclothes Chicago police officers.

The unwanted meds collection in our building filled almost the whole barrel. Looking pleased are Vicki Thomas (Great Lakes Program), Region 5 Administrator Mary Gade, and Great Lakes National Program Office Director Gary Gulezian.

Karen Reshkin works in EPA Region 5's public affairs office.

With Great Lakes comes Great Responsibility

One of the Earth Day Challenge events is a new Chicago Public Television program called Professor Mike's City Science. It will air in the greater Chicago area on Monday, May 5, 2008  at 7:30pm on WYCC Channel 20.   It's geared toward middle school students and their parents. I got to appear on the show as an EPA expert on the Great Lakes.

The first episode is on electronic waste and our challenge to collect one million pounds of e-waste. It opens with a student attempting to throw out an old computer monitor. She is perplexed  when the garbage man refuses to pick it up. She visits Professor Mike to find out why. The show then progresses through an exploration of the Great Lakes, pollution, conservation, invasive species, and what to do with old electronics in a variety of settings ranging from Navy Pier to the Research Vessel Peter Wise Lake Guardian. Professor Mike conducts several experiments in a Mr. Wizard like fashion.

My scene was filmed in a laboratory at a local college decorated with dismantled computers and lots of graduated cylinders filled with brightly colored liquids. When I arrived on set, I was introduced to Professor Mike and sent off to hair and make up. (Apparently the style and polish of a typical government scientist isn't quite up to par with television standards, but one can't disappoint the fans.) After being sufficiently primped, Professor Mike, the student and I began to rehearse our scene. It took a little while to work out all the kinks, but eventually we found a good flow for the information we wanted to share and started to film the scene.

It was really important to both the show's producers and to me that the information be accurate and entertaining without dumbing anything down for the viewers. I gave a lot of general information on the Great Lakes:

• the HOMES acronym for the names of the Great Lakes
• the water in the Great Lakes equals about 10 feet of standing water if spread out over the lower 48 states
• 25 million people get their drinking water from the Great Lakes.

I also did my best to explain how deposition of pollutants from the air impacts the Great Lakes.

The main message, however, was that if we want to keep the Great Lakes GREAT, every person needs to do their part, a little every day, to keep our water clean and to ensure that it is a resource for generations to come. With Great Lakes, there truly comes Great Responsibility.

Beth Murphy works in EPA's Great Lakes National Program Office, and runs the Great Lakes Fish Monitoring Program.

More to do

There's more to do.

Every so often someone sets a TV set or computer monitor or other old piece of electronics in the alley behind my house. Did they put it there in hopes that someone will pick it up to use it? (I found one TV with the remote taped to the top.) Or maybe they really meant to throw it out but couldn't lift it into the big trash cans.

Lots of times this stuff ends up getting rained on, broken, or torn apart, and then it can't be used again. Sometimes the scrap guys that drive down the alley cut off the cords for scrap metal. Either way the equipment gets picked up with the trash collection a few days later.

When it gets closer to an electronics recycling event and I have a few things to take, I start picking up some of this stuff and storing it in my garage (see photo). I figure I'm making the trip anyway.

These events have been going on for several years. There's even a collection site that's open two days a week in my city, and lots of people make use of it. Clearly some people have gotten the message, but many others haven't.

Why aren't people taking advantage of these events.

• Are people uninterested and we're going against the current trying to make change?
• Are they too busy to bother?
• Do they just think recycling isn't worth it? (There has been controversy about the effectiveness of my city's recycling program.)

What do we need to do get people more in tune with electronics recycling?

• better advertising of events?
• outright bans of electronics in landfills?
• waste haulers picking up e-waste?
• reminders about collection events in people's water or garbage bills?

And what if people do show up at the collection events every time they have something to recycle? Will our publicly-funded system be able to cover the costs of recycling all the materials that are brought in?

How can we make this Earth Day message stick with people so that next time they have something that can be recycled, they'll think about recycling it?

We're working with Earth911.org to catalog the events that are in the Earth Day Challenge. Will people remember it and use it as a resource?

One of the states in our Region has a statewide program for recycling electronics . It's been successful; they've collected millions of pounds in about one year. We need programs to cover more states, or even the nation as a whole, so that we can have just one message to get to people, it will be more consistent over time, and they will participate.

More questions than answers here, but it's what I'm thinking about now that the weather is getting better, and my bike is barricaded in the garage behind two cars and two TVs.

Chris Newman works in EPA Region 5's Land and Chemical Division, and deals with issues related to electronic waste, scrap tires, and composting

Trying to recycle an old TV

A couple weeks ago my Dad called me with some bad news: the old TV in our family room had died. I wasn't shocked. The TV had a long life. It was one of those old-school TVs in the wooden cabinet. I think my parents bought it in 1978. It was the first TV that we had with a remote control. It was the first TV we had hooked up to cable back in the days when I wanted my MTV.

Now that the old TV had died, my Dad finally had the excuse that he had been waiting for to buy a big old flat screen TV - just in time for the start of baseball season. When it came to purchasing his new TV, Dad did his homework. He bought an Energy Star TV so he knew it would be energy efficient. Over the years, he had learned the importance of buying energy efficient products. What he did not learn was to ask the retailer where he bought his shiny new TV if they would take the old one. Some retailers do - unfortunately, where my Dad bought his TV, they would not. That left us with a problem - where could he recycle the old TV?

The county where my Dad lives has a recycling center that has free recycling for a wide variety of items, including computers, cell phones, and household hazardous wastes. The recycling center also has great hours and is open on weekends. The only problem is that the center does not take TVs. In fact, as I found out while researching e-waste recyclers where my Dad lives, many municipalities that recycle e-waste do not accept TVs. Some do, but often they charge a small fee to offset the expense of recycling. Also, I have learned that even where a recycler will take TVs, sometimes they do not want take the TVs in the wooden cabinets, so you have to ask.

In the end, through my Dad's calls to the city where he lives and my research on Earth 911 , we found out that while the county would not recycle his TV, the city would. A couple of weeks ago, he rolled it down to the curbside, and I hope that it is on its way to being appropriately recycled.

Cynthia Faur is an attorney and the Senior Policy Advisor to the Regional Administrator in US EPA Region 5.

Translating concern into positive action

On April 22, 2008, we will be celebrating the 38th annual Earth Day. While I find it hard to believe, I participated in the first Earth Day in 1970. My friends and I picked up trash in my Wisconsin hometown. Some may say our contribution to cleaning up the environment that day was small, and we really did not make much of a difference. I think that we did. Earth Day is all about small actions that people can take to protect the environment because those small actions add up.

This year, I want everyone who lives in the Great Lakes basin to participate in Earth Day and to do something to protect our Great Lakes. Last summer, when the State of Indiana issued a water discharge permit to BP's plant in Whiting, there was a loud public outcry. More than 35,000 people signed petitions objecting to the permit. I saw people picketing at gas stations. People were concerned about protecting the Great Lakes. That is a very good thing!

This Earth Day, I would like to take the concern that people expressed for Lake Michigan and translate it into positive action across all the Great Lakes. That is why I am challenging everyone this Earth Day to help us collect 1 million pounds of electronic waste and 1 million pills that are unwanted or expired. When people do not properly dispose of their televisions, computers, iPods and cell phones, contaminants from the electronic components can find their way into the Great Lakes. Similarly, when people flush old medicines down the drain, wastewater treatment systems cannot clean all traces of the drugs out of the water so the medicines that we take to make or keep us healthy are harming our fish. As you may have read in the newspapers, traces of medicines are also turning up in the drinking water in some places.

The good news is that there is something that we can do about these problems. We can recycle our electronics, and we can properly dispose of our unwanted medicines. This Earth Day, EPA Region 5 is making it easy for everyone around the Great Lakes to do this. We have over 70 recycling or collection events taking place between April 19 and April 27 listed on our webpage where you can take your old medicines and outdated electronics.

Lake Superior's North Shore, Lake Superior Minnesota Minnesota Extension Service, Dave Hansen

I plan to do a little spring cleaning around my house and take the old cell phones that have been gathering dust in a desk drawer and any expired or unused medicines in my cabinet to a nearby event. I hope that you will do the same. Individually, the action is small. But together, our small actions will add up to something great. And that's good for the Great Lakes!

Mary A. Gade is Regional Administrator of US EPA Region 5 and Great Lakes National Program Manager.

What Goes Around, Comes Around

So here we are preparing for the Great Lakes 2008 Earth Day Challenge, and working to get the word out about recycling electronic waste (e-waste) and properly disposing of unneeded pharmaceuticals. Then it struck me again, as it as a few times in my 4 ½ years here at EPA as the e-waste expert, just how ironic this all is for me.

You see, many years ago while I was in high school (before studying soils in college and then working as a crop extensionist in the Peace Corps), I was pretty heavy into electronics and computers, to the point that I was President of the high school amateur (Ham) radio club. And I worked at two large retailers, one a catalog retailer and the other a national chain that sells consumer electronics and electronics parts, selling all of these electronics that I am now encouraging people to recycle. Ironic. Talk about making your own future!

Back then, when I was selling people their first cell phone or home computer, and a 286 was considered "smokin'", we never gave any thought to what would happen to what we sold at the end of its life. We were just happy to have the sale. I don't think we ever imagined how fast new products would be introduced in the future, or that people would replace things for any other reason than because they broke. "Planned obsolescence" wasn't thought about -- at least not on the sales floor. But there were a few new things coming out all the time, some winners and others losers.

When we changed out the rechargeable battery in a cordless phone, we just threw it out without a second thought, even though at the time as a society we knew that there might be some issues with the materials inside it.

Now the same store collects those batteries for recycling with the Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation.   And the same with the cell phones we sold, the computers, the TVs, and just about anything else. There are options now to recycle them, and the store or the manufacturer that sold your fancy new gadget to you is likely playing a part in recycling it when you're done with it. Sometimes it's just as easy as looking for a label or phone number on the product, or visiting the manufacturer's website.

It's great that we're thinking about what's going to happen to all of these things at the end of their life, but there's still more work to be done to get the word out, and get people to use these services for reusing or recycling e-waste.

Chris Newman works in EPA Region 5's Land and Chemical Division, and deals with issues related to electronic waste, scrap tires, and composting.