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January 29, 2008
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As part of our ongoing fascination with all things environmental and efficient, about half of our office toured the Washington and Ramsey county Resource Recovery facility in Newport MN, just a few minutes southeast of our office in downtown St. Paul.
All five of us were quite captivated during our tour, which included a stop in the control room and the tipping floor, and we saw the refuse-derived-fuel getting compacted into trucks headed for Mankato and Redwing.
Our tour guide, Mark, informed us that only about 10 percent of municipal solid waste is organic or food based; the remaining 90 percent is primarily packaging. (We saw a lot of plastic, cardboard, and paper.)
We were also surprised to hear that most of the media attention on waste-to-energy facilities is negative. It's baffling, considering they've kept the equivalent of about 250 Metrodome's full of waste out of landfills. As, Mark said, that would be a big hole.
And, yes, that's vinyl siding headed for the incinerator in the photo. We were a little concerned about dioxins from combustion (see previous post on plastics), but one fact helped ease our consciences: Just one family using a backyard burn barrel will emit more dioxins per year than a 200-ton-per-day waste-to-energy facility. Wow.
Ramsey county and Resource Recovery
Reduce.org
Green Guardian: a Twin Cities waste and recycling resource
Recycling Association of Minnesota
Xcel Energy bulb recycling program
Plastic bag recycling in the Twin Cities
posted by M Finn @ 6:07 PM
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January 24, 2008
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Plastics seem to be everywhere in the news these days, from plastic water bottle guilt to the nastiness of PVC to China's recent nationwide ban on plastic bags.
As part of our office's ongoing research, Michelle Pribyl re-presented a session from last year's AIA convention on toxins in the environment, originally given by Dr. David Wallinga. Dr. Wallinga is a staff member at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minnesota based research and resource center focused on issues of agriculture and commodity across scales of government and sides of the globe. Among their "observatories" is a collection of topics collected as a "Health Observatory."
Dr. W's presentation is available on their website, listed below, and includes all sorts of depressing statistics and photos on the devastating impact of exposure to toxins, many of which are found in plastics. Surprisingly, minimal exposure has been found to be just as harmful as extreme exposure, due primarily to the slight hormone changes that can affect metabolism and reproduction.
Dr. Wallinga's report is available here under the heading Plastics and the Environment
Also worth checking out is their Smart Plastics Guide
NY Times on plastic bottles:
The (Possible) Perils of Being Thirsty While Being Green, Jan. 5, 2008
Canadian retailer bans some plastic bottles, Dec. 8, 2007
Turn on the Tap, Aug. 22, 2007
Water, Water Everywhere, but Guilt by the Bottleful, Aug. 12, 2007
posted by M Finn @ 4:54 PM