April 17, 2018

Environmentalists who have fought loggers for generations have a surprising new strategy to save California’s storied old-growth redwood forests: Logging.

Save the Redwoods League, a venerable San Francisco organization that has preserved more than 214,000 acres of redwood forest since it was founded in 1918, is embarking on a $5 million plan to thin out 10,000 acres of redwoods, Douglas fir, tan oaks and other trees. The logging will begin at Redwood National Park and Del Norte Coast Redwoods State Park near the Oregon border over the next five years. After that, the group plans to thin forests in nearby Jedediah Smith and Prairie Creek Redwoods state parks.

Many of the spots under consideration were heavily logged decades ago before they were purchased and added to the parks, the league says. And cutting down the thinner trees — including those planted by loggers too densely as part of commercial reseeding operations in the 1960s — will restore more natural conditions, and reduce competition for sunlight and water, helping regular-sized redwoods grow faster into majestic old-growth giants.

But chainsaws in beloved redwood parks? Will the public go for it?

“It’s about allowing the younger forests to grow more effectively,” said Sam Hodder, president of Save the Redwoods League. “Right now in some of these places all the trees are crowding each other out.”

Many of California’s old-growth redwoods — the world’s tallest living things that can grow to more than 300 feet high and live 2,000 years — were cut down between the 1800s and the 1970s for decks, paneling, and even fence posts and railroad ties. Modern environmental laws and the creation of public parks ended it. Today, nearly all redwood lumber sold in stores is from second-and-third growth younger trees. Only about 5 percent of the original old-growth acreage remains, and nearly all of that is preserved in parks.

The new task for this century, Hodder said, is to restore landscapes that were logged but now exist in parks in a damaged, unnatural state.

That means removing old logging roads, restoring streams to bring back salmon and other fish, and doing everything to help second-and-third growth redwood trees get bigger, he said. On April 27, the league is scheduled to sign an agreement with the California state parks department and the National Park Service to allow for “restoration forestry” funded by the league as a way to undo the damage from industrial logging and recreate forests that are more natural.

The project in Humboldt and Del Norte counties “aligns the public and private sectors to take the next big steps towards restoring these cherished public landscapes. It is a great investment in our future,”said Steve Mietz, superintendent of Redwood National Park.

All four parks involved together have about 120,000 acres of forests. Of those, about 40,000 acres is old-growth redwood, and the other 80,000 acres are in formerly logged areas that project planners hope to thin and restore in the coming decades. Most of the trees cut down will be Douglas fir, with some second-growth redwood and hardwoods like tan oak, said Paul Ringold, a forest ecologist and chief program officer of the Save the Redwoods League. Roughly 30 to 70 percent of the trees will be taken out in the 10,000 acres treated between now and 2022, he said, and in some cases, sold to timber companies.

“These stands are a legacy of clear-cut logging,” Ringold said. “We want to restore these areas as close as we can to the way they were pre-logging.”

But not everyone is rushing to embrace the project, which is called “Redwoods Rising.”

“I do have concerns when organizations who have historically been involved in the preservation of our old growth redwoods and our parks get into the business of logging. I’d like to see more details,” said Jodi Frediani, a longtime Santa Cruz County logging activist.

Frediani said she supports the removal of old logging roads and efforts the league is taking to study the impacts of climate change on redwood and Giant Sequoia forests. But she noted that the league has very few specifics about the new thinning projects on its website. And in any logging operation, even well-meaning ones, she added, heavy equipment can damage the forests and there is pressure to cut down larger trees, which are worth more money than thin ones.

“I find it a very slippery slope to have timber operations in state and national parks,” she said.

Hodder noted that in a natural old-growth forest there are about 200 trees per acre. In some forests that were clear cut and reseeded, there are 10 times that amount now. Redwood National Park already has done some thinning, he noted, to help restore areas that were purchased by the federal government from logging companies after the companies clear cut the biggest, oldest trees.

Under the organization’s plan, an environmental impact statement will be drawn up and made public later this year. Commercial timber crews will be hired and given detailed direction. And although some logs will be sold and the money used to offset costs, the goal will not be profit, but rather ecological restoration, he said.

A similar project has been underway for the past few years at San Vicente Redwoods Preserve, an 8,300-acre property in rural Santa Cruz County near the town of Davenport. The land was purchased for $30 million in 2011 by four environmental groups — the Peninsula Open Space Trust, Save the Redwoods League, Trust for Public Land and Land Trust of Santa Cruz County. Since then, they have allowed roughly 350 acres that were logged years ago to be thinned again, raising about $500,000 that has funded stream restoration, a public access plan and other work on the property. A new logging plan being drawn up this year aims to restore previously logged areas of the property.

Some environmental groups are OK with the trend.

“There is a need for restoration. What they are trying to do is exciting,” said Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center, in Arcata, which fought commercial logging plans at Headwaters Forest in Humboldt County during the 1990s. “Honestly, it is a little bit of an experiment. There is only one way to create old growth redwoods and that is with time. If we can kick start the process a little bit, then we are all in favor of that.”

May 24, 2018

A leading activist has raised concerns over the ecological impact of solar panels — a renewable energy technology widely considered to be harmless to the environment.

Michael Shellenberger — the president of Environmental Progress, a nonprofit organization working to promote clean energy — detailed the real-life impacts of discarded solar installation.

Solar technology typically contains cadmium, lead and other toxic chemicals that can’t be extracted without taking apart the whole panel, resulting in entire solar panels being considered hazardous, Shellenberger noted in a Forbes article Wednesday.

More specifically, these toxic chemicals become an environmental threat when solar panels reach their end-of-life stage and need to be disposed.

Panels left in landfills may break apart and release toxic waste into the ground or even enter bodies of water.

Solar panel disposal in “regular landfills [is] not recommended in case modules break and toxic materials leach into the soil,” the Electric Power Research Institute determined in a 2016 study.

There is growing concern over the possibility of rainwater washing cadmium out of panels and into the environment. In Virginia, for example, a group of locals are pushing back against a proposal to construct a 6,350-acre solar farm in Spotsylvania County.

“We estimate there are 100,000 pounds of cadmium contained in the 1.8 million panels,” Sean Fogarty of Concerned Citizens of Fawn Lake stated to Shellenberger. “Leaching from broken panels damaged during natural events — hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. — and at decommissioning is a big concern.”

Instances can occur where severe weather — such as a tornado in California and a hurricane through Puerto Rico — decimate solar panel farms, potentially leaking chemicals into the ground.

Virtually no one in media cares to discuss the solar industry’s negative effects on the environment, Shellenger also noted.

“With few environmental journalists willing to report on much of anything other than the good news about renewables, it’s been left to environmental scientists and solar industry leaders to raise the alarm,” he wrote.

As a suggested solution, Shellenberger entertained the idea of an added fee with solar panel purchases that can go toward the recycling and disposing of decommissioned panels. He also encouraged greater government involvement as to avoid the placement of solar installation into landfills.

Previous studies have examined the solar industries’ effect on the environment. The process it takes to build renewable energy technology is extremely intensive, an April America Rising Squared report determined. The production of solar panels and wind turbines, America Rising found, requires the extraction of rare earth metals such as Indium, Gallium and Tellurium. Refining these rare minerals is extremely energy intensive.

Issues relating to solar panel waste will only worsen as more Americans utilize the technology. Lured with promises of long-term financial gains and environmental benefits, a growing number of U.S. households are purchasing rooftop solar installations.

On May 9, California became the first state in the U.S. to mandate every new household have a solar panel.

Environmental activists, like billionaire Tom Steyer, are funding national campaigns to promote renewable energy use. Such campaigns and government mandates are increasing renewable portfolio standards across the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/c...ic-papers.html

Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not

Plastics and papers from dozens of American cities and towns are being dumped in landfills after China stopped recycling most “foreign garbage.”

May 29, 2018

Oregon is serious about recycling. Its residents are accustomed to dutifully separating milk cartons, yogurt containers, cereal boxes and kombucha bottles from their trash to divert them from the landfill. But this year, because of a far-reaching rule change in China, some of the recyclables are ending up in the local dump anyway.

In recent months, in fact, thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of American cities and towns — including several in Oregon — have gone to landfills.

In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import “foreign garbage.” Since Jan. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper, and tightened standards for materials it does accept.

While some waste managers already send their recyclable materials to be processed domestically, or are shipping more to other countries, others have been unable to find a substitute for the Chinese market. “All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn’t have a place to go,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.

China’s stricter requirements also mean that loads of recycling are more likely to be considered contaminated if they contain materials that are not recyclable. That has compounded a problem that waste managers call wishful or aspirational recycling: people setting aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren’t.

In the Pacific Northwest, Republic has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills since the Chinese ban came into effect, Mr. Keller said. The company has been unable to move that material to a market “at any price or cost,” he said. Though Republic is dumping only a small portion of its total inventory so far — the company handles over five million tons of recyclables nationwide each year — it sent little to no paper to landfills last year.

But for smaller companies, like Rogue Disposal and Recycling, which serves much of Oregon, the Chinese ban has upended operations. Rogue sent all its recycling to landfills for the first few months of the year, said Garry Penning, a spokesman.

Western states, which have relied the most on Chinese recycling plants, have been hit especially hard. In some areas — like Eugene, Ore., and parts of Idaho, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii — local officials and garbage haulers will no longer accept certain items for recycling, in some cases refusing most plastics, glass and certain types of paper. Instead, they say, customers should throw these items in the trash.

Theresa Byrne, who lives in Salem, Ore., said the city took too long to inform residents that most plastics and egg and milk cartons were now considered garbage. “I was angry,” she said. “I believe in recycling.”

Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway. Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it could be hard to get them to start again.

It is “difficult with the public to turn the spigot on and off,” said Brian Fuller, a waste manager with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

The fallout has spread beyond the West Coast. Ben Harvey, the president of E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The bales are filling almost half of his 80,000-square-foot facility.

“It’s really impacted our day-to-day operations,” Mr. Harvey said. “It’s stifling me.”

Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives.

Still, across much of the United States, including most major cities, recycling is continuing as usual. Countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are importing more of the materials that are not processed domestically. And some waste companies have responded to China’s ban by stockpiling material while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy.

Americans recycle roughly 66 million tons of material each year, according to the most recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of which is exported. The majority of those exports once went to China, said David Biderman, the executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, a research and advocacy group.

But American scrap exports to China fell by about 35 percent in the first two months of this year, after the ban was implemented, said Joseph Pickard, chief economist for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group.

“It’s a huge concern, because China has just been such a dominant overseas market for us,” Mr. Pickard said.

In particular, exports of scrap plastic to China, valued at more than $300 million in 2015, totaled just $7.6 million in the first quarter of this year, down 90 percent from a year earlier, Mr. Pickard said. Other countries have stepped in to accept more plastics, but total scrap plastic exports are still down by 40 percent this year, he said.

“There is a significant disruption occurring to U.S. recycling programs,” Mr. Biderman said. “The concern is if this is the new normal.”

Curbside recycling is typically hauled by a private company to a sorting plant, where marketable goods are separated out. Companies or local governments then sell the goods to domestic or overseas processors. Some states and cities prohibit these companies from dumping plastic, paper and cardboard, but some local officials — including in Oregon, Massachusetts and various municipalities in Washington State — have granted waivers so that unmarketable materials can be sent to the landfill.

Recycling companies “used to get paid” by selling off recyclable materials, said Peter Spendelow, a policy analyst for the Department of Environmental Quality in Oregon. “Now they’re paying to have someone take it away.”

In some places, including parts of Idaho, Maine and Pennsylvania, waste managers are continuing to recycle but are passing higher costs on to customers, or are considering doing so.

“There are some states and some markets where mixed paper is at a negative value,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling at Waste Management, which handles 10 million tons of recycling per year. “We’ll let our customers make that decision, if they’d like to pay more and continue to recycle or to pay less and have it go to landfill.”

Mr. Spendelow said companies in rural areas, which tend to have higher expenses to get their materials to market, were being hit particularly hard. “They’re literally taking trucks straight to the landfill,” he said.

Will Posegate, the chief operations officer for Garten Services, which processes recycling for a number of counties in Oregon, said his company had tried to stockpile recyclables but eventually used a waiver to dump roughly 900 tons. “The warehouse builds up so much that it’s unsafe,” he said.

In California, officials are concerned that improperly stored bales of paper could become hazards during wildfire season, said Zoe Heller, the policy director for the state’s recycling department.

While China has entirely banned 24 materials, including post-consumer plastic and mixed paper, it has also demanded that other materials, such as cardboard and scrap metal, be only 0.5 percent impure. Even a small amount of food scraps or other rubbish, if undetected, can ruin a batch of recycling.

Some waste managers say that China’s new contamination standards are impossible to meet, while others are trying to clean up their recycling streams by slowing down their processing facilities, limiting the types of materials they accept or trying to better educate customers on what belongs in the recycling bin.

Mr. Bell, the Waste Management executive, said he had seen everything from Christmas lights to animal carcasses to artillery shells come through the company’s recycling facilities. “Most of our facilities get a bowling ball every day or two,” he said.

Some materials can ruin a load, he said, while others pose fire or health hazards and can force facilities to slow their operations and in some cases temporarily shut down. (And a bowling ball could do serious damage to the equipment.) Approximately 25 percent of all recycling picked up by Waste Management is contaminated to the point that it is sent to landfills, Mr. Bell said.

Recyclers have always disposed of some of their materials. But the percentage has climbed as China and other buyers of recyclable material have ratcheted up quality standards.

Most contamination, Mr. Bell said, happens when people try to recycle materials they shouldn’t. Disposable coffee cups — which are usually lined with a thin film that makes them liquid-proof but challenging and expensive to reprocess — are an example. Unwashed plastics can also cause contamination.

“If we don’t get it clean, we’re not going to be able to market it, and if we can’t market it unfortunately it’s going to go to the landfill,” said Mr. Penning, the Rogue spokesman. In March, Rogue told customers to put everything in the trash except for corrugated cardboard, milk jugs, newspapers and tin and aluminum cans, which the company is finding domestic markets for, Mr. Penning said.

Rogue customers who make mistakes might see an “Oops” sticker the next time they check their recycling bin, he said.

In Eugene, similar restrictions have been imposed by the waste company Sanipac. These have not sat well with some residents. “Eugene is a very green city and people love their recycling here,” said Diane Peterson, a resident. “There are a lot of things like yogurt containers that we get all the time, and now we can’t recycle them.”

Leah Geocaris, another Eugene resident, said the change had prompted her to try to consume less overall. “On the one hand, I hate it, because I don’t want stuff to end up in landfill,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s a wake-up call.”

“Recycling is the third R,” she said. “You have to reduce and reuse first.”

In Norway, a hurricane caused by manmade climate change kills thousands of people. In response, the Green Party is elected into power. They decide to ban all drilling, selling, and exporting of fossil fuels, and build a bunch of thorium nuclear reactors to make up for it.

Russia doesn't like their loss of access to Norway's fossil fuels, so they invade and take control of them. The EU supports the invasion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has become energy independent, and is indifferent to the invasion.

That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.

Moreover, people are tossing garbage into those blue bins that they shouldn’t be. It just gums up the process.

“People are engaged in wish recycling,” says Mark Oldfield, public affairs director at CalRecycle, which runs the state’s recycling program. “They think: ‘This should be recycled. I’m going to put it in the bin.’”

“It’s amazing what people put in recycling bins,” Oldfield continues. “Dirty diapers. Broken crockery. Old garden hoses. Some of the worst offenders are old batteries.”

But what constitutes forbidden material is more nuanced than soiled diapers and corrosive batteries. Oldfield says it includes pizza boxes blotched with cheese and grease, plastic wrappers for food, shredded paper, unclean jelly jars, broken glass, unrinsed bottles and newspapers that have lined bird cages. Even paper envelopes with plastic address windows.

Recyclers these days don’t want items with mixed material such as paper and plastic, or cardboard and tape. It doesn’t pay to tear the stuff apart. Off to the landfill.

Moreover, what used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables recently shut its door.

“China doesn’t want our garbage anymore,” says Steve Maviglio, a political strategist who is advising the recycling industry. “It’s time we cleaned up our own mess.”

In January, China began barring “contaminated” material it once accepted. And under China’s new rules, if something is one-half of 1% contaminated, it’s too impure for recycling.

“This policy change is already starting to have adverse impacts on California,” CalRecycle declared last month in a bulletin, “and is resulting in more material being stockpiled at solid waste facilities and recycling centers or disposed of in landfills.”
More from George Skelton »

Eric Potashner, a government relations official for Recology, a curbside hauler that sorts San Francisco Bay Area trash for recycling, says, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”

One big problem, he says, is mixed paper — newsprint, magazines, junk mail. China no longer wants it. So it’s being sold to smaller markets in India, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries. The issue is compounded because, unlike with Chinese vessels, there are fewer ships making round trips from Southeast Asia to California.

“A year ago,” Potashner says, “we were getting $100 a ton for newsprint. Now we’re getting an average $5…. Revenue has fallen off the cliff.”

Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an advocacy group, says: “China’s not the bad guy. To the Chinese credit, they’ve decided they don’t want to have Third World [trash] sorting in their country.”

The Chinese have a growing middle class, Murray continues, and “they don’t want kids and families sorting through mixed paper and plastic. They want to hire factory workers, not people doing the dirty work.”

Collapse of the China market is just the latest recycling problem for California.

There’s continuing struggle with the popular beverage container recycling program that originated with passage of California’s convoluted so-called Bottle Bill 32 years ago.

Under it, people can ostensibly cart their used bottles and cans to a recycling center and collect the nickel apiece — or dime for larger ones — that they deposited when buying the beverage at a store.
Coverage of California politics »

But the program itself needs recycling. It’s not generating enough money, in many cases, to make recycling pay. Scrap value has dropped — especially for plastic. When oil prices tumbled, it became cheaper to make plastic bottles from all-new material than recycled matter.

Nearly 1,000 recycling centers have closed in the last two years, about 40% of the total, leaving consumers in many communities with no local place to leave their bottles and redeem their nickels.

California’s once-proud recycling program “is teetering on the edge,” says state Sen. Steve Glazer (D-Orinda). It was hit hard in 2016 when the state cut back on fees it paid to recyclers. The old fees served as recycling incentives.

Glazer has a modest bill that he says is “better than doing nothing at all.” His measure would return fees to their 2015 level.

That’s a carrot. There’s a stick in a bill by Sen. Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont). It would require all beverage containers sold in California to contain a minimum amount of recycled material. CalRecycle would establish the minimum.

The bill is particularly aimed at plastic containers. The goal is to establish a bigger market for plastic recycling in California. It also would help reduce greenhouse gases, the senator says, because “we wouldn’t be burning more oil to make plastic bottles.”

Gov. Jerry Brown, in his new state budget, shifted $15 million in bottle bill money to private firm incentives for processing and purchasing recycled plastic.

Nice touches, but they’re Band-Aids.

Consumers — taxpayers — will need to put more into the pot to pay for sustainable recycling and creating a bigger market for California trash.

We’ve got to stop dumping useless, filthy crud in blue bins.

It’s either that or spend more money for ugly landfills.