Guest Post by Wayne Stevenson Thomas, in San Antonio, Texas
[Editor’s note: We stayed with Wayne on our first trip to San Antonio many years ago, and have stayed in contact. I am always looking for examples of for-profit businesses that serve a greater good. If you’ve got an example and would like to guest-blog, please write to me through this site.]
Thrift Shop Interior
Cliff Morgan was an executive at the local St. Vincent de Paul. They had a big operation of recycling the items they couldn’t sell or give to the poor. But he and the St. Vincent board found that the not-for-profit model didn’t allow him the flexibility he needed to operate. (Something about how all contracts or agreements had to go to the board as well as any expenditures above a fairly low number.)
So St. Vincent decided to spin off the operation into a for-profit, which Cliff owns. SA3 Community Recycling serves three communities of interest: Nonprofits who receive donations they cannot use, nonprofits who need items, and citizens (as represented by our governmental organizations).
He collects unneeded items from providing nonprofits. He pays them for clothing, shoes and bundled cardboard, generating a small revenue stream for them while allowing them to concentrate on their mission, rather than on disposing or selling unwanted material.
He contacts receiver nonprofits to provide them exactly the items they need from the stream of items he receives from the provider nonprofits. He provides exactly what they need. For instance, Dress for Success might need 5 size 16 Women’s business suits. SA3 would pull exactly that out of their stream and no more.
For the citizens as a whole, he contracts with governmental organizations to keep items out of the landfill. For instance he accepts cathode ray tube TVs from the providing nonprofits and disassembles them. He does the same with other electronics (if he doesn’t have another nonprofit that can use them.)
He generates income (as I understand it) by selling the clothing and cardboard for a bit more than he pays for it, and by selling the metal and other material captured from the electronics. He pays his staff, who do the pick-ups and supervise the volunteers who help sort the items that come through the door.
Among the nonprofits he provides with items from his stream are: Habitat for Humanity (building material), the Diaper Bank (loose and packaged diapers), Dress for Success, Spare Parts (an arts nonprofit that provides used and repurposed items to local art educators) and Samministries (household items for families leaving shelters). He also provides items as needed to several St. Vincent operations in South Texas. I believe he sincerely wants to recycle as much as he can within the community (and have connected him with several other receiver organizations).
Wayne Stevenson Thomas is a former volunteer and assistant manager at Jefferson Thrift Store in San Antonio.
After a wonderful week visiting four cities in Portugal, I noticed a lot about the state of green consciousness there. Obviously, visiting only four of hundreds of communities is only a sampler, but certainly enough to share with you.
Renewable Energy
For such a sunny country, Portugal has remarkably empty rooftops. We saw a few dozen photovoltaic arrays, mostly just a two to five panels and maybe two or three larger installations. And hardly any roofs had solar hot water heaters, even though other sunny countries, like Israel, have them on practically every house and they’re far less expensive than PV, with very quick payback.
Large building with rare photovoltaic solar array, Aveiro, Portugal. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
We passed one wind farm, and a few installations with a turbine or two. I didn’t see any hydro or geothermal facilities, but we weren’t in the mountains where they’d be more likely to be built.
Trash sorting stations for metal/plastic, paper/cardboard, glass, and undifferentiated (the world looks a lot like “indifferent”) were very common in Sintra (where they were enormous and hard to miss), and somewhat more sporadically—and in smaller bins—in Lisbon, Porto, and Aveiro.
In places, litter is a problem, especially around the edges of some of the plazas and parks.
Green Food Movement
It was easy to get vegetarian options in every city we visited. All of them also have a small natural foods community with places to get organic, vegan, gluten-free, and other options. In two cities, we stayed with families, and both served us farm-fresh eggs (one from their own chickens). For every vegan cafe, there are hundreds of traditional cafes and restaurants serving almost entirely meat or fish or seafood, but there would usually be one or two vegetarian options such as an omelette or a baguette with cheese. Artisanal cheeses are commonplace (and scrumptious). Choices are much more limited for vegans.
Some of the more artisanal vineyards and port wine cellars use organic grapes—and in fact we’ve enjoyed organic Portuguese wine in the US for several years, particularly the vinho verde, young, “green” wine. In-country, we sampled a number of wines and were especially impressed by some of the reds.
Fruits were often amazingly delicious, and fresh-squeezed orange juice (sumo laranja) is available almost anywhere. Many natural food cafes and smoothie bars will also juice carrots, mangos, and other fruits and vegetables, to order.
Transit
In Lisbon and Porto, it was possible to get most places via metro, bus, antique tram, modern tram, or funicular, and both cities have at least three intercity train stations (including the one across the river from Porto in Vila Nova del Gaia). Transit was inexpensive. Taxis were also inexpensive, and tuk-tuks were available as well. Car-sharing networks exist but don’t seem heavily used.
The small communities of Aveiro and Sintra were much less well served. Most of central Aveiro is built along canals, and there are plenty of boats, but more for sightseeing than actually getting someplace. There’s a nice bike path going from town to both halves of the university. Sintra has frequent commuter rail service to Lisbon, Queluz, and several other towns along its one rail line. Sintra had local buses serving the downtown area, hop-on/hop-off service to the palaces and parks from at least three companies, and rather poor service to the outlying areas.
Open Space
Every community we visited had lots of parkland, public plazas, and nearby farms. Sintra is particularly phenomenal, with vast and magnificent nature reserves in and surrounding the town. Three of the four (Lisbon, Aveiro, and Porto) had active waterfronts with good public access, and Aveiro had public salt marshes. High marks on this one.
Several times, when someone realized we were from the US, the other person would bring up the presidential decision a few days before our visit to exit the Paris Climate Accord, signed by 193 countries including the US. This decision is seen as a disaster in Portugal. We did not meet a single person who supported it—and our president is seen as either a madman or a laughingstock. This survey was based only on those who started conversations with us, but it was consistent. Not one person who started these conversations had anything good to say about the new US regime.
Interest in eating organic and natural foods seems to be rising rapidly.
Small cars are still extremely dominant, as was true in most of Europe until about 20 years ago. There are surprisingly few motorscooters and motorcycles, and even fewer bicycles—but you see almost no large cars. I saw two Jeeps (one small, one larger) and one Hummer. Most everything else was no bigger (and often a lot smaller) than a Toyota Corolla. This may be based in economics as much as environmental awareness, or even just a reaction to the narrow streets in all the historic sections—or it may have to do with carbon consciousness. Almost all the cars have manual shifts, which is no longer true in other European cities we’ve visited in the past decade. Of the cars I happened to look into, only one (the big Jeep Wagoneer) had an automatic.
Urban architecture is primarily row houses, which are energy-efficient because they have fewer outside walls. In the few houses we entered, the appliances seemed pretty large. Portugal clearly values historic preservation, though many of the buildings are only 100-130 years old, but look centuries older.
Water-saving dual-mode toilets were very common, though there were still plenty of single-mode ones.
In short, Portugal is moving nicely along with the rest of its European Union neighbors on the full range of green issues, even though it’s one of the poorer countries in the federation.
But this is National Geographic! The slick-paper photo-intensive standard-bearer for educational travel.
In other words, out the window goes the argument from any magazine that the quality of their photography makes it impossible to use at least some recycled. If National Geographic can do it, any magazine can do it.
So this could be a game-changer in the industry. And it’s an industry that needs its game changed. Many major magazines still use 100% virgin paper. Of those that do include some recycled paper, most use only 10 to 30 percent.
And on the consumer side, far too much magazine waste goes to the landfill, and far too little to the recycling center.
Like so many industries, change happens when both consumers and producers are aligned in a goal of creating more eco-friendly products using more environmentally appropriate processes and materials. So if you subscribe to some paper magazines, ask your publishers how much recycled paper they use, and if they might use more.
When I get a good apple or pear, I eat it “right down to the bone.”
This is an actual core from a wonderful Macoun apple that I picked myself. It was fresh, juicy, crunchy, and that wonderful combination of sweet and tart. An apple right from the tree is one of the great pleasures in life. When we go apple picking, I get home and immediately start drying them and making apple sauce, because even one day later, it won’t taste quite as good. And three weeks later, it’ll taste only a little bit better than a store-bought apple shipped from the other side of the country.
As a locavore, a green business profitability expert, and someone who attempts to live a very green, yet very comfortable life, I feel each of us has a responsibility to minimize waste. Eating every last bit of a tasty apple is one of the ways that minimizing waste can actually be fun. And of course, the few grams remaining go into the compost, to be recycled by Mother Nature into something else.
And those are the two principles of waste reduction: use things more efficiently so you generate less waste, and figure out what that waste can be turned into to create something else. Better than pollution, I’d say.
Please comment below about how you are—or how you could be—generating less waste or setting that waste up as raw material for something else.
Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?
This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.
He proposes that as a society, we change our society’s thinking about this: that we design machines that don’t require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, but instead can use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:
To a large degree, we’ve already extracted the easy stuff. Mining and drilling will continue to produce lower-grade, lesser concentrations that need more work and energy, increase carbon footprint, and produce more waste, to get usable raw materials—getting more and more expensive in both dollar and environmental measurements. Look at the horrible process of extracting oil from tar sands, if you want an example.
Designing machines that can run on waste streams turns landfills into abundant sources of raw materials. When we start mining landfills, we have lots to feed the machine—as long as the machine can run on a mixed and inconsistent stream of materials. If we can mix together several kinds of plastics even as the specific mix constantly shifts, our landfills become resources, right along with our reycle bins. Our trash problem goes down; the environmental consequences of mining are also much-reduced.
A logical corollary: instead of designing a machine to make one output from one consistent input, we can design machines that create multiple kinds of materials depending on what sources are being harvested at the moment.
In contrast, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.
InterfaceFLOR is now able to use 97 percent of the messy mix of materials in old vinyl carpet tiles to make new flooring tiles, and the remaining three percent goes into other products. I think that’s pretty cool!
And this kind of holistic thinking is how we, as a society, change our demons into delights.
After more than a week of traveling in Ireland and Northern Ireland, here’s some of what I notice:
Fairly high public awareness in general terms, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to behavior.
Wind power plays a significant role. It’s common to see large wind turbines (as in much of the rest of Europe), thouh for the most part in small clusters of one to five, rather than in the vast wind farms of say, Spain—and also to see older, smaller private installations on individual farms, of the sort that were common on US farms in the late 1970s.
Solar’s role is minimal. I have seen exactly one rooftop solar hot water installation, and the only places I’ve seen photovoltaic have been on self-powered electronic highway signs. Of course, it’s not the sunniest place in the world; an Italian immigrant told us, “in Ireland, they call this a beautiful day. In Italy, we would call it a disaster.” But there must be more than is obvious, because we passed quite a number of solar businesses, even in some pretty rural areas.
Fair trade has a lot of currency here, and you can find a fair number of fair trade items not only in specialty stores and supermarkets, but even at gas station convenience stores.
Big cities have some limited public recycling in the major commercial and tourist areas. I imagine there are recycling programs for households, too.
On the campus of the technical college we visited, environmental awareness was quite high. This school is also about to launch a degree program in sustainability and one in agriculture, yet they haven’t explored the obvious linkages between those two program offerings—in part because they’re slotted for different campus, 50 miles apart.
To my shock, the small conference center we stayed at in rural Donegal was still using energy-hogging incandescent light bulbs.
This is a reminder of two critical concepts for the coming years:
1. Money is not a goal; it is a means of accomplishing something. While having more money means you can purchase the goods or services you want, there are often other ways to accomplish the goal.
2. Buying stuff is not the only way to accomplish something.
Here’s a look at how to leverage other methods of getting your needs met and your wants fulfilled.
Zipcar just commissioned a study on the sharing habits of Millennials, showing that they are more willing to share not just cars, but a wide range of resources, than their parents and grandparents.
That may be true of the majority culture, but there are plenty of us older folks who know a good thing when they see it. I’ve been lifelong practitioner of this sort of approach, and a public advocate all the way back to at least 1995, when I published my fourth book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist. I’m turning 55 on Saturday, and here are some among many sharing experiences I’ve had over the years:
As a college student in Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1973-76, I became aware of a mostly Quaker community called The Vale. Instead of everyone going out and buying a lawnmower, they pitched in and bought a communal tractor.
In 1990, when laser printers cost several thousand dollars, I organized a co-op and brought in a bookstore owner, a community activist, and a magazine publisher to share the costs of purchasing one (it lived at my house, since I organized it).
As a member of Servas since 1983 and Couchsurfing since 2009, I’ve shared my home with strangers traveling through, and received hospitality form others on three continents.
My neighbors, a Republican mainstream farm family, constantly drive each other’s vehicles. The question seems to be what’s the best car, truck, or tractor for the task, and not who owns it.
Two decades ago, I was on the board of a group called Homesharing in Hampshire County: a mainstream social service agency that matched up people with extra space in their homes (often elders in need of both companionship and home/property maintenance) with people who needed a place to live.
Thirty years ago, I lived in a community in West Philadelphia (a place with good public transit), where three or four cars were shared among about 120 people, as needed, and users paid a small fee per mile to cover costs. When we needed to make a supermarket run or fill our water jugs (we all hated the municipal water, so we self-bottled 50 gallons at a time at a spring in the next town), we borrowed one of the communal cars. Most of this community lived in group housing: six or eight people sharing a big old Victorian. It worked out very nicely.
For a decade at least, Freecycle has provided a formal structure to get rid of stuff you no longer need by passing it on to someone else, or to get something you need without having to buy it.
The article, in The Atlantic, also linked to a cool website (and concept) called Collaborative Consumption, which may be increasingly important as we try to turn the world green.
Here’s a company that’s been selling hand-made recycled art papers since 1998 (think about really cool and classy invitations)—and has just developed a new paper line using post-brewery barley as one of the ingredients—and being smart marketers, billing it as the first beer paper. They sponsored this morning’s HARO, and thus, I learned about them. I clicked over half expecting some very rough page put up by a few carousing fratboys–boy, was I wrong! These people love the earth and love what they do, which is obvious on every page of their site.
Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.
One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.
But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.
Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.
Cool, huh?
Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.
BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.
The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…
Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).
Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.
And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:
I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.
Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.
Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.
