Diving Into the Trash at NRDC
Posted November 16, 2009 in Curbing Pollution, Health and the Environment, Living Sustainably
Monday's "Trash" Generated at the Office
With the first weekday of this experiment nearly complete I can say (and show above) that my impact has been small. Other than that napkin I used out of habit during lunch I haven't produced any non-compostable or non-recyclable waste worth mentioning. Missing from the photo are the two eggshells from breakfast now sitting in the compost container in the freezer awaiting a trip across the street to the compost bin in our community garden. Tonight after work I was called to help my brother-in-law with a screen test. He provided dinner from a great Mexican restaurant in his neighborhood. I chose a meal with just a piece of wax paper and a sheet of aluminum foil.
Giving Credit Where Credit is Due
This impressively small amount of workday waste was made easy by the comforts of home we enjoy at our office. Each floor is equipped with a kitchen that includes dishware, silverware, mugs, cups, a sink, and a dishwasher. Each kitchen also includes a hook with two reusable bags for staff to take with them while out getting lunch or running errands. And if you do need a napkin you grab one made from 100% post-consumer recycled paper fibers.
The Simple Steps to a Small Footprint
Below are the reusable things that made it so easy to avoid paper and plastic.
About the Rest of the Waste
Even with our best efforts to reduce our consumption here at NRDC, there is no getting around the fact that an office of almost 140 people is going to make some trash. The key is to pull as much of the recyclable content out of the stream before it reaches the truck down on 20th Street. To achieve that goal we've contracted with haulers who can accept just about every kind of paper, plastic, glass, and metal we can collect. And we separate out the redeemables for a guy who lives in the neighborhood. Here is a snashot of what goes where when it leaves the office:
And where do those numbers come from? Picking through lots of bags like this:
What's in the Bag Doesnt Lie (or Why We Picked Through Our Own Trash at 8:00 in the Morning for Five Days Including Saturday)
Earlier this year a handful of NRDCers conducted a waste audit at the New York Office. We arrived at the office in the morning before the rest of the staff to pick through the previous day's trash (set aside for us by the cleaning staff) and methodically measured the weight and counted the number of recyclable items that had carelessly been tossed. We made both quantitative and qualitative notes about what we found in the bags to help gain a clear picture of what we were sending to the landfill and how we send less.
The Quick and Dirty on NRDC's Waste Audit
We began our audit on Tuesday morning with Monday's trash and then continued for a total of five days. We came in on Saturday morning so we could capture the effects of changes in behavior at the end of the week (Hey, it's Friday. Let's treat ourselves to take out and lots of unnecessary packaging) and measure the effect of our refrigerators being cleaned out (as they are on a rotating Friday schedule). Keeping the audit a secret to get valid results meant that all week long we had to work quickly and quietly in the freight elevator areas to avoiding attention. It was a nice change on Saturday to leisurely put on our rubber gloves and weigh coffee grinds down to the tenth of an ounce!
Hooray for Us, and Some Room for Improvement
When the last used tea bag had been counted and all the trash returned to its bags we crunched our data and found that, as a whole, our office is doing quite well. In the upper left corner of trash bag photo above you can see a few of the items that should've been recycled: aluminum dish from Chipotle and aluminum foil, plastic drink cups, Starbucks coffee cup sleeves, frozen food box, and a draft copy of a wonky carbon allowance allocation chart (if interested, the final version is in this Cap 2.0 policy brief). There were also some coffee grinds and a tea bag or two that should've been composted (for more details on NRDC's compost program check out today's post from Lindsi. That bag contained more "mistakes" than most.
Audit Your Office
Conducting the trash audit was one of the most satisfying projects I've been a part of in my 2.5 years here at NRDC. The work was important and concrete and results garnered a lot of attention around our office. Our colleagues were grateful for the care we put into the crafting the audit and for the ideas about how we might all perform better.
Think your office is already doing a pretty good job on the trash front? Or know that your coworkers are doing more than their share to trash the planet? If you'd like more information on how to take a closer look at your office's waste then drop me a note in the comments section.
Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
Dr. James Singmaster — Nov 17 2009 01:46 AM
I would like to commend your effort but it just misses the point due to directing attention to steps too small to do anything. We have to wake up to the massive ever-expanding messes of organic wastes and sewage solids that get dumped to allow natural biodegrading of them to reemit GHGs. And the messes are a costly disposal problem especially with dumps still having escapes or washouts of the germs, toxics and drugs to be causing water pollution problems.
You need to be thinking about the 22 billion disposable diapers going to dumps and who knows how many billions of rolls of toilet paper flushed away. Your office audit did notinclude flushed toilet paper and possibly how much dirty paper towel went out to be composted, a useless concept as the organic materials end up being biodegraded to reemit trapped carbon as carbon dioxide.
I have proposed elsewhere in comments on various Switchboard postings that the massive ever-expanding messes of organic wastes and sewage solids can be a resource in battling the climate crisis. Those messes can be pyrolyzed to get inert charcoal preventing the reemitting while also removing some energy from its overload in the biosphere, if renewable energy is used. Some renewable energy can be gotten from pyrolysis as I have pointed out in those comments. The big bonus
for pyrolysis of the messes is that the germs, toxics and drugs are destroyed greatly reducing costs and water pollution from new dumps.
In order to get control of the climate crisis and more, we have to go negative carbon and energy, not just neutral as the overloads of both are growing and along with them are those messes. Those messes, because we are not paying much attention to them, may soon be overwhelming with polluted water going into agricultural areas to contaminate
food and kill off food fish. I urge NRDC members to get attention to those messes that can become a resource in controlling several environmental crises. Dr. J. Singmaster
Dr. James Singmaster — Nov 18 2009 02:05 AM
I need to add a couple of details to my comment above pointing out that 22 billion diapers is every year based on some data from a few years, although some reductions may now be occurring as some families supposedly are switching back to cloth due to the concern of overloading dumps. But disposal of soiled toilet paper by flushing will keep growing with the population growing and along with soiled nose tissues. Of course all kinds of germs go along with those paper wastes, but the separated sewage solids and the dumped paper wastes, if they were pyrolyzed, would have the germs destroyed.
Won't getting a program to take care of those waste messes achieve a lot more than getting the minor amounts of office wastes neatly accounted for? Dr. J. Singmaster
adrian cooper — Nov 18 2009 09:00 AM
I wonder if Dr Singmaster would care to look at our website www.firstpowerlimited.eu and then contact me to discuss his comments on pyrolysis. regards adrian cooper
Anthony Clark — Nov 18 2009 08:21 PM
Thanks for your interest and comments.
@ Dr. Singmaster: To be direct, we aren’t talking about an either/or situation. The amount of waste we send to landfills versus recycling/downcycling into other products is extremely important. The opportunities for improving our behavior at the individual and collective level on this front are many. I highlighted these particular efforts at NRDC because they are easily replicable and are in line with the spirit of the No Impact Experiment, which is to identify simple steps we each can take to reduce our impact on the planet.
I would absolutely agree that organic wastes and sewer solids are a major environmental concern. For going on 20 years NRDC has published Testing the Waters (www.nrdc.org/water/oceans/ttw/titinx.asp) -- the report of record on beachwater quality around the nation. As I’m sure you know, combined stormwater sewer overflows represent a significant source of the dangerous pollution that flows into our nation’s waterways and beaches. In our report we provide recommendations for curbing these sources of pollution. In next year’s edition we will be looking even more closely at the infrastructure improvements needed to address the problem more fully. It does seem pyrolysis holds significant potential for killing two birds with one stone. I look forward to learning more about the technology.
@ Adrian Cooper: Thanks for pointing our readers to your site. We’ll certainly need all manner of innovation to deal with our waste and develop cleaner sources of energy.