Phil Gutis's Blog: Health and the Environment

Hurray for Home Depot!

2008-06-24T15:36:27Z

This weekend, the husband and I stopped by Home Depot to see if we could find shelves to house my out-of-control Kidrobot collection. We got our shelves -- at a huge discount in fact -- but still walked out a couple thousand dollars poorer.

How? Well, we finally bought a new refrigerator, replacing our ancient grumbling sweating box with a sleek French door model from LG. Most importantly, it was an Energy Star model and from I could tell from comparison shopping, it operates at the lowest end of the energy consumption scale.

So what transformed a simple trip for cheap shelving into a major investment in home appliances? Home Depot was offering a gift card worth as much as $250 for buying an Energy Star appliance. Combine that with a 10 percent sale and free delivery and removal of the existing refrigerator and I figure we saved about $600. That's real money and we're not even talking about the energy savings.

After our credit card failed to melt at checkout, I felt good about the purchase and about Home Depot for offering the $250 gift card as an incentive to switch to Energy Star. I recognize that it is their enlightened self interest to help sell refrigerators and other appliances but it also educates -- and prods -- folks like us who knew our refrigerator was a energy monster to make the shift.

And then this morning, while flipping through The New York Times, I saw the prominent news that Home Depot has started a recycling program for compact fluorescent light bulbs. Home Depot -- the nation's second largest retailer -- will announce today that it will take back CFLs at all of its 1,973 stores in the United States, a move that the Times says will create "the nation's most widespread recycling program for the bulbs."

CFLs carry a very small amount of mercury -- roughly equivalent in size to the tip of a ballpoint pen -- and, according to an excellent NRDC fact sheet, it is sealed within the glass tubing.

I've previously applauded Home Depot for starting, among other programs, a new line of environmentally friendly paints and for actively encouraging the purchase of energy saving bulbs.

"We're trying to do the right thing," Ron Jarvis, Home Depot's senior vice president for environmental innovation, told the Times. "Some of the things we do are for the community and not for the bottom line."

The cynical journalist in me finds that really hard to swallow, but in this case I'm prepared to let go and believe. It feels good to do that every once in a while.

If it Bleeds ...

2007-10-20T22:56:45Z

There's a saying in television journalism: if it bleeds, it leads.

That's why whenever you switch over to the local news in your placid community, you could be forgiven for feeling as though you live in a level 10 crime zone.

Television news choices are also why, whenever polled, people generally put crime way at the top of the list of things that deeply bother them. Even if they live in a community like mine, where speeding and littering seem by far the biggest "crime" issues around. The environment, by contrast, often barely registers on top concern lists but that's a topic for another blog post (or two or three or more).

But what would happen if crime were firmly linked to environmental quality?

This weekend's New York Times Magazine poses just that question in a column by Jascha Hoffman, who writes about a recent study from Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, an economist at Amherst College, linking the elimination of lead in gasoline in the '70s and '80s under the aegis of the Clean Air Act to steady drops in crime.

"Reyes found that the rise and fall of lead-exposure rates seemed to match the arc of violent crime, but with a 20-year lag — just long enough for children exposed to the highest levels of lead in 1973 to reach their most violence-prone years in the early ’90s, when crime rates hit their peak," Hoffman writes.

Another researcher that Hoffman cites -- Rick Nevin, a senior adviser to the National Center for Healthy Housing -- published a study in the journal Environmental Research that found confirmed the lead hypothesis. "

“It really does sound like a bad science-fiction plot,” Nevin said. “The idea that a society could have systematically poisoned its youngest children with the same neurotoxins in two different ways over the same century is almost impossible to believe.”

Interesting stuff. Unfortunately, I doubt the lack of crime -- and its causes -- will qualify as sensational in anyone's book and therefore won't receive much coverage.

In contrast, the latest incident of isolated crime or terrible fire and accident draws attention far beyond its impact on our lives.

Here's an idea: We hook up NRDC lawyers and scientists sirens and bright flashing lights. Then when they pull up to the scene of a significant-but-not-so telegenic environmental crime just perhaps they'll find TV reporters chronicling the event and raising public concern.

After all, a local crime or accident generally impacts only those directly involved. As Hoffman writes in the Times Magazine, environmental crimes can impact tens if not hundreds of millions.

The Horror in my Eyes

2007-10-05T14:13:50Z

As you can see from the photo on the right, I'm a stocky guy (see, also, Bear Meets Bear). But I had my socks surprised right off me a few weeks ago when my doctor not so calmly informed me that I had crept right into a clinical diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes. Treatable, curable, blah blah blah but definitely not good. After the doc spelled out all the risk factors -- I believe he called me a set of walking bomblets -- he told me that he knew I would take his urgings seriously because he could easily see the horror in my eyes.

Both of my grandfathers had diabetes and my mom's father actually lost both of his legs from the disease. So the propensity is definitely in my genes although I never thought it would hit me. After all, I'm the stocky guy who ran 17 marathons (that's a picture of me running the Disney World Marathon in 2003) and never really lost my stockiness. I just thought I'd always be stocky and always be okay.

Not to be, I guess.

But by now you're probably wondering what this has to do with the environment. Hang with me and you'll see that the relevance is quite strong.

Besides enduring a professional environmentalist schedule that -- particularly after this year's Oscars ceremony -- has steadily stolen my exercise time, what this diagnosis taught me more than anything else was the need for balance in my life.

I no longer subway back and forth from the train station to my office. I walk instead. And when presented with the choice between an escalator or a set of steps, I hoof it up the steps. I'm also seeking time for exercise (not too successfully yet) and, more successfully, watching the diet. Maybe I should do a weight watch on this blog. The publicity may just keep me in line!

Here comes the environment. What would help the environment the most? Balance!

I was just reading a story in Good Magazine about the Compact, the semi-infamous group of people who pledge not to buy any new stuff. Their basic take: Our hyper-consumer society has led to global environmental and the only way to reverse it is to stop buying. Literally.

Intriguing movement for sure. (I even signed up a while ago for one of their email lists, but quickly had to unsubscribe because Compact members clearly spend all of the time they're saving not shopping by writing email. Never have I seen so many bytes being consumed by one group of people.)

But how many of us are going to ever join the Compact movement? Not many. I personally like to shop. It is relaxing and I enjoy trying to find new green(er) products to buy and then rave about. So I'm not stopping.

And I'm not going to stop driving (although I do drive a hybrid). And I'm not going to stop adopting dogs (I'll soon be introducing Abe, a 12-week-old Jack Russell puppy who is the newest member of the Weaver-Gutis pack).

But I'm also never going to stop seeking balance. In my life, for my family and for the environment. What happens when we realize that we've crept past the clinical diagnosis of global warming and the scientists tell us that its not so curable or treatable.

Can you imagine the horror that would be reflected in our eyes then?

This Was America

2007-09-01T14:24:18Z

The Los Angeles Times this morning features a long piece from Ann Simmons, a former war correspondent who had been detailed to New Orleans to cover the city's recovery post Katrina. In many ways, it hasn't been much of a recovery, as Simmons reports.

Here we were in supposedly the world's most powerful industrialized nation, yet getting New Orleans back on its feet was so slow. Federal, state and city officials continue to blame each other for the lethargic progress.
My perception of the United States as a democracy that takes care of its own was shattered.

This wasn't Somalia of the 1990s, where the absence of a central government guaranteed a dearth of public services and shoddy infrastructure; or postwar Angola, where broken bridges, land mines and derelict roads and airstrips could be blamed for hampering the transport of supplies or assistance to a populace in need. It wasn't southern Sudan, where aid groups often had to suspend relief efforts because of security concerns.

This was America.

The lack of faith in the government, common among people in the developing world, gradually began to show itself among New Orleanians as they waited in vain for an outpouring of help from authorities.

"It's like no one cares; like we've been forgotten," Marie Benoit, a schoolteacher pre-Katrina, said one day on the way to her home in a park of 500 campers on the campus of Southern University at New Orleans.

Simmons ends her story on an uplifting note about the resilience of the city and its people, which is delightful to read. But NRDC's two-years-later work unfortunately presents an anything-but-uplifting picture.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the floodwaters that swamped New Orleans swept oil, diesel and toxic chemicals from gas stations, industrial sites and toxic waste dumps into residential neighborhoods. Today, residents are still returning to communities laced with hazardous pollution. The latest round of NRDC environmental testing in New Orleans shows that several areas of the city -- including schools and playgrounds -- contain high levels of arsenic in the soil.
The flooding appears to have spread long-buried arsenic from pesticides or industrial processes, or from the muck at the bottom of the canals and Lake Pontchartrain, throughout the city and onto the surface of the soil, where people -- especially young children -- can easily touch it, breathe it, or get in their mouths. NRDC found six schools and two playgrounds sitting on arsenic hotspots -- areas where the level of arsenic exceeds environmental cleanup guidelines. Arsenic can cause cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and other serious health problems.

A team of NRDC scientists, lawyers and communicators visited New Orleans a few months ago to talk with residents and complete another round of soil samples. You can see their travels in the following video.

Bad News for Anyone Who Eats

2007-08-26T05:00:00Z

One of the favorite parts of my job at NRDC is that I get to serve as publisher of OnEarth, our quarterly magazine. Beyond being able to work with a superbly talented team of editors and designers, what makes this piece of my job so pleasurable is that we engage in real journalism, breaking stories that typically show up in the mainstream media months or even years later.

Last summer, for example, OnEarth published one of the first stories about the modern-day plight of the honey bee. In the 12 months since our cover article appeared, the fate of the bees has been covered far and wide.

In a recent issue, Wired Magazine covered the phenomenon from the perspective of a scientist at the University of Montana who is wiring hives that he believes to be in the early stages of "colony collapse disorder," which is believed responsible for the deaths of billions of bees nationwide.

"Colony collapse disorder," Wired writes, "is bad news for anyone who eats."

In one particularly detailed section of the OnEarth article, author Sharon Levy writes about a bee keeper named Jeff Anderson who believes he knows what is killing his hives.

"One of the biggest problems is irresponsible use of pesticides and the failure of regulators to enforce the rules meant to protect bees from poisoning," Anderson said.

Levy writes:

Over the past few years, Anderson has become a reluctant expert on one particular pesticide, Sevin, and the quirks of the system meant to govern its use. In the summer of 1998, Anderson's hives were stationed on farmland next to hybrid poplar groves managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the International Paper Company. Both sprayed the trees with Sevin to control infestations of the cottonwood leaf beetle, which damages poplars. Soon after, Anderson's bees began to die. He videotaped sick ones as they lay twitching, just outside their hive boxes, in the throes of nerve poisoning from the insecticide. The poisonings would continue long after a Sevin application, he says, because worker bees carried contaminated pollen back to the hive, where it affected the colony for months. More than 50 percent of his bees died.

Sevin is scarcy stuff. Also known as carbaryl, it is one of the most widely used broad spectrum insecticides. Two years ago, NRDC's health and toxics program led a coalition of public interest groups in petitioning the EPA to eliminate its use.

I checked with NRDC's policy staff for an update and the word was that "we sued EPA for failing to respond to our request to ban Sevin or carbaryl. We just settled that lawsuit with a deadline for them to make a final decision on it in the coming months."

So stay tuned. Maybe just maybe we'll have some good news soon.

Carrot Sticks

2007-08-22T15:26:45Z

In an interesting example of policy advocacy crossing into marketing land, this week's Advertising Age has an article titled "BP touts greenness, then asks to dump ammonia."

The controversy involves a plan by the energy giant to increase the amount of toxic discharges from a refinery into Lake Michigan and how its plans have angered Chicago officials and flamed talks of a consumer boycott of the company.

Ann Alexander, an attorney in NRDC's new Midwest office, joined the fray in a recent op-ed in the Chicago Sun Times.

"Like a pious preacher caught with the secretary in a cheap motel, the oil company that spent years promising to take us 'beyond petroleum' has suddenly found itself at the center of a growing storm brought on by a severe case of hypocrisy," Alexander wrote. "Instead of a public atonement, BP is digging in its heels. Odds are that this is a losing game, one that will leave both corporate and political reputations battered and broken."

Alexander notes that BP has spent millions promoting itself as the greenest oil giant. But BP has applied and won permission to start dumping 1600 pounds of ammonia and nearly two and a half tons of contaminated sludge each and every day into Lake Michigan from a refinery in Indiana that is a mile away from where 11 cities get their drinking water.

That's the point of the AdAge story, which notes that the controversy has drawn "attention to the cardinal sin of touting an environmentally conscious image in marketing —the central focus of BP's advertising for the past several years —and failing to live up to the message."

NRDC more than welcomes corporate efforts to go green. We're actively involved in helping giants like Wal-Mart transform their operations and working with many other companies.

But Ann's op-ed about the controversy over BP in the Midwest should serve as a reminder that NRDC will not shy from using the age old carrot and stick approach (Or, as one of my colleagues called it, the "carrot stick."

When rhetoric does not live up to actions, we're not going to be shy about letting the world know. You can bank on that.

Thinking About Garbage

2007-08-18T22:02:46Z

It was a beautiful afternoon, a day for moving slowly and enjoying the outside, even in New York City and even in the early evening as I headed off to Penn Station to begin the long commute home. And even though it was also the evening before trash day and the sidewalks were becoming crowded with bags of garbage and recycling. Although it was a year ago now, I remember having one of those random thoughts, the kind that pops into your mind one second and then leaves just as quickly. I thought, damn, there must be zillions of dollars of raw materials buried in landfills across the country. I briefly wondered why no one has started mining for them and continued on my way.

Until that is I finally got to the train and started plowing through the magazines I've become addicted to reading. And there, lo and behold, in Fast Company's July/August 2006 issue, I found an article titled "There's Gold in Them Thar Smelly Hills." The subtitle was equally intriguing: "A single ton of junked PCs has more gold than 17 tons of ore. That's why landfills might – just might – pay for their own cleanup."

In his article, Fast Company senior writer Alan Deutschman said that insatiable demand for raw materials in China and India was driving up the price of metals such as aluminum, copper, iron and steel. But Deutschman wrote that the increasing demand had a silver lining in that "private enterprise has a chance to create a market-driven solution." And he reported that at a recent IBM Global Innovation Outlook conference, a speaker kept the audience captivated by "suggesting we could treat landfills as though they were mines – and dig up the valuable metals buried in them."

"And there's plenty to dig for, says Patrick Atkins, the director of energy innovation at Alcoa. North American landfills contain more aluminum than we can produce by mining ores. He thinks the same is probably true of gold and copper, which are used in the circuit boards of computers and electronic gadgets. One ton of scrap from discarded PCs contains more gold than can be produced from 17 tons of gold ore – and humans throw away 20 million tons of electronic waste a year. Americans dispose of 50 million computers annually; by the end of this decade, the Japanese alone will have trashed 610 million cell phones."

The numbers are staggering. The amount of money that could be made by turning our garbage into raw materials is also incomprehensible to someone like me who is unable to balance a checkbook. But I'm confident that smart business minds are even now exploring the money that can be made by mining our landfills and otherwise capitalizing on our trash.

The alternative is too pathetic to consider.

PS -- I know this all happened a year ago, but I was reminded of the story this morning when my husband and I dropped off a computer and old television at our county's electronic recycling day. More on that soon ...