Using Waste as a Resource: The Lessons Learned
If anybody’s growing biomass, it’s us. To keep our system from collapsing on itself, industrial ecologists are attempting to build a “no-waste economy.” Instead of a linear production system, which binges on virgin raw materials and spews out unusable waste, they envision a web of closed loops in which a minimum of raw materials comes in the door, and very little waste escapes. The first examples of this no-waste economy are collections of companies clustered in an ecopark and connected in a food chain, with each firm’s offal going next door to become the other firm’s raw material or fuel.
In Denmark, the town of Kalundborg has the world’s most elaborate prototype of an ecopark. Four companies are collocated, and all of them are linked, dependent on one another for resources or energy. The Asnaesverket Power Company pipes some of its waste steam to power the engines of two companies: the Statoil Refinery and Novo Nordisk (a pharmaceutical plant). Another pipeline delivers the remaining waste steam to heat thirty-five hundred homes in the town, eliminating the need for oil furnaces. The power plant also delivers its cooling water, now toasty warm, to fifty-seven ponds’ worth of fish. The fish revel in the warm water, and the fish farm produces 250 tons of sea trout and turbot each year.
Waste steam from the power company is used by Novo Nordisk to heat the fermentation tanks that produce insulin and enzymes. This process in turn creates 700,000 tons of nitrogen-rich slurry a year, which used to be dumped into the fjord. Now, Novo bequeaths it free to nearby farmers—a pipeline delivers the fertilizer to the growing plants, which are in turn harvested to feed the bacteria in the fermentation tanks.
Meanwhile, back at the Statoil Refinery, waste gas that used to go up a smokestack is now purified. Some is used internally as fuel, some is piped to the power company, and the rest goes to Gyproc, the wallboard maker next door. The sulfur squeezed from the gas during purification is loaded onto trucks and sent to Kemira, a company that produces sulfuric acid. The power company also squeezes sulfur from its emissions, but it converts most of it to calcium sulfate (industrial gypsum), which it sells to Gyproc for wallboard.
Although Kalundborg is a cozy collocation, industries need not be geographically close to operate in a food web as long as they are connected by information and a mutual desire to use waste. Already, some companies are designing their processes so that any waste that falls on the production-room floor is valuable and can be used by someone else. In this game of “designed offal,” a process with lots of waste, as long as it’s “wanted waste,” may be better than one with a small amount of waste that must be landfilled or burned. As author Daniel Chiras says, more companies are recognizing that “technologies that produce byproducts society cannot absorb are essentially failed technologies.”
So far, we’ve talked about recycling within the confines of one manufacturing plant or within a circle of companies. But what happens when a product leaves the manufacturer’s gates and passes to the consumer and finally to the trash can? Right now, a product visits one of two fates at the end of its useful life. It can be dissipated to the environment (buried in a landfill or incinerated), or it can be recaptured through recycling or reuse. The closed-loop dream of industrial ecology won’t be complete until all products that are sent out into the world are folded back into the system.
Traditionally, manufacturers haven’t had to worry about what happens to a product after it leaves their gates. But that is starting to change, thanks to laws now in the wings in Europe (and headed for the United States) that will require companies to take back their durable goods such as refrigerators, washers, and cars at the end of their useful lives. In Germany, the take-back laws start with the initial sale. Companies must take back all their packaging or hire middlemen to do the packaging recycling for them. Take-back laws mean that manufacturers who have been saying, “This product can be recycled,” must now say, “We recycle our products and packaging.”
When the onus shifts in this way, it’s suddenly in the company’s best interest to design a product that will either last a good long time or come apart easily for recycling or reuse. Refrigerators and cars will be assembled using easy-open snaps instead of glued-together joints, and for recyclability, each part will be made of one material instead of twenty. Even simple things, like the snack bags for potato chips, will be streamlined. Today’s bags, which have nine thin layers made of seven different materials, will no doubt be replaced by one material that can preserve freshness and can easily be remade into a new bag. And that bag will most certainly be marked with a universal material code, making it easier for the companies charged with take-back to recycle and refurbish them.
As Allenby explained, take-back laws are a change in the market environment, and the companies that want to survive in that habitat are already evolving. BMW’s new sports car, for instance, can be broken down in twenty minutes on an “unassembly” line. (“I wouldn’t want to leave one of these on the streets of New York,” kids Laudise as he shows me before-and-after pictures.)
Refurbishment is another key to giving products a longer life in the marketplace. Instead of buying a new computer case each time you want to upgrade, you’ll most likely buy the snappy new module and plug it into your original case. When you do hand over your old behemoth, it may be “mined” for parts which will be refurbished and show up again in new machines. “Asset recovery” is what Xerox calls it. The parts stripping and refurbishing program for its copiers saves the company $200 million annually.
The Canadian arm of Black & Decker has started a recycling system for its rechargeable appliances, hoping to reduce contamination and waste from nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries. Customers have the choice of either having the rechargeable batteries replaced or leaving the products with a local distributor for recycling. As an incentive to bring the item in, customers who do so are eligible for a five-dollar rebate toward their next Black & Decker product. So far, 127 fewer tons of waste (including 21 fewer tons of nickel-cadmium batteries) were landfilled in Ontario, where the program has been piloted. Black & Decker also benefits from future sales that the rebate system encourages.
Canon, in response to worldwide demand for recycling, is also inviting customers to mail in their old ink cartridges from printers and copiers. The postage is paid by the company, and for each one mailed in, Canon sends a five-dollar donation to either the National Wildlife Federation or The Nature Conservancy.
Businesses that have been in the game for a while report that being green is good for profits. Anita Roddick’s Body Shop has made a fortune on the concept of refilling customers’ containers of cosmetics and toiletries to cut down on packaging waste. Déjà Shoe (my candidate for best green name) makes old tires into shoes, claiming it’s better to wear them than burn them. Patagonia does the same for pop bottles, polishing its already verdant image by offering the first guilt-free polar-fleece jackets. With waste-recovery successes like these, suggests Allenby, we might as well stop calling it waste.
2. Diversify and Cooperate to Fully Use the Habitat.
The more we learn about nature’s resource allotment strategies, the more it looks like Tennyson had it only half right when he said nature was “red in tooth and claw.” In mature ecosystems, cooperation seems to be just as important as competition. Using cooperative strategies, organisms spread out into noncompeting niches and basically clean up every crumb before it even falls off the table. This diversity of niches creates a dynamic stability; if one organism drops out of the network, there’s usually a backup, allowing the web to stay whole.
Even when individuals within a species share a niche, there are “agreements” about resource allotment. Animals will claim territories, for instance, or feed at different times of day to avoid overlapping with their counterparts. As a result, the spoils of their habitat are divvied up so that whole gaggles, herds, troops, and coveys can be supported by the same piece of land without constant energy-draining fights. This “peacefu
l coexistence,” writes ecologist Paul Colinvaux, is inherently cooperative, though it may not be a conscious pact as it is with humans.
More overt forms of cooperation can be seen in the partnerships that some animals form for mutual benefit. The classic example is the goby fish that picks parasites from the teeth and gills of the Nassau grouper fish. In return for this cleaning service, the grouper resists eating the tiny goby and actually protects it from other predators. Noisy oxbirds also perform a service, alerting hippos to interlopers in return for being allowed to dine on ticks embedded in the hippo’s skin. Lichen represent a more permanent arrangement between two species: Algae and fungi move in together, one harvesting solar energy, the other providing a safe support structure. What emerges when you combine talents like these is synergy—a sustainable system far greater than the sum of the parts.
Lynn Margulis, co-author of the Gaia hypothesis (the idea that the Earth is self-regulating, like a living organism), believes that symbiosis is not confined to a few oddball species, but is in fact essential to all evolution. According to the endosymbiotic hypothesis, which she has written about extensively, a large leapfrogging of progress occurred billions of years ago when two species joined forces. A bacteria that couldn’t manufacture its own food engulfed another bacteria that could photosynthesize. Instead of being killed, the green “boarder” stayed on, and has stayed on to this day. In fact, says Margulis, the successors to these symbionts are the chloroplasts that exist in all green plants. Another symbiotic story can be seen in the oxygen-breathing, energy-producing organelles in our cells called mitochondria. Proponents of this hypothesis, which is widely accepted, postulate that these mitochondria were free-ranging bacteria at one time, which explains why they still have their own set of DNA.
If the endosymbiotic hypothesis is true, then every cell in our body is a symbiotic creature. When these symbionts gather in great herds, they form organs and organisms. In fact, writ large, the theory goes like this: Our body is actually an aggregate of single-cell creatures that have formed a giant multicellular assembly. In short, we are a colony—a single organism composed of many—and a living proof of the power of cooperation.
Diversifying and Cooperating: The Lessons Learned
Anyone who has collected green bottles for several months only to hear “Sorry, we can’t recycle green glass—no markets” knows the frustration of the web that has holes. The more pathways we have for feeding off each other in the industrial ecosystem, the more loops will be closed and the less waste will be lost from the system.
Right now, within the linear extract-and-dump model, the niches—the jobs within the web—are not all in place. As the Japanese industrial ecologist Michiyuki Uenohara says, we have plenty of “arteries”—ways for products to flow from the heart of manufacturers into the body of the economy—but we need “veins” as well, ways to return the products so that their materials can be purified and reused. As part of Japan’s Ecofactory Initiative, restoration factories are being built nationwide to refurbish or recycle products at the end of their life.
The Japanese are also building a form of cooperation into the design phase of their product development. In this strategy, the competitive whistle doesn’t blow until marketing begins. Prior to marketing, companies participate in common goals like Design for Disassembly. This notion of precompetitive cooperation is also showing up in the United States, the most notable example being the Vehicle Recycling Partnership of Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors. Putting aside their normally fierce competition, companies like these are working through trade associations, special alliances, and “virtual firms” to come up with common labeling and materials standards which will allow them to reuse each other’s parts. This kind of alliance-building is to be expected in an emerging Type III economy. The more veins and arteries you add to a system, the more complex it becomes, and the more cooperation you need for proper functioning.
One day, say industrial ecologists, the town that has no takers for green glass will be seen as a town with a niche unfilled, an opportunity that won’t stay open for long. In an economy where veins and arteries are equally profitable, entrepreneurs will consciously work to sew up the loose ends of resource use and reuse. The result: a web without holes that looks and behaves more like a mature community.
3. Gather and Use Energy Efficiently.
Not everything needed by industry can be recycled, however. Even in a natural system, only nutrients and minerals can be circulated through the diverse connections of an ecosystem; energy cannot. In a salute to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy is converted to heat in the process of doing work, and is therefore unavailable to do more work. As a result, the energy that runs the juggler’s art must be continually imported into the system.
In nearly every community (except sulfur-based “vent” communities on the ocean floor), the purchasing agents for energy are photosynthesizers—green plants, blue-green algae, and certain bacteria. They siphon their radiant energy from a nuclear fusion occurring 93 million miles away (the sun) and transform it into the chemical bonds of sugars and carbohydrates. Though they use only about 2 percent of the sunlight that reaches the Earth, they make the most of it, achieving an astounding 95 percent quantum efficiency. (That means that for every 100 photons of light captured by the leaf’s reaction center, 95 are funneled into bond making.)
Next time you are in a leafy mature forest, take time to marvel at nature’s efficient solar-collector array. Leaves are positioned relative to one another to maximize exposure, and like miniblinds, some actually tilt and swivel as the sun traces the sky. This efficient process collects energy for all living beings, and sets the ceiling for what an ecosystem can aspire to be.
The carrying capacity of the land has everything to do with how much energy there is to go around. After plants use their energy booty for growing and reproducing, only 10 percent is available to the next food chain level, the herbivores. Only 10 percent of that 10 percent is available to carnivores, and so on. That’s why, as ecologist Paul Colinvaux says, “big fierce animals are rare,” and why plants usually constitute most of the biomass (total living weight) in terrestrial ecosystems. The pyramid of life is quite literally an energy distribution chart, a record of the sun’s movement through the system.
When you’re only one of many species competing for a slice of the sun’s energy, you can’t afford to be capricious in your use of energy. That’s why animals travel a minimum distance to get what they need, and time their activities to maximize their rewards and minimize energy costs. Plants send roots only as far as they need them and don’t try to “tough it out” where the soil or water levels are wrong for them. Both animals and plants doggedly protect what they secure. The Southwest’s collared peccary hoards its hard-won water (even its urine is crystalline), while the sugar maple of the North drops its leaves to seal off water loss during the winter. These energy-saving devices are not coincidence; those who overuse or squander energy are eventually edited out of the gene pool.
Thrift, on the other hand, pays handsomely. Even in the manufacture of bones and skin and shells and webs, organisms have evolved ways to work smarter, not harder. The use of enzymes for catalyzing or speeding up chemical reactions is a perfect example. A good enzyme can accelerate a chemical reaction by 1010 times (1 with 10 zeros after it). Without such acceleration, a process that takes five seconds, such as reading this sentence, would take fifteen hundred years. Biological catalysts also allow nature to manufacture benignly; instead of using high heats and harsh chemicals to create or break bonds, nature manufactures at room temperature and in water. The physics of falling together and falling apart—the natural drive toward self-assembly—does all the work.
Gathering and Using Energy Efficiently: The Lessons Learned
We could learn a lot from plants. Ideally, we too should use an external, renewable source of energy, specifically current sunlight (solar, wind, tidal, and biodiesel forms of power all rely on current
sunlight). As it is, we are using ancient sunlight that was trapped here on Earth in the bodies of Cretaceous plants and animals. Because these remains were compressed without oxygen, they never got the opportunity to decay. Now, when we burn these fossil remains as oil, coal, or natural gas, we complete the decay process all at once, exhaling the stored carbon into the atmosphere in large doses, violating the “no large fluxes” ecosystem lesson. Unfortunately, as long as these ancient sources are still cheap, our energy-addicted society appears determined to burn them all.
Renewable energy expert Amory Lovins believes that until we can make the shift to gathering current sunlight directly, the best strategy is to coax every last kilowatt out of the fuels we are using. Already, many industries have discovered the monetary benefits of tightening energy leaks with devices such as compact fluorescent lights, weather-tight building panels, and energy-sipping appliances. Du Pont has reduced energy use per pound of production 37 percent since 1973. It’s expecting to shave another 15 percent during the 1990s. In the last twenty years, while Japan’s economic activity has increased, its energy consumption has actually decreased. It attributes this reduction to the substitution of information—good ideas—in place of more energy.
Utility companies in this country are beginning to help consumers plug the leaks at the company’s expense. In western Montana, for instance, my rural electric cooperative, which buys from Bonneville Power, paid two thirds of the cost to insulate my attic. It believes that by weatherproofing its customers’ homes, it can help keep power demand below the level that would force it to build a new power station. Though it seems incongruous, Bonneville sells less electricity this way but makes just as much money, because it has eliminated construction costs of new plants from its budgets. Everybody wins, including the environment.
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