BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
Showing posts with label recycling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recycling. Show all posts
11 September 2025
11 July 2025
WIND TURBINE BIKE SHELTERS
COULDN'T these be used for mass transit shelters for bus, tram and train stops? Carports for apartment parking lots? Put solar panels on top for lights inside....
06 September 2019
Saving over a million trees is possible if we all just Wipe Right 26AUG19
NO reason to be grossed out or embarrassed talking about this, we all do it 😉 AND this is not the first time I have posted on this issue, you can go to my post in MAY and sign the petition from SumOfUs to Costo telling them to change to recycled toilet paper. This from NRDC.....
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For nearly a month, the Amazon rainforest — "the Earth's lungs" — has been on fire. This tragedy affects us all, and is yet another terrible reminder about climate change, how fragile the world's forests are, and how much work needs to be done.
Today is National Toilet Paper Day, a day to act to protect another of the Earth's critical carbon-storing forests — the boreal forests of northern Canada. These majestic forests store huge amounts of our climate-busting carbon pollution. But the boreal is also being cut at a dizzying rate… much of it to make toilet paper. And right now, too many toilet paper brands use 100% virgin forest fiber that often comes from clear-cut ancient trees and old-growth forests — like the Canadian boreal. But there's something that we can do to help stop the destruction of the old-growth boreal forest — We Wipe Right. By pledging to switch from 100% virgin forest fiber toilet paper to 100% recycled, each wipe can help save trees and reduce greenhouse gas pollution and also let companies know you want them to switch to making products that don't flush our forests down the toilet. Take the pledge to Wipe Right and save our trees — and our climate — by switching to 100% recycled toilet paper. Help us reach our goal of 100,000 pledges, and find out which toilet paper brands are best for the environment. 
Never underestimate the importance of toilet paper in our fight against climate change: Destroying forests to make toilet paper is a threat not just to our environment and our climate, but to hundreds of Indigenous communities, iconic boreal caribou, billions of songbirds, and other wildlife that call this ancient forest home.
Too many toilet paper brands use 100% virgin forest fiber that often comes from clear-cut ancient trees and old-growth forests — including Canada's boreal forest. But, if every person in the U.S. replaced just one roll of toilet paper made from trees with a roll made with 100% recycled materials, we could save 1,083,000 carbon-storing trees. So, what can we do to help stop the destruction of the old-growth boreal forest? We Wipe Right. Take the pledge to Wipe Right and help us reach our goal of 100,000 pledges. By taking the pledge, you'll be on your way to becoming a more conscious consumer of toilet paper and other paper goods. We'll even share more information and resources with you that will give you the rundown on what brands are the most sustainable. So, in honor of National Toilet Paper Day, help us reach 100,000 pledges by taking the pledge to Wipe Right for our environment. Then find out which toilet paper brands are best for the planet. Thanks, and happy National Toilet Paper Day! Shelley Vinyard Boreal Corporate Campaign Manager, NRDC  |
The mission of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is to safeguard the Earth: its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
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26 May 2019
Costco: protect the boreal forests and use recycled pulp in your toilet paper 25MAI19
I am a Costo customer and have participated in petition campaigns to Costo to get them to change company policies and practices for the benefit of the planet. Costco does respond to public pressure so I hope you will not only sign this petition to Costo but will also stop buying Kirkland toilet paper until Costo agrees to make their toilet paper with a minimum of 50% post consumer recycled materials.
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27 March 2014
Your Coffee Pods' Dirty Secret 19MAR14
I love my coffee. My drip brewer is set up as a little shrine, and every morning after I grind my +Mayorga Coffee beans for a fresh pot I burn a little incense, chant and ring a small string of bells during the brewing process!
NOT REALLY!, But I do love my coffee. I have never been impressed with coffee brewed from any of those pod things, and have no intention of ever owning one. When I had to buy a new coffee machine a couple of years ago I found a +Hamilton Beach system that will brew a pot and offers the option on the side to brew a single cup, no pod required. Pot or single cup, it uses wire mesh filters for the coffee. I am very happy with my coffee system, it brews a great pot or single cup of coffee without the waste of paper filters or pods. This from Mother Jones.....
Coffee brewing is in the midst of a revolution, and I'm not talking about the AeroPress. It comes in the form of a small 2-by-2-inch single-serving pod that requires a special machine.
Keurig, owned by Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee, makes the most
popular pods, called "K-Cups." At the press of a button, the Keurig
brewer punctures a small hole into the aluminum lid of an individual
plastic cup filled with grounds, flushes it with steaming water, and,
voilà! Out comes one hot cup of joe.
When Keurig launched its specialized brewing system in 1998, it might have come off as a bit niche. Not anymore. According to a survey by the National Coffee Association, nearly 1 in 5 adults drank single-cup-brewed coffee yesterday, making it the second most popular way to brew after the traditional drip methods—and far more popular than espresso machines.
What Keurig customers love, proclaims Green Mountain's 2013 annual report, is the system's "Quality, Convenience, and Choice"—and let's be real, it's convenience that trumps for most busy Americans. Keurig systems take under a minute to brew coffee, and cleaning them is laughably easy: Just chuck the used coffee pod in the trash, then press a button, and a "cleansing brew" shoots hot water through the system to clear it of residue.
But critics warn that the packaging needed for these systems comes with environmental and health-related costs. By making each pod so individualized, and so easy to dispose of, you must also exponentially increase the packaging—packaging that ultimately ends up in landfills. (And that's to say nothing of the plastic and metal brewing systems, which if broken, aren't that easy to recycle either.)
Journalist Murray Carpenter estimates in his new book, Caffeinated, that a row of all the K-Cups produced in 2011 would circle the globe more than six times. To update that analogy: In 2013, Green Mountain produced 8.3 billion K-Cups, enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times. If Green Mountain aims to have "a Keurig System on every counter," as the company states in its latest annual report, that's a hell of a lot of little cups.
Green Mountain only makes 5 percent of its current cups out of
recyclable plastic. The rest of them are made up of a #7 composite
plastic, which is nonrecyclable in most places. And for the small few
that are recyclable, the aluminum lid must be separated from the cup,
which also must be emptied of its wet grounds, for the materials to make
it through the recycling process. Even then, chances are the pod won't
be recycled because it's too small, says Darby Hoover, senior resource
specialist at the National Resources Defense Council.
Keurig just released a sustainability report announcing that the company plans to make all coffee pods recyclable by 2020, among other ecofriendly efforts. The company says it's evaluating the type of plastic used in the cups, exploring potential biodegradable and compostable packaging, and coming up with an easier way for customers to easily prepare them for recycling.
Some competitors already have recyclable or biodegradable versions of this single-serve pod; Nespresso's lid and pod is made entirely from aluminum. A Canadian brand, Canterbury Coffee, makes a version that it says is 92 percent biodegradable (everything save for the nylon filter can break down). Finding a substitute is an interesting challenge, says Keurig spokeswoman Sandy Yusen, because coffee is perishable, and so the material used must prevent light, oxygen, and moisture from degrading the coffee.
Another reason to look beyond plastic is a concern with what could leach out of the material when heated. Yusen confirmed that the #7 plastic used in K-Cups is BPA-free, safe, and "meets or exceeds applicable FDA standards." But new evidence suggests that even non-BPA plastics can test positive for estrogenic activity. (Our "Frightening Field Guide to Common Plastics" contains more information about this.)
"No. 7 plastic means 'other,'" says the NRDC's Hoover. "You don't know what it is." One concern with this plastic mix is the presence of polystyrene, containing the chemical styrene, which Hoover warns is especially worrisome for workers. A possible carcinogen, styrene can wreak havoc on the nervous systems of those handling it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The chemical also shows up in tobacco smoke and home copy machines, and in the Styrofoam used in food containers.
Keurig does make a plastic and mesh reusable coffee filter. But why use a filter that necessitates cleaning—and also requires a fancy-schmancy brewing system—over the traditional method? As Hoover points out, "you're essentially giving up the convenience of the little teeny tiny cup."
It's not just convenience that's sacrificed. By my calculations, a K-Cup-worth of coffee will run up your tab way more than grounds and a filter (not including the cost of the brewer); a standard pod of Green Mountain coffee costs 68 cents, while one cup of the company's Vermont Blend brewed the traditional way costs about 44 cents, filter included. The New York Times did a more comprehensive analysis of the actual price of single-brew coffee, and determined that it ends up costing more than $50 a pound, even for standard brands like Folgers, compared to the less than $20 you can expect to pay for a bag of roasted beans. Call me a cheapskate, but I'll stick to freshly ground coffee that doesn't require a bulky brewer and billions of plastic pods to be delicious.
NOT REALLY!, But I do love my coffee. I have never been impressed with coffee brewed from any of those pod things, and have no intention of ever owning one. When I had to buy a new coffee machine a couple of years ago I found a +Hamilton Beach system that will brew a pot and offers the option on the side to brew a single cup, no pod required. Pot or single cup, it uses wire mesh filters for the coffee. I am very happy with my coffee system, it brews a great pot or single cup of coffee without the waste of paper filters or pods. This from Mother Jones.....
| Wed Mar. 19, 2014 3:00 AM PDT
When Keurig launched its specialized brewing system in 1998, it might have come off as a bit niche. Not anymore. According to a survey by the National Coffee Association, nearly 1 in 5 adults drank single-cup-brewed coffee yesterday, making it the second most popular way to brew after the traditional drip methods—and far more popular than espresso machines.
Keurig would not tell me what types of plastic go into its #7 blend, saying the information was proprietary.
The single-serve method has experienced impressive growth: According to the Seattle Times,
while US consumers bought $132 million worth of coffee pods in 2008,
they forked over $3.1 billion for them last year, compared to $6 billion
for roasted coffee and $2.5 billion in instant coffee. Keurig also has
similar brewing systems and pods for tea and iced beverages, and will
roll out a system for Campbell's soup later this year.What Keurig customers love, proclaims Green Mountain's 2013 annual report, is the system's "Quality, Convenience, and Choice"—and let's be real, it's convenience that trumps for most busy Americans. Keurig systems take under a minute to brew coffee, and cleaning them is laughably easy: Just chuck the used coffee pod in the trash, then press a button, and a "cleansing brew" shoots hot water through the system to clear it of residue.
But critics warn that the packaging needed for these systems comes with environmental and health-related costs. By making each pod so individualized, and so easy to dispose of, you must also exponentially increase the packaging—packaging that ultimately ends up in landfills. (And that's to say nothing of the plastic and metal brewing systems, which if broken, aren't that easy to recycle either.)
Journalist Murray Carpenter estimates in his new book, Caffeinated, that a row of all the K-Cups produced in 2011 would circle the globe more than six times. To update that analogy: In 2013, Green Mountain produced 8.3 billion K-Cups, enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times. If Green Mountain aims to have "a Keurig System on every counter," as the company states in its latest annual report, that's a hell of a lot of little cups.
Keurig just released a sustainability report announcing that the company plans to make all coffee pods recyclable by 2020, among other ecofriendly efforts. The company says it's evaluating the type of plastic used in the cups, exploring potential biodegradable and compostable packaging, and coming up with an easier way for customers to easily prepare them for recycling.
Some competitors already have recyclable or biodegradable versions of this single-serve pod; Nespresso's lid and pod is made entirely from aluminum. A Canadian brand, Canterbury Coffee, makes a version that it says is 92 percent biodegradable (everything save for the nylon filter can break down). Finding a substitute is an interesting challenge, says Keurig spokeswoman Sandy Yusen, because coffee is perishable, and so the material used must prevent light, oxygen, and moisture from degrading the coffee.
Another reason to look beyond plastic is a concern with what could leach out of the material when heated. Yusen confirmed that the #7 plastic used in K-Cups is BPA-free, safe, and "meets or exceeds applicable FDA standards." But new evidence suggests that even non-BPA plastics can test positive for estrogenic activity. (Our "Frightening Field Guide to Common Plastics" contains more information about this.)
"No. 7 plastic means 'other,'" says the NRDC's Hoover. "You don't know what it is." One concern with this plastic mix is the presence of polystyrene, containing the chemical styrene, which Hoover warns is especially worrisome for workers. A possible carcinogen, styrene can wreak havoc on the nervous systems of those handling it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The chemical also shows up in tobacco smoke and home copy machines, and in the Styrofoam used in food containers.
The New York Times determined that single-brew coffee ends up costing more than $50 a pound, even for Folgers.
Keurig would not tell me what types of plastic go into its #7 blend,
saying the information was proprietary, nor would it confirm or deny the
presence of polystyrene in the mix.Keurig does make a plastic and mesh reusable coffee filter. But why use a filter that necessitates cleaning—and also requires a fancy-schmancy brewing system—over the traditional method? As Hoover points out, "you're essentially giving up the convenience of the little teeny tiny cup."
It's not just convenience that's sacrificed. By my calculations, a K-Cup-worth of coffee will run up your tab way more than grounds and a filter (not including the cost of the brewer); a standard pod of Green Mountain coffee costs 68 cents, while one cup of the company's Vermont Blend brewed the traditional way costs about 44 cents, filter included. The New York Times did a more comprehensive analysis of the actual price of single-brew coffee, and determined that it ends up costing more than $50 a pound, even for standard brands like Folgers, compared to the less than $20 you can expect to pay for a bag of roasted beans. Call me a cheapskate, but I'll stick to freshly ground coffee that doesn't require a bulky brewer and billions of plastic pods to be delicious.
Coffee capsule designed by Stefan Brechbühl from The Noun Project.
11 March 2011
How Clean Must Food Containers Be Before Recycling? from MOJO 21FEB11
I have always wondered about this, and now I know....
From Econundrums reader Holly comes this question:
I decided to call Recology, the company that runs San Francisco's recycling program, to ask about the fate of dirty food containers. According to Recology spokesman Robert Reed, most facilities won't throw away a container simply because it's dirty. And it's not a giant deal if containers have little food residue on them (say, the yogurt your spoon couldn't extract from the plastic cup).
But here's the interesting part: The cleaner your containers, the more they're worth on the recyclables market. Municipal facilities first sort recycling by type (paper, several kinds of plastic, tin, etc.), and then by quality. Workers separate clean recyclables from soiled ones, into bales. "If the bale is lower quality, there is less revenue coming back into the system from the sale of recyclables, which helps pay for the program," says Reed. The takeaway: By providing clean recyclables, you can actually save your city (and ultimately, taxpayers) money.
Jennifer Berry, a spokeswoman for the recycling experts over at Earth 911, agrees. "It's a consistent refrain that I hear from recyclers that the 'cleaner' the product, the more it's worth and the more desirable it is."
Soiled containers are particularly problematic in communities where plastic and paper are transported together, since paper can easily absorb oil and other residue. But dirty plastic-only streams decrease cities' revenue, too. To wit: Frank Cvetovac is the operations manager at Epic Plastics, a manufacturer of plastic goods that buys its materials from municipal recycling facilities. One of Epic's regular suppliers doesn't have a very clean stream. "We offer them 25 or 30 percent less than market value, since we have to do so much work on our end to get it into usable shape," says Cvetovac.
That said, Berry and Reed agree that you should follow your city's guidelines on cleaning out containers, since facilities' equipment and capacity vary widely. But in general, you don't have to get all Lady MacBeth about it. "Remember that you don't have to get items clean enough to store food or eat from—so you don't necessarily have to use so much water that they are sterilized or completely grime free," says Berry. You might consider running containers through the dishwasher if you have one. If not, use a spatula to get most of the gunk out before you chuck it in the bin.
City recycling instructs you to put clean containers in the recycle bins. But I've become increasingly frustrated trying to get certain pet-food cans, yogurt containers, and margarine containers cleaned without using a lot of water. I feel that the water I use, the gas to heat the water, the dish soap, and the paper towels are wasting natural resources as well as costing me money. So how clean is clean enough?This question irks me every time I throw a take-out salad container into the recycling. Will my leftover vinaigrette contaminate the whole bin? And if it does, will the recycling plant decide it's not worth the effort to clean and simply throw it into the trash instead?
I decided to call Recology, the company that runs San Francisco's recycling program, to ask about the fate of dirty food containers. According to Recology spokesman Robert Reed, most facilities won't throw away a container simply because it's dirty. And it's not a giant deal if containers have little food residue on them (say, the yogurt your spoon couldn't extract from the plastic cup).
But here's the interesting part: The cleaner your containers, the more they're worth on the recyclables market. Municipal facilities first sort recycling by type (paper, several kinds of plastic, tin, etc.), and then by quality. Workers separate clean recyclables from soiled ones, into bales. "If the bale is lower quality, there is less revenue coming back into the system from the sale of recyclables, which helps pay for the program," says Reed. The takeaway: By providing clean recyclables, you can actually save your city (and ultimately, taxpayers) money.
Jennifer Berry, a spokeswoman for the recycling experts over at Earth 911, agrees. "It's a consistent refrain that I hear from recyclers that the 'cleaner' the product, the more it's worth and the more desirable it is."
Soiled containers are particularly problematic in communities where plastic and paper are transported together, since paper can easily absorb oil and other residue. But dirty plastic-only streams decrease cities' revenue, too. To wit: Frank Cvetovac is the operations manager at Epic Plastics, a manufacturer of plastic goods that buys its materials from municipal recycling facilities. One of Epic's regular suppliers doesn't have a very clean stream. "We offer them 25 or 30 percent less than market value, since we have to do so much work on our end to get it into usable shape," says Cvetovac.
That said, Berry and Reed agree that you should follow your city's guidelines on cleaning out containers, since facilities' equipment and capacity vary widely. But in general, you don't have to get all Lady MacBeth about it. "Remember that you don't have to get items clean enough to store food or eat from—so you don't necessarily have to use so much water that they are sterilized or completely grime free," says Berry. You might consider running containers through the dishwasher if you have one. If not, use a spatula to get most of the gunk out before you chuck it in the bin.
19 November 2010
What Happens to Your Phone When You Recycle It? from MOJO 15NOV10
GREAT information from Mother Jones on recycling your old phones.....
I'm thrilled that my phone contract is up in February. I've been coveting the iPhone, which will be a welcome change after two years of toting around a clunky, barely web-enabled dinosaur. But when I upgrade to a smart phone, what will become of my dopey old dumb phone?
This very question is the subject of the The Story of Electronics, the latest installment of sustainability expert Annie Leonard's engaging Story of Stuff Project. The eight-minute film explains that today's consumer electronics are "designed for the dump": After about two years, most gadgets are either obsolete or broken, and they're usually cheaper to replace than to repair. Technology is advancing at so fast a pace that every two years, the number of transistors placed on a circuitboard doubles, increasing computer memory and processing speed. (This continuing trend was first noticed in the late 1960s and is called Moore's Law.) Until that rate slows, or manufacturers begin to make cell phones with standardized replaceable parts, you'll still have to get a new phone every two years just to keep pace with technology.
More than 130 million cell phones in the US alone are retired every year, the USGS estimates. Not great news for the planet, considering phones contain substances harmful to humans and the environment, like cadmium, lead, and beryllium (all carcinogins), as well as arsenic. So what's the best way to make sure your old phone's not leaking chemicals into the ground?
This very question is the subject of the The Story of Electronics, the latest installment of sustainability expert Annie Leonard's engaging Story of Stuff Project. The eight-minute film explains that today's consumer electronics are "designed for the dump": After about two years, most gadgets are either obsolete or broken, and they're usually cheaper to replace than to repair. Technology is advancing at so fast a pace that every two years, the number of transistors placed on a circuitboard doubles, increasing computer memory and processing speed. (This continuing trend was first noticed in the late 1960s and is called Moore's Law.) Until that rate slows, or manufacturers begin to make cell phones with standardized replaceable parts, you'll still have to get a new phone every two years just to keep pace with technology.
More than 130 million cell phones in the US alone are retired every year, the USGS estimates. Not great news for the planet, considering phones contain substances harmful to humans and the environment, like cadmium, lead, and beryllium (all carcinogins), as well as arsenic. So what's the best way to make sure your old phone's not leaking chemicals into the ground?
Most major wireless carriers participate in "take-back" programs, which allow you to send your dead phone back where it came from for free—or sometimes even a cash rebate. Once a cell phone arrives at a take-back facility, if it's still workable and a relatively recent model, it's likely going to get refurbished and resold, either on the consumer market or to a charity. (Verizon's HopeLine program, for example, donates phones loaded with 3,000 free minutes to domestic violence victims.) Other refurbished phones are sold in Latin America and Africa, to people who don't mind using a secondhand, behind-the-times phone.
If your phone is really kaput, it will either get broken down and sold for parts or passed on to a smelter, where the entire phone is melted down and the liquids are separated to be reconstituted. (This process is sometimes called "above-ground mining.") Smelters harvest the little bits of valuable metals (gold, copper, iron, silver, zinc, nickel, platinum, tin) used in the circuitboards and soldering. In one metric ton of old cell phones without batteries (about 8,800 individual phones), there's an estimated 308 pounds of copper, 7 pounds of silver, and half a pound of gold. The smelting process, also used to melt down recycled aluminum cans, does generate some greenhouse gases and slag (the discarded silica and metal oxides used to isolate liquid metal). But overall, the environmental and monetary costs of smelting down existing metals are lower than mining, transporting, and refining new ore. For example, one ton of gold ore only contains .18 ounces of pure gold, while there's about 40 times that amount in one ton of cell-phone circuitry.
Breaking cell phones up and separating the parts is the process that most people are leery of. Annie Leonard points out that workers in China and Africa often dismantle electronics' harmful insides without proper personal or environmental protection: For example, in the town of Guiyu, China, 1.5 million pounds of e-waste are dismantled every year—often by workers without gloves—and leftover junk is disposed of in open fires.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to find out if your cell-phone carrier exports items abroad to be broken, because many of them work with third-party companies—three of which I tried unsuccessfully to contact by, um, telephone. (I did reach a T-Mobile rep who said his company works with a Dallas-based recycler called Touchstone that separates phone components in the US. He also said 70 percent of the phones T-Mobile receives go on to be refurbished.) Newer phones like smart phones may be heavier than old candy-bar-style phones, but they contain a lot more electronics in a smaller package.
The good news: Cell phones are getting more environmentally friendly. Today's phones are made with considerably less cadmium and lead than older models, and they're also getting lighter. The average phone weighs around 4 ounces, minus the battery—about half of what it weighed in 2000. Recycling rates are also improving: In 2003, fewer than 1 percent of owners recycled their phones, but now it's closer to 20 percent. Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) recently introduced the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (H.R. 6252). It would outlaw sending e-waste to developing nations, but it's still hanging out with the House Committee of Energy and Commerce.
You can help minimize waste by opting for a refurbished phone (available through all major carriers) instead of a new one. Once you're done with your phone, there are a number of recycling systems you can participate in. To reduce the carbon footprint from ground transportation and reclamation, I prefer programs that handle large volumes of cell phones. Best Buy has kiosks in nearly every store where you can drop off your used electronics. The program doesn't export any non-working phones or components to developing countries, and it requires third-party partners to submit documentation of environmental compliance. If you're looking to make a few bucks off your phone, check out GreenPhone.com, which gives you cash for your old unit; offers you a free, printable shipping label; and will plant a tree every time you recycle a phone. The folks over at Earth911 recommend this website to see if your local recycling outfit is certified as an "e-Steward"—which requires strict control over exporting overseas, "full accountability for the entire downstream recycling chain," and disclosure on any airborne toxins released during the smelting process. If none of these float your boat, you can see an extensive list of drop-off and mail-in recycling programs at the EPA's eCycle site.
Got a burning eco-quandary? Submit it to econundrums@motherjones.com. Get all your green questions answered by visiting Econundrums on Facebook here.
If your phone is really kaput, it will either get broken down and sold for parts or passed on to a smelter, where the entire phone is melted down and the liquids are separated to be reconstituted. (This process is sometimes called "above-ground mining.") Smelters harvest the little bits of valuable metals (gold, copper, iron, silver, zinc, nickel, platinum, tin) used in the circuitboards and soldering. In one metric ton of old cell phones without batteries (about 8,800 individual phones), there's an estimated 308 pounds of copper, 7 pounds of silver, and half a pound of gold. The smelting process, also used to melt down recycled aluminum cans, does generate some greenhouse gases and slag (the discarded silica and metal oxides used to isolate liquid metal). But overall, the environmental and monetary costs of smelting down existing metals are lower than mining, transporting, and refining new ore. For example, one ton of gold ore only contains .18 ounces of pure gold, while there's about 40 times that amount in one ton of cell-phone circuitry.
Breaking cell phones up and separating the parts is the process that most people are leery of. Annie Leonard points out that workers in China and Africa often dismantle electronics' harmful insides without proper personal or environmental protection: For example, in the town of Guiyu, China, 1.5 million pounds of e-waste are dismantled every year—often by workers without gloves—and leftover junk is disposed of in open fires.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to find out if your cell-phone carrier exports items abroad to be broken, because many of them work with third-party companies—three of which I tried unsuccessfully to contact by, um, telephone. (I did reach a T-Mobile rep who said his company works with a Dallas-based recycler called Touchstone that separates phone components in the US. He also said 70 percent of the phones T-Mobile receives go on to be refurbished.) Newer phones like smart phones may be heavier than old candy-bar-style phones, but they contain a lot more electronics in a smaller package.
The good news: Cell phones are getting more environmentally friendly. Today's phones are made with considerably less cadmium and lead than older models, and they're also getting lighter. The average phone weighs around 4 ounces, minus the battery—about half of what it weighed in 2000. Recycling rates are also improving: In 2003, fewer than 1 percent of owners recycled their phones, but now it's closer to 20 percent. Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) recently introduced the Responsible Electronics Recycling Act (H.R. 6252). It would outlaw sending e-waste to developing nations, but it's still hanging out with the House Committee of Energy and Commerce.
You can help minimize waste by opting for a refurbished phone (available through all major carriers) instead of a new one. Once you're done with your phone, there are a number of recycling systems you can participate in. To reduce the carbon footprint from ground transportation and reclamation, I prefer programs that handle large volumes of cell phones. Best Buy has kiosks in nearly every store where you can drop off your used electronics. The program doesn't export any non-working phones or components to developing countries, and it requires third-party partners to submit documentation of environmental compliance. If you're looking to make a few bucks off your phone, check out GreenPhone.com, which gives you cash for your old unit; offers you a free, printable shipping label; and will plant a tree every time you recycle a phone. The folks over at Earth911 recommend this website to see if your local recycling outfit is certified as an "e-Steward"—which requires strict control over exporting overseas, "full accountability for the entire downstream recycling chain," and disclosure on any airborne toxins released during the smelting process. If none of these float your boat, you can see an extensive list of drop-off and mail-in recycling programs at the EPA's eCycle site.
Got a burning eco-quandary? Submit it to econundrums@motherjones.com. Get all your green questions answered by visiting Econundrums on Facebook here.
11 February 2010
GREEN JOBS FOR JAILBIRDS from MOTHER JONES JAN/FEB 2010
What a great idea, something that should be copied across the country....click the header for the article at Mother Jones
Green Jobs for Jailbirds
Can turning prisons into hothouses of sustainability pay off for everyone?
By Beth Schwartzapfel | January/February 2010 Issue
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time Anthony McKinney gets out of prison [1], he will have missed his 20s entirely. He's 28 now, a compact man with a short mohawk and a tattoo of a chain on his neck. "When I get out, I'll be only 30 years old, and I'll have 13 years of prison. If that was all time wasted, I would have come out a very experienced criminal, with a stronger body and a sharper mind," he says. "That's not what you really want to unleash on the community."
It's a cloudless day in western Washington, sunny and hot, and McKinney and three of his fellow inmates are tending to the apiary at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center [2], in Littlerock, outside Olympia. Until he was transferred here from a prison in Arizona, McKinney says, he was on the road to exactly that scenario. "I was very angry up until about six months ago," he says. "I've been active in negativity for the past ten and a half years in the system." The bees changed all that.
McKinney is one of about 60 inmates involved in the Sustainable Prisons Project [3], a collaboration between the state Department of Corrections and The Evergreen State College. The project began here at Cedar Creek, a minimum-security work camp, and has expanded to three other prisons. Inmates compost the facility's food waste [4]. They sort recycling by hand. They grow organic produce. They collect rainwater for the gardens. They raise bees. And they partner with scientists to do ecological research projects; right now, two of them are painstakingly raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs.
"If you can create jobs or activities for offenders that are educational in nature, what you're doing is employing people and getting them out of their cells," says the state's deputy director of prisons, Dan Pacholke [5]. "Any prison system will tell you that idleness is a bad thing. If we don't have stuff for them to do, then we're just going to hire more security staff." Pacholke, 49, is a career DOC employee whose expertise is high-security response and emergency operations: escapes, disturbances, hostages, executions. His demeanor is easygoing, but he's not the kind of man who spends taxpayers' money on bleeding-heart projects. "It's environmental economics," he says. "We're expensive places to operate. I could sell the [project] on cost containment alone: solid waste, energy, food costs."
Cedar Creek's 38-acre compound is located inside the Capitol State Forest, and as a result, the prison offered inmates green work opportunities long before anyone called them that—tree planting, brush clearing, firefighting. The work pays as poorly as most prison jobs, 25 to 85 cents an hour. But it has its rewards, says inmate Daniel Travatte, who works with McKinney in the apiary. "This is something else for me to do that's positive activity, and I'm learning something. It's something I'll take with me when I leave," he says.
Biologist Sam Hapke teaches inmate Daniel Travatte how to tend bees. "This is positive activity and something I'll take with me when I leave," Travatte says.
The air hums as McKinney, wearing a long-sleeved pullover and garden gloves, gingerly lifts a frame from one of the hives. Travatte has constructed each of these bars from slightly different material—one is plain wood, one is coated in wax, another has a piece of comb attached to it—and he takes careful notes on which materials the bees seem to respond to best. "They're fascinating," says Travatte. "It's fun for me to keep track of different experiments, trying different things, and seeing what happens. It gives us something to talk about besides drugs, criminal activities. I've been to quite a few prisons, and I can tell you, when I get bored, I get in trouble."
Back in 2004, Nalini Nadkarni [6] was looking for people with a lot of time on their hands. A forest ecologist and Evergreen professor, Nadkarni was concerned about poachers, who were harvesting moss from old-growth forests to sell to florists. Nadkarni wanted to see if she could eliminate the demand for poached moss by growing it in a greenhouse. No one had ever tried this before, so she needed people to watch moss grow and gather data on which species could thrive in captivity, and under what conditions. Moss takes a very long time to grow.
Nadkarni, one of the nation's preeminent experts in rainforest canopies, started asking herself, Who has a lot of downtime? "When you start thinking about it," she says, "what population in the United States is completely devoid of nature, and doesn't get to use their minds?"
She found her answer at Cedar Creek. By 2005, there were 8 to 10 inmates babysitting Nadkarni's moss samples and taking meticulous notes. "The guys would come up to me and say, 'Nalini, I'm really helping the old-growth forests, aren't I?'" says Nadkarni. "That turned out to be incredibly important to them."
Nadkarni is a spry 55. A mass of frizzy black hair dominates her delicate frame, and she is partial to sandals with mismatched socks. The daughter of a Hindu father from India and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn (who in 1952 married in New York because racist officials in Washington, DC, where they lived, had turned them away), Nadkarni has an explosive laugh, an infectious enthusiasm, and a notebook filled with drawings, notes, and to-do lists that she frequently pulls out of her bag. A tireless science evangelist—in 2001, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded her a fellowship to talk about her beloved forests to "nonscientists"—she gives sermons in local churches, synagogues, and Buddhist temples. Bringing moss to prisoners seemed like a natural extension of her mission.
It was at a dinner for Cedar Creek volunteers that Nadkarni met Pacholke, then the superintendent of Cedar Creek. She watched as inmates involved with the prison's various volunteer-run programs—church groups, veterans' groups, Toastmasters—"would stand up with the volunteer person and say, 'I'm really glad Prisoners for Christ is here because they gave meaning to my life on the inside, and I'm not screwing up so much anymore, and thank you so much, Reverend, for coming,'" Nadkarni recalls. She had come with samples of moss and her own enthusiastic participant—a since-released inmate named Wayne Hudspeth. "And Wayne got up, and he just was so fervent about what he was doing—'This has changed my life, and I'm so grateful to Dr. Nadkarni for coming.' And the tone in his voice was exactly like the tone in the Prisoners for Christ's voice!" Nadkarni recalls with her giant laugh. "And I realized at that moment that I had something here that could go beyond the scientific stuff. I had a convert."
Pacholke realized it too, and that night he and Nadkarni planted the seeds for a scientific lecture series at the prison; scientists would come in and talk to inmates and staff about topics like organic farming, composting, and water conservation. The lecture series, in turn, set off a chain of environmental projects at Cedar Creek. "They'd bring in a lecturer, we'd talk about it, and the business manager and I would say, 'Hey, let's do that,'" says Pacholke. Because Pacholke was the superintendent, he didn't have to ask anyone's permission, nor did he need extra money—the prison just used what it had to build what it needed. "We could turn around a project so quick!" he says. "In a month they'd come back and we'd be done, and say, 'Hey, look at this!' You can spend a million dollars on an in-vessel composter, or you can put in a concrete slab and hand a guy a thermometer and a water temperature gauge, and say, 'Go out there and figure out how to make this work.'"
In 2008, the program went from Nadkarni and Pacholke's scrappy and unlikely partnership to a more formal arrangement. The Department of Corrections has provided Evergreen with a $300,000 grant to administer and run the newly christened Sustainable Prisons Project. It's led to savings that Pacholke is happy to rattle off: By conserving water, Cedar Creek avoided a previously planned $1.4 million expansion of its wastewater treatment facility; by recycling and composting, another facility sent two-thirds less waste to landfills this year—garbage can cost upwards of $100 per ton to haul.
The program that began at Cedar Creek has already expanded to three facilities, including Stafford Creek, a medium-security lockup in Aberdeen, a coastal town about 50 miles west of Olympia. A blanket of gray hangs low over Aberdeen—the staff calls it "sea fog" because it comes from the nearby Pacific—and even on a July day, the air has a soupy chill. Where Cedar Creek is a "work camp" with minimal fencing and bars, Stafford Creek is definitely a prison: metal detectors, rows and rows of razor wire, buildings like monoliths of concrete. Still, every few hundred feet there's a patch of green or a splash of chaotic color—inmate-tended flower beds and lawns. The men are allowed to check out push mowers whenever they want, and today a solitary inmate is lost in thought as he runs a squeaky mower over grass that is already aggressively, emphatically short. Almost 2,000 men live here, but only a few dozen with the best behavior records are allowed outside the security "hub," where most of the Sustainable Prisons Project activities take place.
There are five greenhouses and more than two acres of organic gardens. The inmates graze as they work, savoring the mellow sweetness of golden raspberries, running a thumbnail down a pea pod to pop out the green orbs. "When you can go to dinner and see your radishes chopped up in the salad, or onions in the potatoes," says Travis Brown, carting a wheelbarrow full of weeds to the compost pile, "you know you did a little something productive." These are luxuries that normally would not be part of prison food, and Brown tells his friends as much. "I make sure to let 'em know, 'You know, that's from our garden.'"
Because of the success of the moss project, a key component of the Sustainable Prisons expansion is that each facility should have a scientific research project. At Cedar Creek, the men who raise endangered frogs have a success rate much higher than professional counterparts in zoos throughout the state. Here at Stafford Creek, in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy [7] and the US Army, inmates are growing rare prairie plants that are crucial habitat for endangered butterflies. Inmates Toby Erhart and Daniel Smith (who has since been released) oversee hundreds of thousands of little yellow tubes, each of which contains a single plant, which they've seeded, watered, and weeded by hand. These men are growing seedlings—early blue violet, showy fleabane, cut-leaf microseris—that biologists will use to replant prairie on a large scale on protected land at the Fort Lewis Army base just outside Tacoma. US Army biologist Rod Gilbert says that growing these plants at Stafford Creek will cost him about a penny a plug—about 100 times less than it would have cost in a commercial greenhouse. Without these men, growing the amount of plants he needs would have been "just out of the question."
Erhart, 4 years into a 16- to 20-year sentence for rape and incest, is tall and thick around the middle, with hazel eyes and a thoughtful demeanor. Standing in the stuffy greenhouse, surveying the rows of tiny plants, he is clearly deeply proud of his work, but with Nadkarni visiting, he affects a casual scientific curiosity.
"What do you think of the project so far?" he asks her.
"You've got 98 percent germination! That's amazing!" The men keep a logbook, in which they note dates and types of seed planted, time to germination, and other data. Nadkarni and the inmates trade hypotheses on why some of the plants grow faster than others. She says it's clear they're doing a wonderful job. "The plants are telling me that. It's like the frogs at Cedar Creek," she says. "They did better than any of the other facilities that have these professional wildlife people working on them."
"Why do you think that is?" Erhart asks. He reaches down and absently plucks a weed from one of the tubes.
"This is like your link to nature," says Nadkarni.
The men nod. "Plants actually feed off of you," says Smith.
"Absolutely. And we feed off them. It's a circle," says Nadkarni. "And I think the circle you have is really tight, going on in this greenhouse."
"It's the constant care that we give them every day," says Smith. "We get excited when we see them germinating. And the plant feels that, our excitement, so it thrives more."
He thinks for a moment. "As far as the difference between here and maybe somewhere where a professional horticulturist is doing this as part of his job? You know, they do that for a living. We do it for 42 cents an hour. That's not a living. We don't do this for the money, and I think that's what the difference is. We were hired from a pool of, what, 1,800 people that could be doing this? And we're the ones doing it. We do it because we like to do it. If we didn't, I don't think the success rate would be so high."
This is the crux of the issue that will confront the Sustainable Prisons Project going forward. All of the green jobs at Stafford Creek combined employ about 40 people—and the men who pull cardboard boxes out of the waste stream, who rebuild broken bicycles, who train troubled dogs for adoption, are some of the most motivated, best behaved inmates at the prison. They have to be, or they wouldn't qualify for these jobs. What about everyone else? And if their interactions with science and nature are as transformative as they seem to be, wouldn't the men who aren't already changed be the ones who need it most? In other words, which comes first—does the work motivate the men to change their lives, or is it only the men whose lives are already changed that sign up?
Pacholke says that even those inmates who are not involved in the program are affected by it. He recalls the day they served salsa in the Cedar Creek dining room, with all the ingredients grown and harvested by inmates. They put signs up so the men would know where the food had come from. "There's an educational component to that, because people start getting curious: 'What do you do out in the garden?' It changed the dynamic of the prison." Like Travis Brown talking to his friends about radishes at dinner, "the informal network of their communication gets centered around more green kinds of activities." What's more, Pacholke continues, it's sometimes hard to tell where the "green" jobs end and the regular jobs begin. The guys in the kitchen preparing the organic food, or scraping waste into the compost bins? They're learning environmentalism, too, albeit on a much smaller scale.
And if the green activities are enough of a presence in the prison, maybe some guy will ride into the compound on a bus, in shackles, and see the stacked white boxes of beehives, and maybe this will put the germ of change in his mind. That is what happened to Anthony McKinney.
In the apiary, the grounds unfold around us in shades of green and brown. Cucumbers grow in a little garden nearby, and a patch of earth is upturned where the men harvested garlic yesterday. McKinney points to the lid of one of the hives, a white rectangle some three feet long and two feet wide. "If this whole board was who we are, about this much of it"—he traces a very small square with his finger—"is the part of us that got us in here." It's easy to imagine that small square. It's filled with violence, drugs. Ego. Kidnapping, burglary, and robbery, which are what McKinney is here for. "It's humbling to come out here, slow down, and see: There are other living things, and you're not the center of the universe." The bees, he says, "they're aware of our presence here, but they really don't care. I'm not important to them whatsoever."
"I thought this was the world," McKinney says of his little square, laughing softly. "That's all I cared about. But there's so much more to us, and there's so much more growth that we can experience, if, not so much given the opportunity, but even just pointed in the right direction. If a door was opened, and said, 'Look. Look what's inside.'"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/green-jobs-prison-work
Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2008/07/prison
[2] http://www.doc.wa.gov/facilities/prison/cccc/
[3] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/
[4] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2009/05/waste
[5] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/dan-pacholke/
[6] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/nalini-nadkarni/
[7] http://www.nature.org/
Green Jobs for Jailbirds
Can turning prisons into hothouses of sustainability pay off for everyone?
By Beth Schwartzapfel | January/February 2010 Issue
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By the time Anthony McKinney gets out of prison [1], he will have missed his 20s entirely. He's 28 now, a compact man with a short mohawk and a tattoo of a chain on his neck. "When I get out, I'll be only 30 years old, and I'll have 13 years of prison. If that was all time wasted, I would have come out a very experienced criminal, with a stronger body and a sharper mind," he says. "That's not what you really want to unleash on the community."
It's a cloudless day in western Washington, sunny and hot, and McKinney and three of his fellow inmates are tending to the apiary at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center [2], in Littlerock, outside Olympia. Until he was transferred here from a prison in Arizona, McKinney says, he was on the road to exactly that scenario. "I was very angry up until about six months ago," he says. "I've been active in negativity for the past ten and a half years in the system." The bees changed all that.
McKinney is one of about 60 inmates involved in the Sustainable Prisons Project [3], a collaboration between the state Department of Corrections and The Evergreen State College. The project began here at Cedar Creek, a minimum-security work camp, and has expanded to three other prisons. Inmates compost the facility's food waste [4]. They sort recycling by hand. They grow organic produce. They collect rainwater for the gardens. They raise bees. And they partner with scientists to do ecological research projects; right now, two of them are painstakingly raising endangered Oregon spotted frogs.
"If you can create jobs or activities for offenders that are educational in nature, what you're doing is employing people and getting them out of their cells," says the state's deputy director of prisons, Dan Pacholke [5]. "Any prison system will tell you that idleness is a bad thing. If we don't have stuff for them to do, then we're just going to hire more security staff." Pacholke, 49, is a career DOC employee whose expertise is high-security response and emergency operations: escapes, disturbances, hostages, executions. His demeanor is easygoing, but he's not the kind of man who spends taxpayers' money on bleeding-heart projects. "It's environmental economics," he says. "We're expensive places to operate. I could sell the [project] on cost containment alone: solid waste, energy, food costs."
Cedar Creek's 38-acre compound is located inside the Capitol State Forest, and as a result, the prison offered inmates green work opportunities long before anyone called them that—tree planting, brush clearing, firefighting. The work pays as poorly as most prison jobs, 25 to 85 cents an hour. But it has its rewards, says inmate Daniel Travatte, who works with McKinney in the apiary. "This is something else for me to do that's positive activity, and I'm learning something. It's something I'll take with me when I leave," he says.
Biologist Sam Hapke teaches inmate Daniel Travatte how to tend bees. "This is positive activity and something I'll take with me when I leave," Travatte says.
The air hums as McKinney, wearing a long-sleeved pullover and garden gloves, gingerly lifts a frame from one of the hives. Travatte has constructed each of these bars from slightly different material—one is plain wood, one is coated in wax, another has a piece of comb attached to it—and he takes careful notes on which materials the bees seem to respond to best. "They're fascinating," says Travatte. "It's fun for me to keep track of different experiments, trying different things, and seeing what happens. It gives us something to talk about besides drugs, criminal activities. I've been to quite a few prisons, and I can tell you, when I get bored, I get in trouble."
Back in 2004, Nalini Nadkarni [6] was looking for people with a lot of time on their hands. A forest ecologist and Evergreen professor, Nadkarni was concerned about poachers, who were harvesting moss from old-growth forests to sell to florists. Nadkarni wanted to see if she could eliminate the demand for poached moss by growing it in a greenhouse. No one had ever tried this before, so she needed people to watch moss grow and gather data on which species could thrive in captivity, and under what conditions. Moss takes a very long time to grow.
Nadkarni, one of the nation's preeminent experts in rainforest canopies, started asking herself, Who has a lot of downtime? "When you start thinking about it," she says, "what population in the United States is completely devoid of nature, and doesn't get to use their minds?"
She found her answer at Cedar Creek. By 2005, there were 8 to 10 inmates babysitting Nadkarni's moss samples and taking meticulous notes. "The guys would come up to me and say, 'Nalini, I'm really helping the old-growth forests, aren't I?'" says Nadkarni. "That turned out to be incredibly important to them."
Nadkarni is a spry 55. A mass of frizzy black hair dominates her delicate frame, and she is partial to sandals with mismatched socks. The daughter of a Hindu father from India and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn (who in 1952 married in New York because racist officials in Washington, DC, where they lived, had turned them away), Nadkarni has an explosive laugh, an infectious enthusiasm, and a notebook filled with drawings, notes, and to-do lists that she frequently pulls out of her bag. A tireless science evangelist—in 2001, the Guggenheim Foundation awarded her a fellowship to talk about her beloved forests to "nonscientists"—she gives sermons in local churches, synagogues, and Buddhist temples. Bringing moss to prisoners seemed like a natural extension of her mission.
It was at a dinner for Cedar Creek volunteers that Nadkarni met Pacholke, then the superintendent of Cedar Creek. She watched as inmates involved with the prison's various volunteer-run programs—church groups, veterans' groups, Toastmasters—"would stand up with the volunteer person and say, 'I'm really glad Prisoners for Christ is here because they gave meaning to my life on the inside, and I'm not screwing up so much anymore, and thank you so much, Reverend, for coming,'" Nadkarni recalls. She had come with samples of moss and her own enthusiastic participant—a since-released inmate named Wayne Hudspeth. "And Wayne got up, and he just was so fervent about what he was doing—'This has changed my life, and I'm so grateful to Dr. Nadkarni for coming.' And the tone in his voice was exactly like the tone in the Prisoners for Christ's voice!" Nadkarni recalls with her giant laugh. "And I realized at that moment that I had something here that could go beyond the scientific stuff. I had a convert."
Pacholke realized it too, and that night he and Nadkarni planted the seeds for a scientific lecture series at the prison; scientists would come in and talk to inmates and staff about topics like organic farming, composting, and water conservation. The lecture series, in turn, set off a chain of environmental projects at Cedar Creek. "They'd bring in a lecturer, we'd talk about it, and the business manager and I would say, 'Hey, let's do that,'" says Pacholke. Because Pacholke was the superintendent, he didn't have to ask anyone's permission, nor did he need extra money—the prison just used what it had to build what it needed. "We could turn around a project so quick!" he says. "In a month they'd come back and we'd be done, and say, 'Hey, look at this!' You can spend a million dollars on an in-vessel composter, or you can put in a concrete slab and hand a guy a thermometer and a water temperature gauge, and say, 'Go out there and figure out how to make this work.'"
In 2008, the program went from Nadkarni and Pacholke's scrappy and unlikely partnership to a more formal arrangement. The Department of Corrections has provided Evergreen with a $300,000 grant to administer and run the newly christened Sustainable Prisons Project. It's led to savings that Pacholke is happy to rattle off: By conserving water, Cedar Creek avoided a previously planned $1.4 million expansion of its wastewater treatment facility; by recycling and composting, another facility sent two-thirds less waste to landfills this year—garbage can cost upwards of $100 per ton to haul.
The program that began at Cedar Creek has already expanded to three facilities, including Stafford Creek, a medium-security lockup in Aberdeen, a coastal town about 50 miles west of Olympia. A blanket of gray hangs low over Aberdeen—the staff calls it "sea fog" because it comes from the nearby Pacific—and even on a July day, the air has a soupy chill. Where Cedar Creek is a "work camp" with minimal fencing and bars, Stafford Creek is definitely a prison: metal detectors, rows and rows of razor wire, buildings like monoliths of concrete. Still, every few hundred feet there's a patch of green or a splash of chaotic color—inmate-tended flower beds and lawns. The men are allowed to check out push mowers whenever they want, and today a solitary inmate is lost in thought as he runs a squeaky mower over grass that is already aggressively, emphatically short. Almost 2,000 men live here, but only a few dozen with the best behavior records are allowed outside the security "hub," where most of the Sustainable Prisons Project activities take place.
There are five greenhouses and more than two acres of organic gardens. The inmates graze as they work, savoring the mellow sweetness of golden raspberries, running a thumbnail down a pea pod to pop out the green orbs. "When you can go to dinner and see your radishes chopped up in the salad, or onions in the potatoes," says Travis Brown, carting a wheelbarrow full of weeds to the compost pile, "you know you did a little something productive." These are luxuries that normally would not be part of prison food, and Brown tells his friends as much. "I make sure to let 'em know, 'You know, that's from our garden.'"
Because of the success of the moss project, a key component of the Sustainable Prisons expansion is that each facility should have a scientific research project. At Cedar Creek, the men who raise endangered frogs have a success rate much higher than professional counterparts in zoos throughout the state. Here at Stafford Creek, in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy [7] and the US Army, inmates are growing rare prairie plants that are crucial habitat for endangered butterflies. Inmates Toby Erhart and Daniel Smith (who has since been released) oversee hundreds of thousands of little yellow tubes, each of which contains a single plant, which they've seeded, watered, and weeded by hand. These men are growing seedlings—early blue violet, showy fleabane, cut-leaf microseris—that biologists will use to replant prairie on a large scale on protected land at the Fort Lewis Army base just outside Tacoma. US Army biologist Rod Gilbert says that growing these plants at Stafford Creek will cost him about a penny a plug—about 100 times less than it would have cost in a commercial greenhouse. Without these men, growing the amount of plants he needs would have been "just out of the question."
Erhart, 4 years into a 16- to 20-year sentence for rape and incest, is tall and thick around the middle, with hazel eyes and a thoughtful demeanor. Standing in the stuffy greenhouse, surveying the rows of tiny plants, he is clearly deeply proud of his work, but with Nadkarni visiting, he affects a casual scientific curiosity.
"What do you think of the project so far?" he asks her.
"You've got 98 percent germination! That's amazing!" The men keep a logbook, in which they note dates and types of seed planted, time to germination, and other data. Nadkarni and the inmates trade hypotheses on why some of the plants grow faster than others. She says it's clear they're doing a wonderful job. "The plants are telling me that. It's like the frogs at Cedar Creek," she says. "They did better than any of the other facilities that have these professional wildlife people working on them."
"Why do you think that is?" Erhart asks. He reaches down and absently plucks a weed from one of the tubes.
"This is like your link to nature," says Nadkarni.
The men nod. "Plants actually feed off of you," says Smith.
"Absolutely. And we feed off them. It's a circle," says Nadkarni. "And I think the circle you have is really tight, going on in this greenhouse."
"It's the constant care that we give them every day," says Smith. "We get excited when we see them germinating. And the plant feels that, our excitement, so it thrives more."
He thinks for a moment. "As far as the difference between here and maybe somewhere where a professional horticulturist is doing this as part of his job? You know, they do that for a living. We do it for 42 cents an hour. That's not a living. We don't do this for the money, and I think that's what the difference is. We were hired from a pool of, what, 1,800 people that could be doing this? And we're the ones doing it. We do it because we like to do it. If we didn't, I don't think the success rate would be so high."
This is the crux of the issue that will confront the Sustainable Prisons Project going forward. All of the green jobs at Stafford Creek combined employ about 40 people—and the men who pull cardboard boxes out of the waste stream, who rebuild broken bicycles, who train troubled dogs for adoption, are some of the most motivated, best behaved inmates at the prison. They have to be, or they wouldn't qualify for these jobs. What about everyone else? And if their interactions with science and nature are as transformative as they seem to be, wouldn't the men who aren't already changed be the ones who need it most? In other words, which comes first—does the work motivate the men to change their lives, or is it only the men whose lives are already changed that sign up?
Pacholke says that even those inmates who are not involved in the program are affected by it. He recalls the day they served salsa in the Cedar Creek dining room, with all the ingredients grown and harvested by inmates. They put signs up so the men would know where the food had come from. "There's an educational component to that, because people start getting curious: 'What do you do out in the garden?' It changed the dynamic of the prison." Like Travis Brown talking to his friends about radishes at dinner, "the informal network of their communication gets centered around more green kinds of activities." What's more, Pacholke continues, it's sometimes hard to tell where the "green" jobs end and the regular jobs begin. The guys in the kitchen preparing the organic food, or scraping waste into the compost bins? They're learning environmentalism, too, albeit on a much smaller scale.
And if the green activities are enough of a presence in the prison, maybe some guy will ride into the compound on a bus, in shackles, and see the stacked white boxes of beehives, and maybe this will put the germ of change in his mind. That is what happened to Anthony McKinney.
In the apiary, the grounds unfold around us in shades of green and brown. Cucumbers grow in a little garden nearby, and a patch of earth is upturned where the men harvested garlic yesterday. McKinney points to the lid of one of the hives, a white rectangle some three feet long and two feet wide. "If this whole board was who we are, about this much of it"—he traces a very small square with his finger—"is the part of us that got us in here." It's easy to imagine that small square. It's filled with violence, drugs. Ego. Kidnapping, burglary, and robbery, which are what McKinney is here for. "It's humbling to come out here, slow down, and see: There are other living things, and you're not the center of the universe." The bees, he says, "they're aware of our presence here, but they really don't care. I'm not important to them whatsoever."
"I thought this was the world," McKinney says of his little square, laughing softly. "That's all I cared about. But there's so much more to us, and there's so much more growth that we can experience, if, not so much given the opportunity, but even just pointed in the right direction. If a door was opened, and said, 'Look. Look what's inside.'"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source URL: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/green-jobs-prison-work
Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2008/07/prison
[2] http://www.doc.wa.gov/facilities/prison/cccc/
[3] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/
[4] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2009/05/waste
[5] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/dan-pacholke/
[6] http://blogs.evergreen.edu/sustainableprisons/about/nalini-nadkarni/
[7] http://www.nature.org/
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