A tale of two circles
What's commonly referred to as municipal solid waste is only a small slice of the waste pie. And that could be a problem for companies. Read More
One illustration of how enduring “facts” some-times obscure bigger problems — and of the power of context over content — is something I call “A Tale of Two Circles.” It offers a good example of how the public and companies can focus on a set of environmental issues or aspects of corporate operations that may not necessarily have the biggest environmental impact. And it offers a warning to companies that have been telling the wrong story when the public’s focus changes.
On the figure above, the first of the two circles is a pie chart containing a half-dozen or so “slices” representing the composition of the nation’s trash, collectively known as municipal solid waste (MSW). You’ve no doubt seen some version of this. It shows that paper makes up about a third of our nation’s trash, nearly as much as yard waste, food scraps and plastics combined, each of which represents about 12 percent of the contents of landfills. They are followed by smaller amounts of metals, rubber, textiles, leather, glass, wood and even smaller amounts of assorted other materials.
The MSW pie chart is well known to those in environmental circles and is the grist for a range of claims and disputes. The plastics industry, for example, uses it to “prove” that plastic packaging and bags are less of an environmental problem, at least a solid-waste problem, than their paper and cardboard counterparts. Everyone, it seems, finds some solace in the numbers.
But there’s another circle that no one ever sees or discusses.
Four slices
This second circle is much, much bigger, totaling about 13 billion tons of waste a year, or roughly 65 times the size of the MSW pie. This circle doesn’t have an official name — indeed, it’s virtually unknown by most solid-waste experts. I’ve dubbed it the gross national trash (GNT).
The biggest slice of the GNT pie — 57 percent — consists of industrial wastes from pulp and paper, iron and steel, stone, clay, glass, concrete, food processing, textile manufacturing, plastics and resins manufacturing, chemical manufacturing, water treatment and other industries and processes. All of this results from fabricating, synthesizing, modeling, molding, extruding, welding, forging, distilling, purifying, refining and otherwise concocting what are collectively referred to as the finished and semi-finished materials of our manufactured world.
A slightly smaller slice, comprising 39 percent, is something called RCRA special waste, referring to a category of wastes defined under the U.S. Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976. This includes medical waste, septic tank pumpings, industrial process waste, slaughterhouse waste, pesticide containers, incinerator ash and a host of other things. This is the daily detritus of our industrial world, the emissions, effluents, dregs and debris created by industry.
A third slice, about 2 percent, consists of industrial hazardous waste, a witch’s brew of toxic ingredients found in paints, pesticides, printing ink and chemicals used in hundreds of manufacturing processes — nearly 500 such substances, from acetonitrile (CH3CN) to ziram (C6H12N2S4Zn).
The final slice of the pie, a miniscule 1 percent sliver of the whole, is municipal solid waste — the entire MSW circle.
GNT doesn’t even include the complete universe of waste created by business and industry — it omits, for example, the billions of tons a year of U.S. agricultural waste. Suffice to say that a lot more waste is created than is generally recognized by waste mavens, environmental activists and the public.
What’s the point? It’s only a matter of time before the story of GNT gets told, and the public recognizes that for every pound of trash that ends up in municipal landfills, at least 65 more pounds are created upstream by industrial processes — and that a lot of this waste is far more dangerous to environmental and human health than our newspapers and grass clippings. At that point, the locus of concern could shift away from beverage containers, grocery bags and the other mundane junk of daily life to what happens behind the scenes — the production, crating, storing and shipping of the goods we buy and use. And interested parties may start asking questions.
This is no fantasy. Communities around the world are, variously, banning or limiting big-box retail stores (such as in San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, Vermont and Maine), outlawing plastic bags and polystyrene foam take-out containers (for example, San Francisco, Beijing and Australia), prohibiting waste incineration (Iowa, Maryland, Massachusetts, Chicago, New York City, the Philippines and Buenos Aires are among those that have done so), limiting passage of diesel trucks (the ports of Oakland, Long Beach and Los Angeles, to name three), restricting landfill disposal of electronic waste (such as Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New York) and boycotting companies for their profligate water use, resource extraction, carbon emissions, waste disposal, energy demands, land consumption, or pesticide use.
And beyond that, communities are penalizing companies that fail to provide the levels of accountability and transparency demanded by those claiming the “right to know.”
What will you say when reporters call and camera crews appear, inquiring about the GNT? What will you tell your customers and employees and shareholders? What will you tell your family?
