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Still, there was a time when things were done a little differently, even in this country. Warning off-color personal anecdote approaching. We were visiting one of those restored historic villages in Connecticut when I notice in the outhouse a stack of corncobs without the corn. A light when off in my head: so that's where the expression cornhole comes from. Seriously, maybe the growing shortage of newsprint and used office paper could be answered by the growing use of corn ethanol in this country. Since 1985 this country's ethanol corn production has risen from 271 million bushels to 3.6 billion. That's a lot of corncobs being tossed out that could be serving vital hygienic purposes. Then again, working around a stack of corn cobs could be a challenge for any bathroom decor. Maybe the age of Wallypop is upon us.

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Anyone who has ever taken post-graduate statistics knows, you can pretty much find numbers to prove anything. So, when we found a plastic water bottle company survey saying San Francisco, Seattle, NYC, Portland and Boston are the nation's least wasteful cities while Houston, Cleveland, Atlanta, Tampa, and Indianapolis are the most wasteful, we started wondering what other numbers correlate with conservation? Guess what? There's a correlation between wealth and wastefulness. Look at the water bottle company list. Now look at this list of richest and poorest cities in the US. Without getting into multivariate statistics, you can see a lot of the cities on the top of the water bottle survey are also at the top of the rich list. Correspondingly, the poorer towns can be found at the bottom of the survey. At first blush that doesn't make any sense. Is it possible that the less money you have the more trash you have? Or the more you conserve the less you consume? Or is it just that rich people recycle and poor people don't?

Could it be a little bit of both? We all know about liars and figures, but it's another kind of liar that figures into these numbers. Here's a study saying brand names are highly associated with conspicuous consumption. In other words we buy Tommy Hilfiger not because it's great clothing, but because Tommy Hilfiger has spent ga-jillions telling us to. But what happens when Aeropostale and Abercrombie start upping their advertising ante? We toss out our Hilfigers and buy Abercrombies of course. Not all of us. Only those who want to appear rich. And who wants to appear rich even more than rich people? Poor people.

Warning! Personal anecdote approaching. While attending graduate school I found myself alone on  NY City's 1 and 9 train around 1 AM when a pile of Latinos took up seats around me at the 59th St. station. They started telling jokes about white people and how cheap we are. The jokes centered around  sneakers, cloths and cars. I was wearing Sperry Top-Siders with frayed stitching, a grubby tee-shirt and a pair of $11 Wrangler jeans. My car was a $200 Plymouth Horizon. (I have no idea what the kids were wearing. I was too busy watching my life flash before my eyes, as I stared unflinching at the Dear Abby column in the New York Post I was hiding behind.) Right as these kids were about my fashion and spending habits,I was going to graduate school at Columbia University and I was pretty sure none of these kids were classmates. The point is, I had the money to pay for graduate school and I was more concerned about plans than appearances. Is there a correlation there?

What about the other half of the equation: that poor people don't care as much for the environment? Sorry, but another personal anecdote is needed. After graduating I landed a $30K job in Perth Amboy, NJ, working for The News Tribune. So much for plans. Not only did I look broke, I was. I found myself the only white guy in an apartment complex full of Puerto Ricans. My neighbors were the warmest people you could ever hope to be a minority-of-one amongst. They took me in as their own. They also didn't give a rat's pitoot for the recycling bins next to the dumpsters behind the buildings. They used them for household trash.

So, drawing on these varied life experiences, and the studies above, is it fair to say poor people produce more trash and care less what they do with it. I know I'm getting into deep water here, but before you say that's absurd and racist, a little more food for thought. The U.S. enjoys some of the world's lowest food and energy prices. Even this nation's poor, more than any other, can afford to buy stuff and throw it away. And look at how much money is spent encouraging them to do so. In the absence of greater economic opportunity or cultural incentive to enable or teach poor people otherwise, can they be blamed for wasteful behavior? Just to drive home the point here's a slightly tangential story about such opportunity and incentive transforming Baltimore.

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Tucked into the recently approved $160b jobs bill is $381 million for “Empowerment Zones”, mostly for community renewal tax incentives targeting the District of Columbia, New York City, and the Katrina-battered Gulf Coast. Does it sound like pork once again being stuffed into the least productive communities in the country? As self appointed devil's advocate for everything, NBN says there's probably no better place to spend this money. As the real estate explosion was starting to mushroom, investment was working its way back to the inner cities. In particular mill buildings, like these here in Lawrence, MA. Since 1960 such buildings were vacated wholesale in struggling cities across American as industry increasingly moved out of the city and residents followed suit.

As real estate prices soared, daring entrepreneurs began snapping up these prime riverfront buildings with high ceilings and easy highway access right in the heart of many downtowns. These were derelict buildings with water, sewer and electric in place, being refinished into premier properties for pennies. The only problem was the cities surrounding them could be pretty awful, like Lawrence.

Accordingly, the nation's construction industry went for the gated community and McMansion markets in places like Vegas, Phoenix and Coral Gables, FL. Communities like Lawrence, Providence, RI, and Philly were just seeing serious interest when the bottom dropped out. Now both markets have stalled, and a wonderful opportunity to fix up the nation's inner cities, stem urban sprawl, bolster struggling inner-city school systems and put these wonderful, one-of-a-kind mill buildings back to work has been stymied. Such residences are also much more energy efficient and exact a minimal toll on the environment compared to clearing woods and backfilling marshes to make room for new construction. Not to mention the improved cultural offerings in our cities compared to our McMansion living rooms and flatscreen TVs. Here is a link to a great pre-subprime article about the promise such projects held out for Lawrence, still one of the most disadvantaged cities in Massachusetts.

Given all the arguments in favor, you'd think the $160b Stimulus jobs bill should have a couple billion for “economic empowerment.” But then, what do we do with all the brand new housing in places like Orlando FL, many in various stages of completion. Caution, personal anecdote approaching. We recently spent a week at a time share outside Disney World called the Marriott Harbor Lake, pictured here. Take notice of the amount of torn-up open field surrounding the place. According to Google Earth, this is a 2010 picture. It looked exactly the same in 2009. Yet, a Marriott timeshare salesman assured me during two hours of arm twisting that this lot was going to be developed into all manner of amenities that would make our $25,000 investment in a Harbor Lakes timeshare the wisest move since shorting real estate stocks in August 2007.

Take a moment and cruise the surrounding area with Google Earth. You will see complexes in similar stages of construction everywhere. Just as we did driving back and forth to Disney every day. Now, play with the time line photos Google Earth offers (look for the little clock at the top of the page.) Those excavations disappear around 2002. I don't want to call the Marriott salesman a liar, but if I was Mr. Marriott I'd want to sell a couple thousand of those vacant timeshares, condos, townhouses, coops, apartments, and resort rentals of every stripe before building more. Sadly, those building are likely going to filled before the mill buildings up north see again the sort of hopes outlined in the Lawrence link above.

It's just another testament to the price we're going to continue to pay for the excesses of the last decade. These wonderful mill buildings will remain vacant and the surrounding cities will fester as these townhomes and resort communities continue to soften the real estate market. Unless of course we find a way to send more of this stimulus money to places like Lawrence. There is some hope. Google News “mill building” and “condominium.” The page displays a lot of stories suggesting eyes are turning once again toward these mill buildings.

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Not sure what exactly this press release means but it has something to do with Hewlett Packard using recycled plastic  to make its printers. HP might be pleased to know NBN is  also doing its share to reduce its plastic waste stream by refilling its  empty HP ink cartridges with  an ink refill kit bought at Staples. Not only are we not throwing our old ink cartridges into a landfill, HP doesn't have to sell us new cartridges at $30 a pop. The printer cost $49 at Walmart, BTW. Seriously, HP should be commended for using recyclables, regardless of their predatory ink cartridge practices. This image above came off a website devoted to ink cartridges (And you thought NBN was out there!) That website says these are all recycled ink cartridges.

Ink refill kits are an amazing savings and prevent a lot of the waste in the photo above. Don't believe what your local Staples sales person tells you about these kits. We were told it would ruin our printer, that was about 40 refills ago: about a $1,400 savings. Why is this worth an article that you are hopefully still reading? Ink cartridges are a particularly nasty compilation of toxic metals, plastic and noxious chemicals. If that picture above really is a mountain of ink cartridges, it poses a very real threat to the environment if not properly disposed of or recycled. With Hewlett Packard selling printers that use ink cartridges faster than the Emeril Lagase uses paper towels, we might want to find ways to use fewer ink cartridges. Not to mention the money it will save you. A fair warning, however, it takes a few minutes to learn how to refill some of these things. Start slowly, and with lots of paper towel.

Most likely some folks have seen this slideshow, please click on it anyway. It's the finest compilation of art, stats and text on the bottle water problem to have surfaced in some time. We don't realize how ingrained in our daily lives these bottles have become. And we're using more every day. Then we have groups like this, which are still promoting the bottle water industry and they are doing a good job. In 2007 the total volume of bottled water consumed in the United States surpassed 8.8 billion gallons, a 6.9% advance over the 2006 volume level. That translates into an average of 29.3 gallons per person. The sale of bottled water has increased by 500% in the last decade. The bottle water group says the stuff was critical to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. Who can doubt that it was. But is that convenience worth the price we're just now coming to realize we're paying. Couldn't we find a way to add to water bottles the $.05 redemption now being collected on soda onto bottled water. Or better yet, let’s make it $.20 and the money generated has to go toward buying these things to filter water and make it available without the bottle. You just fill up a jug and go. If there was one of these filters on every corner in New Orleans, the Katrina argument disappears. You might even want to use one of these to fill with your free filtered public water. Please pardon the gratuitous plastic bottle shot. It's all we could find to illustrate this copy.

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Holy banana peels Batman! Is composting finally going mainstream? Mega trash haulers Waste Management Inc. just invested a ton of cash into some unknown company called Harvest Power. The US still only recycles about a third of its trash. So, it's surprising to see Waste Management betting folks will pull their coffee grinds and orange peels from their trash when only a third of us are willing to separate out plastic water bottles. The "one-third"  figure is a five-year-old EPA estimate compiled in the middle of the nation's What Me Worry days.

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Fresh from our unusual recycling stories folder we have this release about war veterans being retrained as building energy conservation audiitors. What a great idea, taking war veterans and teaching them the ins and outs of making buildings more energy efficient.

From the same folder we have this release. Sadly, after three reads, it still makes little sense. Apparently someone built a school in Hawaii out of bamboo. We only bring this up here to illustrate what an amazing building product bamboo is. It grows quickly and is amazingly strong. It's working its way ever deeper into our homes and habitats. At left you can see the stuff is used for scaffolding in Asia that is stacked hundreds of feet high. We  have no idea what its resistance to rot and wear is, but it doesn't hurt to learn a little more about it.

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I did this story in 2005 about a company that was using its waste water to grow bananas and such in a greenhouse in Ipswich, MA. I hung the story on an opening line about New England's first banana harvest, but a much more subtle message might have gone largely ignored  through my word play.

The waste water referred to in the story came from a very wealthy biological manufacturing company that made enzymes for lab tests and such. It challenges imagination to ponder what gets flushed down the drains of that company. Yet, those same drains led to a greenhouse outside the plant that was growing tropical fruit and flowers in the dead of winter. I was banging off the walls when I saw this technology. I started shooting queries to magazines across the country asking if they wanted a story on this amazing technology that was using waste from a chemical plant to grow bananas in New England. The fellow who built the green house was was considerably more subdued about the story's prospects and it took me a little while to figure out why. All you need is one janitor to flush a few gallons of ammonia down the toilet and the greenhouse will be turning brown.

That gets to the essence of America's environmental problems and the concept that there is no such thing as waste. In theory even a discarded Poland Spring bottle has utility. I saw lots of folks using them to carry stove fuel on the Appalachian Trail. But Poland Spring makes millions of new bottles every year, rather than pull their old bottles from landfills. Ditto for the hypothetical ammonia that gets flushed into the waste stream when it could get segregated into a separate chemical receptacle. Used ammonia may not have the same utility as used bottles, but you get the idea. If there was a way to more rigorously separate all our waste products, and not just bottles and cans, maybe the greenhouse technology could be more reliable. For example: could the company's toilets drain into one septic system and sinks and wash systems drain into another.  Let's get even more impractical. Could the same technology be used in residential septic systems? Taken to the extreme, maybe the hot water we flush down our drains could wash over copper coils which extract the heat before heading to your septic systems.

The point is, there are so many efficiencies to be extracted from our present lifestyle. The challenge for the future will be teasing them out, mining all these babies we now throw out with the bathwater each day. Not just in our waste water but in every facet of our lives.

This is impossible when attempted at the receiving end, the landfills and cesspools and such. Which might explain why my greenhouse septic system engineer isn't too concerned about PR right now. However this extraction process becomes more practical, even possible, when the enduser, the home owner, is helping out. Imagine not just separating your plastics from newspapers, but separating your plastics according to the little numbers stamped into the recycling symbol on the bottom.Suddenly the mixed plastic that's barely redeemable in the recycling markets today starts to take on real value. Imagine telling Poland Spring that it can purchase an unlimited supply of it's bottles back,clean with no paper labels. They could start to reclaim the billions, yes billions, of plastic bottles they've littered across the planet. (In my mind one of the greatest environmental crimes of this century that we've yet to start seriously paying for.)

These efficiencies will cost money, imagine actually paying a $1 for a pint of Poland Spring instead of the 25 cents youpay at supermarkets. It will also take a fundamental rethinking of how we live our lives and what we throw out. But once the trasnistion is made it will never be needed again. And think of the money we will save. Modern day America can eliminate a lot of it's pollutions problems and pay of the absurd debt this president is getting us into if we were just much more care about what we throw out and where we throw it.

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