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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.

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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