The Zero Waste Solution

An open letter circulated by GAIA and a number of environmental justice groups sums up what it takes to beat incineration and other unwelcome projects pushed on communities by powerful corporations:

To build a powerful movement, you must first figure out where you have power, and build from there. We have power in our communities where we have relationships and can hold politicians and corporations accountable. In DC, corporate power rules because they can concentrate energy and resources there—in ways we cannot. However, when confronting these same corporations in our tribes, cities, and towns, we reveal that they are not nimble or powerful enough to defeat our communities. Movements are built house-by-house, block-by-block, community-by-community, whenever people in communities rally around a common cause, acting on their own behalf with allies and networks—often against powerful interests, often building new institutions needed to win lasting change.33

Indeed, it was this wonderfully succinct tool designed to help citizens on many technical issues that we used as a model for Waste Not. Each issue of Rachel’s was short enough to be read on the day it was received. Everything was meticulously documented so that citizens could use the information in public hearings and meetings with confidence. Each issue had a large identifying number, the date, and was already punched with three holes for convenient filing and retrieval for later use. In fact, Waste Not copied this format and tried to do for news coverage on incineration and recycling battles what Montague did with technical advice on hazardous waste and many other issues. Both were designed to give citizens ammunition to fight the Goliaths of the municipal and hazardous waste industries. According to author Robert Gottlieb, “By the late 1980s, both the Connetts and Montague had become important adjuncts to the grassroots groups and anti-toxic networks. . . . Their publications became essential reading for community groups. They made obscure documents and reports accessible, covered project battles and revealed information the waste industry would rather have kept removed from public view.”35

Meanwhile, measurements made in cows’ milk in Ireland, which had no trash incinerators at the time (but also a lot less industry), were about ten times lower than in the United Kingdom and about one-fifth of the “ideal” goal set by the German government.23

Waste Not. We sent out weekly hard copies of Waste Not, as this was before the availability of the Internet. These helped keep citizens opposed to incineration informed of victories and defeats. This kind of news service was very important, because while it wasn’t difficult to get local media coverage on incinerator battles, the national media never did a serious job of covering the issue. Too many journalists and editors (including those of the New York Times) swallowed the public relations spin of the incinerator industry that these were waste-to-energy facilities and represented the only viable alternative to megalandfills

Debates. Along with others like Tom Webster and Barry Commoner, I challenged incinerator promoters and consultants to debate the issue in the communities where these facilities were being proposed. More often than not they refused, but when they agreed both citizens and decision makers were usually convinced that incineration was not the panacea that it was cracked up to be. By this method we were able to punch through the public relations hype of promoters and empower citizens to fight the battle themselves.

You don’t have to lie about something that is good. Clearly, there was something very wrong with incineration dioxin emissions. When I brought this matter to the attention of the person in our local authority in charge of the environmental assessment for the local incinerator project, he said, “So one expert screwed up.”

I replied, “He didn’t just screw up. He lied.”

He responded, “I have met recyclers who lie.”

It was apparent that governments and industry (including the incineration industry) had a very strong interest in downplaying the significance of dioxin, but scientists who served these interests wanted to do so in a way that did not depress their research funding!

We subsequently found that cows’ milk could expose an individual to nearly two hundred times more dioxin than inhalation. Indeed, by our calculation, one quart of milk would expose an individual to the equivalent of breathing the air next to the grazing cow for eight months.18 About ten years later a study conducted in Germany, and based upon field measurements, confirmed that a grazing cow would put into its body in one day the same amount of dioxin that would be obtained by a human being breathing the same air as the grazing cow for fourteen years!19

The government ordered that the milk of dairy cows in sixteen dairy farms downwind of this Rotterdam incinerator not be sold but instead be collected and sent by the government to a facility where the fat (where the dioxins are concentrated) was removed and then sent to a hazardous waste incinerator to be destroyed

Fortunately, there is also the good law of pollution, which states that the level of pollution decreases as the level of public participation increases. In short, we need to clean up the political system in order to clean up our environment.