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How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

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This story was originally published by the CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“This facility is our version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”

That’s how Eileen Kao described Montgomery County, Maryland’s recycling center on a tour. Kao, who is chief of waste reduction and recycling in the county’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed out how machines in the facility help sort recyclables. As she described how the machines worked, a magnet separated steel and tin cans into a storage silo while a shaker table collected pieces of glass that were too small to be sorted. Dozens of workers hand-sorted at certain steps along the process.

The county’s recycling center in Derwood, Maryland, processed more than 31,000 tons of commingled material and more than 45,000 tons of mixed paper last year. At this building, commingled material (bottles, cans, and containers) is sorted. Mixed paper, including cardboard, is sorted in another facility nearby.

Over recent months, news coverage has depicted China’s National Sword policy as a crisis for recycling in municipalities all over the United States. Since early 2018, China has banned many scrap materials and has not accepted others unless they meet an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent. (Contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before sorting vary from place to place, but can reach 25 percent or higher.) The decision reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its domestic waste. Previously, China had been the destination for about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables.

National Sword sent waves through the global recyclables market. The changes in China diverted many materials to Southeast Asian countries, whose ports were not prepared to receive them in such high volume. Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia have begun to enact their own restrictions.

Meanwhile, many municipal recycling programs in the United States have suffered. As of January, Philadelphia was sending half of the recyclables it collects straight to the incinerator. Minneapolis stopped accepting black plastics. Marysville, Michigan, will no longer accept eight of 11 categories of items (including glass, newspaper, and mixed paper) for curbside recycling, in order to cut costs. Deltona, Florida, stopped curbside pickup altogether.

Many recycling and solid-waste organizations, as well as the U.S. EPA, have dedicated resources and staff to “identify solutions to be able to help support recycling here in the U.S.,” according to Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that gives grants to and works with communities to improve their recycling programs. The EPA, which has typically left leadership on recycling to local governments, held its first-ever recycling summit in November 2018.

While recycling centers have been closing down in some places, like in greater Birmingham, Alabama, and around California, programs elsewhere are stepping up their efforts to decrease contamination levels in the recycling bin by educating residents about their role in the recycling process. This emphasis on outreach suggests a heavier onus on citizens to stop tossing items absentmindedly into the bin, and start disposing of them in a more informed, deliberate way.

Take plastic bags, for example. Whereas most grocery chains accept plastic bags for recycling, most municipal recycling programs do not. Still, plastic bags are frequently found in recycling bins. The mistake is so pervasive that Washington, D.C., mailed postcards to residents instructing them not to put plastic bags in the recycling bin. (D.C. only prints two types of mailers each year for recycling, one an overview and another focused on a particular issue.)

D.C. also did a pilot program with the Recycling Partnership to provide curbside feedback for residents. On one route, staff left a note behind for residents who had plastic bags in their recycling bin. Another route was the control, and staff did not leave tags. The route that gave residents feedback in the form of tags saw a 19-percent drop in plastic bags over the course of two weeks. The control route? An increase in bags of 2 percent.

“What we’re suggesting … is being very strategic and consistent with your tagging,” said Cody Marshall, the Recycling Partnership’s chief community strategist officer. “You have to go to the same houses over and over again four to five times with the tagging messages to really have an impact.”

Systematic tagging is an important strategy in the toolbox, according to Marshall, because it’s a targeted intervention to decrease the high contamination levels plaguing many municipalities as they try to bring their bales of recyclables to market. Recycling programs in central Virginia, El Paso, Tampa Bay and Orange County, Florida, and Phoenix are all tracking the impact of tagging on contamination.

The need for systematic approaches to reduce contamination is clear. Even though Americans recycle more now than ever, they’re not always sure what their local recycling program accepts. Increasingly, those mistakes can be costly for municipalities that are trying to sell the recyclables in bales. And, of course, to ensure that even more materials don’t end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Many Americans are either aspirational recyclers,” said David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), “or they’re confused recyclers. Just because it’s made of plastic doesn’t mean it can be recycled.”

What can and cannot be recycled, as well as how recyclables are separated, differs based on where you live. Montgomery County, for example, has a dual-stream model. Residents have to sort their recyclables into two groups: commingled materials (bottles, cans, and containers) and mixed paper (cardboard and paper). Under a single-stream approach, by contrast, residents throw all household recyclables into one bin, separate only from non-recyclable trash. D.C. has a single-stream system.

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While dual-stream recycling allows the sorting process to begin before waste reaches the facility, single-stream recycling is convenient because people can put everything in the same bin. Between 2005 and 2014, the single-stream model went from being used by 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to one survey. It may lead to people putting fuller bins out to be collected, but the uptake of single-stream recycling has also meant higher contamination rates.

Some communities are switching back to dual-stream in an attempt to bring down contamination. Otherwise, they’re hoping citizens can make better recycling decisions. Ecomaine, a nonprofit that processes recycling for more than 70 communities in Maine on a single-stream model, recently hired a new educator to inform residents about what’s recyclable, what’s not, and why.

“It has certainly been a tough year-and-a-half to two years,” said Ecomaine’s communications manager, Matt Grondin. “But in the end, that landfill storage is forever storage, and to abandon recycling programs for a year or two of a down market really is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem.”

Back in Maryland, China’s policy hasn’t led Montgomery County to stop recycling anything. It continues to generate revenues from all the materials it recycles, Kao said, except mixed-color, broken glass, which it pays to recycle because it has little value. The county sells the majority of its bales domestically. In fact, one silver lining to China’s crackdown is a growing domestic market in the United States. More than a dozen North American paper mills have announced new capacity to process recycled paper, although it will be a few years before all of it comes online.

In any case, there are strategies that local programs can use, either separately or in combination, to find their way back to health and continue recycling waste. China’s policy change may not represent the much-feared “end of recycling” in the United States so much as an inflection point.

Taken from – 

How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

Mother Jones

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This week’s political news has left me feeling panicky. The more I scroll Twitter, the more often I find myself craving my favorite snacks: chocolate chip cookies and canned Diet Coke.

I’m not alone in my attachment to specific foods for certain moods. Studies suggest that when we’re sick, tired, sad, or stressed, we often eat in aims of feeling better. And given this year’s political climate, some of us may be experiencing an extra strong hankering for a greasy slice of pepperoni pizza or fresh buttercream frosting. A Market Watch survey of food businesses on election night showed spikes in cupcakes, wine, pizza, and other junk food orders.

On a recent episode of our food politics podcast, Bite, we asked listeners to tell us what dishes they’re turning to under the Trump administration.

There’s some science to suggest that we’re wired to crave certain kinds of foods in times of duress. Common comfort foods usually include a salty, sweet, or fattening element. A study by University of Colorado medicine professor Richard Johnson argues that our preference for these flavors may trace back to our early development as humans. To our Paleolithic ancestors, sweetness was a sign that a fruit was ripe and safe to eat. The excess calories helped us put on weight. “Foods that were good for survival are often things that are cemented in your neural pathways as being good for you, so you want more of them,” said San Diego Miramar College anthropology professor Laura González, who has researched emotional eating and comfort foods.

The stress response is similar. The moment we feel threat or impending doom, our bodies are flooded with chemicals that can affect our appetite and metabolism. Hormones like cortisol and ghrelin flood our system and, for some people, increase appetite and caloric intake. It’s common to look for that boost in calorie-dense dishes. “Foods that we turn to in times of stress reward the pleasure centers of our brain,” González said. “So they actually produce more dopamine and more serotonin.”

In González’s research on emotional eating, she found people linked favorite foods with memories of childhood, family, and holiday traditions. She noted that people across various cultures often reach for warm food. Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham’s theorizes that once our ancestors starting using fire to cook, they used less energy to digest, leading to stronger bodies and bigger brains—in short, cooked foods is what made us human.

It’s possible that Donald Trump himself isn’t safe from the effects of stress on appetite. During a recent visit to the White House, Time reporters noted that the president was the only one to receive extra sauce on his entree and two scoops of vanilla ice cream with his chocolate cream pie.

Here are some more favorite comfort foods from the Twittersphere:

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Why Trump Has You Craving Mac ‘n’ Cheese and Chocolate Cake

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Climate Change is Putting Your Favorite Foods at Risk

The climate is changing the global temperature is rising, weather patterns are changing, sea levels are rising. Its effects are serious and widespread, but have you ever considered its effects on your favorite foods? Here are 6 foods that will likely be affected if climate change progresses.

Avocados. Scientists expect to see a 40 percent decrease in avocado production over the next 30 years unless farmers uproot and seek more suitable climates. Why? Blame the warming global temperatures. That means a drastic increase in avocado prices, which probably means your guacamole consumption will be cut down in its prime.

Chocolate. Chocolate brings happiness its just scientific fact. But cocoa crops may be on the decline. While cocoas ideal altitude is 100 to 250 meters above sea level, that’s expected to rise to 450 to 500 meters above sea level by 2050. With most cocoa coming from Ghana and the Ivory Coast, this could have a dramatic impact on cocoa costs as yield begins to decrease and arable land diminishes.

Coffee. Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. However, it’s an environmentally sensitive plant. Coffee-growing regions around the world are experiencing the initial complications of climate change. A serious fungus called coffee rust has been sweeping across Central America, spurred by warming temperatures. A pest in Hawaii known as the coffee berry borer is expected to become an even greater threat to crops in upcoming years if it is allowed to spread. And with the temperature rise, coffee-growing regions in Africa the birthplace of coffee are expected to decrease from 65 to 100 percent. Thats right, 100 percent. No more African coffees if the surface temperature continues to spike.

Almonds. Over the next 30 years, almond production is expected to decrease by 20 percent. Interestingly, the model scientists used did not account for decreased rainfall due to changing weather patterns, so this decrease in yield could indeed be greater. If the drought in California is any indication, we may not be enjoying almond milk as regularly in the future.

Grapes. Grapes are very sensitive to temperature and weather changes. In fact, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimates that 19 to 73 percent of the land suitable for grape-growing in wine regions will be lost to climate change by 2050. France is already feeling the effects, with some winemakers being forced to harvest earlier due to an increase in mild nights and extreme weather. If this trend continues, grapes may thrive less in these regions, while places like China or Montana may become surprisingly more accommodating.

Potatoes. With rising surface temperatures, potato farmers in the Andes have been forced to move to higher and higher altitudes to grow their crops. Eventually, if temperatures continue to rise, farmers will simply run out of arable land. (Unless were looking to start farming on Mars.) Think of all the traditional foods around the world that are potato-centric! Its the third most consumed crop worldwide after wheat and rice, with over a billion people regularly consuming potatoes.

Climate change is real, and our agriculture is extremely sensitive. If you needed a reason to get serious about climate change, what’s more powerful than the threat of losing your favorite foods?

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Continued – 

Climate Change is Putting Your Favorite Foods at Risk

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Stop blaming yourself for the woolly mammoth extinction

SPOILER ALERT

Stop blaming yourself for the woolly mammoth extinction

By on 27 Jul 2015commentsShare

Phew! It looks like we might finally be off the hook for killing all the woolly mammoths. New research suggests that it was climate change, not overhunting and human-caused habitat fragmentation, that drove all of Mr. Snuffleupagus’ ancestors to extinction. This must feel almost as good as that time you thought you’d killed your neighbor’s dog by letting it eat a bunch of chocolate and then found out that it actually just had cancer! Welcome back to Spoiler Alerts, where climate change is always the culprit.

Scientists have been trying to figure this out for decades — not only what killed the woolly mammoth, but what killed all kinds of large land animals during what’s known as the Late Pleistocene (miss you, giant ground sloth!). But only recently, with advances in DNA analysis, radiocarbon dating, and historical climate data, have they really been able to zero in on what actually went down.

And that’s exactly what a group of researchers from Australia and the U.S. did using 56,000 years worth of climate and DNA data. They reported their findings — that periods of warming coincided with die-offs — last week in the journal Science. Here’s more from a press release out of the University of Adelaide:

The researchers came to their conclusions after detecting a pattern, 10 years ago, in ancient DNA studies suggesting the rapid disappearance of large species. At first the researchers thought these were related to intense cold snaps.

However, as more fossil-DNA became available from museum specimen collections and through improvements in carbon dating and temperature records that showed better resolution through time, they were surprised to find the opposite. It became increasingly clear that rapid warming, not sudden cold snaps, was the cause of the extinctions during the last glacial maximum.

The researchers also noted that humans, while not the primary cause of the extinctions, certainly didn’t help matters (just like you feeding your neighbor’s sick dog chocolate didn’t help, you monster!). As Chris Turney from the University of New South Wales put it in the press release:

“The abrupt warming of the climate caused massive changes to the environment that set the extinction events in motion, but the rise of humans applied the coup de grâce to a population that was already under stress.”

If these researchers are right, then Harvard geneticist George Church’s attempt to bring back the woolly mammoth in the form of a mammoth-elephant hybrid looks less like a pioneering act of genetic engineering and more like a cruel joke: “Welcome back, guys! There are now 7 billion of us, and we’re driving the Earth toward rapid and catastrophic climate change.”

Source:
Mammoths killed by abrupt climate change

, University of Adelaide.

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One man wants us all to sh*t equally. So he started World Toilet Day

DAY OF THE DUMPS

One man wants us all to sh*t equally. So he started World Toilet Day

By on 19 Nov 2014commentsShare

For anyone who gives a shit: Today is World Toilet Day! For that, we can thank Singaporean Jack Sim, a former construction tycoon who wants to leave his (skid) mark on the world by making sure every deuce gets dropped in a can.

Sim, who started World Toilet Day back in 2001, spoke earlier today at the U.N., which made the day official last year. A hefty 2.5 billion people are toiletless. Sim’s idea for this Day of the Dump is to raise awareness for all of the problems that a lack of johns creates: disease, crime, contaminated water, to name a few. Sim’s theme for this year: “Equality, Dignity and the Link Between Gender-Based Violence and Sanitation.” In an interview with NPR’s Goats and Soda blog (which dedicated all of today to the toilet), Sim unloads on why we should give a squat about lavatory poverty and women:

Women suffer a lot when they have to defecate in the dark early in the morning or at night. [They face] peeping toms, rape and molestation. During the day they can’t go to the toilet because there is no privacy, so they try not to drink water and they become dehydrated. Girls drop out of school when they are menstruating because schools have no toilet.

Having a toilet has to become a norm, and it has to happen very quickly. The first thing is get people to discuss it.

To get the dookie discussion started, Sim recommends making the otherwise serious issue funny. “When we make people laugh, they listen,” says Sim, who is also founder of the World Toilet Organization (ya know, the other WTO). Sim told NPR he wants Adam Sandler or Jennifer Lawrence to star in a music video about how toilets save relationships and rivers. Which would be amazing.

I hate to poo poo, but do we really want the rest of the world to adopt our weird habit of shitting in our drinking water and then wiping our asses with chopped-down forests? Of course not! Sim says that the world’s toilets must be closed-loop to avoid spreading disease and recycle nutrients in a smart way — eat, shit, fertilize, repeat.

Fortunately, smart people are hard at work making smarter toilets that turn your poop into cooking charcoal, fertilizer for your crops, and methane for producing energy. A few years back, the Gates Foundation even held a “Reinventing the Toilet” fair, including a coolest crapper contest for innovators rethinking the daily duty. And composting toilets that turn your chocolate bananas into “humanure,” as Umbra calls it, are already available.

One last pun for a post flush with crappy jokes: Time for this movement to make a splash! Enjoy your celebration.

Source:
Take The Plunge Into World Toilet Day

, NPR.

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The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

Mother Jones

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What can you tell about a restaurant from its menu? A lot more than what’s cooking. That’s what linguist Dan Jurafsky reveals in his new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

Dan Jurafsky Photo by Kingmond Young

Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, looked at hundreds of examples of food language—from menus to marketing materials to restaurant reviews. Along the way, he uncovered some fascinating patterns. For example: In naming foods, he explains, marketers often appeal to the associations that we already have with certain sounds. Crackers and other crispy foods tend to have names with short, front-of-the-mouth vowels (Ritz, Cheez-Its, Triscuits) while rich and heavy foods have longer vowels that we form in the back of our mouth (Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge). He also describes the shared linguistic heritage of some of the most common food words. Take salad, sauce, slaw, and salsa: All come from the Latin word sal, meaning “salted.”

But it’s Jurafsky’s menu analysis that really stands out. Where most of us see simply a list of dishes, Jurafsky identifies subtle indicators of the image that a restaurant is trying to project—and which customers it wants to lure in. I asked Jurafsky to examine the menus of Taco Bell and its new upscale spinoff, US Taco Co., whose first location just opened in Southern California.

We started with Taco Bell’s breakfast menu. Of course, everyone knows that the Tex-Mex fast food chain isn’t exactly fine dining, but Jurafsky pointed to some hidden hallmarks of down-market eateries’ menus.

The first thing that Jurafsky noticed about Taco Bell’s menu was its size: There are dozens, if not hundreds of items. “The very, very fancy restaurants, many of them have no menu at all,” says Jurafsky. “The waiter tells you what you’re going to eat, kind of. If you want, they’ll email you a menu if you really want it.”

Next, Jurafsky picked up on descriptors. “So there’s all of those adjectives and participles,” he says. “Fluffy.” “Seasoned.” That’s one thing that’s common on cheaper restaurant menus—as if the restaurant feels the need to try and convince its diners of the quality of the food. A fancier restaurant, he explains, would take it as a given that the diner expects the eggs to be fluffy and the pico de gallo to be freshly prepared.

“Notice the word ‘flavorful,’” says Jurafsky. “The cheapest restaurants use these vague, positive adjectives. Delicious. Tasty. Scrumptious. Wonderful. Again, more expensive restaurants take all that as a given.”

“The description specifies ‘real cheddar cheese.’ Just like all the other adjectives, ‘real’ tells you that they think customers are assuming that the cheese is not real, so they have to tell you that it is.” Also, note that the word “jalapeño” is missing its tilde—the little squiggle over the “n” that signifies a “nye” pronunciation in Spanish words. Jurafsky isn’t sure whether the missing “ñ” is linguistically meaningful, but keep it in mind, because it will become important when we look at US Taco Co.’s menu.

The words “double portion” and “lots” are also typical on the menus of cheap restaurants,” says Jurafsky. “They want you to know you’re getting enough food for your money.”

Next, we turned to US Taco Co.:

“This is a hipster menu,” says Jurafsky. “This isn’t a linguistics thing, but there’s a Day of the Dead skull on top and the desserts are served in mason jars. I mean, how hipster can you get?”

Let’s take a closer look at some of the menu items:

“What the really upscale restaurants these days are doing is just listing their ingredients. They don’t say “and” or “with.” It’s just a list. They’re also using non-standard capitalization, everything lower case or everything upper case, for example. Here they’re making everything upper case. On the Taco Bell menu, they used standard capitalization.”

Also, in “Wanna Get Lei’d” there’s a reference to sex. Jurafsky explains that we often use sex metaphors to talk about fancy food, while for cheaper food, the metaphor of choice is often drugs. “The wings are addictive, or the chocolate must have crack,” he says. “There’s something about inexpensive foods that make us feel guilty. Talking about it in terms of drugs lets us put the responsibility on the food, not on ourselves.”

“There are more unusual Spanish words on this menu,” says Jurafsky. Taco Bell has “burrito” and “taco.” Everyone knows those. But “here we have ‘molcajete’ and ‘cotija.’ Every item has at least one Spanish word. And there’s the “ñ” in jalapeño! For Taco Bell, there might be tension between English and Spanish. In a hipster place, it’s okay to be authentic.”

Of course, says Jurafsky, language trends are always evolving. What we consider hipster menu language now is not the same as it was a few decades ago. In his book, Jurafsky notes that for most of the last century, trendy restaurants used French words to signify their status (think au jus, a la mode, and sur le plat). To the modern ear, these sound pretentious. Today’s fashionable restaurant menus have replaced French phrases with “carefully selected obscure food words and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables,” he writes. That is, “if they offer you a menu at all.”

From:

The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

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