interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
The Zero Waste Project
by Kirstie Pecci
January 25, 2019
Kirstie Pecci is the director of the Zero Waste Project at the Conservation Law Foundation.
We use the law, science, and the market to create solutions that preserve our natural resources, build healthy communities, and sustain a vibrant economy. That's right from our materials. What that really means to me is, whatever tools we need to make sure people are safe. We work throughout New England, all six New England states, on environmental issues. This organization's been around since about 1966. We're one of the first nonprofit legal organizations in the country.
Would you tell me about the Zero Waste Project? I’m curious to discuss law and policy because I think it’s critical. We hear a lot about consumer responsibility but your approach is much more top-down which feels imperative. What do you think about the dichotomy between those two routes?
That's a great question. First of all, the principle to the Zero Waste projects are based on the Zero Waste International Alliance definition of what zero waste is, because the term is sometimes co-opted by producers, or by the waste industry to mean something other than what zero waste was originally meant to mean.
Sometimes incineration will be determined to be part of a zero waste solution, and that's not correct.
At the end of our use of materials, those materials should be ready to become the beginning of our production cycle again.
Instead of using raw materials, we should be able to take the materials we've just used and have them be the input for our industrial systems. So that we are, instead of mining, and cutting down forests, and using virgin petroleum products, taking what we have already to reuse and recycle, and repurpose those materials so we don't have to be going back to the Earth for raw materials.
The hierarchy under the ZWIA, the Zero Waste International Alliance, starts with reduction, which is really key. If we don't use it, that's the best way to save money and to not have as much of an impact on the Earth's resources, and to use the least amount of energy. After that it's reuse, and recycling, and redesign over, and over, and over again. Composting of course is a type of recycling. That way we're creating that circular economy, that vision of not throwing things away, but using those materials again. That set of principles is really important and central to what we do.
It has to be understood that we don't want to be having a disparate impact, a different type of an impact on environmental justice communities. A negative impact on those communities. What I mean by environmental justice communities, we use the policy definitions in Massachusetts, a policy which includes people who are impoverished, it includes people of color, it also includes people who don't have skills in English to have as much political power as they would otherwise. That's really important to me too, and central to our vision of what the Zero Waste Project is doing.
Finally, our theory of change is that we want to push back against polluting facilities, like landfills and incinerators, and make sure that we're instead encouraging good zero waste programs, and working to define what good programs are, and also support those good programs, and help those good programs to happen, and educate folks so that they can be part of the zero waste solution. That's in a nutshell what we're doing.
That's a lot.
Well, that's why we're just doing it in New England. I figure I can't do the whole world all at once.
Circular Economies continues to come up. In every interview we do. How feasible is it, particularly in a world where our trade and economies are global? Who would be responsible, in your eyes and by law, to implement a circular economy?
I think with that kind of a question the impulse is to give a simple answer and make it seem like it's going to just work. And then a person who's actually in a given industry pushes back because they know how their industry works and they say to themselves, "Well, that won't work well for what I do." I think it's important to remember that for different materials, different schemes are appropriate. Plastics under a circular economy sounds very difficult. Other materials, like textiles, textiles are 97% recyclable. This has started to happen in Massachusetts for instance, we're collecting the textiles, we are selling or granting those textiles to people who need to get those clothes and reusing those clothes. The clothes that are not reusable, get recycled into other materials very easily, like rags, stuffing in automobiles, and a lot of other things.
If we had a better collection system, there's an incentive and it makes sense for textiles to become part of a circular economy. It's a lot harder with a material like plastic. It's easy to say circular economy but it means different things. This is one of the reasons I like Zero Waste and circular economies, because they're supposed to be flexible solutions. They're not supposed to be like, everybody in the world, whether you're in a city or a rural area, you're going to do the same thing. That doesn't make sense. They're supposed to be flexible but it makes it hard to get your arms around them.
Can you expand on your work with landfills and incinerators?
A lot of the good plastics material that I've seen, a lot of the good journalism around this issue concludes with the fact that we need more infrastructure, disposable infrastructure.
I've been working the last 10 years to stop the expansion of landfills in Massachusetts and incinerators in Massachusetts, and now we're trying to do this throughout New England. The reason is because all landfills and incinerators, and it doesn't matter if the incinerators call themselves waste to energy or plasma arc or gasification, whichever type of incinerator you're dealing with, all high heat technologies and all landfills are horribly polluting.
In the United States we have what are called subtitle D landfills, it's the federal regulations that regulate how landfills are constructed in the United States. All of those landfills, at best, have a plastic liner system within another plastic liner system. Two liners and groundwater monitoring around them and a leachate collection system. Landfill cells are open for years – it rains, it snows, water comes into the system, and it makes what I call, landfill coffee. That's leachate. That's really one of the key pieces of knowledge. If you buy a birthday card and it plays a song when you open it, it's got electronics in it, and it's got a little battery in it. That ends up in the landfill. And all of those pieces, all of the municipal, industrial, and commercial waste end up in our landfills and incinerators.
The leachate from the landfill therefore has all those contaminants in it. It breaks down into the leachate and some of the leachate is collected and ends up in wastewater treatment plants.
The contaminants that are in the leachate, collected at the landfill, those millions of gallons of leachate go into our wastewater treatment plants and they emerge pretty much the same as they went in. Some of the contaminants may go into the air, some of them may adhere to the sewer sludge, and some of them may end up going right into the river, but it's not cleaning out the contaminants.
As you know, when plastics break down, they don't rot the way that food waste does, they just become tiny pieces of plastic – those microplastics are in that leachate and end up in our rivers. Similarly, the leachate leaks from the landfill which is inevitable and there's no way for them to repair any leaks underground, that plastic liner's going to break down, and that landfill leachate is going to leak out of the landfill. That gets into our groundwater system. What's happened in central Massachusetts where I live, is that the groundwater is contaminated by a large landfill here. That happens anywhere you're near a large landfill, you're going to have contaminated groundwater sooner or later.
On top of that, because there are organics in the landfill like food scraps and textiles, paper and cardboard, methane is created when they put the daily cover on – there's no air going into that system. As a result of the water and lack of air, methane's created and it drags out contaminants with it. Landfill gas is also very toxic and if you live near a landfill, you're going to be breathing that landfill gas. A lot of times they'll try to burn some of it to make energy, but a lot of it escapes over the life of a landfill. And the landfill never stops making landfill gas or leachate, it's just a matter of the cycles it goes through.
Because the cap and the liners are made of plastic and break down, they're always going to break down, they're always going to allow water into the system and there's always going to be methane and leachate you have to worry about.
Landfills are just horribly dangerous. Incinerators are also terribly dangerous because all those contaminants that are in municipal solid waste, industrial, commercial and household waste, all of those contaminants are being burned in an incinerator at high heat. They mix and match in lots of different ways when you expose them to that high heat. Certain plastics create dioxin, D-I-O-X-I-N. Which is one of the most dangerous contaminates known to man when they're burned.
In the United States we do not require continuous monitoring of dioxin. The incinerator companies are required to be tested, I think once a year. They know the days that they're tested, they make sure that day's going to look pretty good. When they started doing continuous monitoring of that chemical from the incinerator stacks in Europe they found out they were actually emitting a lot more dioxin than they thought they were. That's probably happening in the United States. Dioxin, as well as other heavy metals and dangerous contaminants, are being emitted by every incinerator that operates. And remember, large landfills and incinerators are usually in environmental justice communities. Six of the seven incinerators in Massachusetts are in an environmental justice community.
On top of that all incinerators create ash. That ash is a weight, it's about 25% of the weight of the original amount of MSW that was burned. If you burned 400 tons of MSW, you end up with 100 tons of ash. That ash needs to be landfilled and those landfills, while they don't have the methane problem, do have the leachate problem. Because, again, it's going to rain on a landfill while it's open. The water gets into it and then the leachate that emerges from the leaks is full of contaminants. Landfilling is always unsafe whether it's an ash or an MSW landfill. Incineration is always unsafe.
I'm not saying that if I live in a place where we didn't have good collection systems I would want plastic to be littering the streets or the beaches, but it's not a solution.
What a nightmare.
It's a literal nightmare, yeah.
What does your progress look like over the last 10 years?
It's interesting because a lot of folks literally don't know about this. They think landfills and incinerators must be safe or they wouldn't be allowed. There's an acknowledgement by the federal and state governments that they're not safe and they couldn't be safe. In Massachusetts the standard is that the board of health in a given town can only deny a permit to build a landfill if the board of health can prove that it's going to be a potential danger to public health safety and the environment.
What we end up having are federal regulations that acknowledge these things cannot be made safe. Then the states take on the actual job of monitoring these facilities. When the states find, for instance, that the groundwater monitoring around the landfill shows there's contamination leaking from the landfill, there's no automatic trigger to clean that up or to actually close the facility. They just keep on operating because the states have no money to clean up the facilities or remediate the contamination in any way. The federal government never gave them a pot of money to deal with the problem after it was created. What we see is state governments that are well meaning, not actually able, because they don't have the resources or the political will to actually reform the system.
They are monitoring it and trying to keep things at bay but they're also responsible for finding a place to put the waste. These agencies can only permit the proposals that come to them. You can make a lot of money landfilling or incinerating waste in the United States. In Massachusetts communities are paying around $100 a ton to dispose of their waste. There will always be investors in those technologies, even though those technologies don't work and are very polluting and make people sick. It's a lot harder to set up a business that requires the actual sorting of materials and make that work. One of the reasons we're pushing back at the expansion of landfills and incinerators is because we want to level that playing field a little bit.
There is no reason for someone who's creating something out of plastic to use recycled content because it's going to be the same or more expensive. Unless we create a system that requires that, we're not going to get there. So, when you ask, “what’s the solution and who's going to be taking care of this problem?" I see the solution as being we, as consumers. As you said, there's a big push to say, "Oh, consumers need to fix this problem."
Not false solutions where companies are going to make a lot of money but not protect the environment or create a better economic situation for them.
That's the role of consumers in my mind. Yes, you should recycle and you should compost if you have access to a system, and you should ask for access to those systems. But, if you don't have those services, you don't have the option of being a good actor. That's unfair. If I live in an apartment building in Massachusetts, it's likely I don't have recycling in my building. And I can't force my landlord to put a recycling system in place. The government has to do that. The government will only do that if we also put the right economic drivers in place. So, this solution needs to be people putting political pressure on this system and then also requiring good solutions from our local and state government. Solutions will create the market incentive to make this happen.
You have to create laws that incentivize and give them a push. Especially with plastics because they are such a dangerous material in so many ways. The way we've laid this out at CLF, in our planning, is that we feel strongly looking at the evidence that if a plastic cannot be recycled, due to either the type of material it's made of or it's shape or how it's used, then it should be banned. For instance, styrofoam, polystyrene, should be banned because it's not truly recyclable. Straws should be only offered on request. Plastic grocery bags should be banned because of the filminess of the plastic, they're not going to get recycled. So, that means ban 'em.
In New England, we have a very strong municipal system, most of the times it's cities and towns that are handling their waste and recycling and composting systems, and our cities and towns are getting hammered by the cost of recycling. For a long time the waste companies were sending mixed plastics to China, where a lot of it was not getting recycled, but it was something that didn't cost the cities and towns much money.
Now that the single stream systems are all in place and everyone's gotten used to sending everything to China, the waste companies that are trying to process the recycled plastics and sort it out are finding it's an impossible job because you have seven different resin numbers and triangles and it's very difficult for, not only consumers, but the actual facilities to sort the plastic.
That system is not going to work. We have to be realistic about that, and that cost shouldn't be put on the taxpayers. Cities and towns should not be paying for a system that the waste companies set up and pretty much ensured was unworkable by creating single stream systems. Now cities and towns are paying $75 a ton for their recycling, sometimes more. That cost should be paid by the producers. For that, we're recommending extended producer responsibility systems. You look at the material and say, "Is this recyclable or not?" And create a fee based on that and get that money distributed through the states to the municipalities that are participating.
It sounds to Americans, including myself, to be revolutionary. But 10 states have bottle bills or deposit/return systems, that's the system of EPR, extended producer responsibility. Ontario has a great system, British Columbia has a good system. It works.
15% of the waste stream is plastic, only half of that is probably actually recyclable right now in the United States. We've set up a system that doesn't work from end to beginning. If I'm making something out of plastic, I'm going to use virgin gas because it's cheaper because of fracking. There's the first place that doesn't work. Then, I'm allowed to do whatever the heck I want and make anything out of whatever plastic I want to. Styrofoam is not safe to drink out of, but those Solo cups are made of styrofoam. In New England, Dunkin Donuts styrofoam cups are still everywhere, it's not safe. We shouldn't be drinking out of that stuff. And because we have such a variety of different plastics it's impossible for a consumer to know how to sort through recycling and put everything in a single stream system and not have contamination. They're doing the best they can and the state is doing the best job it can to try and educate consumers about that. But, we really need to be requiring that the producers not use stuff that doesn't work. It's not recyclable.
In some countries, beverages are only allowed to be made out of two plastics, and when that happens you know that everything that's plastic is one of those two plastics. End of story. Then you can sort your recycling and it actually gets separated in a way where it can be recycled.
How do you feel about petrochemical companies re-upping their investment in plastic? And why now when there’s such high levels of awareness about the dangers of plastic?
It really has picked up. The awareness of the problem stems from, number one the difficulty of disposing of plastics. That's definitely made it much more public. I also think social media has made awareness of the dangers of plastic visible.
Why, suddenly, are they willing to re-up and spend even more money on this?
I think the answer is that they're realizing that pretty soon our cars, our homes, and our factories are going to be fueled by solar and wind power. They're not going to be able to sell their product to us anymore. They're saying, "Wow, okay, we gotta transition. We need to find a new market. We have to poison people in a whole different way." It's frightening to me. But they are responsible. You have to expect the company to act like a company. Whether it's a landfill company, an incineration company, or an oil company, they are responsible for showing a certain amount of growth and profit, period. That's their only job. It doesn't matter whether that means there are people who are sick, or rivers that are choked with plastic, or plastic in the oceans. It doesn't matter. That part of it is not part of their job. It's not even on their radar.
That's why when I read articles about plastic pollution and the answer at the end is we need more plastic infrastructure, meaning we've gotta burn it, bury it, or recycle it, that answer is entirely unacceptable. It's not going to work. We need to actually turn off this plastic spigot, I think it may have been Break Free From Plastic that said that, and I love that. We need to stop using plastics when we don't need to use plastics. Which is most of the plastic use, honestly.
If you remember how we used to operate, in the 1970s, 95% of the bottles that we used for say, beer, were reused bottles. And now we've flipped it. Now it's only like 5% that we're reusing bottles and everything else is getting disposed of and some of it's getting recycled. We need to flip it back to a system of reuse, which will save us a lot of money, save us a lot of energy, and end up with a much, much cleaner environment – and we'll be a lot less sick. Which, to me, is what it always comes back to.
How do you stay focused on the work and stay optimistic about the outcomes?
Well, I keep doing it. A couple keys to my success in being able to sustain this kind of work. The first is having a clear set of principles, and a clear idea to where we should be going. Understanding things aren't going to be perfect, but that doesn't mean I have to compromise on those big principles. I will always be opposed to any high heat facility. I will always be opposed to processing waste streams with toxics. You've got to solve the whole problem and get to the root of the problem, so that you don't have false solutions. That makes my job easier because I don't stay up at night and worry about whether a solution is perfect or not. I check it against these guidelines that I've set for the program and then I move on.
The other thing that makes my job easier is that all the solutions I'm in favor of saves money for cities and towns and consumers. They may lose money for the plastic companies and the petrochemical companies and the oil companies, they may lose money for the incinerator or landfill companies, but I'm not worried about that. They've made a killing for a long time, literally, and they could find other ways of doing business that are cleaner.
A lot of people who do this work, we have a little bit of a know it all streak to us, we like being right, so there's always that, the intellectual part of it. But, really the most important and sustaining piece of this work is that the people who do this work, the people at CLF are incredibly supportive. Even if I walk into a room and it's filled with lobbyists from the American Chemistry Council or from the Solid Waste Alliance of North America, or other organizations that have been set up just to support these horribly polluting practices, even if I'm in a room with all those people, I know that the citizens I work with locally, in Saugus and Revere and Lynn, for instance, or the citizens I've worked with in Southbridge and Charlton, they have my back. They care about me, they know I'm doing this work for them. The same with all my coworkers, they're on my team and they've got my back, and they're just really nice people.