Here, There, Everywhere: The future of recycling
by Derrick Gentry –
At one stage of childhood development, still an early diaper-wearing stage, we all learn Garrett Hardin’s second law of ecology: “Everything must go somewhere.” As we grow older and mature, we then develop our moral sense and begin to harbor good intentions and cultivate the desire to do the right thing (regardless of whether it pleases our mother). Some of us go on to become parents ourselves – the stage when we are reminded that it is not so easy to do the right thing given the constraints of our busy day-to-day lives. Disposable diapers are designed for convenience. Reusable cloth diapers require time and effort, and (in any case) we come to learn disheartening facts about how that cotton was sourced and how much of a carbon footprint we are making long before our child takes its first steps. Most of us ending up choosing disposables, with a heavy heart, knowing full well that the mixed materials that make them so lightweight and absorbent also make them unrecyclable.
In spite of all the well-intentioned product labeling and signage, managing one’s own waste is not always an easy task when we are cast in the role of a solitary consumer in a complex economy full of system-level paradoxes and long supply chains. Being the change you want to see, moreover, can sometimes be a challenge when the rules keep changing and it is not always easy to see where things go to when you are done with them (let alone know where they come from).
The rules of recycling have undergone some dramatic changes of late. Ever since the 1990s, when recycling really took off in the United States, China has been by far the largest market for receiving material to be recycled. In July of 2017, however, China announced its melodramatically titled “National Sword” policy, which reduced the acceptable contamination level for all plastic recycling to only .5% of the total load (6-15% or more used to be the standard). Recycling exports to China dropped by 92% over the first five months of 2018 in response to the new policy.
The new de facto ban on recycling has not been in the headlines as much as the emerging tariffs war, but it has received ample media attention. There are reports that local municipal waste management districts nationwide are sending loads of recyclable material to landfill due to unacceptable levels of contamination as well as the general collapse of the market. Media headlines have registered the crisis: “Is This the End of Recycling?” asked the Atlantic Monthly, while the NBC headline did not even take the form of a question: “Recycling Breaks Down.”
The advent of single-stream, single -bin recycling led to a sharp rise in the rates of consumer recycling. The simple days of no-sort recycling seem to be gone. We now live in an era of complex, hard-to-sort packaging that makes increasing demands upon the consumer. Single-use, thin-film plastic (shopping bags, for example) and newer forms of lightweight packaging (the new amazon.com mailers) are not only non-recyclable; they are also wreaking havoc with complex zero-sort machines and are a major contributor to the contamination of entire loads of otherwise acceptable plastics. From a waste processing standpoint, the new contamination standards for recyclables are akin to the herd immunity phenomenon with vaccination. Something close to full compliance and participation is now required in order to make sure the recycling material gathered from various sources is not diverted to landfill. Recycling campaigns now advise consumers “when in doubt, throw it out”: better to err on the side of caution and send your post-consumer packaging directly to landfill.
In addition to the global recycling crisis, our region and our state are facing additional pressures. The three largest landfills in New York — located in Monroe, Ontario, and Seneca counties, all of them managed by Casella — are scheduled to close in 2028 when the current contracts expire. The closure means that all of the waste that has been sent there from various sources near and far, including waste from the host counties themselves, must now find somewhere else to go.
One option, of course, is simply to locate another landfill outside the area, sign a new contract, and continue with business as usual while paying the bill for shipping and landfilling of waste. That is not the plan of Ontario County, home to one of the landfills scheduled for closure. A committee led by Canadice Town Supervisor Kristine Singer has instead passed a Call to Action resolution that sets a timeline for the county to come up with a strategic long-term plan that will divert from landfill as much compostable and recyclable waste as possible. They have resolved, in other words, to treat the current crisis as an opportunity.
Educational campaigns in Ontario County have already had a measurable impact. And while Casella is currently losing money on its recycling operation, the recycling material that gets sent from within Ontario County has a very low contamination rate and therefore still goes on the market — “something we should be proud of” Singer says, attributing the low rate to “public education on how to properly dispose of the recyclables, clean and without non-recyclables mixed in.” There is still work to do, Singer hastens to add, in the project of getting people to appreciate that terms like “post-consumer waste” and “zero-sort recycling” do not relieve consumers of their responsibilities.
“Middle-Out” Change
It is true that the recycling turmoil within the global market has led to a crisis of confidence in many places, including media headlines. But as Ontario County demonstrates, such a crisis can also inspire, or even force, a shift of attention to local solutions at the community level.
We often say that real change must occur at all levels. There are certain levels, however, that tend to get overlooked and perhaps deserve some more focused attention. We all know the two familiar strategies for change: “Top-down” change (whether it be governmental bans or subsidies or taxes, or abstract market forces); and “bottom-up” change (individuals trying to be the change they want to see, whether by being conscientious consumers or by opting out and living off the grid).
Then there is what might be called the intermediate level of “middle-out” change, brought about by local institutions – public, local institutions understood in the broadest sense – that meet local needs and help to create cultures and places of belonging. These are the places where people work and play and hang out; the places where people are educated and where they educate each other; where people work together to do the good they want to do and bring about the kinds of concrete change they want to see. What follows is a profile of three such “middle-out” institutions in our area, along profiles of three individuals within these organizations who are working in different ways to make sustainable practices — including waste management practices – a part of the natural rhythms of daily communal life. We will meet them and get to know their successes, as well as some of the challenges they continue to face along with the rest of us.
Impact Earth
Impact Earth is a zero-waste consulting firm headquartered in Rochester and founded in 2014. On their website, it states that its number one goal is “to educate and prepare our communities’ residents for a future without landfills, and how to be the leaders for a sustainable future.”
Cassidy Putney co-founded Impact Earth while she was still a junior in college. She recalls being motivated by “a need in our community to do something about our impact on the earth and a real lack of solutions when it came to waste. We have a lot of landfills in New York state, and they are all scheduled to close in the next decade, yet we weren’t doing anything to prepare for this huge cultural change. There was a great lack of education and awareness [back then] about personal and corporate waste management.”
The Impact Earth website also announces with pride that as of March 2019 they have successfully diverted 179 tons of waste from landfills. (For reference, the Ontario County landfill accepts just under 3,000 tons of waste every day from within the state, about 300 of which comes from within Ontario County itself.)
Impact Earth is not a pick-up or drop-off service, however. Their work primarily involves educating local companies and institutions on how to set up their own systems for dealing with organic and inorganic waste and working toward a zero-waste system. Their clients come to them with a simple request for ideas on how to do things better. Comprehensive on-site assessments are then followed by data-filled reports offering recommendations on how to set goals and establish timelines. The recommendations often focus on the logically prior task of helping to “create a culture of mindfulness” (as one report reads). Everything is premised on the active engagement and participation of the organization’s members, along with a shared sense that everyone is in it together.
Schools and colleges are among their growing list of institutional clientele. Naples Central School was scheduled for an on-site assessment a few days after my conversation with Cassidy, and I spoke with someone at the school in advance of the visit. Naples already had a recycling program in place that was entirely student-driven, and their cafeteria food waste was already being collected for composting (off-site). They simply wanted to now what they could improve upon.
When working with school districts, Cassidy reports that “the easiest part of our job is to educate the students and staff and get them on board.” The most challenging part, she says, comes with “changing procurement policies and finding affordable alternatives to single use products that cannot be composted or recycled.” More schools in New York will be dealing with the challenge of finding affordable alternatives when the state ban on single-use plastic products goes into effect.
Cassidy is well aware of ways in which “sustainability” can become co-opted in more bureaucratic contexts, in some cases becoming little more than a matter of corporate branding. “Genuine sustainability practices,” she stresses, “[must] revolve around transparency. Institutions that share or publish their data, that are realistic with their goals, and take true action and invest both time and money into implementing solutions are the most genuine. Most institutions don’t take this route because it requires hard work and money, and it’s much easier to just have a ‘sustainability department’ or other ‘go green’ initiative with staff once a year.”
While Impact Earth is obviously motivated by hopes and concerns on a planetary scale, Cassidy is a firm believer in the kind of change that occurs at the level of local community action and produces a chain effect. “If we, as a network of communities, work together to solve our environmental problems, especially related to waste,” she says, “we will create a bigger impact than if we wait for an international agreement.”
Getting educated at the Wegmans Café
For better and for worse, supermarket chains are in some sense the gatekeepers of our consumer culture. Wegmans is a large chain, and a large corporation, that has nevertheless earned itself the reputation of a local institution. It has tried for many years to be a gatekeeper in the better sense. Over the past decade, it has been a pioneer in exploring and implementing ways in which a supermarket chain can educate its customers and create a “culture of mindfulness” with regard to sustainability. With Jason Wadsworth at the helm as Sustainability Manager, Wegmans has approached the task from many different angles. They have made and continue to make significant progress in reducing food waste, for example. And in partnership with the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Sustainable Packaging, they have made innovations in redesigning their packaging so as it make it lighter weight and more easily recyclable. Nearly every in-house Wegmans package has easy-to-read directions on what the consumer can do with their package when they are done with it.
From a cultural and social-behavioral point of view, however, the Wegmans cafe represents perhaps the most interesting laboratory for creating a culture of low-waste consumption. Improving the clarity of recycling bin signage has been an ongoing project, but the current versions are about as clearly articulated as any public signage currently available. On a visit to the café one weekday afternoon, I spoke with one café worker who was emptying a bin designated “landfill.” He confidently reported that “people are pretty conscientious” about following the new recycling procedures. The compostables bin is still fairly new, having made its debut about a year ago. In it go chopsticks, paper plates, napkins, and (of course) organic waste — uneaten apples, banana peels, and a range of other edible non-plastic items.
The system certainly does not have the appearance of a high-stakes sorting game. There is education and signage and people around to assist, and Casella’s zero-sort recycling system is spoken of by café employees as an insurance policy that relieves customers of the full burden of sorting. Many of the patrons in the cafe seemed to be regulars and seemed already comfortable with the new system and how to use it. The only real challenge, according to the Wegmans staff I spoke to, comes when dealing with tour bus patrons and other non-regulars to the café who are not familiar with the new system and may not be fully acculturated to recycling practices.
Determining what goes in the recyclable bin and what goes in the landfill bin can be bit complicated, though the signs above each bin made these fine distinctions between what goes and what does not with the aid of an ensemble of dancing chopsticks and other images on the sign. Sushi is one of the most elaborately packaged items sold in any café or food bar. The bottom of the sushi tray goes to landfill; only the clear plastic top is recyclable. All the packets of soy sauce and wasabi go to landfill. A number of other commonly used items in the café always go to landfill: soup cups and coffee cups and plastic utensils.
Wegmans has replaced plastic with paper straws, but it still offers customers only plastic utensils. The most current innovation with utensils is the single-dispense system. Prominent signage informs the cafe patron of the virtues of the single-dispense system that is designed to dispense no more than what the customer needs utensil-wise (in contrast to packeted utensils with a full ensemble of a place setting and napkin, whether needed or not).
At the top of each napkin and utensil dispenser, the new system announces itself: “The Smart System to keep waste out of landfills.” The “Smart System” refers to the manner of dispensing; the plastic utensils are still single-use, and they still go to the landfill. But fewer of them go than might otherwise have gone. This reduced-impact campaign employs a counterfactual logic that is commonly invoked in sustainability discourse: “here is what we have avoided, and here is we might have done otherwise were it not for the current system.” It is not deceptive advertising, but the logic is nevertheless subtle. By characterizing and advertising progress in this way, the messaging makes the consumer feel like they are a part of the project and share in the real but retrospective savings.
In addition to the complicated but nevertheless clear signage, a recently expanded staff of hospitality workers in the cafe maintain a constant presence. Now part of their job is to assist patrons with question or to spot those who seem confused about what goes where. As Hartman and I spoke, a patron asked “is the straw compostable?” The straw was a paper straw, and the answer on that occasion was simple.
The cafe is something of a controlled environment for Wegmans, where they have the freedom to experiment with reforms they want to make with their in-house packaging and straws and containers. Beyond the café, however, is a forest of k-cups and clamshells and disposable diapers and a full range of choices from other brand-name suppliers. Exiting the café at the Canandaigua store, one first comes across a large display of Driscolls berries in plastic clam shells: #1 PET thermoform plastic, often confused with #1 plastic bottles. Nearly all clamshell packaging ends up in landfill, although it is much easier to sort than lighter-weight packaging and therefore represents much less of a contamination issue. Clamshells can be recycled, but only if the adhesive labels comes off easily – something that the consumer is not instructed to do, but may be done with some difficulty. Three decades after introducing the clamshell, Driscolls R&D is apparently at work on the label problem.
The long aisle of baby products, alas, is a veritable gallery of non-recyclable items, offering few choices to those new parents who still aspire to live a low-waste lifestyle. Baby diapers, no matter how they are packaged, contain mixed materials; and if the user follows the directions, they become soiled in any case and are sentenced to landfill on that charge alone. Traditional glass baby food jars still line the shelves, but they are being displaced by the new mixed-plastic squeeze pouches that are lightweight and convenient – and neither recyclable nor re-usable.
Paper or Plastic? Bins versus Bans
Wegmans generally relies on education and customer choice, though occasionally they have taken a different approach. In 2008, Wegmans banned the sale of tobacco products from all of their stores on ethical grounds, due to their negative effects on human health and the environment. The educational effort and the shift in the larger culture had already taken place by 2008 (delayed in part because of the resistance and notorious lack of transparency of companies like Philip Morris).
This year Wegmans announced that it will phase out their single-use (but recyclable) plastic shopping bags in advance of the state ban that will soon go into effect. In the months leading up the vote, Jason Wadsworth was vocal in his opposition to the state ban. The issue presented Wadsworth with a challenge that corporate sustainability managers often face: educating and informing customers in ways that run counter to their intuitions, framing issues from a systemic point of view and persuading customers that the behavior and choices that may seem right from their point of view are in fact not as right as they supposed. With reports on microplastics and Texas-sized plastic archipelagos in the ocean and images-gone-viral of marine life tangled in plastic and birds feeding plastic to their chicks, it was a formidable challenge for Wadsworth in his middle role as educator and defender of current practices.
In this case, it was the commonly held belief that paper bags are more “environmentally friendly” than plastic bags. Wadsworth does not argue that single-use, thin-film plastic is good for the environment. But he does argue that in many not-so-obvious ways plastic is less bad than paper. Wegmans provides customers with choices, but there are better and worse choices among those options. Cloth is the best choice on the list of bad and less bad, so long as the cloth bag is used on a regular basis.
In the public discussion leading up to the vote, Wegmans had opposed the New York ban of single-use plastics including but not limited to shopping bags. Speaking on behalf of the company, Wadsworth explained the rationale in an open letter press release:
“It has long been Wegmans’ position that unintended consequences come from banning anything. And, we are not in favor of adding fees or taxes that may burden our customers to solve environmental issues and concerns. We know from experience that it’s possible to reduce the use of single-use plastic bags by educating customers about reusable bags and reminding them to bring plastic bags back to our store for recycling. This coupled with the use of plastic bags made from recycled plastic will have a much greater impact in the long run. Wegmans uses a true closed-loop recycling program.”
Wegmans reports that close to 50% of the plastic bags are currently recycled, placed in dedicated bins near the front entrance of each store. In April of this year, Wegmans announced that it is committed to reduce in-store plastic packaging made from fossil fuels, along with other single-use plastics, by 10 million pounds by 2024. The company is currently looking at plant-based alternatives to plastic.
Getting educated at college
Michael Amidori serves as the Sustainability Manager at Hobart and William Smith College, which is located sometimes within smelling range of the large landfill just south of Geneva. When Hobart and William Smith College recently adopted its “when in doubt, throw it out” campaign in response to the China ban, students were initially surprised to hear this advice coming from a sustainability office.
If grocery stores like Aldi and Wegmans are gatekeepers for our convenience-oriented consumer culture, then colleges and universities are gatekeepers for the corporate and institutional world. Colleges are quasi-communities, civic training grounds, where students learn how to be a corporate and institutional citizen while (in some cases) training as future leaders.
When I spoke with Michael, he had a plastic fan running in his office. It was a warm late Spring day, and he had been hauling compost outside. “There is nothing wrong with plastics per se,” he told me. “It is single-use plastics that are the problem.” I asked him his thoughts on the single-use plastics ban and Wegmans opposition to it in favor of consumer-driven choice. “Regulating and education both have a role to play,” he said. “I would rather have a 10-cent charge per bag than a ban.” Like Wadsworth, Amidori believes in consumer-end incentives and disincentives, in “taxing consumption, not production.”
He also worries about the many loopholes in a ban, the opting-out loopholes. In spite of Wegmans’ arguments regarding single-use plastic shopping bags, Amidori is unpersuaded: He would still go with paper over plastic.
Michael’s job promoting and implementing sustainability at the college is centrally dedicated to the task of education. He speaks of sustainability — and unsustainability — in systemic and also in more societal terms. “We need to stop promoting a linear, throwaway culture,” he says. “This behavior needs to change.”
There is also challenge of educating the public about the limits of recycling packaging materials, whether paper or plastic. Michael makes a sharp distinction between downcycling (recycling that degrades) and upcycling (repurposing) old plastic products. Amidori assumes a myth-busting tone, indicating that he knows that he has his work cut out for him. “When they recycle, people think they are doing the right thing,” he says, and then pauses to qualify himself: “Well, they are doing the right thing, but purchasing products made of upcycled plastics is just as important. We have to create a market for these products by choosing to buy them.”
He says that many of the students he works with these days want to talk about the more fundamental problems with our “throwaway society” based on consumer convenience. Virtually everyone endorses the basic ideal of sustainability. But as is the case at any large institution, some people assign these issues a high priority than others. One of the particular challenges at a college, where everyone specializes in a different field of study and prepares for a different profession, is achieving the sense of a “shared community” and a sense that we are all in it together when it comes to sustainability measures.
Hobart and William Smith aims to be a carbon neutral institution by 2025. Recycling is one of many sustainability initiatives at the college. The college has also begun adopting a new carbon offsetting program, a increasingly common policy at institutions that want to offset their carbon footprint when it cannot be reduced or eliminated. There are two large energy expenditures that the institution cannot phase out and must approach with offsetting: travel (for conferences, study abroad, etc.) and heating the facilities with natural gas. It is the institution itself that takes care of the offsetting: Employees are thereby relieved of the burden of calculating their individual carbon footprint and let the institution do the math and fund the planting of an appropriate number of trees somewhere in the world.
Michael has run against some skepticism among the student body with regard to this new policy. Some students think carbon offsetting is a “cop out,” a modern form of the medieval Catholic practice of selling indulgences. Michael admits there is some truth to that charge, but he stresses that “offsetting can still have a huge impact.”
Michael believes in getting students directly involved in sustainability projects at the institution, and that means hands-on work that goes well beyond sorting one’s own waste. “You can learn about food deserts and poverty,” he says, “but it’s not as powerful as planting gardens with members from an economically stressed neighborhood.”
He admits that there are challenges in getting people across campus to prioritize issues that impact us all. This is a challenge at any institution where people spend so much time focused on their fields of study and preparing for specialized careers: “Everyone makes waste, while not everyone is impacted by, say, French literature.” Michael says he particularly loves the opportunity to have public screenings of documentaries that expand the scope of what students care about – documentaries that now constitute a large and fairly popular sub-genre. As Michael spoke, it was hard not to think that this is the sort of college environment (and perhaps stage of life) in which Cassidy Putney, while still an undergraduate, decided to co-found Impact Earth and become a leader helping to bring about change in her community, which happens to be our community.
The bigger picture: How to define “Sustainable”?
Many companies and institutions now have sustainability offices headed by sustainability managers.
A search with that job title will likely turn up a number of openings across the country. The job description includes but is certainly not limited to overseeing zero-waste and recycling programs. Sustainability is a much larger concept and implies a broader mission: a sustainability officer needs training in organizational behavior, the sciences, complex systems thinking, and philosophy. It also helps to have some awareness of the plight of a diaper-changing parent.
The standard definition of “sustainability” still derives from the now-classic wording of United Nations Brundtland report of 1987: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” As many critics have noted, this definition is inherently conservative, since it assumes a constantly shifting baseline of market-driven needs. To a large extent, those needs have been created by companies like Driscolls, whose sales now represent a third of the fresh berry market thanks in large part to their breakthrough innovation of the 1990s: the ubiquitous clamshell plastic packaging that made long-distance transport possible, and which is currently not recyclable. For three decades now, the “needs of the present” — the needs of grocery store customers worldwide — have included a steady supply of non-local blueberries in January (North America) and in June (Australia).
Cassidy Putney is not the only sustainability officer who has doubts about the meaning of the word that appears in her job title. “I think that we need to reexamine what our needs truly are for a functioning economy,” Cassidy says, “and that includes our social and environmental welfare. I think that as a society, it is critical that we change our behavior on how we create and how we consume. Ideally – sustainability in my mind would mean we don’t pollute, we don’t have any waste that cannot be reused or recycled into a circular economy.”
Closing the Loop: The Circular Economy – An online only supplement to Here, There, Everywhere…
“The Story of Stuff” project – one of the educational videos that Michael Amidori alluded to, and currently with 5.8 million views on youtube — defines the problem of the unsustainable consumer economy in simple terms with the aid of animated graphics. The video points out that our consumption-driven economy is a linear system, and linear systems are inherently unsustainable.
The concept of a “circular economy” has become something of a buzzword in sustainability discourse, along with talk of “decoupled growth” and “closed-loop” systems. This language catches sustainability thinking at its most philosophical and utopian. Jason Wadsworth has described some of the Wegmans innovations as aspiring to or having achieved a “closed loop system.” But are these long-term, deep-sounding goals realizable either in theory or in practice? Is the closed-loop ideal a myth of eternal return?
The answer is far from clear. Critics, including the oft-cited energy expert Vaclav Smil, have pointed out a number of fundamental problems, or limitations, with the closed-loop model of a circular economy and the ideal of decoupling economic growth from resource dependence.
The first problem/limitation has to do with the fact that even when it is recycled, most plastic is in fact downcycled – that is to say, its quality rapidly degrades after one or two resurrections until it is finally unusable. This is due ultimately to the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Recycling delays the trip to the landfill, but it does not divert waste indefinitely. That is why, as Michael Amidori stresses, the difference between recycling and re-using (upcycling) is a difference in principle.
Another problem with circular and decoupling models is our continued dependency upon non-renewable fossil fuels, coupled with doubts about whether it is possible even in theory to maintain our current economic growth and meet our current needs with the use of renewable energy alone. The price of oil, in fact, has been major factor in the global market for recycling. In 2015-16, when the price of oil dropped, recycling market collapsed due to the fact that it was cheaper to make plastic from virgin (petroleum-based) materials.
And then there are the intertwined issues of packaging, transportation, and fossil fuel use. Researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Sustainable Packaging are working (with Wegmans and with other companies) to design “smarter” packaging with a lower carbon footprint. But few within the industry openly question the more fundamental need for packaging and shipping, a need that is premised on the assumed need for shipping of goods over long distances.
From an energetic and efficiency point of view, the difference between picking a blueberry off a locally grown bush and shipping a blueberry from California is a difference in principle. Most people who have watched a documentary featuring Michael Pollan, in college or not, are familiar with the 10:1 ratio: For every calorie of food that is produced in the United States, 10 calories of energy are put into the system that brings the food to the shelf. Much of that fuel goes to transportation. The transportation sector (which also includes commuting workers and air travel) has been and remains the largest share of global carbon emissions.
By most standards, Wegmans – they, we – have made enormous progress with regard to sustainable practices. The Wegmans website offers a sort of a scaled-up version of the single-dispense signage for plastic utensils, but these counterfactual figure also more explicitly mention the amounts of fossil fuel involved: “Since 2016, Wegmans has avoided the use of more than 6 million pounds of virgin fossil-based plastic. This equates to approximately 150 truckloads worth of packaging we didn’t use.” Lighter-weight packaging may mean more products being shipped with fewer trucks, which does translate to less energy than might otherwise have been used. But “fewer truckloads than might otherwise have been” does not necessarily mean, year by year, fewer total truckloads. That would require a decoupling of economic growth from resource demands. Efficient use does not equal less use: This is a version of the basic but sometimes oddly counter-intuitive fact known as the Jevons Paradox. Resource-independent circularity may be a utopian goal well worth pursuing. But it is still a far-off goal, as the Wegmans corporate sustainability page acknowledges: “Taking steps—even little steps—together can make a difference.”
Meanwhile, there are deadlines on the horizon. On the local scale, we have timelines for local municipalities to figure out how they want to transform practices at their local level and divert a much larger percentage of waste for which there is currently a limited market. That work is underway, in places like Ontario County and across the country.
And we have some larger scale but similarly tight deadlines issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We are told by the IPCC that we have until 2030 to bring about “transformational behavioral change” on the level of the global economy. The IPCC reports of the past few years, which have been increasingly direct and transparent in their language, speak of the progress we will need to make, rather than the relative progress we have made. They warn that in order to meet the modest Paris Treaty goals of remaining below 2 degrees Celsius, global natural gas usage must decline by 74% by mid-century (and much more dramatically in needier nations like the United States). The IPCC also informs us that in order to meet this goal, 80% of the known fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground. Nothing is mentioned of burning those fuels more efficiently, or reducing the rate at which they are burned and measuring how much we might otherwise have used within a shorter space of time. The language of the IPCC is “reduce” and “refuse,” both in the absolute sense.
Championing market-driven solutions, acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler announced recently that “thanks to President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda, the economy is booming, energy production is surging, and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources. The Trump administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions.”
In January of this year, not long after Wheeler’s announcement, the Rhodium Group reported that U.S. energy-related greenhouse gas emissions rose in 2018 by 3.4%, the second largest increase in 20 years. In 2008, the year of the tobacco products ban, Wegmans operated 71 stores in five states. Within the past ten years, a period of real and unprecedented progress with regard to both corporate and customer-driven sustainability, the company itself has expanded: there are now 99 stores serving the needs of customers in six states. Chinese bans and Chinese tariffs notwithstanding, the United States economy – measured by GDP and mostly in terms of consumption of goods – has been booming.
