News that's refuse
| Pages | 23-23 |
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010 ❧ Page 23
Copyright © 2010, Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, D.C. www.eli.org.
Reprinted by permission from The Environmental Forum®, Jan./Feb. 2010
noTice & commenT
carbon dioxide emissions by
4.2 tons a month.”
At the Hanford nuclear
site, where a cleanup overseen
by the federal government is
underway, managers have be-
come concerned about animal
droppings, which are trigger-
ing Geiger counters. Accord-
ing to the New York Times,
“A government contractor at
Hanford . . . just spent a week
mapping radioactive rabbit fe-
ces with detectors mounted on
a helicopter flying 50 feet over
the desert scrub. An onboard
computer used GPS technol-
ogy to record each location
so workers could return later
to scoop up the droppings for
disposal as low-level radioac-
tive waste.”
The Hanford site was
where the government pro-
duced some two-thirds of the
plutonium used in the nation’s
nuclear bombs, ending in the
1980s. “Today it is the focus
of the nation’s largest envi-
ronmental cleanup, an effort
that has cost tens of billions
of dollars and is expected to
continue for decades.” The
rabbits were contaminated by
strontium and cesium in the
form of gamma ray radiation
“back out of the area in their
digestive tracts,” according to
the Times.
The helicopter flights, paid
for by federal stimulus money,
were over some 13.7 square
miles that were never used for
bomb making — the area was
contaminated by rabbits that
had burrowed into parts of
the site used for bomb manu-
facturing and then hippity-
hopped down the bunny trail
to pristine nesting grounds.
Handling human waste has
always been a priority in en-
vironmental protection, but
today policymakers see oppor-
tunities where others merely see
a flush.
In Brazil, environmental of-
ficials have come up with a new
way of saving water, according
to a local non-governmental
organization called SOS Mata
Atlantica, as reported by the
Associated Press, CBS News,
and numerous U.S. newspapers
— peeing in the shower. In an
ad campaign running on televi-
sion, the narrator intones “Pee
in the shower, save the Atlantic
rainforest.”
Meanwhile, Scientific Ameri-
can reflects on the benefits of
sewage. Wastewater can be used
to irrigate farms, the magazine
opines, and solid human waste
can be used to generate electric-
ity.
How much energy? “One
typical half-pound bowel move-
ment contains 300 kilocalories
of energy when incinerated. . . .
Extrapolating to New York’s
eight million people, it is theo-
retically possible to derive as
much as 100 million kilowatt-
hours of electricity a year from
bodily wastes alone.”
Agence France-Press reports
that a Japanese airline “is tak-
ing its weight-saving efforts to
new heights, asking passengers
on some of its flights to visit
the restroom before flying.
The unusual request is one of a
number of measures being tried
out by All Nippon Airways to
reduce fuel consumption.” Ac-
cording to AFP, the airline esti-
mates “that if half its passengers
went to the bathroom before
boarding, it could reduce its
NEWS THAT’S REFUSE
mote personal actions, measured in
carbon reduction.
Home weatherization turns out
to be the most plastic action, and it
yields the second highest RAER score.
Changes to showerheads, water heat-
ers, appliances, and HVAC equipment
also are highly plastic but do not score
nearly as high in RAER because of
lower PER values. Adoption of fuel
efficient vehicles, a favored policy in
the wake of Cash for Clunkers, on
the other hand, has a very high PER
but scores only 50 percent on plastic-
ity, suggesting less bang for the policy
buck in terms of carbon reductions.
e new tool can guide policymak-
ers better than the ad hoc, intuitive
method that has prevailed to date.
“Car pooling is a great example of a
high PER behavior where plasticity is
very low,” says Harvard Law School’s
Michael Vandenbergh, a co-author of
the PNAS report. “People don’t want
to get out of their cars. at doesn’t
mean that we shouldn’t try to induce
car pooling, but it means we shouldn’t
allocate all of our resources based sim-
ply on the PER.”
Plasticity had been introduced in an
earlier paper, but “this is the first time
the plasticity concept has been intro-
duced into a more widely read jour-
nal,” says Vandenbergh. “It’s the first
time that plasticity has been systemati-
cally combined with potential reduc-
tions to evaluate the greatest overall
emissions reduction opportunities.”
is allows policymakers to think as
rigorously about the behavioral option
as they would about regulating indus-
trial boilers or auto tailpipes.
“It’s not by chance that the term
RAER in the paper sounds like LAER,
MACT, or BACT,” Vandenbergh says.
“We are using the same kind of termi-
nology as we use in industrial regula-
tion as a way to signal the importance
of approaching the behavioral wedge
opportunity with a comparable degree
of effort and analytical rigor.”
Notice & Comment is written by the editor
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