For New Yorkers, shopping online means less travel time and, on occasion, lower costs. It also means more trash to put out at the curbside. Because most online retailers rely on major private carriers such as UPS and FedEx to deliver their goods, this holiday season saw not only a sharp rise in local deliveries but a similar rise in the amount of paper, cardboard and plastic pushed into the city waste stream.
According to the Department of Sanitation, New Yorkers left more than 8,300 tons of cardboard and mixed paper at the curbside in the first full collection week after the Christmas holiday, a 21 percent jump over the same period last year.
This year’s post-holiday numbers were inflated somewhat. Sanitation spokesman Matthew Lipani notes that an awkward alignment of Monday holidays that forced many residents to hold onto their recyclables an extra week. Still, immediate pre-Christmas tonnage -- 7,258 tons this year vs. 6,033 tons last year -- showed a 20 percent increase in paper recyclables and paralleled a national 25 percent surge in holiday online sales according to the Internet research firm comScore.
Such numbers indicate a cultural sea change not only in how New Yorkers are shopping but also in how much trash and recyclables the city will have to process in the years to come. Given the lack of studies on the overall online shopping “life cycle” -- the total net effect on the environment once products have made their way from raw material all the way to consumer’s wastebasket -- environmentalists, for the moment, see only a collection of positives and negatives adding up to a giant question mark.
“There is no guarantee that the Internet’s net environmental impact will be positive,” writes Nevin Cohen, a professor of environmental science at The New School. “For decades, technology watchers predicted that the personal computer would result in the â€paperless office,’ but U.S. shipments of office paper actually jumped 33 percent between 1986 and 1997. E-commerce could have similarly negative effects.”
From a short-term perspective, the cultural shift away from brick and mortar retail seems to offer a net boost to the city’s recycling program. Of the city’s two major recycling contracts, the cardboard and mixed paper contract with Visy Paper is the one that actually pays the city for what it recycles (in pdf format), roughly $7 a ton according to the city’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse & Recyling.
Because the Department of Sanitation also tends to divide per-route costs by the number of tons collected, extra cardboard at the curb in December and January means a better bottom line for the overall recycling program over the long term.
Balancing out such benefits, however, are several concerns. Cohen notes that the biggest benefit associated with online retail is the reduced number of vehicle miles as shoppers take fewer trips to the local mall or department store. As December’s transit strike demonstrated, however, many New Yorkers rely on mass transit (not cars) to do their Christmas shopping. “In New York, there might not be an environmental savings,” says Cohen. “In fact, the net might even be negative once you figure in the additional vehicle miles needed to deliver packages.”
A second concern is the amount of new, non-recyclable or hard-to- recycle materials that come with products ordered online. Many retailers and shippers, in order to protect their goods, load up on plastic cushioning materials such as foam rubber, bubble wrap, and expanded polystyrene -- a material many know by the Dow Chemical trade name Styrofoam. So far, the city does not collect these materials nor does it have many private company suitors begging to take these materials off the city’s hands.
The reason, says Betsy Steiner, executive director for the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers, boils down to the materials’ very nature. Bulky, light and easy to produce in virgin form, foam and bubble wrap are a tough fit for a recycling industry that makes its profit on a per-ton basis.
“Basically, you’re collecting and shipping air,” Steiner says. “So for a program to work, it has to be localized and in very, very large quantities to be economically viable.”
Shipping air is cheap, of course, but not as convenient as simply dropping things off at the curb. Steiner says her organization gladly accepts mailed packages that include the molded foam packaging used to shield iPods and other modern electronic products. Those looking to recycle foam peanuts, a product her organization doesn’t accept, can visit the nearest UPS Store or visit the Plastic Loose Fill Council’s “Find a Collection Center” , enter a zip code and get the address of the closest business that collects loose fill foam.
The day when New Yorkers can simply leave such materials in the blue can at the curbside is still a long way off, however. In the meantime, organizations such as INFORM, a Wall Street-based non- profit firm organization promoting “strategies for a better environment” advocates a European-style system that shifts the responsibility for the waste processing of worn-out products and packaging away from municipalities and consumers and back onto the producers themselves.
“It’s kind of like a welfare system that we’ve generated for manufacturers here in the U.S.,” says Lloyd Hicks, director of INFORM’s solid waste prevention program.
Hicks holds up Germany as the most obvious counterexample. In 1991, the government mandated that manufacturers and distributors take back all transport packaging, including expanded foam and blister wrap. Manufacturers that don’t wish to process such materials can opt out via the Green Dot program, a non-profit program which finances packaging material recycling. To gain membership in the program, companies pay a scaled fee depending on the amount of material recycled. Once in, they earn the right to put the Green Dot logo on their packages, making their products more desirable to distributors who might otherwise bear the recycling responsibility.
“They’ve found a way to deliver the same products with less packaging,” says Hicks. “That’s one reason we believe there should be a way to provide a similar system in the U.S.”
The Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyler’s Steiner says her organization doesn’t endorse producer responsibility legislation. She says the real issue isn’t who pays for recycling so much as who is willing to buy the recycled materials once they’ve been processed.
“I think on the surface it looks like, oh, it’s getting paid for, but the bottom line is they’re still encountering problems on the end use market,” Steiner says. “That’s been the problem with plastics recycling globally. The raw material is so cheap you just get into the chicken or the egg thing.”
Cohen, the environmental science professor, shares Steiner’s sentiment somewhat. Like Steiner, he sees the Green Dot program as a top down solution to a bottom up problem -- i.e. individual consumers shifting their shopping patterns as a way to minimize both stress and seasonal costs. Unlike Steiner, however, he sees a chance to phase out polystyrene and phase in packaging technologies that deliver, at worst, a net neutral effect on the environment.
“The long term goal should be to develop two-way packaging that eliminates the waste,” Cohen says, pointing to NetFlix, a movie rental company which ships its DVDs in reusable envelopes, as a pioneering example. “It would be great if Amazon.com and other companies developed a similar method for shipping their products.”
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If you’re like most New York City homeowners, the recent combination of early winter snow and record high fuel prices already has you griping as you await the first monster Keyspan bill of the season.
If you’re a researcher or entrepreneur specializing in environmentally-friendlier alternative fuels, on the other hand, it has been a time to celebrate.
“People are jazzed,” says John Nettleton, and by people, he means people like his colleagues at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a Cornell University research group. “They see it as a real opportunity.”
Nettleton’s group has two projects under way within the city involving “bio-fuel,” specifically bio-diesel. Bio-diesel is a mixture of refined vegetable oil and ordinary petroleum diesel. By promoting the use of such fuels, environmentalists hope to reduce petroleum emissions while at the same time providing an additional market for local farmers and recyclers.
Earlier this year, Nettleton’s group conducted a survey of New York restaurants and put the total amount of waste vegetable oil available to recyclers more than a million gallons in Brooklyn alone. (Almost 90 percent of that total is currently recycled, Nettleton says, but most of that recycled product goes toward the production of cosmetics, soaps and other organic derivatives. ) Part of the beauty of bio-diesel is that the “bio” part can include a wide range of oils, everything from used sesame oil to animal fat and grease.
“There’s a huge potential supply of restaurants and food service establishments in New York City, I think 26,000 restaurants by the last count,” says James Quigley, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at Bronx Community College.
Percentages vary, but the most common bio-diesel blend, 20 percent vegetable oil, 80 percent petroleum -- often referred to as B20 -- is already price-competitive when compared to regular diesel and gasoline. According to a U.S. Department of Energy report on alternative fuel prices, the average Sept. 2005 price of B20 was $2.91 compared to $2.81 for ordinary diesel and $2.74 for regular gasoline.
The cost will become even more competitive because of a recent federal tax credit giving heating oil producers a dollar back for every gallon of virgin soybean oil they use to produce bio-diesel.
Not only is bio-diesel cleaner-burning than heating oil but it also delivers better efficiency, thus reducing stress on aging boilers. Add in the fact that a recent executive mandate from Governor George Pataki earmarks a five percent minimum of the state’s fuel consumption portfolio for bio-diesel and you have all the requirements for a fast-growing marketplace.
How fast is the market growing for bio-diesel? Environmental Fuel Alternatives, a Brooklyn startup with production facilities In Newark, claims to have sold two million gallons of bio-diesel in less than two years’ time.
“If I could get the production up and everything I wanted, it would be double,” says Bob Lindenbaum, the company’s chief operating officer.
Other heating fuel suppliers are following suit. Mark Schildwachter, an executive at the Bronx heating oil wholesaler Fred M. Schildwachter & Sons, Inc., says his company is currently in the process of switching over its equipment to accommodate B20. The company already offers bio-diesel to customers who wish to order it but expects to ramp up production to all its customer within the coming year.
James Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy personally drives a 20 year-old Volkswagen that can switch over to bio-diesel as a fuel source once the engine has been properly warmed up. Quigley permitted bio- diesel vehicles to be shown off alongside hybrid and fuel cell models in the Center’s “Clean Car Fair” held on Earth Day earlier this year.
As noted in many environmental journals, bio-diesel is, at heart, an imperfect energy solution. Even if you raise the blend ratio to 100 percent refined vegetable oil, you still face the continued problem of turning long-chain carbon molecules into airborne carbon gases such as carbon monoxide, a poison, and carbon dioxide, a heat- trapping chemical considered by many scientists to be a root cause of rising global temperatures.
According to a 1998 U.S. Department of Energy study, mixing vegetable oil with diesel reduces sulfur emissions but actually raises nitrogen oxide emissions, a key contributor to urban smog. Maybe that’s why those looking to clean up local skies and reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuel see bio-diesel and other carbon-based biofuels as the economic equivalent of methadone maintenance -- i.e. a compromise solution for a society too addicted to quit petroleum cold turkey.
“You could say bio-diesel is a transitional fuel like natural gas,” says Quigley of the Center for Sustainable Energy. “It gives us a sustainable resource, and it allows us to put people to work in sustainable jobs while at the same time reducing the export of dollars in exchange for exhaustible fossil fuels that pollute our atmosphere and contribute to global warming.”
Quigley’s program owes its existence to a $2 million Department of Energy appropriation secured by local Congressman JosĂ© Serrano in 2003 to help combat historic air quality problems in the Bronx. As director of the program, Quigley would love to see a bigger local emphasis on technologies that get rid of the emissions issue altogether, technologies such as fuel cells, photovoltaic systems and wind turbines. As a realist, however, Quigley recognizes that bio-fuels are an important first step -- one that could, in time, tilt the free market to these other energy alternatives.
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Tar Beach, those black tarred rooftops where regular New Yorkers got their summer tans, is celebrated in song, in movies like “On The Waterfront” and in a well-known quilt and children’s book by Faith Ringgold. But if they evoke the same kind of nostalgia as stoop ball and stick ball, those roofs turn out to be bad for the environment.
The asphalt and concrete trap sunlight and heat and contribute to what scientists call the “urban heat island” effect that makes the city as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the suburbs. The difference in temperature translates into some $100 million in additional energy costs per year.
That is why a movement is growing to replace New York City’s iconic rooftops with something cooler, literally.
A cool roof, or “white roof” -- as simple as a basic coating of light-colored water sealant – is the roof of the future in New York, says Laurie Kerr, an architect in the Office of Sustainable Design, the eco- conscious division of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction. “The city controls maybe one in ten buildings in terms of square footage. Over the next 20 years, all of those buildings should have cool roofs.”
But others are pushing an alternative -- a “green roof,” in effect a rooftop garden, with plants (even trees) atop a layer of soil.
Common in Europe, and growing more popular in American cities out West, green roofs remain a challenge in New York.
“Roof tops are an enormous wasted resource,” says Leslie Hoffman, executive director of EarthPledge, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that has helped build green roofs atop eight local buildings, including the Rheingold Gardens building in Bushwick, a 250-unit senior housing facility. Her organization’s efforts are paralleled by Sustainable South Bronx, the Hunts Point non-profit that recently opened a demonstration green roof project atop the American Banknote Building. In an interview with WNYC at the time of the installation, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion said the borough was home to at least nine green roof installations. “We can’t force anybody" to install green roofs, Carrion said, "but we are certainly creating incentives by saying we will be very supportive of your project."
Expanding that support to the rest of the city could take some time. Green roofs, while attractive to look at and useful when it comes to minimizing both heat and water runoff, are roughly five times as expensive as the typical roof installation.
Cool roofs demand less of an investment from private property owners and less paperwork for city contractors. With the recent signing of a new law mandating that all major city- funded construction and renovation projects meet energy conservation standards laid out by the U.S. Green Building Council, Kerr from the Office of Sustainable Design expects most projects to go with the easier white roof method.
Green roof advocates, meanwhile, are working hard to boost the economic case for green roofs in the hopes of convincing city leaders to set up incentives for builders and property owners.
“The problem is the reflective roofs don’t deliver one twentieth the benefits of a green roof,” says Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a Canadian advocacy group.
Peck points to green roof’s ability to limit storm water runoff, something the city needs to do in order to bring its sewage system in compliance with the Clean Water Act. The largest green roof on record, a 10.4 acre installation at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge River truck factory, is expected to cut that facility’s storm water runoff -- and the resulting sewer bill -- in half. If New York City were to take a cue from Portland and some European cities and charge building owners for the amount of storm water they send into local sewers, the return on investment issue would quickly balance out.
Peck also points to green roofs’ ability to filter pollutants and to remove carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Like their counterparts in urban forestry, green roof promoters are hoping to come up with models that put a dollar figure on such services.
Should those dollar figures become available, however, they might not be enough to convince individual building owners to make the switch, says Stuart Gaffin, a scientist at the Center for Climate System Research at NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Sciences. Earlier this year, Gaffin served as host of a graduate seminar on green roofs. In their attempt to put together a model on the environmental benefits of green roof installation, however, they found most of the benefits appearing at the societal level, as opposed to the individual property owner.
“You try to get the economic benefits to the owner and you run out of things pretty quickly,” says Gaffin. “There aren’t a lot of direct cost-benefit effects.”
Gaffin says he has deals with two local schools -- one public, one private -- to install and monitor green roofs. With these plots, he hopes to build up local data which can then be used to convince the city council to offer additional incentives for green roof owners.
Gaffin and his students are joined in their effort by Diana Balmori, the architectural designer of the city’s largest green roof, atop the Silvercup Studios facility in Long Island City. Built with the help of Earth Pledge and the New York Power Authority, the installation is the first of what Balmori expects to be two major installations in that neighborhood. Balmori plans to use rainwater data from both installations to push city leaders to follow in the footsteps of their Seattle and Chicago counterparts and add green roofs to the evolving “green building” concept.
“It would be really great if New York grew some industries around this, but it hasn’t reached the critical mass to make it affordable enough for the majority of the population,” Balmori says. “With just some minimum incentives, that turnaround could happen. All we need is that relatively small push.”
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