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Friday, August 12, 2005

Environment - Several interesting stories today

Two very interesting stories today, both long, both from the NY Times. (Remember that the NYT stories are only free available for a week.)

This story, by NYT environmental writer Felicity Barringer, is headlined "Growth Stirs a Battle to Draw More Water From the Great Lakes." It begins:

WAUKESHA, Wis. - Time was when Waukesha's mineral-rich water was coveted by Milwaukeeans and Chicagoans, who scorned the Lake Michigan water lapping at their shores. In 1892, one speculator even tried to pipe the city's water to Chicago for the coming World's Columbia Exposition, until aroused Waukeshans trained pistols, pitchforks and fire hoses on the pipe layers, who retreated.

What a difference a century makes. Waukesha has sucked so much water from its deep aquifer that it is now looking to the vast blue expanse of Lake Michigan, just as Chicagoans once eyed its water.

But the authorities who control some of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world are not sure that any of it should go to communities like Waukesha, which is 15 miles from the lake's shore but outside of its watershed.

Their fear is that without strict rules on who gets Great Lakes water and who does not, water-starved western cities will eventually knock at the door.

"Today the economics are not there to say we're going to take all the water in the Great Lakes and ship it to Phoenix and Vegas," said Todd Ambs, the water division director of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. "But water's not getting cheaper. Twenty-five, 30, 40 years from now, the economics are going to be different. We've got to have a system in place to deal with that."

Fights over who owns and who deserves water have long been a part of life in arid states like California and Nevada. But as the spread of exurbia has more than consumed the savings of a generation's worth of technological improvements like low-flush toilets, even places not perennially in danger of running dry have become jealous of their water.

Akron, Ohio, had to ask for Great Lakes water in the late 1990's. It received permission, but Lowell, Ind., was turned down.

And Michigan has told a Nestlé subsidiary that if it wants to increase production of its Ice Mountain bottled water in Mecosta Township, Mich., all of the additional water pumped out of the ground must be "delivered and sold within the Great Lakes basin." The company is fighting the requirement in federal court.

Don't miss this great graphic of water issues facing the Great Lakes basin.

A second NYT story, about landfills, is headlined "Rumors of a Shortage of Dump Space Were Greatly Exaggerated." Some quotes:

Workers at a landfill in Orange County, Calif. - as if tamping down the contents of a wastebasket - regularly pile one million cubic yards of dirt atop a football field-size section of the giant dump. Six months later, the workers scrape the dirt aside and the dump's surface has fallen 30 to 40 feet, making space for yet more trash.

"It's just amazing," said Mike Giancola, deputy director of the county's waste agency.

Orange County's method is part of a remarkable productivity story playing out in the trash business, quietly saving consumers, businesses and municipalities billions of dollars a year. It is an unlikely industry for such a leap in efficiency.

Simply put, operators of garbage dumps are stuffing more waste than anyone expected into the giant plastic-lined holes, keeping disposal prices down and making the construction of new landfills largely unnecessary. * * *

The productivity leap is the second major economic surprise from the trash business in the last 20 years. First, it became clear in the early 1990's that there was a glut of disposal space, not the widely believed shortage that had drawn headlines in the 1980's. Although many town dumps had closed, they were replaced by fewer, but huge, regional ones. That sent dumping prices plunging in many areas in the early 1990's and led to a long slump in the waste industry.

Since then, the industry and its followers have been relying on time - about 330 million tons of trash went into landfills in the United States last year alone, according to Solid Waste Digest, a trade publication - to fill up some of those holes, erase the glut and send disposal prices skyward again. Instead, dump capacity has kept growing, and rapidly, even as only a few new dumps were built.

How could that be? Waste companies and municipalities have fit much bigger dumps than originally permitted onto existing acreage, piling trash deeper and steeper, and vastly expanding permitted capacity. They are burying trash more tightly, so that each ton takes up less space, increasingly using giant 59-ton compacting machines guided by global positioning systems that show the operator when he has rolled over a section of the dump enough times. They cover trash at the end of the day, to keep it from blowing away, with tarps or foam or lawn clippings instead of the thick layers of soil that formerly ate up dump capacity.

Some operators are blowing water and air into landfills to hasten rotting and thus the shrinkage of buried garbage piles, creating more capacity.

Each practice is fairly prosaic, and many operators have yet to adopt the improved methods, but taken together the waste industry is in the early stages of the kind of increase in efficiency more typically seen in technologies like computer chips and turbines that generate electricity.

There is much more to this story. And see this graphic illustrating "the net increase in capacity for the combined dump sites of the nation's three largest waste haulers."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 12, 2005 06:11 PM
Posted to Environment