Not In My Backyard
- Ted Ross

When Mortar Board invited me to participate in their “First Lecture - Last Lecture Series,” I was told the topic choice was wide open - whatever I wanted to do.  My initial reaction was to
do something light, where humor would carry the talk.  However, the longer I thought about it, the more I came to the realization that this was probably my last opportunity to lecture a somewhat
captive audience. I also have been troubled by a series of events over the last several years and disturbed by some trends that I noticed while preparing for my economic geology course I taught
winter term.  The result is, instead of doing a series of one liners and telling a few war stories, I will sieze the opportunity to vent my concerns in the talk entitled “Not in My Backyard.”

What I will propose to do is document a series of events that have essentially been raised as environmental issues over the past several years and discuss the public response to these issues, hence the title of the talk.  I will also interject reasons the events surfaced in the first place, express my concerns about present use patterns is the U.S. and how they effect mineral economics, and then conclude by supporting a redefined mineral economics model proposed by World Watch that will better serve us as we enter the next century and beyond.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 provided funds to select sites for storage of nuclear waste of both high and low level.  Low level includes the machinery, equipment, cleanup residues, and protective clothing used at nuclear power plants hospitals and research labs.  High level includes the highly radioactive liquid, and solid residues from spent nuclear fuel rods and weapons production.

Originally there were sites in 17 states.  Wisconsin was one of the 17 where they identified 19 potential sites in the PreCambrian granitic rocks of the Puritan and Wolf River batholiths.  The site decisions were based on cursory notions of stable basement complexes of unjointed or unfractured crystalline rocks and no groundwater.  Without any on-site studies, the petitions and notions of not in my backyard surfaced.  In 1983, the Wisconsin Radioactive Waste Review Board went on record as opposed to a site in Wisconsin and in April 1983 Wisconsin residents voted a referendum question on the issue wihth 628,414 opposed (89%) and 78,327 in favor (11%).

Reaction was the same in many of the other states.  Eventually, the list was cut down to 9 sites and then to 3 - Permian salt layers in Deaf Smith County, Texas; basalt lavas at Hanford, Washington; and volcanic rocks (tuffs) at Yucca Mountain, Nevada.  In 1987 Congress stopped the studies as a cost-saving measure and designated Yucca Mountain as the nation’s disposal site.  No real hard science was involved, but it ended up on federal land that was formerly a nuclear weapons test area. If you circulate a petition against the project amongst the neighbors you don’t get very many signatures.  It wasn’t too many people’s backyard.  Very little science went into the choice. Is it a good site?  We’re still working on it.  There are some concerns.  My biggest problem, we’re doing the science after the selection.  It was scheduled to open in 1998 and the federal government has been taxing the power industry since the original act of 1982 to fund the study.  There’s now a lawsuit by 30 power companies over this issue.  It may not be on line until 2010.

Several years ago, Appleton Papers bought land in Calumet County and the Town of Harrison for a landfill site for their waste products.  Disposal fees prompted them to open their own landfill.  Immediately, protest signs and petitions went out and Not in my Backyard was the reason.  Appleton Papers was prepared, they did their homework, had engineered a good working plan and they are in operation today.  It was a rural site with not too many immediate neighbors.

There was a similar public outcry and reaction in the siting of Winnebago and Outagamie County landfills.  They moved forward because the general populace recognized the need for engineereed landfills and the opposition was only those property owners adjacent to the proposed sites and they were required state and federal law.  Recently a group of investors attempted to develop a wind farm for power generation on the Niagaran escarpment near Sherwood.  Although such operations are environmentally friendly, they’re not aesthetically popular.  “Not in my Backyard” opposition prompted the group to pull their proposal.

I also want to mention the current area of hot debate in the valley - the test project to remove PCB laden sediment from the Fox River.  Initially the contaminated sediment went to the Winnebago landfill, however, public reaction, led by those residents residing in the vicinity of the landfill, resulted in the county supervisors reversing their decision and stopping the test project last fall before it was completed.  Since that time, a study group has reassured the supervisors that the landfill is engineered to contain the sediment and they’ve reversed their position.

The final example I will review is the nationally publicized ore body near Crandon, Wisconsin, a major copper sulfide ore body located many years ago by Exon.  For many years, it was a joint venture by Exon and a Canadian Company Rio Algom.  Public pressure and low metal prices resulted in Exon sitting on the project for years. However, recent shifts in the mineral industry resulted in the movement to bring the mine online.  Initially, it was a project by the joint venture but recently Rio Algom bought Exon out.  Playing by the rules in place the requisite impact statements and site studies have been filed and predictably the mines location in the Wolf River watershed, adjacent to tribal lands and in an area of summer residents, has led to the ultimate movement of “Not in my Backyard.”

The pressure to stop the mine reached Madison.  Initial attempts were made to tax the mine to the level where it could not afford to operate.  Interestingly, that attempt was thwarted by lobbying by one of the oldest and strongest industries in the state, the manufacturer’s of mining equipment.  Presently, the project is still on hold as Rio Algom is attempting to comply with the legislators second effort, which is the requirement that they have to demonstrate an example of a like sulfide mine that has been operated for 10 years without any environmental damage and a second like sulfide mine that has been closed for 10 years without any environmental damage.  Rio Algom has submitted the names of two mines as examples and they are currently under review.

What bothers me about this project is I was approached by a retired paper company executive to sign a petition to stop the mine.  The individual had parked his $40,000 car outside my office window in Stephenson and upon questioning his motives learned he had a summer home in the Crandon area.  Emotion, not sound science, was carrying the initiatives and decisions. The examples I’ve just cited are where industry has proposed a project either to provide our materials and energy, or to take care of the waste that our present economy has produced in meeting your demands in the marketplace.

 Now, I’m not against signing petitions, but before we do we have to clean up our act.  It’s time to overhaul our values and lifestyles as we enter the next millenium. Compared to the rest of the world and I’m talking about the more developed countries and not the less developed countries, our material demands and energy demands can only be described as obscene.  Our per capita use of grain, energy, and materials is the highest in the world.  In the U.S. each citizen requires 3 tons of raw materials per month, or 37 tons per citizen per year.  For 270 million people, that comes to 10 billion tons per year.  Our materials use over the last century has increased 18 times. In the 1990’s, the University of British Columbia developed the concept of the “ecological footprint.”

 
-the amount of land needed to sustain the supply of resources for a  population
-the land needed to absorb the waste generated by that same  population
In the U.S. our footprint is larger than our landmass.
*To sustain the entire world population at a U.S. consumption level  would require 3 earths.
*We in the U.S. use 1/3 of all the world’s materials, yet we are only  roughly 4.5% of the world’s population.

 Our world leadership position has made our high-consumption, materials intensive economic model the desired development path for dozens of countries and billions of people.  Now considering that of the 270 million people some are living at poverty levels and others are destitute, the homeless living in a cardboard box that means that some of us are really putting excessive pressure on our materials and energy resources. I don’t have to look very far to recognize where that pressure is coming from.  In fact all I have to do is look in my own backyard.

 We’re building 4000 and 5000 square foot houses, yet statistically the family unit is getting smaller.  Some of those 4000 and 5000 square foot homes house 2 people.  We have 3 car garages to house our cars and toys.  We’re building bigger and fancier kitchens and using them less yet half of us, the adults, are overweight.  Back to that 3 car garage.  We need two cars becasue we’ve built in a low density housing pattern.  To build and maintain this style of living, suburbs, requires 2 -1/2 times the materials and energy of high density housing.

 Behind one of the garage doors there’s probably a van or sedan and behind the second there’s probably an SUV.  We don’t need SUV’s!  We don’t need them in the frost belt let alone out of it.  Madison Avenue has convinced you, peer pressure, I don’t know where you got the idea, but you really don’t need it.  Society doesn’t need the pressure SUV’s puts on our material supply to build or our energy resources to keep them running.  Recently the EPA recognized we don’t need their air pollution either.

 Remember that copper mine that Rio Algom wants to open at Crandon?  That’s the one you signed the petition to stop.  They want to mine it now, and if it happens to be in your backyard, recognize that they can’t move the deposit.  They have to mine it now so they can wire your 4000 square foot house and your SUV.  They need to mine it now because it’s a proven reserve and the world’s proven reserves of copper are only projected to last another 25-50 years.

 By the way, all the electronic devices and toys in your house and SUV require gold and silver for the contacts and with a projected world reserve of only 10-25 years for these metals, be prepared to go through your jewelry drawer and turn your baubles in for recycling.
 When you fire up the lights of your 4000 square foot house, recognize that the uranium that fuels the power plant that supplies your power is down to a world reserve of 25-50 years.  The same is true of the world’s oil supply needed to make the gasoline to keep your SUV running.  Fuel cell technology better evolve quickly or we’ll all be taking the shoe leather express to work.

 We just can’t seem to exercise reasonable controls on judgments on what we think we need or want.  Do we really need a $25,000 boat with a 200 horsepower motor loaded down with electronic gear to go fishing? We’re in search of a 7-inch perch or  a 17-inch walleye.  Isn’t this a little overkill?
 Snowmobiles and jet skis!!  Don’t throw your chubby thighs over the seat of an obnoxiously noisy, energy and material consuming snowmobile and tell me that’s your recreation.  Get on some cross-country skis or snowhsoes and take some pressure off our resources and environment, plus help yourself while you’re at it.  Remember 1/2 of us are overweight.  Jet skiis!! - a true toy and a noisy, obnoxious polluting toy at that.

 We simply must make some changes in our lifestyle.  If we don’t change our ways, the future does not look very bright, in fact, it will be downright dismal.  We simply can’t continue on our current use and abuse patterns.  Other developed countries have problems too, but not as bas as the U.S.  We are supposedly the world’s leader, and we must demonstrate that by changing our ways.  Keep in mind global advertising spends about $450 billion trying to convince the entire world to buy or choose certain products and a lot of that money is spent trying to persuade the rest of the world they should be living like we do in the U.S.

 We’ve mentioned a few of our excesses but there’s more to the problem and eventually the solution to adjust our lifestyle.  As we look at the present economies of the industrialized countries, it’s based on intensive materials use.  Not only are we consuming raw materials at an alarming rate, but because industrialized economies were not tooled for recycling we’ve created massive amounts of waste.  We’ve had to put that waste in that landfill you didn’t want in your backyard.  The waste itself cna be another lecture by itself.  Not only have we created massive amounts of waste during this unique, materially intensive century but we’ve also created unusual byproducts which have damaged human and environmental health.  If you happen to be a Treckie fan and believe there are higher life forms out in space, I’m sure as they look back and observe us they’ve concluded our sole purpose is to take our material wealth and turn it into waste.

 Our resources are finite.  Somewhere along the line, the general population and our political leadership better face up to that fact.  If future generations are to exist on Planet Earth, then changes have to be made.  World Watch Institute has assumed a leadership role in recognizing such problems as I’ve been discussing, and they propose we change what I’ve been describing and they call “Frontier Economics” to an economy built on durable goods - products with an expandable life - and a service economy to keep such goods operable and recyclable.

 Gardner and Sampal at Worldwatch Institute call for a remaking of the material world by rethinking the structure and purpose of modern economics to include:

 -low materials use
 -restructuring of recycling
 -business shifting from less providing goods to more services
 -a need by consumers to critically assess consumption choices

We must dissassociate materials consumption from economic growth.  Walter Stahel of the Product Life Institute of Geneva, calls the resulting economy a “Lake Economy” in which a stock of material circulates indefinitely.  This is in contrast to today’s “River Economy” where materials flow in one direction.

 We need to dematerialize our industrial economies or in other words reduce the materials needed to deliver the services that people want.  Some argue materials use will decline as economies mature.  Once the infrastructure is in place, and as we substitute materials use, lighter materials, and as restructured recycling programs kick in and service industries sprout there will be a natural dematerialization.  The USGS data shows that betwwen 1970 and 1995 the tonnage of materials used to generate a dollar’s worth of output decreased by 1890.  This was thought to be attributed to the maturation of the industrial economies.  Unfortunately, during the same period materials consumption increased 67%.

 Some people will argue that technological advances will decrease material demand.  That’s not always the case.  We’re using 26% more plastic in cars reducing metal use but it results in over 20 different varieties of plastic that can’t be recycled.  Radial tires last twice as long as bias ply tires.  We can’t retread radials as effectively so retreading has dropped 52% over the last 20 years.

 Another thing we can do to cut material consumption is to make virgin material expensive either by taxes or policy change.  Our 1812 mining law plus other incentives and subsidies are not compatible with the next centuries economy.
 You can still stake a claim and extract whatever value of minerals a deposit may contain for $5.00 per acre fee.  In the logging industry we still spend more money (the government) building logging roads, than we gain from timber sales.

 To reduce global materials use, the greatest reduction wll have to be in the industrialized nations because the less developed nations need to increase materials use just to meet their population’s basic needs.
 Recycling is still not where it should be.  As of 1995 73% of the municipal waste in the U.S. was not recycled.  Recycling as it is currently structured focuses at the end of the pipeline on materials that are easily collected, stripped of foreign matter, and for which there is a market.
 The process of recycling should be restructured so the initial design of the product has recycling built into it.  Different components that are easily separated.  I remind you of my comments of the plastic in automobiles.

 When we are forced into recycling, we can be fairly successful.  Lead used in leaded gasoline and in paint gave rise to disseminated lead in the environment which was recognized as a health hazard.  Legislation outlawed both uses and now we have closed the loop on lead and we are now up to a 93-98% recycle rate.
 We have to thoroughly think of our use patterns on products.  We’re quite proud of our recycling efforts of the aluminum cans.  Keep in mind though that the aluminum can replaced the glass bottle which was in use at times when no one ever heard of recycling and it still had a reuse of 95% and were used up to 100 times.  Refundable deposits are very successful.  Not only are they a good story line for a Seinfeld episode but where they are sizeable they up the recycling rate to 98-99%.

 The goal of the future is to achieve a near zero waste.  In some countries they are taxing industries waste and making consumers pay for their waste by the bag.  A “pay as you throw” system.  Such plans have shown dramatic drops in waste volumes.
 Another avenue to cut back on materials use and waste is industrial symbiosis where the waste product of one industry is the raw materail for a second industry.  A former graduate of Lawrence has a  geologic consulting firm in West Virginia and is currently investigating a symbiotic application.  West Virignia has a lot of chicken farms which have a lot of chicken manure or waste.  They’re testing a biological process that converts the manure to methane which will be used for power generation and an end product with zero pathogens that will be sold as a fertilizer.

 As we look at the future of industry we have to shift manufacturing firms into service providing firms.  Instead of building washing machines a company would provide a cleaning service providing the machines, their repair and their recycling.  They would start by making a product that lasts, is easily repaired, dismantled, and recycled.  For those who insist on their own machines they would essentially lease the machine from the company.
 Currently Xerox corporation is moving in this direction and now consider themselves to be a document service company.  It’s doing more and more recycling of its machines. It’s plan is to get to a remanufacturing rate of 84% and a recycled materials rate of 97%.
 Without dwelling on the obvious, we have to eliminate the trend of personal cars and focus on efficient mass transit.  Even Lee Ioacca sees the handwriting on the wall and is hawking bicycles.  The trucks and cars that join our highways should be replaced by container trains and barges.  Let’s use the Tombiggbe.

  When it comes to operating vehicles in the U.S. we must eliminate the subsidies that encourage the use of cars and trucks.  It’s been estimated there’s roughly a $100 billion subsidy that supports transportation in the U.S.
 Industry besides having to keep the edge in research to develop new technologies should also gear up to substitute.  As an example, we could go from petrochemcials to biomass or from exhaustible hydrocarbon to renewable biomass.  Besides being renewable they are biodegradable and eliminate toxic impact on the environment.  There’s obviously an argument here.  Some people will say that agricultural waste can fuel the biomass industry while others contend it belongs back in the soil to aid fertility.  Also, the agricultural industry requires synthetic pesiticides and fuel-consuming equipment.

 One of the most difficult, if not the most difficult phases of restructuring the economy will be to change individual consumption and buying habits.  We literally have to change our lifestyles as we know it.  We have to buy only what we really need and only what’s healthy for us and the environment.  We have to destroy this notion that some people have that life is some sort of game and he who has had the most toys by the time he dies - wins.
 Another element to take pressure off the material needs in a new economy will be a move in the direction of sharing.  Instead of everyone owning the same tool that we use only occasionally, those who would have occasional use would share its use.  Even today in some more developed European countries, they even share cars, and it seems to be working.

 The next economy will also be structured to accomodate tasks being done by the barter system.  A lot of people laughed at some of the “hippie communes” of the 60’s, but in some areas of California, New Mexico, and Colorado, there are communities that still exist with a wide use of barter in their day to day lives.
 In conclusion, I’d like to return to our first lunar exploration flights.  Technologically, we’ve come a long way since then, but my opinion of one of the great contributions from that era was not the technology but the simple photos of planet earth as viewed from space.  The bright sun illuminating the bright colors of the planet surroudned by the darkness of space.  For me, the photos define dramatically the material limitations of planet earth.  Our material resources are finite.  The sooner we as individuals and the policy makers recognize that fact, the sooner we can move in the right direction to preserve some form of moderated lifestyle for future generations.  For us to act right now, I would simply state that the moves we can make right now are “right in our own backyard.”