Burning Bushes

A while ago, having nothing but time on my hands and the overwhelming urge to do something other than housework for a change, I went out and drastically cut back the hedges that blocked nearly all the light from the living room and kitchen windows. It took hours, chopping away with a cane knife, cutting tree-sized limbs with a chainsaw, and trying (but not really succeeding) to finish-cut with an electric hedge trimmer.

By the time I was done, I had light streaming into previously dark rooms, and a pile of hedge-trimmings the size of a Buick.

As I started stuffing said trimmings into the yard-waste can, and then black plastic bags, I started to reminisce about my childhood, when late summer would include at least one big bonfire of collected yard-waste, scrap wood, and (shocking by today's environmental standards) whatever other flammable junk we had to get rid of.

You can't do that most places these days. Here in Port Townsend, you either have to set your yard-waste out for pick up (which you pay for) every-other Thursday, or pack it up and drive it to the dump (where you have to pay).

And there, in the crisp autumn sun, I had my Moses-moment.

First, it dawned on me that these rules do nothing to "help the environment", rather they wrap a green cloak around a government mandated monopoly on waste disposal. Think about it for a minute. You are required to send this material either in your own (gasoline burning) vehicle or the city contractor's (diesel burning) truck to a central location, where it is chopped up and ground down (by a diesel-powered chipper) and placed in a huge pile to compost (where the anaerobic bacteria deep in the pile will leach out large amounts of methane, which does ten to twenty times more greenhouse gas damage than CO2), until it has decomposed enough to be shipped out in container trucks (diesel again) to garden centers to be sold as potting soil, which is then taken home in the back of consumer's cars and trucks, burning fuel all the way.

Whereas if I burned the stuff right here in the garden (its mostly laurel trimmings, which rot very very slowly but burn well, as they are rich in oils) there is a much smaller amount of air pollution (nicer smelling too, laurel makes a sweet smoke), and the ash and charcoal (trapped carbon) can simply be spread back into the soil. To top off the absurdity, our house, and nearly every house on the street has a wood-burning stove, all of which were blazing away.*
*For the record, no, I can "just burn all the trimmings in the wood stove" as they will burn wet and oily, risking a chimney-fire like the one we just had, a result of the previous tenant not being aware of this fact.

It got me thinking of other "greenwashed" practices that we all feel obliged to follow, yet aren't all that ecologically sound.

Take recycling. While you can still get paid for some recyclables in Iceland, very few places in the the Northwest will pay you to do so. That didn't used to be the case. These days, you have to pay someone (either directly, for curbside recycling, or indirectly for the fuel to take it to the dump) to recycle. Not to mention that the city-contractors drive two separate vehicles, one to pick up trash, one for recyclables, doubling the carbon emissions. After which the dump uses petroleum burning vehicles to shred, compact, bale, and ship these materials to distant plants to be recycled into new goods, which are then shipped all the way back here.

It would be one thing if the recycling took place locally. * If waste was recycled into useful products within a hundred mile radius, to be re-sold primarily within that radius, then the net reduction on greenhouse gases, resource depletion, and local unemployment would certainly justify the resultant pollution. But if the purpose is to simply provide a cheaper set of raw materials to distant manufacturers, is it really much "greener" than resource-extraction (mining, logging, etc).

*It may in regard to paper products, as there is a paper mill not a half-mile from the dump. If not, that's just fucking criminal.

Or take electric and electric-petroleum hybrid cars. Is the amount of pollution and resource extraction, not to mention the fuel spent on shipping material and finished products, that goes into manufacturing these vehicles counter-acted by their reduced CO2 emissions? Wouldn't it make more sense to simply (and it is simple) convert existing vehicles to run on renewable fuels (like methane, wood-gas, ethanol, and biodiesel/plant oils, all of which if produced locally for local sale are if not fully carbon-neutral* then at least much less harmful than petroleum fuels) or further convert them into steam/internal combustion hybrids (which do not require any of the scarce, hard to refine chemicals and minerals required by gas/electric hybrids and "cutting edge" electric cars)?

*Depending on how they are produced, some of these fuels actually result in a net reduction in CO2, not just neutrality.

In the end, recycling, hybrid cars, and yard waste disposal are not about "saving the planet" as much as they are about "insuring profits". The garbage company that hauls away my yard clippings and recyclables makes a profit from the monthly charge to our household, and a further profit from the resale of the valuable materials (paper, plastic, aluminum, glass, scrap-metal, wood-chips, compost/potting soil etc) to whoever will pay the highest price, whether near or far, for purposes ecologically sound or not. The car companies that tout their newest "ultra-efficient" hybrid wonder wagons don't tell you about the waste their production causes, nor that you could reduce your bills along with your "carbon footprint"* by simply converting your existing car to run on locally produced renewable fuel. They don't want to talk about those things. They want you to buy their cars.

The irony is, if I wanted to flaunt convention, regulation, and the like, and just set the remaining pile of trimmings alight, I'd likely have to use a either a petroleum-based accelerant to start the fire, or some plant-oil shipped here all the way from California, or paper produced locally, shipped thousands of miles to be printed, then thousands of miles to be filled with product, and then thousands of miles so I could buy it.

You just can't win...