———————– ** Fresh Green Beans ** ———————– Grown in Kansas. Eaten Worldwide.

Ah, May in a college town. You might think of graduation, flowers blooming, the start of summer vacations.

How about the not so beautiful sight of Dumpsters overflowing with couches, jeans and junk food wrappers?

The City of Lawrence figures that during the ginormous trash month of May, Lawrencians toss out a staggering 7,243 tons of trash, or 14.5 million pounds for you math-challenged out there. That’s enough to fill more than 600 of the average trash trucks that rumble down your street or alley.

Those trucks haul the food packaging, discarded Britney Spears CDs, soiled mattresses and abandoned Royals t-shirts to Hamm Waste Services in Jefferson County, north of Lawrence. They also abscond with a lot of the good stuff people toss, like still-useable cameras, televisions and cell phones.

All told, in 2007, the citizens and businesses of Lawrence added 72,703 tons of trash – roughly the weight of 10 Eiffel Towers – to the Hamm facility.

But there would be more trash headed to the landfill if the City of Lawrence didn’t offer incentives to recycle materials, especially yard waste and paper products. In fact, the city boasts the highest recycling rate in Kansas, at 34 percent.

What makes reducing waste in Lawrence such a challenge, however, is the transient nature of a college town. In Lawrence, 50 percent of all housing is rental. Students shed residence hall life or graduate from the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University. And every time they move out or move in, they leave belongings at the curb or bulging out of Dumpsters.

On top of all that movement, advertising available city and local recycling services can fall on deaf ears. The information has to be repeated year-round, every year.

KU, which has a thriving recycling program started in the mid 1990s, tackles part of the waste staff and students generate. The university offers a surplus property program, headed by Celeste Hoins of the KU Environmental Stewardship Program, that collects unwanted furniture on campus to offer it to area nonprofits. KU also has a Center for Sustainability, a kind of clearinghouse of resources to help the university reach for a more sustainable future.

The state university can’t offer services down the hill in the high-density “student ghetto,” where the city’s garbage trucks have to patrol daily during peak move-out times. There’s no way to coordinate moving belongings abandoned at the curb to people looking for new stuff.

So, what’s the solution, you ask? It’s time to pitch in. Got a truck or a van? Advertise your services for a day to get some of that furniture to area donation centers. (Try trading pickup service for after move-in beer.) Or, if you’re willing to think big, consider forming a group that could collect such property and find a way to give it to charity or sell it to those who want it, just as the KU surplus property program manages to do on campus. And if you’re one of the people moving, plan ahead, and consider shopping for “new” belongings at the curb or at area used furniture dealers, instead of buying new. -Jen Humphrey

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The 600,000 people of northeast Kansas generate this amount of trash, about 2-3 feet deep, daily at the area’s sanitary landfill. photo credit: Jen Humphrey

Egyptian pyramids have their mummies, and landfills have their petrified banana peels.

Yes, the banana peel your aunt Edna threw out more than three decades ago is almost perfectly preserved, still partly yellow, a mummified testament to the garbage she took to the curb that sunny day in June 1972.

It’s a common misconception that food scraps, condoms, soup cans and celebrity gossip magazines rot in commingled gooey bliss in the landfill. At least, it was my misconception until I became a junk junkie, rifling through the glorious world of garbage.

Engineer Charlie Sedlock at Hamm Waste Services north of Lawrence set me straight. Trash doesn’t decompose. It stays suspended in time in a landfill, largely locked away from air, sunlight, moisture and even the microbes that might go to work on that banana peel.

Under the visible trash at Hamm’s rock quarry and landfill is an entire sewer system that drains away all moisture, leaving the garbage veritably toasty and dry. And above the trash, Hamm employees top the waste with soil and later with prairie grass. Charlie tracks every such tomb and the gases each emits at the 600-plus-acre operation – one of about 1,850 landfills left in the United States.

Those landfills hold the roughly 251 million tons of trash Americans generate annually – or about 4.6 pounds of trash per person, per day.

As in most modern landfills, the chief item you’d find at Hamm is paper – beer cartons, corrugated cardboard, office paper, junk mail and newspapers. On average, the federal government estimates that paper accounts for more than 40 percent of a landfill’s contents.

On one hand, it might not be a bad thing that all the leftovers of our lives, from cat litter to packaging, can be preserved in a landfill. Think of what could happen in a couple hundred years, long after Peak Oil, when we are scraping for scarce manufacturing materials (or that quintessential ugly college couch). Plus, that trash could help us develop energy from landfill methane.

However, when Charlie tells me he can find a banana peel from the year I was born (let alone some toy pharoh with gold peeling paint), it encourages me to keep potential petrifying material out of the landfill entirely.

For more information on getting rid of your goods, check out the city’s recycling and composting, and for big items, there’s freecycling or Larryville.

– Jen Humphrey

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My partner asked me a question yesterday that summed up a lot of my trepidation about blogging. Philosophically, she could have been asking me the old tree falling in the forest question. “If you blog and no one reads it,” she said, “have you said anything?”

Hmmmm. Well, the answer depends on the reason you write.

I’ve pursued English in my post-secondary education for eight years. It’s taken about that long to figure out that writing for me alone isn’t enough. It may be cathartic to puzzle out the most compelling way to write, but it isn’t satisfying. What I really crave is a conversation – inspiring a conversation among other people sometimes, or other times a discussion between writer and reader. That’s what drew me to creative non-fiction and essay writing as a grad student. You can apply your personal lens to experiences (both common and uncommon to the rest of the populace), and maybe they get something out of that, too.

Now that I’ve been properly introduced to blogs (howd’y’do), I see them as a mechanism to bring good writing and that conversation together. Blogs do what I would argue the printed form cannot: they are an invitation. They are, look what happened! Isn’t this amazing? Let’s talk about this and find the other people who are passionate about it, too! There’s an intimacy in their personalities and immediacy in their instant communication.

But communication is not just message sent. It’s also message received. People have to find that blog or you have to find them, and that brings us back to blogging in the forest, so to speak. If you write just for yourself, there isn’t much potential for someone else to hear you. That’s just narcissism and diary fodder and frankly, the blogosphere has enough navel gazing as it is. If you want to bring about change, conversation, make someone think – all those things and more will be reflected in the blogging choices you make. That means cultivating an audience through your personal writing style, the information you present, your credibility, your candor.

So, I’d like to turn the question around. I don’t think the issue is whether you’ve been heard; the question to ask yourself is, how will you make sure that you are heard? How will they make a connection to what you write, what you say, what you present to them, so they can continue the conversation?

I don’t know about you, but after this semesterly experiment is over, I will still be talking about the issues we’ve discussed. And writing. And listening. And hoping (ever idealistic) that it makes a difference. –Jen Humphrey

At the start of this class, Simran handed out SIGG metal bottles students could use and reuse instead of buying disposable plastic bottles or carrying around more permanent hard plastic ones, known as polycarbonate bottles. We learned about the possible toxins used in the manufacture of polycarbonate bottles such as Nalgenes. Today the New York Times posted that Canada is likely to label a plastic common to sturdy bottles as toxic.

Canada would be the first country to declare bisphenol-a, or B.P.A., a toxin that threatens health. BPA has been shown to disrupt the hormonal systems of animals. According to the article, the chemical is used in the manufacture of Nalgenes, baby bottles and the linings of canned foods. -Jen Humphrey

When I skim through the vitriolic comments that follow Adam Werbach’s recent speech, I begin to doubt my critical thinking skills. I don’t accept everything that Adam proposes, but as with his much debated “Death of Environmentalism” speech I appreciate the super complex picture he’s trying to bring into focus. For those who haven’t read Adam’s most recent call to arms, he essentially says the environmental movement needs to meet people where they are, as consumers. If you can’t tap into the Everyday Joe and Jane who shop at Wal-Mart, juggle work and raising kids, you’ll fail to create real, sustainable, long-term change, in other words.

I know that although my personal strategy is to consume less and support local businesses when I can, that doesn’t mean everyone else has that choice nor that they are informed about the ripple effects of their choices. This is one of the reasons Adam – despite the shortcomings of his consumer-tailored BLUE movement – appeals to me. I would like to entertain the idea that if you can reach people to help them understand the process behind their choices, they will make different ones if they have the means, and the all mighty market will sort out the rest (neverminding the fact that the price of goods versus income affects those choices enormously). Or as one person commented, “if people start to understand enough about the manufacturing process to be able to differentiate greener processes from dirtier ones, then they may start to become interested in the manufacturing/industrial system as a whole, and then we can move toward “industrial literacy.’”

Of course, first you have to get through to them, and Adam would have you doing that by appealing to them through shopping.

On Saturday, Lawrence’s farmers’ market opened for the 2008 season amid frigid winds and spiraling snowflakes. A few die-hard folks including me wandered by the market (800 block of New Hampshire, downtown) to see what was there so early in the season. I picked up a dozen eggs and talked with the vendors and a couple of shoppers. People were excited for the prospects for the year. They like participating in something that makes them feel good about the way they feed themselves and their families. I think that’s at the heart of Adam’s argument in some twisted way: consumers who feel good about the (informed) choices they make are going to be the root of change. Ignoring that just because you might want people to consume less won’t get us any closer to an idea of a sustainable future. - Jen Humphrey

Think of the delicate way this word dances on your English-speaking tongue: mariposa, mar-ee-po-sa. Even the sound of it brings to mind something fanciful, perhaps delicate. Now that I have your aural attention, I give you one mariposa, one butterfly, in particular: the monarch. This magical mariposa, which depends on a Mexican sanctuary each winter, faces steep odds for survival because of illegal logging.

Wait – don’t go. This isn’t one of those whiney enviro stories. Instead, I want you to think about your tiny apartment balcony, the yard at your residence hall complex, maybe your flowerbed. Consider inviting a monarch there for lunch and more.

Here’s the deal: KU is home to Orley “Chip” Taylor, professor of entomology and founder of Monarch Watch. Monarch Watch keeps tabs on migrating monarchs and is a bounty of research, conservation and education. There are tagging events every year, wherin Monarch Watch schoolchildren and others put tiny stickers on the critters so researchers can track how far or where they go.

This amazing insect migrates to the place of its ancestor, a place it has never been before. Then it reproduces, and several generations later returns to the same place.

Last week, Chip sounded the alarm about the pending collapse of monarch migration and population. declining Logging in Mexico threatens the butterflies’ winter home, while human expansion — paving, developing, building, etc. — gobbles up the resources of the insects’ summer home, North America. Since 2000, Monarch Watch has counted the three lowest populations at the Mexican sanctuary.

So, now that you’re all depressed, here’s whatcha can do: Create a monarch waystation with milkweed, making a Pony Express reproduction stopping point for their long journey that will assure that at least here, we keep some habitat preserved.

There’s a lot to be learned from these butterflies, Chip said. “If we don’t, we’re pretty lousy stewards of this planet and it bodes poorly for our future.”
–Jen Humphrey

Monarchs in Mexico:

Last night, I returned home late from squeezing in hours at the farm I’m moving to with my partner in June. We spent all day helping her father move new goat kids and their mothers from pen to stall, stall to nursery, nursery to pen. They look like this when they are about five days old:

It’s hectic, exhausting, mucky, work. About a dozen kids were born yesterday, and another eight today. That means a lot of running around as we help coordinate the many births with the few stalls available for mothers and kids to bond together during their first 24 hours. We learn the new ways of this work via fresh straw, buckets of water, screamin’ baby goats (man they can wail!), and lots of bodily fluids.

We are juggling this farming life with our day jobs as best we can. We are remodeling and renting out our city house while remodeling and buying a farmhouse. It’s never-ending chores, and we’ve only just begun. So I asked myself last night as we drove home, why do this? Why work so hard, when it would be so much easier to get up, go to an office job, go home, watch tv, eat take-out, drink a beer, stay numb and go to bed?

We talked it over, and it comes down to living a conscious life, one where we are aware of the impact of the choices we make. It means having a passion for for that life. For me, that comes from a belief so strong in a human right to have food security, that I am willing to change my life to make it happen – even on the smallest scale, one that is now but a glimmer of a vision for a tiny organic, sustainable farm.

Providing accessible, healthy food for ourselves and others takes on greater significance with every article I read about food security. Right now, there are global food shortages and increasing prices worldwide for the foods many cultures hold dear, let alone need to survive. In Egypt, the cost of bread is up 35 percent and cooking oil 26 percent. The price of pasta in Haiti has doubled. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization expects prices to continue to increase for another 10 years, and the poorest of the world will suffer the most. Already, the U.N.’s World Food Program says it’s facing a $500 million shortfall in funding.

I’m not so naïve that I think I’m solving world hunger or anything like that. But I do think that working this hard for good, local food options is what helps me sleep at night. (Being wiped out from double-duty and all that conscious living helps, too!)

Sometimes I feel like I’m giving up a lot to change my life this much. Members of this blog have discussed several times that sacrifice won’t convince others to join you in going green. But I ask you — what would you be willing to change to reach for a greener goal close to your soul?

- Jen Humphrey

Anyone else find this photo creepy?

Something about the sunglasses, I guess. Or the export of American culture.

The photo dipicts clowns who were on hand to celebrate the opening of a McDonald’s in Beijing, and it was part of a New York Times article about the company’s record profits in February. McDonald’s profits jumped 11.7 percent internationally, fueled in part by Leap Year sales but also the weak U.S. dollar. You can get more Mac for your Yuan these days.

I’d like to use that story to play the Six Degrees of Separation game. But instead of people, in this instance, I’d like to look at the short distance between food news. We know McDonald’s is doing well – that’s one data point. Let’s put another marker by the story that University of Washington researchers determined that calorie for calorie, junk food is way cheaper than good-for-you food. According to the researchers, who compared foods in major grocery stores in the Seattle area, you pay $1.76 per 1,000 calories for sugary, fatty foods that have the most calories, but you pay $18.16 per 1,000 calories for the lowest-calorie foods (which are most often better for you, such as fruits and vegetables).

Now, here’s our third degree: increasing food costs overall. We’ve endured a 4.2 increase for meats, fish, veggies, fruit, dairy and eggs in 2007, and there’s a predicted jump of 3.5 to 4.5 percent in food costs for this year. May not sound like much to you as an individual, but when you add in higher fuel costs for gasoline and heating your home, you’re bound to notice it.

And finally, there isn’t enough grain to go around. We’re looking at a worldwide grain shortage brought about in part by more people on the planet, corn-hungry biofuels such as ethanol, and fewer acres to grow food successfully. Or, you can think of it the way Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource put it in this comprehensive look at grain shortages:

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” Basse said. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

When I look at the big, big picture, taking all this news and more into account, I’m scared by what I see coming together. A faltering U.S. economy. More people are cash-strapped and rely on unhealthy, calorie-dense foods. Those unhealthy foods gobble up lots of resources (transportation, grain for animal meats, land and plastics for packaging, among them). Global warming may restrict those resources even further. At the same time, prices for all foods are going up, driven in part by scarcity of supply. Already, some nations have to safeguard grain supplies that are distributed to keep people from rioting.

There’s no easy way to answer such a complex economic web of problems. But I think that if anything would bring about change to the American, Western diet that the world seems to embrace more and more often, it’s going to be the force wielded by economics. If there isn’t enough money to buy meat, or bread or milk, at some point we will be forced to go without it. I wonder how that will affect that jump in profit at McDonalds?*

*And I’m not picking on McD’s as the evil empire, but they are a mom and apple pie export of American living, as well as an enormous corporate success. About 47 million people each day eat at the 31,000 McDonald’s locations worldwide. That’s roughly the entire populations of Greece, Australia and the Netherlands combined.

–Jen Humphrey

I have this weird, unshakable addiction to canned tomatoes. I can eat a can a day as a tasty accompaniment to a salad or soup, but I have been known to open a can of stewed tomatoes and devour them a la carte. Canned tomatoes are my flavor and vitamin C bridge between the end of the fresh tomato season in August and the start of the new season in late June.

But corn is putting an end to my canned tomato addiction.

I found corn in the form of high fructose corn syrup in my can of tomatoes last night. Why would a can of tomatoes need that stuff? Then I read a few more labels to discover it’s in my Glaceau vitamin water, it’s in my breakfast cereal, it’s in the salad dressing I put on the salad, and it’s in the salsa I had.

A cursory Internet search will tell you that corn is used in the production or processing of 2,500 grocery store items out of 10,000. It’s used in manufacturing for things like adhesives, aluminum, antibiotics, asbestos insulation, aspirin, automobiles – and hey, we’re not even out of the A list!

One of the ways it gets into the food supply is via high fructose corn syrup. It’s strange stuff. The New York Times described the process this way: “It starts with corn kernels and takes place in a series of stainless steel vats and tubes in which a dozen different mechanical processes and chemical reactions occur — including several rounds of high-velocity spinning and the introduction of three different enzymes to incite molecular rearrangements.”

Sweeeeet, right?

A few years ago, there was an uproar over high fructose corn syrup. Rates of increasing obesity were commensurate with the increasing presence of HFCS in the food supply. The corn lobby didn’t want manufacturers to lessen demand, which relied on consumer demand, so they put up this slick, innocuous looking site to tell you “all the facts” about HFCS. You have to hunt around for the contact us page before you find out who is sponsoring the site.

Since then, the original studies about the possible relationship between HFCS and obesity have been called into question but I’m avoiding it nevertheless. No more canned tomatoes except for the ones I home can myself.

Reading labels isn’t new to me, especially for calories and fat. But the idea of thinking about them, really reading them to consider what I’m ingesting, is. The fewer the ingredients, the closer you are to eating the real food instead of a chemical cocktail meant to seem like food. I’m going to try to eat the way author Michael Pollan (check out his thoughts on corn) says to: if something has health claims on the label, question whether it’s going to be good for you. Ever see a health claim on an apple?

– Jen Humphrey

I used to live in rural Douglas County where there wasn’t any municipal trash service. We would hold onto our trash for a week and whenever the smell began to overpower the back porch, we’d haul it to town and toss it into an unsuspecting apartment Dumpster. We didn’t recycle. Nothing like living under the same roof with your trash will make you appreciate how much garbage you produce.

So over a period of several years, and after adjusting to the conveniences of city life again, we learned how to reduce our trash. We now recycle everything we can, re-use plastic Ziploc bags, compost our veggie and fruit scraps, and we try to reduce the amount of packaging in our purchases. Not that it’s automatic, though. Sometimes I am incredibly reluctant to do this. More times than I can count I haven’t wanted to shuffle across the yard with the compost or grumbled in the morning when I realized that I hadn’t emptied the reusuable coffee filter from the day before.

But living with the Reduce-Reuse-Recycle mantra has paid off. We now go through about one small (13-gallon size) trash bag every 7-10 days. When I weighed out and photographed my trash, I wasn’t surprised that most of what I photographed wasn’t destined for the brown bin at the curb.

I’d made enchiladas for dinner, had leftovers for lunch before that and began the day with an egg and an orange. Round that out with a bottle of wine, the newspaper and the coffee grounds for the day, the junkmail and the dryer lint (ew), and it doesn’t amount to much. In fact, my total trash weighed in at 4.5 pounds, but the amount I threw away – the cheese bag, the tea bag wrapper, the aforementioned dog waste – amounted to what I’d estimate was about 8 oz (I wasn’t about to weigh my canine’s …um…trash contribution, but I’m confident in the estimate).

But this little experiment took place in winter, not anywhere near a celebration or holiday. At the visit to the landfill on Friday, I learned that the amount of trash spikes in the summer and after seasonal holidays (think of plastic easter grass, heart boxes at valentines day, gift wrapping paper and packaging, etc.). And in a college town like Lawrence, it also increases dramatically in August and May, the typical move-out/move-in seasons. How many of us have hastily left chemicals, furniture, clothes, junk mail and even our recyclables at the curb on move-out day, all because we just wanted to be done with the process?

–Jen Humphrey