What's in your landfill? Garbage 101

On the coldest day of the year, we went to Wellington’s Happy Valley landfill on Saturday with about 40 other parents and kids.  What an eye-opener!

What we learned
In NZ, over one million tons of waste to landfill are generated by the household sector per year. That's an average of 260 kg (572 lbs) per person or 676 kg (1,487 lbs) per household. Over 44% of that waste is organic, with 25% of the total being kitchen waste, a huge proportion! Compare this with 11% for paper and 10% for plastics.

Canadians produce 2.2 kg of waste a day each. (Yes, I did the math... New Zealand's numbers are better, but that doesn't let us off the hook.)

North America only has 8% of the world's population, but consumes 1/3 of the world's resources and produces 1/2 of the world's garbage!

Methane production
Methane from the decomposing rubbish at the plant now gets used to produce electricity for 1,000 households. Even more methane is vented to atmosphere (what a waste!). Methane is a significant greenhouse pollutant and harnessing it to produce electricity makes good sense from both an economic and environmental viewpoint. There is enough methane being produced to run at least one other generator.

What was surprising
Here in Wellington the “solids” from the local sewage system (yummy...) get pumped across town to the landfill and dried out. They used to get composted and mixed with the compost produced by the landfill for sale. Bit of a problem though: the locals are building homes closer and closer to the landfill and have complained about the smell, so this great fertilizer is getting buried.

Most amazing rubbish!
The zoo buried both a giraffe and hippopotamus in the pet cemetery section of the landfill.  Now that ought to stump some archaeologist in a few hundred years.

Mining in the future
The guide suggested that people in the future might start to mine landfills for metals. One day, we'll run out of good mining (and maybe stop cutting down mountains), and then it will be economical to dig all the metal out of the landfills around the world and use that. I remember reading that in the 1970s!

Interestingly, it's been shown that landfill mining is economically feasible, although market rates for plastics, metals, and fuels can also have an impact on potential profitability. 

Things thrown into landfills take a long time to break down -- food can take from weeks to years; a plastic bag from between 50 and 500 years!  We need to stop making so much waste!

• How can you find out where your trash goes?
• How can your family reduce what it sends to landfill?
• What can you do?

Cool resources if you want to learn more

• Check out the lovely new Rubbish and Recycling book from Gecko Press
• Great Canadian resource for kids
• NZ resource to learn about waste audits and NZ E-waste Day Sept 12
• Global Landfill Mining Conference

And make sure to let us know how you go in the comments!

Letter from The Tooth Fairy

When our 7-year old son was born, my husband and I asked the Tooth Fairy a special favor. Instead of having her give money, we asked her to deliver small crystals or interesting stones to replace lost teeth. Since then, losing a tooth has been a much looked-forward-to tradition in our house. A few weeks ago a lovely family friend sent an unexpected envelope ‘TO THE TOOTH FAIRY’ with some gems and stones gathered over years of traveling. Today, he received the following reply:

Dear Supplier:

Please find following, your feedback rating from ToothFairy Inc. on this morning’s receipt by a child of your gem via ToothFairyExpress (because it absolutely, positively, had to get there).

We are very pleased to inform you that ToothFairy Inc. chose from your selection the little cut garnet, which, on receipt, was awarded an A+ rating. The rationale for this rating is as follows:

1. Presentation
   All crystals and stones were received by ToothFairy Inc. in excellent condition. Extra credit was awarded for the accompanying information, such as: "I found this one in a high Himalayan valley called Valley Of The Flowers" and "This is from a tiny island beach in Barbados".  Descriptions such as "gleaming gold drop" were also worthy of distinction.
2. Child Response
   The Extraction/Expectation equation states that the harder it is to extract the tooth, the higher the expectation of reward. In this case, difficulty of extraction was well above average. Parents were requested to gaze at, wriggle and comment on various stages of the tooth’s extraction, every hour, for a week. In addition, they were expected to grimace at every tasting of blood and description of how many “strings” the tooth was hanging by. The father was requested to pull the tooth out using the thread-to-door-handle method and when he chickened out (Dad, that is) there were tears. The child cried too. Upon the father trying to manually extract the tooth with large sausage-fingers, slippage and banging of the child’s mouth occurred, with more tears. Thus, expectation of reward was correspondingly high.

We are therefore pleased to inform you that your garnet well exceeded expectation. For an A+ rating there must be at least 2 positive comments. These were:

• “This is really precious! (No kidding, this one actually is).  It's beautiful!”
• “Cool! I was wondering if I’d be disappointed like last time* but I wasn’t!”

(* ToothFairy Inc. has since switched suppliers from Mum&Dad Co.)

Accordingly, we award you ‘Supplier of the Year’. We have included front row tickets to the next extraction. Please allow yourself two weeks as it will be the right eye-tooth and half-hourly inspections will be required. Please also plan to stay in the house as the parents will be assisting ToothFairy Inc. in their search for the next stone, on a tiny island beach in Barbados.

Yours faithfully,

Gem Dispatch, ToothFairy Inc.

The role of kids in the climate crisis

This Friday, I have the remarkable privilege of going to Melbourne to train with Al Gore and become a Climate Project Ambassador.

As part of this training, I have committed to giving a minimum of ten presentations of (my adapted version of) An Inconvenient Truth. Amazingly -- and happily -- several schools have been waving their hands in the air for presentations: Pick me, pick me! The schools are for small-to-medium children, from five-year-olds to teenagers. They have recycling programs or they're enviro-schools or they're reading A Hot Planet Needs Cool Kids. And for all of them, climate change is a front-burner, hot button issue.

The popularity of the topic isn't generated from the top down, either. In a fantastic sign of the times, my friend Kim's son Oscar, aged 10, sent me a tweet when he heard about the Climate Project training. "I hear you're going to meet my hero Al Gore," he messaged. "What's the story?"

We adults are fast becoming the followers, not the leaders, when it comes to taking action. Take a look at the myriad youth movements going on, from It's Getting Hot In Here to the UK Youth Climate Coalition to TakingITGlobal to 350.org's many youth actions. If we didn't already feel a sense of urgency to behave more responsibly with our Earthly home, we should quickly develop one, if only to save ourselves from the embarrassment of being on the receiving end of our children's disdain.

We need to get our own acts together, and then we need to make sure we're giving kids whatever they need to create a radical shift in the global culture.

A couple of weeks ago, my eight-year-old nephew sent me a picture he had drawn of "New Zeland". It was two brown islands -- reasonably accurately shaped -- on a sea of blue. I called to thank him. "You're such a good drawer!" I enthused. "I can almost see my house!"

"Really?" he asked, skeptically. "I didn't even draw your house!"

Despite millenia of evidence to the contrary, we still suffer from the delusion that we can put things over on our kids -- but it's plain we can't. They know we're not doing our best for the planet. They know we've been slack and are being slack. They know they didn't draw our house.

And they're not afraid to call us on it. If you haven't already, take 18 minutes out of your day and watch John Doerr's TED talk -- and then come back here and tell me whether you can appreciate his shame at the thought of letting his daughter down. I know I can.

One of the reasons I'm grateful to be involved with MiniMonos is the virtuous cycle I know it will create. The kids I know are smart, inquisitive, and joyful; when they're watching, we're forced to stand a little straighter and try a little harder. When they refuse to accept the excuses that hold us back, we grownups are forced to reexamine those same excuses. When they lead us in the fight against climate change, we will have no choice but to follow.

And I will follow them. Will you?