we close out with the book: "i know who who you are and i saw what you did." let me tell you what is next. our first panel of the day on this sunday, and it's called "disposable nation. "here's the panelists. edward how many, and anna sklar, brown acres, an intimate history of los angeles sewers. live coverage begins now. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> please take your seats. we're going to start shortly. >> welcome, happy earth day everyone. my name is madeline brand, hess of the madeline brand show monday through fridays at

9:00 a.m. and i'm really excited for the next hour or so to talk trash, and waste, with our distinguished panel here. just to note, please turn off your cell phones if you have them on. also, after our talk the authors will be available to sign books, and answer more questions. we'll also do a q & a so if you have questions, please use the microphones, this is all on c-span. all right. welcome to disposable nation, trash and consequences, and we're going to find out exactly where our waste goes in the next hour. perhaps it's not a pretty sight but it's interesting. at the end we have anna sklar, she has written the book "brown acres, a.m. an intimate history of the los angeles sewers" and

tells the story of the often -- quite a colorful title -- tells the story of the often alarming history of how we dispose of our waste, and she tells the battles to come up with a clean, safe alternative to dumping our sewage in the ocean, which we did for many, many years, anna grew up in los angeles, she has a masters in history from ucla, worked in various city agencies, including the department of public works, has been a reporter for npr and kcet, contributed to "the los angeles times" and other publications. welcome, anna. >> thank you. glad to be here. >> and next to anna is kendra pierre-louis. she has written: "green washed why we can't buy our way to a green planet" and details we cannot buy our way into sustainable it by buying a prius, and wearing ore gappic shirts but it isn't doing much

to help the environment. kendra is the sustainable development editorror just means.com. has a masters agree in sustainability development and worked for the unitees nations program on conventional bio die verity and this is her first program. conclude. >> thank you. >> and to my left, ed humes, who has written, garbology, our love aware with trash, and tells the story of what happens to our garbage. l.a. has one of the biggest land fills in the world and it has its own microclimate. ed humes introduces to us tons of characters in the book, from a billionaire garbage queen to a woman who has so little garbage her annual nonrecyclable waste fits into a mason jar. we'll find out how she does that. he is a pulitzer prize winning journalist, and his last book,

he won an award for a book on juvenile court. welcome. >> thank you. >> i want to start with the general question for all of you, and that is, i think we're all curious about where our waste goes but maybe we don't want to know about it. what made you want to find out so much more that you wrote entire books? let's start with anna. >> it was more or less by accident. the engineer out of a treatment plant, which processes the majority of the city's sewage waste, in 1993, told me, anna, the hundred anniversary the first sawer to the sea is coming up next year. do a little research. and it started. i got fascinate by the characters, the people involved, the fact that we didn't seem to really care much about the environment, and the whole process of what happens to our waste. and how and why we didn't really take care of the environment during the more than 100 years

since the first sewer to the sea, which was built in 1894. >> so then -- >> then i just kept going and researched and visited archives, and then fortunately the john randolph haynes foundation got interested and gave me a grant so i could actually write the book and do more research and paid me to do it. that's how it happened. kendra? >> is it on? >> it should be. >> i was sitting at work one day and i was working for data design consulting firm, and it was this beautiful office that had -- once been a department store and i was looking in my office and i noticed we all had this stainless steel water bottle thats the environmental marker of environmental awareness, and it made me laugh because i remember a time before water bottles, there used to be

water fountains or people were thirsty all the time, but i started piquing my curiosity, what was this whole lifestyle because i tend to lose mine. i'm on my fifth or sixth. and i knew that it couldn't possibly be sustainable even though they were very much marketed as a green alternative and that got me interested in looking at the time life cycle of products we label green and their effect on the larger ecosystem. >> ed. >> i had worked on a couple of earlier books that were environmentally themed. the first one was about kind of eco -- i call them ecobarons, doing innovative things and then the next project was the idea of sustainability stopped being this radical extreme costly idea to american corps and has actually started to become a business strategy and why that has started happening.

but both of those projects, the core problem that was making businesses unsustainable or that was making it very difficult to make advances on improving our energy infrastructure or automobiles, whatever, it all came back to waste. that was the core problem. climate. our flagging economy, energy issues, all at its core, either caused directly by or exacerbated by biowaste, and that seemed like a good followup to me, and what i started finding out what that we have been very poor at keeping track of our trash. we don't really know how much we make. the official trash bible that the epa puts out is all wrong and vastly underestimates the bad and overestimates the good. they think such as recycling, and it seems it was an

interesting exercise to try and get some real data on our trash and find people and communities, businesses, that are discovering ways back from what turns out to be an epic amount of trash we have begun to consider is noblal. >> let's talk about that. you say in your book we now generate seven pounds of garbage a day each of us. seven pounds of garbage a day. and how did we get here? kendra, as you just said, we didn't have these until a few years ago. these weren't ubiquitous so why are we in this predicament right now? ed? >> oh! why indeed. well, just to quantify, per capita we make twice as much waste as americans did in 1960. and part of the reason is that we have these new disposable

products. when plastic was invented it was a miracle substance that could take the place of things like ivory. we don't have to kill elephant anymore to make piano keys and billiard balls. we can make it out of this plastic, and save nature. this miracle substance was to make durable uneven touring things and we still value them. those art deco radios and telephones made out of one of the earliest plastics are cool retroand valuable heirlooms now. but somewhere along the line, we started making much more disposable objects out of the this miracle substance, the plastic forks and bottles, and we dispose of 650 of those a second in this country. it's a colassal level of waste for a product that is essentially a sham, and useless, and we have accepted a level of

waste that no other developed nation generates. the japanese are two and a half pounds of trash per day per person. the danes about four pounds. why are these other robust developed countries getting by with so much less waste than we do? it's a kind of national blindness. i call it an addiction in the book. we have attached prosperity and coupled it to wastefulness in a way that is -- has been unheard of in he history of humanity up until post-world war ii america. it's a whole new experiment. >> it's also an assumption of out of sight out of mind, literally? because we used to, and anna, maybe you can talk to this as well -- we used to dump or trash and sewage in the streets. >> actually, oddly enough there was a time when we valued or trash, particularly in los angeles, where we were actually

recycling and it selling it. then the mayor at the time got a -- it became a throwaway society. in america we value though things away just like with our wastewater. we don't really value recycling it when in fact it should be recycled. far more than we do. so, it's a kind of symptom of america. plentiful. throe it out. >> the problem runs deeper. for example, h & m revealed an a line of organic cotton t-shirt until you realize it is meant to intention lay fall apart in ten uses. it's that fashion. and so there's also on the business side a really big push to get us could consume and dispose things that used to be -- i call it the ikea factor.

things you used to hold for a long time and now everything is disspottable, even furniture. >> televisions, every, we're supposed to turn it over every few years, computers, who has one that is more than five or six years old. the message is, buy a new one. you won't be up to date, and then it becomes, hazardous waste in fact. electronic waste, and most of us don't dispose of it responsibly either. >> there's incentives to be wasteful instead of thrifty. junk male is my favorite. let me see the hands of those want junk mail. 85 billion pieces of junk mail last year were received by americans, all of this theoretically recyclable but less than half gets recycled. if you read it and processed it all and considered it ex-it would cost you eight months of your life over time. and the thing is we subsidize it

because we give a lower than the cost of delivery rate to junk mailers, far less expensive than mailing your check to the phone company or whatever. so we are paying for that junk mail that plagues us, and try to stop it, there are ways -- you're supposed to be able to cancel some of it, but it doesn't seem to work. why are we putting up with that? but that's just one tiny example, and if you -- >> water -- >> waste in everyday lives. >> we use more water than any other nation, 600,000-gallons of water a day. in nations it's 60 gallons a day. so it's really a whole training process that has to be involved, and, yes -- >> this is tap water, by the way, and it costs more per ounce than gasoline does at the

current price. >> we are blessed with the most pure and far reaching municipal water display. the enhave i of the world for our city water supplies. which, by the way, is less than a penny a gallon to use that and put it in a reusable container. it's that power of -- that vision of endless abundance that has captivated our economy since post-world war ii that has allowed a product like this to be marketed in some parts of the world this can save a life but here it's a useless expense and waste. >> i think also the problems run deeper. i used to live in france where electronics are heavily taxed so if your tv breaks you can get a repairman and get it fixed. but we tried to get our tv fixed and the repair mop was, it's cheaper to buy a new one. so there's a penalty for trying to do the sustainable thing in our country.

>> that's true. >> so anna, there is a county south of ours taking our wastewater -- orange county. >> and turning it into potable water. sounds disgusting, and there's a huge x factor there. why are we doing this here in l.a.? >> oddly enough, in 2000 the city of l.a. was poised to re-recycle at least 80 million gals a day being processed in the san fernando valley at a re claimation plant, and they even built a mine that would take the reclaimed water north, quite as processed as the water currently is being processed in orange county, but it was going to take that water and recharge the groundwater at the dam. a couple of politicians didn't like and it people in the valley said, oh, my god, toilet to tap, and they started a campaign. also, there was a beer company involved that was worried about what would happen if their beer

was associated with previously used toilet water. the project was shut down, dwp, which was responsible for doing the program, never really did a public education practice, and even to this day, they constantly have these, quote, stakeholder meetings to find out if people would be willing to accept recycled water into the groundwater table, which then gets mixed with fresh water, actually cleaning up some of the polluted water underground from industrial use. so they've done several of these stakeholder meetings and still hasn't started a program. >> so it's not a question of technological ability or scientific know-how in terms of making it safe to drink. it's a p. r. problem. >> basically both p.r. and economic. orange county did a huge educational program before the embarked 0 then recycling program and the whole houston

embraced it, and it does go to replenish ground water supply and irrigation. we only use a fraction of our wastewater for irrigation basically and some of it is to prevent ocean water from encroaching. balboa would valley is reclaimed water but it's a public relations problem and public education and also a commitment on the part of the utilities, and in this case dwp is one of the most powerful agencies in inclination never had that commitment. >> i want to talk about shifting the kaleidoscope. you profoiled a woman and she is china's first female billion area and became incredibly

wealthy by mining our garbage for paper. tell us her story. >> well, she is, as you say, the first billionaire woman in china, and kind of the queen of trash. she came to america after the tianimen square massacre and started a business with her husband, savaging paper and other items from the los angeles area land fills and selling that on the national market. she gradually grew a viable business and was exporting her scrap paper to china where there was an enormous shortage of paper as their factories and manufacturing base geared up to

operate products for the u.s. this was in the late 80s early outs and her business grew like gangbusters because we only recycle a fraction of material in this country that is available for recycling, and she saw a nitch that she rapidly expanded. today, fast forward, she owns one of the largest paper companies in china called nine dragons paper, and here in america, a company based in los angeles, she is the largest exporter per collar container -- cargo container volume in the united states and our number one export is in fact trash. her company alone accounted for -- well, i don't want to misquote it but a colassal figure of containers and many, many cargo veesfuls worth of scrap paper.

can't remember if it's 300,000 but a big number. china's number one expert to the u.s. is electronics and computers and our number one expert to china is our trash. the line i use is, we have become china's trash compactor. our new economic model. >> the question being, why doesn't the city and county of los angeles mine its own trash? because billions of dollars potentially. >> we're starting to, both in the public and private sector. starting to turn that around but it's -- after all the effort to ramp up recycling, which is really a very inefficient strategy -- better than nothing strategy if -- the better strategy is not to make such wasteful products in the first place but we're only recycling 25% of the things we could be recycling. even san francisco, our national municipal leader in diverting things from land fill, they system look at what they're sending to the land fill.

60 ginormous drug -- big double trucks every day of waste to a land fill, and they say at least a third of that could be recycled but we can't do it. the private sector won't accept it. so there's all these barriers from actually effectively reclaiming that. bill typier, d steiner, the ceo of the world rest biggest waste product. he said if i had the technology i'm sitting on 10 bill worth of material that comes into my land fills. we haven't figured out how to do that in a cost effective way, in a way that will make a profit. and of course that's the barrier. >> we are doing that actually with some of the wastewater, the solids removed. 600-tons a day in l.a. of sludge or what the like to say biosolids, and that's the reused and financially all over the

country, a couple of firms are making a lot of money with sludge that's being removed from the wastewater plants and are being applied to land, sometimes just forestry but most of it is agricultural, and while it's not really directly food-related, eventually it does go into the food chain, but it's -- for example, l.a. has 4800-acre farm in kearn county called green acres, where they grow wheat and they sell that to dairy farms. so it is a profitable reuse, and it's surprising -- at one time we were dumping all our sludge into the ocean. seven miles, and creating this black hole of cal indicate a or brown acres. >> exactly. >> but now it's being reused, and there's some conserve about

biosolids, but the epa set standards what can be in there and if you do pretreatments the solids are valuable for phosphorus and nitrogen and potassium, which farmers would prefer not to have to buy in commercial fertilizers, which then become newt nutrients that spoil the water supply. >> one thing to remember, there's a woman who is mining our trash for paper, shipping it to china, and then making a finished product -- recycling and it making a product out of and it shipping it back to us and we buy that product ourselves and it's labeled recycling paper and it's essentially green but it has been shipped halfway around the world twice. >> exactly. >> i want to follow up on that with you. because you really explode a lot of the comfort we, and i think i speak for a lot of us here, we try to be green in what we buy.

probably more conscious than most if we're sitting in the audience, we care more maybe but we bay maybe the alum newman water battle, drive a prius, only by. he or cotton products but you're saying that's not only not a good idea but might be making things worse. why? >> so, i think everyone should work really hard to live a low con sumptive lifestyle but what has happened over the past decade or so is we have been conditioned to believe that individual actions are a substitute for social action. so we go out and buy a hybrid car and we don't take any thought at all about the larger infrastructure that cars are dependent on. so something like one single mile of one single lane of highway takes between 5,000 and 12,000-tons of resources and emits almost 1,000-tons of co2, so think about one mile of one lane of that highway, and doesn't matter if your driving a hummer or prius or a leaf, that infrastructure that is dependent

on -- it's still releasing toxins. and using all of those resources and taking it a step back, one of the largest places where road building is going on is in detroit, which kind of makes no sense because nobody lives in detroit. and people are really trying to get out of detroit, and bass people are trying to get out of detroit they move though suburbs where there's a tremendous amount of road growth, so they're taking open spaces and putting roads over them and building subdivisions, so cars create entire knew communities that wouldn't be able to exist without the automobile. right so when we focus our attention and what can i do, i can buy this car, we don't pay anyway attention to the larger system that we're still continuing to feed into. and that larger system is wholly unsustainable, so i'm saying you shouldn't drive the most fuel efficient car possible. you absolutely should. but don't they can at that time a substitute for creating real

social change. we're often treating it as an either/or, and really it's a both you. need to live a low con sumptive lifestyle and work on a love and state and national level to get these systems changed, and that is where we get lost in the big tick tour. >> when you talk about the aluminum water bottle, a great example of what you're talking about, because you say that these water bottles are not -- the material to manufacture them is not recyclable material. >> in many cases if you're buying a stainless steel or an alum news water bottle the material going into it, even though they say a sticker, may be recycled, are usually made from virgin materials inch the case of eye lahm -- aluminum water bowls -- one of the reasons we are cutting down the rain forest is to build alum

null plants so people thing hoop not going to buy bottled water anybody but you're both this stainless steel water bottles and they're creating another problem. the other issue with durable battle in general none of us are good at using them because if you use at the rate of water bottle use at the same time this sort of market niche has taken off, the amount of water -- bottled water we consume has not declined. so we're still drinkings as much bottled water as ever and now we're buying these echo logically disruptive stainless steel and durable water bottles. so it's making us consume more and not less. >> i had a question. >> you go first. >> we think when we throw away our plastic water bottles and everything else and we separate our trash and throw it away in the blue containers, that's all being recycled. is it?

>> no. no. sadly. part of that is because we don't throw those things away correctly. if you put the can with the mashed pumpkin paste still stuck to the side. not going to be recycled. depends on what company is doing it. but the recycling injury is concerned about contamination of the material they receive. the greasy pizza box. the con tame nation is not go it costs more to process the material so likely the material, most of our recyclables are contaminated in some way, will be divert evidence away from the recycling chain, diverted towards the land fill. that's not a universal rule but one of the ropes we're at 25% national recycling rate. >> so they have to be squeaky clean, and then perhaps you're wasting water washing out these -- how do you live?

>> unintended consequences. who would have thought that land fills are worse green house gas contributors than burning trash. >> because of the methane? >> because of the methane, and there's solutions that we think make sense sometimes as kendra points out, bite us in the butt. people are fixated on the price of things at the cash register. one way consumer choices can impact waste is if you're looking at the cost of openership. ...

cmac if you use the bad 11 times, it will have a lower than a year's worth of disposable grocery bags that are plastic. if you do by this buy this reusable product and you use it correctly, throughout its life, it is a wise environmental choice. a wise choice.

if you use a plastic bag, then you are worse off then -- >> the point is that one time, you would get fabric reusable bags that would switch to plastic. with fabric, at least you can wash it and wash it. >> i have bags that i got 15 years ago that are still usable. if you keep are using and reusing them, they start to deteriorate, and you have to get new ones. i don't know if that is such a good thing, because again, we are increasing the trash and also the plastic byproduct, as opposed to, like you said, something that can be repaired. or like the mesh bags. people would get mesh bags to carry the groceries in. particularly, in france. it is very to find hard to find a mesh bag. they really promote the plastic

bag and they are not ecologically sound. there is also a point where there isn't -- as we said in this title, there don't seem to be consequences for the average person to change their habits substantially. i think we are talking about something that is much larger than us individually and our individual sense of guilt. correct? >> when we are being bashed to some extent, in certain cities if you want to use a plastic bag, they will charge you to use it. >> but 5 cents? >> yeah, it's not much. >> people don't want to pay the die more than 5 cents. >> actually, it does change

behavior. >> you talked about in ireland, the plastic bags there really were. you can have the back, but you have to pay for it. that has encouraged a different kind of audience. >> you mentioned the driving force of the footprint. the force behind that is it started with an artist who moved into a house and they had to downsize and get into a smaller house and get rid of the things that they accumulated that they didn't need. we throw away things that we thought were durable very quickly. they did a whole thing of rethinking what they should buy and spend. she got very -- more than most people -- she would bring her

own containers to the market and buy in bulk and weight quaker foods, then she would go to the deli and do it again. >> a shot glass. no more impulse buying for me. i didn't even know what i'm spying anymore. she changed that. her husband was very skeptical. she said, let's do some numbers. he sat down and looked at their household budget after she had been on this kick. she saved 40% of their household expenses over all red they have a beautiful house. and now have a college fund for their two kids. they are taking very cool vacations. they have stopped giving things to the children, they say that they give experiences.

they are giving their time and something to do together as a family. this is a cool family. older solutions won't work for everyone, but i think the idea of being less wasteful -- didn't your grandma tell you that if you didn't waste things, you are living a more sensible lifestyle. that's what my grandmother said. it is not a crazy idea that being less wasteful will save you money in the end. >> but the environment, when you are considering industry and the global climate change problem, is that enough? is enough for one family to cut out waste? >> people can get organized. one of the things that is interesting is that we are not just wasteful, but we were polluting the santa monica bay extensively. no one was really doing anything, even though the federal government was financed. then a group of people got together back in 1985.

they became a small group called heal the bay. everyone in this room has probably heard of heal the bay. they were responsible for the changes of a major united states cities, like los angeles, which would have continued to disregard the federal requirements to give full treatment to of its wastewater, which it wasn't doing. he'll do they really pushed not for more sophisticated environmental movements. the movement grew. they were able to do something. as everyone has pointed out, it is not just on the individual side. if you can focus on something they think is important, maybe get together with some friends and see how you can put pressure to change our behavior, whether it is buying publicproducts at

the market or replacing things. i also think it is important to focus that businesses are doing this too. apple unveiled their third ipad. i don't know what version they are on now. there is a reason why. businesses need to grow more this year than it did the year before. our economy needs to do the same things. it is not enough to have these conversations individually or within our community. we really are going to have to have very good questions about how we want to structure society moving forward. the way that we are structured right now, is too much consumption. there was a book that talked about this eloquently. it wasn't accidental.

there really was a big push together to treat things to supposedly, because we need to find a way of getting to find americans to consume more. unfortunately, it is hurting us economically and economically and socially. we can't continue on this debt to consume lifestyle. it is too much stress for anyone family to support. >> one of the messages that we see in this regard is flatscreen tvs. i have an old tv. i cannot connect to the internet through my television set. but the picture is better. i don't know if you have noticed it, the flatscreen does something to the photograph -- to the pictures. you need a 40-inch screen because if you get a 21-inch screen, it's like looking at a computer screen. that is really an amazing thing. my television set is not that old, actually.

in 2003, or something like that. it is still doing fine. at one point i was going to buy one. -- i thought, wait a minute. this isn't even as good of a picture as the one i have. so something to think about maybe, not responding to the marketing push. there are many people in this room. you could share the message about them being manipulative. with apple, with this tv screen, we can hold onto it another year or two. >> i want to open it up for questions. if anyone has questions for our panelists, please come up and stand in front of the microphone. >> with all the federal government's prohibitions against marijuana and industrial hemp, don't you think that the fact that hemp can reduce cotton

since there are so many pesticides and cotton, and also it can cut down on the use of paper, don't you think that would make a significant change? >> maybe kendrick and into this. >> i think the fundamental problem is the scale of our consumption. it might help a little bit in the case of industrial hemp, but i don't know if that would fundamentally change the landscape enough. >> you have a question? >> relative to other dangers to the water supply, how big of a problem our pharmaceuticals in the water supply at? >> of? >> i'm glad you asked that. we don't know. there have been attempts to get the epa to establish standards. we don't know. we do know that we have been finding them in the water supply, but no one has been doing tests as to how much and what the impact is on the water

supply. unfortunately, when it gets into the water supply, or when you take the medicine, for example, even though you are taking it, you are being environmentally sound. it is going through your body, and some of it does go into the wastewater, and divides binds to the solids. but they don't have a test. the tests have not yet been developed to determine the levels of pharmaceuticals in the water. they just know that there are some and they have not established standards. blood pressure needs to be put on epa to develop those standards. it is a growing concern. >> just? >> i would like to preface my question. after years of being a health and environmental journalist, i became aware that human overpopulation is the number one environmental problem. i started doing public speaking on it, and i definitely address what you're saying. even extreme green living only

reduces the ecological footprint at 25% at most. now i am working with the center for biological diversity. they have a 7 billion and counting campaign where they are giving out endangered species condoms. we talk about habitat and resource destruction. thousands of species on the brink of extinction. i'm curious, because i have noticed a disconnect, why is there a disconnect where so many people will talk about the environment, green living, all of this stuff, but very rarely does anybody ever mention overpopulation, which back in the beginning of the environmental movement in the 1960s was half of the foundational formula. it was talked about all the time. now, only the half that is into green living, that is all that is discussed. i would love to hear what you have to say. >> thank you.

>> i think this was talked about once on charlie rose. how the ecosystems could not support barely a billion people. he was demonized. you can imagine what an opinion leader -- what he dared to do by approaching the subject. it created a firestorm. he didn't achieve anything positive at all. you are tackling a subject that is probably the most difficult to gain any traction on, particularly in the united states. i don't know what the solution to that is. but it is a challenge. >> for me, i live in the united states and the average american consumption -- you see, the population growth is happening in our world. one american is equal to 10

indians. something like that. when you start looking at this, it is not even a little better. if you improve the education and improve women, that helps. i have a right to tell someone not to reproduce when the reproduction isn't really, at this point, it isn't a problem. our problem is that the people in the west consume too much. yes, there is a connection to population, but i don't feel like that discussion is the one that we need to have just yet. i have friends in lots of places. the women in other countries take birth control willingly, so their partner doesn't know, so they can speak out in time their pregnancies. that is just my perspective. but if you want to decline population in the united states, i am all for it.

>> thank you for your question. >> edward, you had mentioned that the junk mail that we all did. i thought you might have been hinting at a way to minimize that. i asked my mail carrier to stop delivering that, and she said she could not. is there a solution of? >> there are somethings you can opt out on. the reason why is that you can't, is there is no equivalent of the do not call list for junk mail. there should be, but there is not. >> just get off the list for catalogs. he meant yes. >> all those catalogs, you can write them. part of? >> and you can remove the name. a big chunk of that. most of the catalogs are actually requested at some point. >> do you think junk mail is

worse for the landscape than disposable diapers? >> yes. >> divers have been overestimated as a landfill issue. but they still make up about 2%. >> for us to be able to draw their garbage, which is degradable, without putting it in a plastic bag, which is not agreeable, that would be terrific. even that would be a step in the right direction. right now, when we get rid of the garbage, and we don't want to put it in the garbage disposal because it's bad for the wastewater system, it goes into a plastic bag. plastic bags have a half-life, that would be a good solution. >> thank you. great panel. thank you for all your work and literature. i have a question for edward and kendra. have you heard about and wonder what your opinion might be about the municipal solid waste project in toronto. it will be the world's largest

conversion of liquid fuels. i understand they are converting solid waste. converting that to ethanol. i want to know if you have thoughts about pla as a alternative plastic. for kendra, i wonder if you have any thoughts on the big picture about recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. there are people like palo alto research center and others in europe. i know the group in iceland that are working on actually taking carbon dioxide and converting that into a fuel from waste products or from the atmosphere. i was wondering if any of you thought about that kind of recycling. >> i am not familiar with that particular project. but the waste to energy idea, whether it is to generate electricity through the combustion process or driving some kind of fuel from it, it has really caught on in some parts of the world.

particularly in europe. past attempts at that have brought up concerns about omissions. many of those, but not all, have been resolved. that is why i mentioned that they actually can be looked at from a greenhouse gas contributor perspective. the problem is that that is a very inefficient way to make energy. it is better than mining and adding to the landfills, the kind of project you are talking about is maybe four times more efficient. but it is far more efficient to generate less wasteful material in the first place. that is really the whole idea of conservation as a potential solution. it is the one with the best waste outcome. the nrdc came out with a study about vampire electronics.

it is something like a cable box. if you add up the power drain of these devices, it is equivalent to 20 coal-fired power plants. taking that kind of device off the market and refusing it, would have a much greater impact on the technology that you were talking about. although that has some benefits to. >> i am reticent to encourage any form of engineering. first, i think that climate changes are taking place. it is a pressing issue and important, but it is not only an issue for environmentalism. when we look through these technical fixes to fix these problems, we ignore all these other, larger problems, and we become fixated on fixing the climate. and we forget about all these other problems as well. >> thank you. >> first, i would like to thank you all for participating in the

panel. we have learned a lot and this is exciting. what are some big challenges at the start managing your own lifestyle. trying to figure out which organizations to support, and which are doing projects and population groups and et cetera. i'd like to ask each of the four of you to just tell us what you think is your favorite charity to contribute to. >> jpcc. [laughter] >> my favorite charity is greyhound rescue. [laughter] >> by the way, it is ed's birthday today. happy birthday. >> happy earth day birthday. >> i sit on the board of the

white roof project. we paint groups white in new york city because it reduces energy. it is super fast and relatively cheap and easy to get people involved in. >> of course, my favorite group is heal the bay. also, the southern california library. [applause] >> my wife and i are on your side. >> i've heard that there are limited amounts that we can do to reduce the amounts we use. but i'm looking for -- then we have to reduce consumption, but a push for alternative energy. i know cracking is a big problem. the pipeline agenda than what they're going to do up there.

i know that nuclear is a problem with waste and disposal and etc. a big push towards solar am and i know there are some problems with that in the desert habitats. big push towards solar and wind. you guys have -- i live in a big city in la. people are still going to of course unless we have a really great transportation system. big solutions that are done beyond the individual level but for energy and transportation. >> i'm from new york. i don't know a lot about la. i rented a car and haven't killed anyone yet. [laughter] >> i am pretty proud of that. we have an opportunity to speak to the public into the public to become engaged. one of the things you can do is be representative of your city. in order for you to get to the

point of transit where you live and where people live and work, it is a compelling economic peace. you have to get involved and you have to engage your community and transit boards and be a pain in the butt. you have to say that i want a bus system or a light rail. you have to do those things to get your voice heard. otherwise, they will just keep giving money to the same people to give money to. again, bracken is a huge concern where i live, because it is in the new york city watershed. there goes the best water that we have in the century. the reason they have been able to inhibit bracken so far, it has really been putting pressure on things. the same things that are going on with the power plants. the non-funding of the coal power plants. there are a bunch of direct

actions to solve these problems. at the end of the day, have the same core values with these people in your neighborhood. maybe articulated slightly differently. if you take climate change out of the equation, and you start looking at people's attitudes towards community and consumption are my people's attitudes towards the environment, most people have more in common than they don't have in common. the whole red and blue divide is a lie. >> with pollution, no one wants to have dirty air or dirty water. forget about global warming. it is that kind of common -- most people want that, that industry pushback exists against it. i guess the question is, how do you push back, other than community organizing. >> community organizing is something that is successful. >> we only have time for two

more questions. >> i wasn't talking about that, but i have absolute -- i have absolutely taken the bus. people think it is something that poor people take. i think people should be forced to take the bus, first of all, it's getting easier and easier, and you can read and talk to somebody that you might never have talked to before. what i want to talk about is the issues that i have been successful with. i wanted to see if you could address order of us put them out there. composting is wonderful. i have a little bit of trash. i used to have a full trash. i still have a lot of recycle that i wouldn't have invited him shop at traders so much. when i don't shop at traders, --

for the farmers market,, mostly, and a little bit at traders, you don't get so many plastic vegetable fats. if i didn't take the time or take as much of the time than i would have less to recycle. i only have a little bit of trash. do you have a have a little bif trash. do you have a quick question? >> do have a question? >> i would like you to address the importance of that in your scheme of what we can do, and also, i would like to ask about giving up beat. how would you rate that in your overall address and evaluation of how we can change things? >> composting, farmers markets, that is valuable. >> and vegetarianism. >> i love what you are saying there. our last question was talking

about what are the big things we need to do to become less wasteful. when you are talking about are things that anybody can do to modify their trash and garbage profile. composting is a great strategy for getting things out sh and ge profile. composting is a great strategy for getting things out of landfills and using material and materials that we have productively. if you can shorten the distance between where their food comes from to your plate, you have eliminated an enormous amount of waste. look at what happened with roadside litter. all of a sudden, we collectively as a society decided that enough was enough and change their behaviors. these are individuals that stopped throwing stuff out of their car windows. we took collective action. that was a good way to modify our behavior. this is the one big social thing that anybody can really do something meaningful about. right in their own homes.

when they go out shopping. when they decide to choose a farmers market over a heavily packed store like trader joe's or whatnot. it doesn't take a pack. you don't have to be a good great big corporation. you don't need a power plant plants do that and make those changes. it is the opposite. it is not wasting by 1000 small acts. i think i can work better than waiting for the big thing to come to save us. >> one more question. >> i'm old enough to remember when sustainability and efficiency were good things, they were patriotic things. my parents went through world war ii and the great depression. that was a good attitude when i grew up. a sense of common good. i am amazed how over the years we have become unpatriotic. i remember in the 1990s, bush saying that efficiency was bad for