 Will fault lines exhibited at Organic Summit hinder movement’s ability to move ahead?
July 13
Recently, I attended the opening sessions of The Organic Summit in Boulder Colorado. While as a long time Organic advocate, I enjoyed the chance to get together with so many like-minded industry people, this year it was apparent to me that we were not all quite as "like minded" as I might have liked. In fact we were more splintered and divided than I had realized—which made me more than a little concerned about just where the Organic Industry is going.
As in other great reform movements, a “fault line” seemed to have appeared between well-intentioned people who had distinctly different visions of what we were trying to achieve.
In one camp were the ‘purists” who believes that organic is more than just an agricultural movement, but a kind of quasi-religion – that is to say, a spiritual evolution of the kind invoked by Rudolph Steiner, but one not capable of achieving any real degree of economic efficacy. The second group is one that believes “locally grown” has now superseded organic in importance and is where the real efforts should be concentrated. The third faction is the one whose beliefs are most in accord with my own perspective -- that the organic movement needs scale. That is to say, it needs to be made affordable and accessible for the masses.
That this entire Organic Summit was so divided on these issues, to me, did not bode well for the overall growth of the industry. We can have all the certification systems in the world, but if we can't as a unified movement agree on the direction the industry should take, we will not grow--- maybe this is why after 20-plus years, organic agriculture still accounts for less than three percent of our total food supply.
A good example of why it doesn't need to be this way was contained in the keynote address by Daria Myers, the global president of Origins, the Estee Lauder organic subsidiary. The company’s decision to put organic ingredients in the Origins product line, she said, caused the organic share of the skin-care industry to jump to a significant 8,8% in just a few short years. This type of leadership is what we have gravely missed in organic food, and now my concern is that the movement may never resolve this internal battle amongst its constituents, and will fail to merge effectively with the "green movement" at a crucial juncture.
We just completed the “Organic Sequel” to Chemical Free Kids, using a lot of research from the Organic Center and other sources. But after this conference, this just may be a bit of closure for me in an industry to which I’ve committed a significant amount of time and energy, but can't seem to get out of its own way.
Or perhaps this is just the “growing pains” that any social revolution has to go through before it finds its true sense of direction.
World’s largest landfill a high-tech marvel
with woefully underused recycling capacity
July 1
I recently took the twice-yearly bus tour of the largest landfill in the world, the La Puente landfill, located just east of Los Angeles. The tour is incredibly well orchestrated, complete with Starbucks, doughnuts and a tour guide who provided lots of facts and figures about the facility to the 30 or so visitors in our group.
The landfill accommodates 13,400 tons of refuse per day, with a flag in front that is raised when daily capacity has been reached. Since plans call for its closure in 2013, they are now building a rail system that will transport the garbage yet to come to the Mesquite Mega Landfill, which is expected to accommodate 20,000 tons per day for 100 years. Their current tipping fees are very low to make sure they get their share of trash -- $29 . They will, however, be moving to $60 plus with the rail system. The good news is that they capture all the methane and convert it to energy, not only making the operation completely self sufficient, but enabling it to sell enough to power 70,000 homes per year in southern California.
The infrastructure they are building is unbelievable. They‘ve erected a beautiful material recovery facility, or MRF --in fact the most attractive one I have yet seen. But, alas, it is mostly for show—using a mere tenth of its 4,000-ton- per-day processing capacity. In fact,100 percent of the material on one conveyer belt was being processed by hand, without the benefit of either brushes or air. Unbelievable! But then, the facility’s operators were forced into the MRF by AB 939 (the Integrated Waste Management Act), and apparently have never really been all that committed to the serious realization of its potential.
The water treatment plant is a nice addition because they have plenty of water to grow vegetation on the landfill, making for a lush green mountain with a crater in the middle for trash. The system is a basic dam-and-fill operation, with a six-foot thick liner of sand/gravel/clay lined with plastic. Once the trash is dumped, machines go over it to crush it. Then it is covered with dirt and watered every night. It’s all quite organized and orderly -- they seem to have the burying of garbage down pat. But recycling doesn’t even appear to be a blip in this district’s scheme of things, other than for presentation purposes.
I hope I am wrong about this. But the 30-plus people I was with seemed a tad perplexed upon being told that all the recycled material goes into empty containers at the port to ship to China, and that very little of the recycled paper or cardboard is used here in the U.S.
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