“… Fuel for international travel and transport of goods, including food, is exempt from taxes, unlike trucks, cars and buses. There is also no tax on fuel used by ocean freighters.”

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

… Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

… Proponents say ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.

The food and transport industries say the issue is more complicated.

- Elisabeth Rosenthal @ New York Times: April 26, 2008: Link.

Via Jon Taplin’s blog: Link.

“I sell garbage.” - Justin Gignac

Justin Gignac sells garbage: carefully picked, artfully arranged New York City garbage. As Art.

You might say, “I wish I’d thought of that ….” And who could blame you? I think we all wish we’d thought of that:

I sell garbage.

I scour New York City streets picking up trash. After filling bags with subway passes, Broadway tickets, and other NYC junk, I carefully arrange plastic cubes full of the stuff. Each box is unique and won’t leak or smell. The cubes are then signed, numbered, and dated, making them perfect for anyone who wants their own piece of the NYC landscape. Just get one now before they clean up this city.

- Justin Gignac, NYC Garbage Sculpture: Link.

I like his home page — great rollovers. Most sites, if they have rollovers, each rollover swaps only one image, the moused-over image. NYC Garbage Sculpture uses multi-image swaps for jumbo-sized extra-splashy rollovers.

Thanks, Kim!

“The Garbage Patch is not a solid island …. Instead, it resembles a soupy mass, interspersed with large pieces of junk such as derelict fishing nets and waterlogged tires …. “

The so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a stewy body of plastic and marine debris that floats an estimated 1,000 miles west of San Francisco, is a shape-shifting mass far too large, delicate and remote to ever be cleaned up, according to a researcher who recently returned from the area.

But that might not stop the federal government from trying.

Charles Moore, the marine researcher at the Algalita Marina Research Foundation in Long Beach who has been studying and publicizing the patch for the past 10 years, said the debris - which he estimates weighs 3 million tons and covers an area twice the size of Texas - is made up mostly of fine plastic chips and is impossible to skim out of the ocean.

“Any attempt to remove that much plastic from the oceans - it boggles the mind,” Moore said from Hawaii, where his crew is docked. “There’s just too much, and the ocean is just too big.”

The trash collects in one area, known as the North Pacific Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that circulates along the Pacific Rim. It accumulates the same way bubbles gather at the center of hot tub, Moore said.

- Justin Berton, San Francisco Chronicle: October 30, 2007: link.

Trashed: Across the Pacific Ocean, Plastics, Plastics, Everywhere

I often struggle to find words that will communicate the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to people who have never been to sea. Day after day, Alguita was the only vehicle on a highway without landmarks, stretching from horizon to horizon. Yet as I gazed from the deck at the surface of what ought to have been a pristine ocean, I was confronted, as far as the eye could see, with the sight of plastic.

It seemed unbelievable, but I never found a clear spot. In the week it took to cross the subtropical high, no matter what time of day I looked, plastic debris was floating everywhere: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. Months later, after I discussed what I had seen with the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, perhaps the world’s leading expert on flotsam, he began referring to the area as the “eastern garbage patch.” But “patch” doesn’t begin to convey the reality. Ebbesmeyer has estimated that the area, nearly covered with floating plastic debris, is roughly the size of Texas.

- Charles Moore, Natural History v.112, n.9, Nov03: link.

Sargasso Sea: this is a region of the North Atlantic with low winds, surrounded by currents which tend to accumulate matter in the center.

[There is] sometimes total lack of wind over the sea, and the possibility for modern engines to become entangled in the sargassum, stranding most vessels. Thus, it is sometimes called the “graveyard of ships.”

- Wikipedia: link.

Flotsam and Jetsam: the Sargasso Sea is the setting for “Mystery of the Lizard Men“, the pilot episode of Jonny Quest.

Via Boing Boing: “Chris Jordan renders American consumer statistics as art. For instance: above, 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day. At left, an idea of what the 60 x 100″ piece looks like from a distance; at right, detail view.”

How do you negotiate the concepts and ideas behind your photographs, and any attempt to create or find beauty through your work?

That’s a very interesting question. At the very beginning of my Intolerable Beauty series, I had this idea that the images had to be beautiful in order for people to be interested in them. I thought that if I made an ugly image, no one would want to see it. If I can make a beautiful image of a difficult subject then the beauty will draw the viewer in and they’ll spend some time with the beauty part and the message will sort of seep in. I went with that notion for the longest time, but part of what got me started on Running the Numbers is that when I would show my work, especially the Intolerable Beauty series, all people would talk about was how beautiful it was. I found that the beauty was actually getting in the way of the message I was trying to convey.
ked to that image and they were talking about how beautiful it was.

[Link]

Personally, I find it beautiful, in the manner of schooling fish.

“The Mob was in charge of garbage and, it seemed, no one could stop them.”

Since the mid-1950s, when local officials handed over commercial waste collection to private haulers, New York City’s garbage industry had been dominated by a Mafia-led cartel. (The city government’s Department of Sanitation has continued to collect residential garbage) …. The Mob was in charge of garbage and, it seemed, no one could stop them. Some of the Big Apple’s trash carting businesses were more directly Mafia-connected … but many were not; yet if they wanted to run their collection trucks down New York City streets, they had to join the cartel. The payoff for being a member was guaranteed customers and a healthy income — in other words protection against the market forces that might drive prices down and companies out of business. Estimates put the amount that the cartel overcharged its customers in the hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

All this ended rather abruptly in the mid-1990s when the Mafia’s New York City garbage monopoly was destroyed. The confluence of forces behind the cartel’s demise included a police crackdown on Mob activity and, perhaps more significantly, a major restructuring in the garbage industry. No longer was refuse treatment simply a service municipalities conducted themselves or contracted out to quaint mom-and-pop hauling companies. Multinational trash corporations, started in the 1970s and 1980s by a handful of innovative refuse firms, were seizing control of the garbage trade.

[Heather Rogers, “The Power of Garbage “: Link]

Personal anecdote: in college (circa the mid-eighties), I took a course in Land Use Ecology. The professors (two of them) asserted that it was common knowledge, in some circles, that New York City’s garbage disposal was run by organized crime, and that anyone who made too much fuss was liable to end up as part of the garbage stream. They said it laughingly, but it was clear to me that they were serious.

“When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.”

Mr. Harda is admired by his colleagues as the last of the great Mumbai rat catchers. His is a dying breed in a city whose dreams of being rat-free recede year by year.

… But Mr. Harda is an Indian Sisyphus. When he got the job 33 years ago, the rats were no match for the catchers. Government service attracted India’s brightest in those days, and Mumbai was still clean enough to starve rats of the garbage on which they snacked. But in three decades, India has turned inside out, and so has the equation between catchers and rats.

Private-sector jobs in call centers and software firms beckon, and the government struggles to attract men of Mr. Harda’s caliber. Many rat-catching posts lie vacant. Meanwhile, Mumbai has metastasized from a genteel city of a few million into a grimy megalopolis of 17 million. More than half of the population lives in shanties surrounded by garbage — and, consequently, by rats.

[Link: New York Times: ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Published: July 20, 2007]

From New York City to Western Texas: dumping the sludge.

Center for Land Use Interpretation: Sierra Blanca Sludge Ranch –

Between 1992 and 2001, as many as 45 train cars per day bought sewage sludge from New York City to this 129,000 acre West Texas property, where it is spread out on the ground like peanut butter. The waste site is a former resort called the Mile High Ranch, and is owned by a Long Island New York company, Merco Joint Venture. The contract with New York City was terminated in June of 2001, and the sludge ranch, possibly the largest in the World, is now idle.

[Link]

Toxic Texas casts a critical eye on the history of sludge dumping –

This week the Texas Toxic Tour takes us to Sierra Blanca Texas, home to the nation’s largest sewage sludge dump. The story examines how Sierra Blanca, a small town on the U.S./Mexico border, became the resting place for New York City’s sewage.

…. Until Congress banned ocean dumping of sewage sludge in 1988, New York City dumped millions of tons of its sewage into the ocean. New York sludge was too contaminated with toxic pollutants to be used and too expensive to be buried safely in a landfill. In 1992, New York City awarded Merco Joint Venture; an Oklahoma-based company tied to New York organized crime (”Flood of Money Wins an Uneasy Home in Texas for New York City Waste”, Allen R. Myerson, The New York Times, 7/17/95 and “Stink Over Sludge”, Kevin Flynn and Michael Moss, New York Newsday, 8/2/94.), a six-year contract to dispose of nearly a fifth of the Big Apples’ sewage sludge.

In 1992, after dumping began, the people of Sierra Blanca began to complain of the odor. “The chemical odors coming off the application area are not just a nuisance and a trespass, they’re a health hazard - hydrogen sulfide and ammonia vapors mixed with a fecal smell are indescribable - except to say that it smells like death … We noticed strange rashes and blisters in the mouth, more flu, more colds, more allergies, and asthma since they came. We’ve seen a lot more sickness - especially with the kids,” says Bill Addington, a local resident.

… In 1997, Merco applied to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) for a renewal of their sludge permit for an additional five years. The company also requested an amendment to triple the amount of sewage sprayed per acre. To support their efforts, Merco hired Gov. Bush’s former legislative director, Cliff Johnson, to lobby the Bush appointed commissioners (1997 Commissioners -Barry McBee, Ralph Marquez, John Baker) at the state regulatory agency.

Bill Addington and Millie Dodge of Sierra Blanca used this opportunity to file a motion for reconsideration with the TNRCC. In response, the TNRCC Executive Director Dan Pearson filed a brief arguing for the motion for reconsideration to be denied. Pearson, hired by the Bush-appointed TNRCC Commissioners, claimed that the Merco operation wasn’t a threat to health or the environment …. The Bush-appointed Commissioners denied the motion, saying properly treated sewage sludge posed no threat, and Merco began dumping up to 400 tons a day.

In 1999, Merco admitted that it had spread sludge from New York that had not been properly treated to reduce pathogens - a state and federal requirement. (12) Merco had previously been caught spreading untreated sludge and fined $12,800 in 1994, a sum unlikely to deter illegal dumping on a contract valued at $168 million dollars over five years.

…. Addington summed up the community feeling saying, “Sierra Blanca is in desperate need for a community health survey, a county survey, by an independent group …we feel like guinea pigs”(14)

[Toxic Texas: Link]
[Via Fark]

PR Watch reports: Merco’s SLAPP Suit Fails in Texas –

1997: An appeals court has overthrown a 1996 libel verdict won by a New York company that hauls sewage sludge against filmmaker Michael Moore’s TV Nation television program and EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman.

On August 2, 1994, TV Nation aired a segment titled “Sludge Train,” which followed a load of sludge from a sewage plant in New York as it was hauled by train to Sierra Blanca, Texas, where it was applied as fertilizer on ranchland owned by Merco Joint Venture, the company hired to dispose of the sludge.

It featured footage of Sierra Blanca residents who complained about odors from the sludge operation, and interviewed EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman, who described the ranch as “an illegal haul and dump operation” and said “the people of Texas are being poisoned.”

Merco retaliated with a libel lawsuit against Kaufman, TV Nation and its parent company, TriStar Television. After a year of litigation, a Texas jury awarded actual damages in the paltry amount of $2, plus $5 million in punitive damages.

Upon appeal, however, the circuit judges found that Merco had failed to prove its case. “…. Merco presented no proof that TriStar and Kaufman knew, or should have known, that any part of the ‘Sludge Train’ broadcast was false. Indeed, Merco failed to show any part of the broadcast actually was false.”

“TriStar and Kaufman are not liable for defamation because they refused to corroborate the Merco party line,” the judges concluded. “Defamation law should not be used as a threat to force individuals to muzzle their truthful, reasonable opinions and beliefs. To endorse Merco’s version of defamation law would be to disregard . . . constitutional protections.”

[PR Watch: Link]

National Sludge Alliance: Sludge Magic –

“The question is, why would New York City pay $800.00 per ton to ship sludge to the western states when other municipalities are paying less than $30.00 a ton for disposal?”

[National Sludge Alliance: Link]

Environmental News Service reports –

NEW YORK CITY STOPS SHIPMENTS OF SEWAGE TO TEXAS DUMP

SIERRA BLANCA, Texas, June 26, 2001 (ENS) - The largest sewage sludge dump on Earth, the 81,000 acre municipal industrial dump at Sierra Blanca, will no longer be accepting toxic sewage from New York City.

The New York Department of Environmental Protection (NYC DEP) has canceled its 15 year, $500 million contract with MERCO NYC, which runs the Sierra Blanca dump in the high desert of Texas. MERCO was in its third year of the contract, which was renewed in 1998.

MERCO earned $168 million from the NYC DEP by dumping New York City sewage at Sierra Blanca between 1992 and 1998.

Ten dry tons of sludge cake were spread on each acre of the dump each year. A minimum of 250 tons per day and a maximum of 400 tons a day were dumped over the surface of the registered 81,000 acre land application area, under the guise of fertilizing the desert land.

The sewage sludge contained several contaminants, including lead, PCBs, dioxin, pesticides and other pollutants. New York City sewage is not allowed to be spread or even landfilled in New York State, because the material fails state standards for copper and lead at many of the NYC treatment plants.

[Environmental News Service: Link]

Michael Scally observes, in a footnote to an otherwise unrelated article –

Opponents of the proposed contract award to Merco Joint Venture, the sludge contractor, noted the speed with which the contract proposal was approved by the Texas Water Commission after Merco made a $1.5 million contribution to Texas Tech University to study the “benefits” of sludge sewage disposal, approval it won without an environmental impact study or serious opportunity for public process or debate. Merco Joint Venture was subsequently tied to organized crime elements. See, Allen R. Myerson, Flood of Money Wins an Uneasy Home in Texas for New York City Waste, The N. Y Times, (July 17, 1995) at B02.

[Link]

See also Sierra Blanca: Radioactive Waste.