How Vancouver won the green medal

The Vancouver Winter Games have come to a close, and the Canadians did indeed "own the podium", just as they set out to do. Good for them.

The 2010 Games have been billed as a great success, probably the most-watched winter event in history (though die-hard Olympic skeptic Dave Zirin obligingly challenges the merits of this particular edition).

VANOC has also declared this to have been the "greenest Olympics ever", and they're probably right, even though I can't imagine the 1896 Games belched nearly as much carbon into the air as any modern iteration. Regardless, the notion of green Games doesn't really mean much these days.

Still, there were valiant efforts to reduce the Olympic footprint. The odd-looking, wavy medals are probably the best example -- they're comprised of gold from recycled e-waste, an innovative use of one of our most daunting environmental scourges. Have a look (via Motherboard.TV):



Whatever the level of green-ness at the Vancouver Games, you can be sure it will trump the next Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, where environmental degradation is already running rampant -- only one of many problems facing Sochi.

And speaking of e-waste and Vancouver, here's something from the J-school students at my alma mater, UBC, that is quite old but always worth knowing about. It's a Frontline investigation into what happens to the e-waste from North America after it leaves the continent (it goes to impoverished areas of Africa and Asia) as well as the potential national security questions the practice of exporting e-waste raises (not to mention environmental and human security). Watch the video here.

Singapore leaders are either too cheap to recycle or too lazy

Last week, Singapore's infallible first Prime Minister and current Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was giving a talk at the Singapore Management University and was asked a question about why Singapore has fallen so far behind other industrialized Asian nations like Japan and South Korea on the recycling front. His answer? Too expensive:

On recycling, (MM Lee said) the main problem is that the single rubbish chute in every Housing and Development Board flat encourages residents to throw everything into it, instead of separating their recyclables from food waste as the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans commonly do.

“We have thought about this very carefully, but just restructuring the buildings to make the lift stop on every floor...may cost nearly $100,000 per flat. You start putting two or three chutes into every flat, where do you find the space and what will it cost?” he asked.

True, Singapore has some green tendencies. Just this week it launched a Zero Energy Building, which produces as much energy as it uses and is the first such building in Southeast Asia. The country has also found a fairly innovate method for disposing of waste, at least for the short term. Trash is incinerated and then shipped to an island a few miles off the coast where the ashes are buried. The Semakau landfill also doubles as a rejuvenated nature preserve. But trash incineration, even though it supposedly also creates up to 3% of the total power generated in Singapore, is far from a sustainable way of getting rid of waste.

Still, Singapore is hardly known for its environmentalism. The most popular food courts serve their goods almost exclusively on Styrofoam plates with disposable chopsticks. Grocers may literally give you more plastic bags at checkout than actual products you're purchasing -- one small bag for the meat, one for the soap, another for the shampoo and so on, all placed in another large bag to carry all your (bagged) products. It's shocking, and I stand by with a watchful eye declining the excessive baggage. I usually leave an unneeded bag or two on the counter when I leave.

Recycling is such an easy way to reduce waste. It's a habit that's been drilled into my Western mindset, but it's one of the healthier habits I've developed. Recycling bins apparently exist across the island, but I can't recall ever seeing one. And without a vehicle, it's not exactly convenient to haul bulging bags of bottles and containers to some faraway receptacle.

At my apartment, we put bags of recyclables and stacks of newspapers outside our door or down in the basement, assuming they're picked up and properly deposited. But now I'm not so sure that whoever picks up those items doesn't just toss them in with the rest of the trash.

For MM Lee to be so flippant about even trying to promote recycling is troubling. The way he puts it, it'll just be too expensive to retrofit apartment buildings and that's the end of the discussion. All it would take is to have a collection bin at all apartment complexes, convenient enough for willing recyclers, and have waste management services swoop by on their regular routes. People may be lazy, but just because they can't currently toss recyclables down a shoot like they do other refuse doesn't mean recycling is a lost cause. For such an advanced Asian nation, Singapore's primitive attitude towards recycling is inexcusable.

Pacific Ocean's Trash Island revisited

Some of you may remember a mention I made last year about a massive "trash vortex" about the size the size of the continental US floating out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

It's still there, of course, and got a recent write-up in the Wall Street Journal. The gyre of trash sounds like an environmental travesty; The Economist doesn't seem to think it's doing much good since the breakdown of plastics tend to seep into the food chain on onto our plates. But the Journal still manages to put a positive, yet interesting, spin on it:

Though no one thinks any possible benefits of plastic outweigh risks, Prof. Karl did find some positive aspects of the patch -- a high concentration of microorganisms clinging to the debris. "The microorganisms are good for the ocean, because it turns out they're making oxygen," Prof. Karl says. "If plastics were otherwise neutral to the environment, then they'd be helping by harvesting more solar energy." Dr. Bamford says it is possible that a cleanup, even if it were feasible, would do more harm than good, by removing these organisms.

The Journal also mentions the disagreement over the exact size of this marine plastic pile. Could be as big as North America, could be as small as Quebec. I wonder how much of of the estimated 100 million tons of plastic out there is made up of my discarded goods...

(This originally appeared on this date at the old address, which is no longer accessible)

Trash island -- 'plastic soup' as big as a continent

I wish there was some sort of picture because I don't believe it myself, but apparently there is a massive "trash vortex" -- twice as big as the continental United States -- 10 meters thick and packed with everything from footballs to kayaks to Lego pieces and other garbage thrown overboard or elsewhere that is swirling around the Pacific Ocean about 500 nautical miles off the California coast stretching almost as far as Japan.

Go to the link to read more and to see a graphic. There's no picture because since much of the waste is translucent, satellite images can't detect it. I'll just leave you with this vivid (written) image:

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

(This originally appeared on this date at the old address, which is no longer accessible)