Category: Recycling

There’s a problem trying to be an environmentalist. The problem is Mom.

I try pretty hard to be pretty good dealing with the environment. I only heat two rooms in my house and I keep them at 50 most of the time. I don’t heat my bedroom at all, I sleep under a big pile of wool and down. I wear a lot of flannel pants and fuzzy slippers and fleece in my house. I use a few compact fluorescent lights and turn them off when I leave the room. My kids don’t particularly like to come visit my house, because it’s too dark and too cold, and I tell them to wear more clothes.

And then my Mom shows up. My Mom’s in her eighties, and she’s a really good Mom and a good person, as anyone who knows my Mom will tell you.

When my Mom shows up, the temperature in her bedroom goes up to seventy, or a little more. The temperature in the rest of the house goes up to seventy, or a little more. The heat stays on at night. Many more lights get turned on, and they stay on.

I could tell my Mom that the temperature needs to stay low and she needs to wear more clothes. But I don’t. I could tell her we need to conserve electricity and turn out lights when we leave the room. But I don’t. I could tell her how wasteful it is to turn on the electric heat in the bathroom when she takes a shower. But I don’t. She’s in her eighties. She always has and still does live modestly. She knows what I do and what’s important to me. And she wants to be a little comfortable. Who am I to begrudge her that?

I drive a car that gets 45 miles a gallon. Outside of work I try to drive as little as I can.

And then my Mom shows up. She divides her time now between her place in South Jersey and mine in New Hampshire. I drive her both ways, 800 miles round trip. I make that trip once a month. Last week, because it was a beautiful spring day in New Hampshire and she is in her eighties and doesn’t have an infinite number of beautiful spring days left, we took a long drive up into the White Mountains. Today, because it is a beautiful spring day in South Jersey and she doesn’t have an infinite number of beautiful spring days left, we will drive down to the among the flowering blueberries and greening fields of Southwest Jersey.

I wonder about this, in the context of being an environmentalist. If there’s hope for human society on this planet, we’re going to have to start making different decisions about how we use resources. We’re going to have to recognize, for real, that husbanding the natural environment and its resources needs to be our highest priority. We’re going to have to make life and lifestyle choices that aren’t 100% about comfort and convenience. We can do these things. Personally, I try to do these things.

But then Mom shows up. And when it’s Mom vs Mother Nature, Mom wins.

I had a meeting this afternoon in a place called Ashburn Virginia.  Of course you have never heard of Ashburn, Virginia, because Ashburn, Virginia doesn’t exist.  It is not a town, it is not a township, it is not a city or a community.  It is a “Census Designated Place.”  It is 30 miles northwest of DC.  It is an indiscriminate collection of subdivisions and corporate campuses (and renta-corporate campuses) and condo developments and strip malls.

My meeting was at two this afternoon.  At two I waited in long lines of traffic on a road called Route 7, which is three lanes in either direction, one or two red-green cycles before I got through the traffic lights, of which there were many.  At four when my meeting ended I waited in a continuous line of traffic, two or three or sometimes four cycles before I got through the traffic lights, of which there were many.  All the way to Leesburg.  At Leesburg, I got off onto a route called 15, and I waited through many more cycles of many more traffic lights.  This was 40 miles from DC.

And I thought, what have we done to this beautiful country of ours.

From Route 7 you could turn off at any one of a hundred driveways and shop at any one of a hundred strip malls where there was a Best Buy, and/or a Target, and/or a Famous Footwear, and/or a Marshalls, and/or a Sports Authority.  A Wal-Mart.  A Bed Bath & Beyond.  Take your pick.  Any one of ten dozen stores identical to the same ten dozen stores you can find in any strip mall suburb in America.  If you were hungry, you could get something to eat at a Panera, and/or a Chilis, and/or a Red Lobster, and/or a P.F Changs.  At any one of ten dozen restaurants identical to the same ten dozen restaurants you can find in any strip mall suburb in America.

And I thought, what have we done to this beautiful country of ours.

Looking across the valleys you could see hundreds of acres of townhomes.  They used to be called townhouses, but someone must have decided that “townhomes” makes them sound more like a home, and less like a piece of mass-produced tract structure plastered onto the landscape.  Looking across at the ridgelines, you could see the ridgelines crenellated with more and more townhomes.  From the low 300’s.  If they were not townhomes, they were fake mansionettes, brick veneer over 2×4, with their own crenellations to make them look more castle-like and real, less 2×4 and temporary.  From the low 500’s.  If you didn’t want to take a driveway into a strip mall, you could take a driveway into a tract development called Ashmont or Brambleton or Belmont Greene (I do not know what a Greene is, so don’t ask), or even The Village of Waxpool (I do not know what a Waxpool is, either).

And I thought, what have we done to this beautiful country of ours.

I sat in traffic and I wondered, in the sense that we wonder at something we cannot understand:  People do this every day.  People sit in traffic, for hours, to go to their townhomes or their mansionettes scarring the landscape like bad acne, and they sit in this traffic, and they live in these places, so they get to shop at Best Buy and Target and Marshalls and Walmart, and eat at Golden Corral or Outback Steakhouse, in strip malls like more and bigger bad acne.  In places that aren’t towns, or communities, but Census Designated Places, surrounded  by acres of unbroken, unabashed black asphalt, and connected only by black asphalt, and held together only by black asphalt.

And I thought, what have we done to this beautiful country of ours.

Every now and then, several times in fact, there was a sign that said “Battlefield Park”.  This part of northern Virginia is where much of the Civil War was fought.  Six hundred thousand soldiers died in the Civil War.  Compared to the U.S. population, that’s as if six million soldiers were to die today.  Six hundred thousand soldiers, and who knows how many innocent others, died to preserve this awesome democracy of ours, in this beautiful land that is ours.

All so that we could pave over their gravestones to build chain stores in strip malls surrounded by asphalt?  All so we could turn their fields into townhome developments built from cruddy 2x4s from plantation forests?  All so we could eat mass-produced food at yet another McDonald’s or Outback Steakhouse?

And I thought, what have we done to this beautiful country of ours.

This spring Boston University passed a major milestone.  In the past ten years, BU has provided more than 1.5 million pounds of surplus furniture and equipment to charities.

BU is one of IRN’s original members.  We’ve been working together since IRN was founded at the end of 1999.  A couple of years later, in 2002, BU asked IRN to help with excess furniture and equipment – all the desks and file cabinets and beds and bureaus and thousands of other items that BU could no longer use.

At that point, almost all of BU’s surplus was being tossed into its dumpsters, as it had been for decades – and as still happens on most college campuses.  That first year, BU collected 10,000 pounds of surplus, not even a single truckload.  IRN matched most of it with charities, and recycled the remainder that was unfit for reuse.

From that beginning, BU’s surplus management program with IRN has grown to the point that, in 2011 alone, the school recovered more than 525,000 pounds of surplus.  Currently over 96% of the BU surplus is reused through IRN’s network of charitable partners, and almost all of the rest is recycled for its commodity content.  Virtually nothing is landfilled.  Here’s the ten-year track record:

Year               Surplus Recovered (Lbs)

2002                                 9,800

2003                               14,600

2004                               18,800

2005                              170,300

2006                                30,100

2007                               83,200

2008                              128,300

2009                              202,300

2010                              342,000

2011                               528,000

Ten Year Total  1,527,400

Back in 2002, when we started looking into BU’s waste stream we realized that there are two major sources of surplus on campus.  The first comes from replacements and cleanouts:  replacements when BU purchases new dorm or classroom furniture, cleanouts when the school tears down or renovates.  The second consists of surplus that’s generated in small quantities every single day:  a couple of desks from an administrative office, a few beds or mattresses, two or three filing cabinets, the leftovers when a professor cleans out an office or lab.

Reflecting that pattern, since 2005 BU’s surplus program has had two main tracks.

One works out of a parking lot in Boston’s Back Bay, central to BU’s campus.  There we parked two storage trailers.  Any time a department gets rid of some surplus, BU’s facilities staff puts the surplus into a trailer instead of the trash.  When the trailer is full, IRN cleans it out, takes the surplus to our warehouse, and makes a match with our network of charities.  This steady program has kept more than 400,000 pounds of BU surplus out of the trash.

The second track handles large replacements and cleanouts.  This surplus has come from many departments on campus; the most active has been BU’s Housing Department.  When BU renovates a dorm or buys new furniture, IRN identifies a charity that can use the surplus in relief or development projects.  IRN then arranges movers to come on campus and load the old furnishings into trailers (for U.S. charities) or shipping containers (for overseas shipment).  Once packed at BU, the trailers are not unsealed until they reach their final destination.  This program has provided over a million pounds of furniture and equipment to worldwide charities.

And then there are things like the basketball floor.  For 30 years the floor at BU’s Brown Arena hosted the likes of Rick Pitino, Mike Krzyzewski, Reggie Lewis, and Grant Hill.  When BU built their new Agganis Arena, they kept the old floor in storage. But eventually they needed the storage space, and the old floor needed to disappear.  IRN placed a call to nonprofit partner Food for the Poor, and FFTP identified a school outside of Kingston, Jamaica.  The school had a gym but no floor; BU had a floor with no gym.  It was a perfect fit.  BU packed the floor into two shipping containers, and three weeks later it was installed and being used by school kids in Jamaica.

Jeanne Sevigny is Assistant Director of BU Housing.  She says:  “This started out as a good idea for recycling our unwanted furniture, but as we became more connected with IRN and their charitable network the social benefits of the program really grabbed our hearts.  For those of us in Housing and Sustainability, we could not be more pleased.  We are doing the right thing environmentally and socially, and the costs related to this program are far less than disposal – a real win-win situation all around.”

Given such successes, BU is recognized as a leader nationwide in surplus property management.  Mike Lyons of BU’s Purchasing Department sums it up:  “The days are long gone of filling dumpsters with materials that could have a second life.  It is not just about furniture.  It’s about doing the right thing for the environment, the right thing for people, and the right thing for BU.”