On Earth Day, consider your role in improving the environment

Today Earth Day is upon us, which should give us cause to pause and wonder what we’re doing to the planet we will pass on to the next generation. How often do we think about how we affect the environment?

Hopefully this Earth Day, April 22, will spur us to review the impact of our actions.

An important concern is about the way we use energy. The United States uses more energy per-person than any other nation in the world. For example, in years past when automobiles were unavailable, would anyone have thought to harness 200 horses to go to the corner store to pick up the daily paper?

Today, we do this when we willingly start a 200-horsepower vehicle. I do not exclude myself. There are consequences to this action. The gases coming out of the exhaust, the effect of traffic on roads, the demand for the fuels required to keep the vehicle moving, the energy needed to keep our roads free of snow or ice, and even the demand for roads all negatively affect the environment.

For the sake of our planet the curbing the use of energy is imperative. Let me now proceed to an example that is a minor player in this whole scenario, but where I have become involved: waste management.

Waste management is an energy-intensive activity. Wikipedia, an oft-cited Internet encyclopedia, depicts solid waste management as a pyramid of six options: Prevention, minimization, re-use, recycling, energy recovery and disposal. The first option, prevention, is preferred. The last one, disposal, is the least desirable.

Consider a simple example: Can we avoid using plastic or paper bags at the grocery store? The answer is yes, if each shopper provides their own bag. The energy to produce bags would be saved if bags were brought to the store.

The second level is minimization. Is each bag filled to capacity? The third option is re-use: Plastic or paper bags can be used again, for example, as liners for waste baskets. Recycling is next. Energy for producing bags from basic stock is greater than the energy used to produce it with recycled materials.

Nevertheless, recycling is still one of the less desirable choices.

The fifth choice in waste management is energy recovery. There are consequences if a used item is placed in an incinerator. Incineration results in emissions of carbon dioxide and particulates. Carbon dioxide contributes to global warming and emissions of particulates aggravate asthma and cause other health problems. With certain plastics, the emissions from incineration contain dioxins and furans that are cancer causing gases.

The last option is disposal. Again, this is an energy requiring effort and certainly contributes to the dedgredation of our environment. Some landfilled plastics last forever. The plaguing presence of a landfill can be seen in Hampden, where the enormity of our callousness is so obvious.

In addition to being an environmental problem, disposal costs money. Auburn pays more than $500,000 to deal with trash. The cost for recycling 800 tons of trash is $83,870, which is actually more per-ton than disposal, partly because Auburn recycles 10 percent of its waste, close to worst in the state.

If the city adopts to single-stream recycling, where sorting is done at a sorting plant rather than the curb, there are savings of time and gas. If we couple this with the approach of pay-per-bag for trash, a higher rate of recycling participation would occur and a much broader array of materials would be accepted.

This has been seen in other communities, where the recycling rate has climbed to 40 percent and more. Businesses would soon realize the simplicity of the process and the broad range of recyclable items is financially attractive

My figures show that at a 40 percent recycling rate, the payback to Auburn would be in the vicinity of $80,000 per-year with fewer of undesirable items being incinerated.

Reduction of energy use is environmentally and financially sound. On Earth Day, let us pause a moment. Let’s think whether that trip to the store is necessary; whether we will bring our own bag to the grocery store, and if we don’t, whether we re-use or recycle that bag.

And that there is so much more that we can do. We have one earth, let’s treat it kindly.

Our children and grandchildren deserve no less.

Dominique P. Casavant is professor emeritus of physics from St. Michael’s College, a former mayor of Winooski, Vt., former Vermont legislator, and former member of the Vermont State Nuclear Advisory Panel. He lives in Auburn.