Since the time when Western countries started shipping off all manufacturing industries offshore (or even jsut across the country), packaging and the ability to recycle goods has been an issue. Some of my readers may remember milk delivered by the dairy farmer, or pop delivered by a local producer - those days are long gone, and as a result nothing is directly reused in any sector of the household consumer market - it all comes from far away, and ends up in the landfill, or the recycling box.

But where does it go from there?

Councils left with recycling mountains as prices dive - Telegraph

The global financial crisis has sent prices for recyclable materials plummeting, as countries like China cut manufacturing output.Local authorities are now calling for ministers to relax rules on where waste collected from household recycling bins can be stored, allowing them to keep it in sealed warehouses, former military bases and airfields.

“Warehouses around Britain could start to be filled with waste paper, metal and plastic bottles. There’s nowhere for these materials to go at the moment. It’s rapidly becoming a very serious problem, ” Steve Eminton, of letsrecycle.com said.

This problem is not isolated to Britain, with contractors around the world wondering what to do with the materials they are collecting.

The Local Problem with Recycling

In the Kootenays, the whole premise of recycling needs to be examined. With no local industries taking the recycled materials as a raw product, these materials are being shipped hundreds of miles to processing plants and then onto a producer. Typically, materials are trucked to Calgary or Vancouver for processing, (why trains aren’t used I’m not sure), and as the above article points out, the market isn’t there for the materials anyway.

Some people have suggested that the materials should be sorted and stored until the value increases. I’d be interested to see some stats on when this is likely to happen, as it seems like any increase in the value of the raw materials is likely to coincide with higher gas prices and therefore higher transportation costs. As far back as 1996, this question was being asked in regards to paper…

Is it better to recycle paper or to burn it for energy? - By Brendan I. Koerner - Slate Magazine

According to a landmark 1996 report (PDF) sponsored by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, it’s a tougher call than you might imagine: “Recycling has environmental advantages over landfill, but the comparison with incineration is less clear cut. Much depends on the transport requirements for waste paper, the nature of the manufacturing process and the extent to which fossil fuels are used to generate the electricity needed for production.”

So, where does that leave us? What should our communities do with our recyclables? No one wants to be the one who suggests that recycling isn’t as green as it all seems, particularly now that we’ve got so many people recycling, but is it all worth the effort?

Technorati Tags: Brendan I. Koerner, China, environment, Local government, municipality, Recycling, Recycling bin, Sustainability, United Kingdom, Waste, Waste management, World Business Council for Sustainable Development

Is it fair? Not at all. Is there anything we can do to improve the situation? Barely.

To those of you who don’t know me, or haven’t read my previous work, you might consider that I am bordering on depression, or perhaps just a really negative person. In fact, these are far from the truth of who I am. I dearly love my family, I love life, I love my job, and I love God. But what I don’t love is the outlook for the future - and what that could mean for my kids.

Peak Oil

As a generation, they will come to see and understand the realities of peak oil. This is not a doomsday scenario or some other crackpot conspiracy theory. Scientific consensus rests on the fact that there is a limited remaining supply of oil left in the ground, and that the remaining reserves are typically those that are more difficult and hence more expensive to extract. The pattern of extraction globally has continued to rise, however in many countries, including the United States, the peak rate of production has dropped for many years. At some point in time, this will happen globally, the maximum oil extracted per day will begin to drop. It won’t be the smooth bell shaped curve that many peak oil “enthusiasts” (if there really is such a thing) display. Rather there will be a continual market adjustment of price, consumption and production that - after a few years - looking in the rearview mirror we will be able to identify clearly that as global consumers of oil, we will have reached peak production.

At this point demand will outstrip production.

Are we at the peak? Will we in a few years look back at the bouncing price of oil at this time as a sign of instability, the market forces succumbing to realities beyond it’s control?

Will my kids witness global conflicts over the last remaining reserves of oil? Or will they witness the birth of renewable fuels and alternative power technologies that replace our oil dependence. As of November 2008, there is no technology on the horizon that can even come remotely close to replacing oil and all of the derivative products that support our lifestyles. I, and many other people have written elsewhere about the changes that we face as we break away from our reliance on oil to support our consumer driven lifestyles.

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• “World Will Struggle To Meet Oil Demand”
• Peak oil: postponed

Pause for a moment and consider your surroundings. Almost nothing you are touching or surrounded by has been grown, produced, transported, marketed, sold, or purchased without the assistance of oil. None of the technology we are surrounded by would have been possible without the extreme energy available from oil. None of the plastic products, including the keyboard I’m typing on, would be possible without oil.

How did we get to this point of complacent belief in the never-ending supply of oil? Now that’s a story in itself, and one of the best authors on this topic is James Howard Kunstler in his book from 2005, The Long Emergency.

What Should We Teach Our Children?

In light of these future scenarios, what should we teach our children? Will education as we know it survive the impacts of Peak Oil? Will we be too busy surviving for our children to attend schools and universities?

Many hard fought liberties that have flowed out of North America and the age of post-industrialization such as health care and education may have only been possible with a continuous river of black gold flowing and underpinning every societal construct that appears to be the normal, expected way of a community operating in a Western culture. Life is going to change as we progress through an energy descent - our whole lives and lifestyles rely on products that are only possible in quantity by growing methods, production and transportation that all relies on oil.

Our children will be the ones to suffer if we do not start adapting our society to an impending change that will include food production that is almost entirely local in nature, revising our methods of transportation to ones that can run on cleaner power, and encouraging massive changes in urban planning principals that have dominated our landscape for the past 50 years - back to smaller scale localized economies.

Your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Business, Energy, James Howard Kunstler, long emergency, Oil and Gas, Oil reserves, peak oil, Petroleum, Saudi Arabia, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, United States

The takeover demonstrates the bandits’ heightened ambitions and capabilities: Never before have they seized such a giant ship so far out to sea. Maritime experts warned the broad daylight attack, reported by the U.S. Navy on Monday, was an alarming sign of the difficulty of patrolling a vast stretch of ocean key to oil and other cargo traffic.The MV Sirius Star, a brand new tanker with a 25-member crew, was seized at about 10 a.m. Saturday more than 450 nautical miles southeast of Mombasa, Kenya, the Navy said. The area lies far south of the zone where warships have increased their patrols this year in the Gulf of Aden, one of the busiest channels in the world, leading to and from the Suez Canal, and the scene of most past attacks.

Source: Somali Pirates Grab Saudi Oil Tanker - NYTimes.com

Stories like this are likely to increase as the battle for oil supremacy increase. Carrying over 2 million barrels of oil, the supertanker’s cargo could be worth as “little” as $100 million dollars. Protection of these shipping lanes is supposedly maintained by a flotilla of multinational ships from countries as diverse as Holland, Russia, India and, of course, the USA. The markets were briefly rattled by the news, but shipping companies are making routing changes as a result…

A few shipping companies have already begun to reroute their ships to avoid the pirates. On Monday, the Norwegian shipping group Odfjell, which specializes in chemical tankers, said it would shun the Gulf of Aden for the safer if much longer route around Cape of Good Hope. There have been some 70 pirate attacks in and around the Gulf of Aden so far this year.

“We will no longer expose our crew to the risk of being hijacked and held for ransom by pirates in the Gulf of Aden,” the company’s chief executive, Terje Storeng, said in a statement.

Source: Pirates Briefly Rattle Oil Market - The Lede - Breaking News - New York Times Blog

I remain composed despite the obvious opportunity for alliteration in the title of this post, replace “Pirates” with “Swashbucklers”.

Technorati Tags: Africa, Cape of Good Hope, Energy, Gulf of Aden, Kenya, Mombasa, peak oil, Somalia, Suez Canal, Supertanker, Transportation, United States Navy, US Navy

The concept is that six light beacons would be placed on hills in the Castlegar Valley around the airport, allowing pilots to orient themselves visually - when they are within the lights and at a given altitude, they are effectively safe. Simple enough, and it allows for planes with all types of navigation equipment to utilize the system.

A Strategic Priority?

The project has been identified as a strategic priority for the City since at least November 2007 (pdf from City Website - original link here) - which incidentally was after the developer connected with the Castlegar Gaming Center proposal was given the go ahead.

The premise of the application is that emergency medical flights will have greater access to Castlegar after hours - assuming that weather conditions are acceptable. According to the grant application, some 18% of departing flights are canceled due to darkness. I find this hard to believe. If there were five flights departing a day, every day, this would mean that one of those flights is canceled every day of the year due to darkness. Perhaps the statistic should read that 18% of flights scheduled to leave after 4pm are canceled, or something to that effect. However, the weather conditions, particularly in winter are a much more significant reason for delays and cancellations to and from this airport. Also of concern is that the figures given in the grant application are different from those quoted by the CAO in a Provincial Finance meeting held in Nelson in September.

One of my particular concerns with this application is the invisible link to the approved Gaming Center which is to be located right next to the airport, (and possibly with a direct connection between the buildings). Now wouldn’t it be convenient for gambling business if there was actually something going on at the airport at night - say people waiting for flights that are now able to land and take off because there was now $1,000,000 worth of lights? It appears that the developer for the Casino Gaming Center has not started work on construction before winter as hoped - perhaps they are waiting for the green light, so to speak?

The Problem of Peak Oil

Some might say that I am arguing against improved medical services and increased tourism and business travel to the City and region. Far from it. I believe that air travel is a short term luxury made possible by cheap, plentiful oil reserves. This situation is not going to remain for ever. In fact, it is likely that the world is reaching its peak production of oil, (measured in millions of barrels per day), but use of oil products is still increasing. At some point soon the demand for oil will outstrip the potential to extract it - and by the way even the oil companies are saying that the remaining reserves are limited.

Considering this information of limited remaining oil reserves and still increasing oil consumption we have to consider alternatives for powering our cars, trains and planes. As I write this, there is no alternative technology or fuel comparable to oil for powering aircraft. The future as shown by the Jetsons cartoon - with flying cars and robots is only possible with cheap, plentiful, portable energy. It is interesting to note that at the same Provincial Finance meeting, Douglas Hurst from Selkirk Power Ltd spoke of Peak Oil, power privatization and the implications on electricity generation and coal extraction. Much talk ensued about the importance of electricity to replace waning oil supplies - unfortunately, as I write this, there are no plans or prototypes for powering passenger planes by electricity. Maybe a plugin hybrid? - It would still need gas, and lots of batteries - if it were at all possible.

The Problem of Airline Travel

The grant application talks of extending the benefits from the beacons to commercial passenger flights after a proving period with the emergency services. Unfortunately, even with the beacons, travel to Castlegar may be limited by outside constraints. Already companies around the world (like Teck, which has operations in Trail, just down the road from Castlegar) are doing more teleconferences, rather than flying for meetings. Worldwide, airlines are seeing a reduction in the passenger volumes, and it is likely in my mind that air travel to Castlegar will be reduced by Air Canada to a couple of flights a day within a few years. Here’s a story about British Airways - with these statistics how much longer would a company extend services to small rural areas.

Gulfnews: British Airways first-half profits dive 92% but shares take off

BA’s chief executive, said the group had achieved a “good performance given the incredibly difficult trading conditions amid the surge in fuel costs and falling traffic volumes”.

“The six-month period will be remembered as one of the bleakest on record,” said Walsh.

Pre-tax profits fell 91.6 per cent in the six months to the end of September from record levels a year ago while premium traffic fell 9.2 per cent year-on-year. However, the results were better than feared by the market…

The airline is planning to reduce capacity in the next summer season from April to October by about 1 per cent following cuts of 3 per cent this winter.

Speak to the Castlegar Council if you are concerned about this proposed use of funds, and see what plans they have to hold Castlegar together through Peak Oil?

If the City is looking for ways to spend a million dollars, why not run a competition? I can think of a number of worthy projects that would contribute to the long-term sustainability of the City, with or without cheap oil.

Click to download pdf of the Airport Beacons Grant Application

I really have no idea whether the beacons and the gaming center are in any way connected - there just seems to be a coincidental synergy between these two projects succeeding - and who knows, it may be just that, a coincidence. If you have any questions about what I’ve written here, leave them as a comment, or use the contact form - I will get back to you as soon as possible.

Technorati Tags: Air Canada, Airline, Aviation, British Airways, Business, Castlegar, Castlegar Airport, Energy, energy descent, Oil reserves, peak oil, Transportation, travel

“There is an overemphasis on brightly coloured equipment, an over-preoccupation with safety and far too little thought and time paid to making them playful, interesting places that adults will want to spend time in, as well as children.”

‘Boring’ playgrounds stifle children’s creativity - Telegraph.

I get all the play module manufacturers’ catalogs at work - at least the ones that are attempting to market in this part of BC and I have to agree. An extreme over emphasis on bright colours and excess PVC parts distract children’s imagination and segregate these spaces as off limits from the real world.

The problem is that when a city or developers are considering installing a play space, the usual temptation is to pick something that is recognizable and familiar to adults, looks solid and safe, and meets the budget. Unfortunately this is boring.

Children are not accountants, scientists, or machines that respond to a discreet set of stimuli (colour + swing = fun), rather they are designers in imagination and adventure. Let’s treat children with respect and allow them to play with natural textures and shapes. Play spaces are some of a community’s most important public spaces and should be accessible and pleasant for all ages.

Technorati Tags: Child Welfare, Children Youth and Family, Design, Playground, playspace, Polyvinyl chloride, public space, Safety

For a link to the film website, click here.

This movie is showing in Nanaimo, BC in November…

Urban Issues Film Festival in Nanaimo, BC on November 21st, 2008. The festival is held at Vancouver Island University. For more info, contact:
Deborah Jensen, Development Services Department
City of Nanaimo
238 Franklyn Street , Nanaimo , BC
Phone (250) 755-4473 Fax (250) 755-4479

HT to City Farmer for the news.

Technorati Tags: chickens, Mad City Chickens, urban agriculture, urban chickens, urban farming, urban hens

The study, led by University of Northern British Columbia professor Annie Booth, tracked the eating habits of goats for two summers in Prince George. The study found the goats effectively cleared properties of hearty weeds including thistle, hawk weed, dandelion and horsetails.

“As soon as we unloaded them, they turned around and started eating dandelions,” Booth said. “They do their job — which is clear up and clean out the weeds here.”

“We were very pleased to discover that goats do provide a very effective form of weed control, particularly for some tricky weeds that are difficult to eradicate even with the use of herbicides.”

Source: Forget herbicides, weed-whackers: get some goats, study says

Goats were a domesticated animal before dogs - yet with the rise in industrial farming, the concept of keeping a goat or two has fallen out of favour, despite their usefulness in vegetation management, natural fertilizer, milk and meat production.

A few months ago, when I suggested that goats and hens could be beneficial to a community like Castlegar, I was effectively ridiculed by much of Council despite support from many people around the community.

Long term reliance, (or even the planning to rely) on oil-driven solutions for weed and vegetation management, fertilizers and food production is foolish. Communities need to revise their expectations of normality as they attempt to be greener or build sustainability into their systems and structure.

And if you think this is just for rural municipalities, check out the City of Seattle’s program. Should I start a goat petition?

Technorati Tags: Annie Booth, BC, British Columbia, Business, Canada, Castlegar, CBC, Environmental, Goat, goats, Kootenays, Prince George, sustainable living, University of Northern British Columbia, urban agriculture, Weed

Few people realize the magnitude of change that is being heralded with the new presidency - but most of the change has nothing to do with Barack Obama’s ability to lead, it’s outside of even his sphere of control. The world as we know it is changing - will the leadership of our nations choose a path that honours this change, or squanders it…

Jim Kunstler : Presto Change-o

The dilemma is essentially this: the consumer economy we all knew and loved has died. There will be pressure from nearly every quarter to keep it hooked up to the costly life support machines even though it is dead. A different economy is waiting to be born, but it is nothing like the one that has died. The economy-to-come is one of rigor and austerity. It is not the kind of thing that a nation of overfed clowns is used to. Do we even have a prayer of getting to it, or are we going to squander our dwindling resources on life support for something that is already dead?

Planning for a future as uncertain as that which faces us requires strength of conviction and a will to protect the basic rights of a nation people. These rights do not necessarily include any of the following, despite the fact that we have had these in bountiful quantities over the past 50 years:

• Health Care
• Education
• Consumer Products
• Automobiles
• Air Travel
• Foods from outside our local area

The rights that a nation like America or Canada can reasonably stand for, directly reflect those which our forefathers fought to gain or keep:

• Safety
• Freedom

Are there any others? Even these two are likely to be compromised in the near future as conflicts over food, water, oil, gas and arable lands cause major upheavals across the globe.

What is the future for America under Mr Obama?

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Barack Obama presidential campaign 2008, climate change, food, gloabl, global warming, Health, Health care, peak oil, politics, President of the United States, Society and Culture, United States

Remembrance Day 2008. Today is the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day in 1918, the end of the !st World War. I was in the Australian Army for four and a half years - training to serve my country, fortunately, I never went to war, many of those I trained with ended up in Iraq and other conflict zones around the world.

Today I salute those who have fought for their country, for freedom, for justice around the world. We are entering a period of potentially great conflict around the globe - I wonder how the young men of the world today feel about the prospect of fighting for freedom. The men in the photo below barely knew of the horrors they would see at Gallipoli in Turkey as Australian Troops entered their baptism by fire - and they thought they’d be home for Christmas.

We shall not forget.

Technorati Tags: Australia, Australian Army, Gallipoli, Iraq, Iraq War, Remembrance Day, Turkey, World War I

Rail rolls to victory on ballot - News - Starbulletin.com

Oahu residents voted to approve the City Charter amendment supporting the 20-mile elevated steel-rail transit system from Kapolei to Ala Moana, the single-largest public works project in state history. Mayor Mufi Hannemann, the leading advocate for a steel-rail system, said it was a tough campaign, but asked opponents to find a way to support the project.

“The feeling has been let the people decide and the people have spoken,” he said.The mayor said the economy and environment need the steel-wheel-on-steel-rail system. “But most of all, our families need traffic relief,” he said.

Is this the future for all North American Cities? Will we see transit popping up in place of the ever independant automobile?

Having driven around Oahu, the traffic really didn’t seem that bad, so it is a surprise to see this project gaining so much support, particularly for a 20-mile line. Considering the usual timeline for construction of these type of projects, I wonder if it will be completed in time for $500 a barrel oil?

Technorati Tags: Ala Moana, Business, City Charter, elevated rail, Hawaii, Kapolei, Mufi Hannemann, Public transport, rail, Traffic congestion, transit, United States