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  But it wasn’t until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 that this romantic strain of wilderness appreciation merged with a scientific basis for concern. Up until that point, environmentalism meant protesting the obvious damage—deforestation, mining destruction, factory pollution, and other visible changes—and seeking to conserve especially appreciated landscapes, like the White Mountains of New Hampshire or Yosemite in California. Carson pointed out something more insidious; she imagined a landscape in which no birds sang, and moved on to explain that human-made chemicals—particularly pesticides such as DDT—were devastating the natural world.

  Although it took almost a decade, Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT in the United States and Germany and sparked a continuing controversy about the dangers of industrial chemicals. It influenced scientists and politicians to take up the cause and to form groups such as Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Federation, and BUND (the German Federation for Environmental and Nature Conservation). Environmentalists were no longer interested simply in preservation but in monitoring and reducing toxins. Declining wilderness and diminishing resources merged with pollution and toxic waste as the major realms of concern.

  Malthus’s legacy continued to hold strong. Shortly after Silent Spring, in 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a pioneer of modern environmentalism and an eminent biologist working at Stanford, published an alarm of Malthusian proportions, The Population Bomb, in which he declared that the 1970s and 1980s would be a dark era of resource shortages and famine, during which “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.” He also pointed out humans’ habit of “using the atmosphere as a garbage dump.” “Do we want to keep it up and find out what will happen?” he asked. “What do we gain by playing ‘environmental roulette’?”

  In 1984 Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, followed up the first book with another, The Population Explosion. In this second warning to humanity, they asserted, “Then the fuse was burning; now the population bomb has detonated.” Primary among “the underlying causes of our planet’s unease,” the two posited, “is the overgrowth of the human population and its impacts on both ecosystems and human communities.” Their first chapter is entitled “Why Isn’t Everyone as Scared as We Are?” and their parting suggestion for humanity begins with two urgent suggestions: “Halt human population growth as quickly and humanely as possible,” and “Convert the economic system from one of growthism to one of sustainability, lowering per-capita consumption.”

  The association of growth with negative consequences has become a major theme of environmentalists in the modern age. In 1972, between the publication of the Ehrlichs’ first and second warnings, Donella and Dennis Meadows and the Club of Rome (a group of international business, state, and scientific leaders) published another serious warning, The Limits to Growth. The authors noted that resources were plummeting due to population growth and destructive industry and concluded, “If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” Twenty years later a follow-up, Beyond the Limits, concluded with more warnings: “Minimize the use of nonrenewable resources.” “Prevent the erosion of renewable resources.” “Use all resources with maximum efficiency.” “Slow and eventually stop exponential growth of population and physical capital.”

  In 1973 Fritz Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered tackled the issue of growth from a philosophical vantage point. “The idea of unlimited economic growth,” he wrote, “more and more until everybody is saturated with wealth, needs to be seriously questioned.” In addition to advocating small-scale, nonviolent technologies that would “reverse the destructive trends now threatening us all,” Schumacher posited that people must make a serious shift in what they consider to be wealth and progress: “Ever-bigger machines, entailing ever-bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever-greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom.” Real wisdom, he claimed, “can be found only inside oneself,” enabling one to “see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends.”

  At the same time that these environmentalists were issuing important warnings, others were suggesting ways consumers could reduce their negative impact on the environment. A recent version of this message is found in Robert Lilienfeld and William Rathje’s 1998 Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are. Consumers must take the lead in reducing negative environmental impact, the authors argue: “The simple truth is that all of our major environmental concerns are either caused by, or contribute to, the ever-increasing consumption of goods and services.” This devouring impulse in Western culture is comparable, they maintain, to a drug or alcohol addiction: “Recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a rather large collective hangover . . . overconsumption.” Or again, “The best way to reduce any environmental impact is not to recycle more, but to produce and dispose of less”

  The tradition of issuing urgent, often moving messages to producers and consumers is rich and long-standing. But it took decades for industries themselves to really listen to them. In fact, it was not until the 1990s that leading industrialists began to recognize causes for concern. “What we thought was boundless has limits,” Robert Shapiro, the chairman and chief executive officer of Monsanto, said in a 1997 interview, “and we’re beginning to hit them.”

  The 1992 Rio Earth Summit, coinitiated by Canadian businessman Maurice Strong, was organized in response to this concern. Approximately thirty thousand people from around the world, more than a hundred world leaders, and representatives of 167 countries gathered in Rio de Janeiro to respond to troubling signals of environmental decline. To the sharp disappointment of many, no binding agreements were reached. (Strong is reported to have quipped, “There were many heads of state, but no real leaders.”) But one major strategy emerged from the industrial participants: eco-efficiency. The machines of industry would be refitted with cleaner, faster, quieter engines. Industry would redeem its reputation without significantly changing its structures or compromising its drive for profit. Eco-efficiency would transform human industry from a system that takes, makes, and wastes into one that integrates economic, environmental, and ethical concerns. Industries across the globe now consider eco-efficiency to be the choice strategy of change.

  What is eco-efficiency? Primarily the term means “doing more with less,” a precept that has its roots in early industrialization. Henry Ford himself was adamant about lean and clean operating policies, saving his company millions of dollars by reducing waste and setting new standards with his time-saving assembly line. “You must get the most out of the power, out of the material, and out of the time,” he wrote in 1926, a credo that most contemporary CEOs would proudly hang on their office walls. The linkage of efficiency with sustaining the environment was perhaps most famously articulated in Our Common Future, a report published in 1987 by the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development. Our Common Future warned that if pollution control was not intensified, human health, property, and ecosystems would be seriously threatened, and urban existence would become intolerable: “Industries and industrial operations should be encouraged that are more efficient in terms of resource use, that generate less pollution and waste, that are based on the use of renewable rather than non-renewable resources, and that minimize irreversible adverse impacts on human health and the environment,” stated the commission in its agenda for change.

  The term eco-efficiency was officially coined five years later by the Business Council for Sustainable Development, a group of forty-eight industrial sponsors including Dow, DuPont, Conagra, and Chevron, who had been asked to bring a b
usiness perspective to the Earth Summit. The council couched its call for change in practical terms, focusing on what businesses had to gain from a new ecological awareness rather than on what the environment stood to lose if industry continued current patterns. The group’s report, Changing Course, timed for simultaneous release with the summit, stressed the importance of eco-efficiency for all companies that aimed to be competitive, sustainable, and successful in the long term. “Within a decade,” predicted Stephan Schmidheiney, one of the council’s founders, “it is going to be next to impossible for a business to be competitive without also being ‘eco-efficient’—adding more value to a good or service while using fewer resources and releasing less pollution.”

  Even more quickly than Schmidheiney predicted, eco-efficiency has wended its way into industry with extraordinary success. The number of corporations adopting it continues to rise, including such big names as Monsanto, 3M (whose 3P—“Pollution Pays Program”—went into effect in 1986, before eco-efficiency was a common term), and Johnson & Johnson. The movement’s famous three Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle—are steadily gaining popularity in the home as well as in the workplace. The trend stems in part from eco-efficiency’s economic benefits, which can be considerable; 3M, for example, announced that by 1997 it had saved more than $750 million through pollution-prevention projects, and other companies too claim to be realizing big savings. Naturally, reducing resource consumption, energy use, emissions, and wastes has a beneficial effect on the environment as well—and on public morale. When you hear that a company like DuPont has cut its emissions of cancer-causing chemicals by almost 70 percent since 1987, you feel better. Eco-efficient industries can do something good for the environment, and people can feel less fearful about the future. Or can they?

  The Four R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—and Regulate

  Whether it is a matter of cutting the amount of toxic waste created or emitted, or the quantity of raw materials used, or the product size itself (known in business circles as “dematerialization”), reduction is a central tenet of eco-efficiency. But reduction in any of these areas does not halt depletion and destruction—it only slows them down, allowing them to take place in smaller increments over a longer period of time.

  For example, reducing the amounts of dangerous toxins and emissions released by industry is an important eco-efficient goal. It sounds unassailable, but current studies show that over time even tiny amounts of dangerous emissions can have disastrous effects on biological systems. This is a particular concern in the case of endocrine disrupters—industrial chemicals found in a variety of modern plastics and other consumer goods that appear to mimic hormones and connect with receptors in humans and other organisms. In Our Stolen Future, a groundbreaking report on certain synthetic chemicals and the environment, Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers assert that “astoundingly small quantities of these hormonally active compounds can wreak all kinds of biological havoc, particularly in those exposed in the womb.” Furthermore, according to these authors, many studies on the hazards of industrial chemicals have focused on cancer, while research on other kinds of damage due to exposure has only begun.

  On another front, new research on particulates—microscopic particles released during incineration and combustion processes, such as those in power plants and automobiles—show that they can lodge in and damage the lungs. A 1995 Harvard study found that as many as 100,000 people die annually in the United States as a result of these tiny particles. Although regulations for controlling their release are in place, implementation does not have to begin until 2005 (and if legislation only reduces their amounts, small quantities of these particulates will still be a problem).

  Another waste reduction strategy is incineration, which is often perceived as healthier than landfilling and is praised by energy efficiency proponents as “waste to energy.” But waste in incinerators burns only because valuable materials, like paper and plastic, are flammable. Since these materials were never designed to be safely burned, they can release dioxins and other toxins when incinerated. In Hamburg, Germany, some trees’ leaves contain such high concentrations of heavy metals from incinerator fallout that the leaves themselves must be burned, effecting a vicious cycle with a dual effect: valuable materials, such as these metals, bioaccumulate in nature to possible harmful effect and are lost to industries forever.

  Air, water, and soil do not safely absorb our wastes unless the wastes themselves are completely healthy and biodegradable. Despite persistent misconceptions, even aquatic ecosystems are unable to purify and distill unsafe waste to safe levels. We have just too little knowledge about industrial pollutants and their effects on natural systems for “slowing down” to be a healthy strategy in the long term.

  Finding markets to reuse wastes can also make industries and customers feel that something good is being done for the environment, because piles of waste appear to go “away.” But in many cases these wastes—and any toxins and contaminants they contain—are simply being transferred to another place. In some developing countries, sewage sludge is recycled into animal food, but the current design and treatment of sewage by conventional sewage systems produces sludge containing chemicals that are not healthy food for any animal. Sewage sludge is also used as fertilizer, which is a well-intended attempt to make use of nutrients, but as currently processed it can contain harmful substances (like dioxins, heavy metals, endocrine disrupters, and antibiotics) that are inappropriate for fertilizing crops. Even residential sewage sludge that contains toilet paper made from recycled paper may carry dioxins. Unless materials are specifically designed to ultimately become safe food for nature, composting can present problems as well. When so-called biodegradable municipal wastes, including packaging and paper, are composted, the chemicals and toxins in the materials can be released into the environment. Even if these toxins exist in minute amounts, the practice may not be safe. In some cases it would actually be less dangerous to seal the materials in a landfill.

  What about recycling? As we have noted, most recycling is actually downcycling; it reduces the quality of a material over time. When plastics other than those found in soda and water bottles are recycled, they are mixed with different plastics to produce a hybrid of lower quality, which is then molded into something amorphous and cheap, such as a park bench or a speed bump. Metals are often downcycled. For example, the high-quality steel used in automobiles—high-carbon, high-tensile steel—is “recycled” by melting it down with other car parts, including copper from the cables in the car, and the paint and plastic coatings. These materials lower the recycled steel’s quality. More high-quality steel may be added to make the hybrid strong enough for its next use, but it will not have the material properties to make new cars again. Meanwhile the rare metals, such as copper, manganese, and chromium, and the paints, plastics, and other components that had value for industry in an unmixed, high-quality state are lost. Currently, there is no technology to separate the polymer and paint coatings from automotive metal before it is processed; therefore, even if a car were designed for disassembly, it is not technically feasible to “close the loop” for its high-quality steel. The production of one ton of copper results in the production of hundreds of tons of waste, but the copper content in some steel alloy is actually higher than it is in mined ore. Also, the presence of copper weakens steel. Imagine how useful it would be if industries had a way to recover that copper instead of constantly losing it.

  Aluminum is another valuable but constantly downcycled material. The typical soda can consists of two kinds of aluminum: the walls are composed of aluminum, manganese alloy with some magnesium, plus coatings and paint, while the harder top is aluminum magnesium alloy. In conventional recycling these materials are melted together, resulting in a weaker—and less useful—product.

  Lost value and lost materials are not the only concerns. Downcycling can actually increase contamination of the biosphere. The paints and plastics that are melted into recycled stee
l, for example, contain harmful chemicals. Electric-arc furnaces that recycle secondary steel for building materials are now a large source of dioxin emissions, an odd side effect for a supposedly environmental process. Since downcycled materials of all kinds are materially less rigorous than their predecessors, more chemicals are often added to make the materials useful again. For example, when some plastics are melted and combined, the polymers in the plastic—the chains that make it strong and flexible—shorten. Since the material properties of this recycled plastic are altered (its elasticity, clarity, and tensile strength are diminished), chemical or mineral additives may be added to attain the desired performance quality. As a result, downcycled plastic may have more additives than “virgin” plastic.

  Because it was not designed with recycling in mind, paper requires extensive bleaching and other chemical processes to make it blank again for reuse. The result is a mixture of chemicals, pulp, and in some cases toxic inks that are not really appropriate for handling and use. The fibers are shorter and the paper less smooth than virgin paper, allowing an even higher proportion of particles to abrade into the air, where they can be inhaled and can irritate the nasal passages and lungs. Some people have developed allergies to newspapers, which are often made from recycled paper.

  The creative use of downcycled materials for new products can be misguided, despite good intentions. For example, people may feel they are making an ecologically sound choice by buying and wearing clothing made of fibers from recycled plastic bottles. But the fibers from plastic bottles contain toxins such as antimony, catalytic residues, ultraviolet stabilizers, plasticizers, and antioxidants, which were never designed to lie next to human skin. Using downcycled paper as insulation is another current trend. But additional chemicals (such as fungicides to prevent mildew) must be added to make downcycled paper suitable for insulation, intensifying the problems already caused by toxic inks and other contaminants. The insulation might then off-gas formaldehyde and other chemicals into the home.