Recycling shredded automobiles in China

The Atlantic has an eye-opening set of articles by Adam Minter detailing how other countries recycle scrap material, including much of the "waste" from the U.S.  Pictured above are the "metal sorters of Shanghai," who are sorting shredded automobiles:

[Shredded automobiles go] to a place where raw material demand is high, labor is low-cost and well-trained human hands can sort the parts of a shredded automobile with precision that no technology can come close to matching. People outside of the scrap industry tend to assume that cheap labor is the more important factor in this process, but the reality is that there are plenty of countries with cheaper labor than China, but nowhere that needs as much as aluminum as China. It goes to Shanghai because that's where the demand is...

Shredded automobiles go to China in greater numbers -- millions of tons per year -- than anywhere else, where they're sorted by teams of women (conventional scrap industry wisdom says that women are more precise) who are practiced, and highly trained... hand-sorters who can and must prove that they can accurately sort several tons of this stuff -- the industry term for this particular grade is 'zorba' -- in a day. It's not an easy job, but it's not so bad, either, as manual-labor goes: to prevent fatigue most zorba sorters work eight-hour days, five-day weeks, and enjoy income far in excess of recent Chinese university grads...

Companion articles discuss the metal sorters in Mumbai -

- and the plastic shredders of China:

...consider, then, those baskets, imported from Thailand (originally, with fruit in them). They are perfectly re-usable, and likely would have been thirty years ago. But China, now the world's second largest plastics consumer, is home of the world's largest recycled plastics industry... fulfilling the near endless demand for plastics from Chinese manufacturers of phones, computers, cars, and other products exported to developed countries and, increasingly, purchased in China. Demand is so high, in fact, that China must import large volumes of scrap plastics from abroad (900,000 tons from the U.S. in 2009) to keep the businesses running, and the plastics flowing into all those iPhones, car tail lights, and flat-screen monitors.

And that's why, in part, this couple, once farmers, were shredding a small mountain of plastic fruit baskets: a consumer electronics company (you'd know the name) guaranteed (with money) that destroying the fruit baskets (destruction is the first step in recycling anything) would be more economically rewarding than re-using them. That's an odd, new way of thinking among China's peasants, and increasingly, across the developing world.

There are seven articles in the series.

BTW, if you're curious about industrial-grade shredders that can chew up a car, watch this video of a shredder being fed automobile engine blocks.

An update for those who have forgotten the Gulf oil blowout

As reported in Salon:

Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.

That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012...

"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.

"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."

The head of the agency in charge of the health of the Gulf said Saturday that she thought that "most of the oil is gone." And a Department of Energy scientist, doing research with a grant from BP from before the spill, said his examination of oil plumes in the water column show that microbes have done a "fairly fast" job of eating the oil...

In five different expeditions, the last one in December, Joye and colleagues took 250 cores of the sea floor and travelled across 2,600 square miles... She also showed pictures of oil-choked bottom-dwelling creatures. They included dead crabs and brittle stars... She also saw tube worms so full of oil they suffocated...

Sea coal

[Chalk drawing, 'Sea Coal Gatherers' by Frederic Shields, undated]

This past week I encountered the drawing above at Victorian/Edwardian Paintings.  My personal experiences with coal began when I lived for a time in a semi-rural location in Kentucky and heated my house with a coal-burning stove.   I was surprised at the time to note how relatively light in weight coal was, but I had never thought much about it floating in water until I saw this drawing.

A quick search led me to Within the Walled Garden, which had a story about harvesting the material along a beach:

We followed the high tide line because I love to search for treasures. Coloured or shiny bits glinting in their recent wetness. A woman in front had a dog and a bag of stuff she kept gleaning from the berm ahead of us. I asked her what she was scavenging. "Sea coal" she said, and showed us how to identify the lumps and distinguish them from the black pebbles by their lighter weight and glimmer even when dry... It wasn't a great harvest because we only had DJ's hat to carry it in. But we shall return.

The post included this photo of freshly acquired sea coal -

- showing the rounded edges consistent with wave action, quite different from the material available in Kentucky roadcuts.

The next useful item I found was "A Manxman's Tale", about sea coal scavenging, in The British Journal of Photography:

Killip first visited the beaches around Lynemouth in 1975 but, he says, it took him years to win the sea coalers' trust. 'I went there when I was first in Newcastle, and I couldn't believe it,' he remembers. 'It was so odd, these guys getting coal from the sea, and so visually amazing with all these horses and carts. But when I went on the beach with my camera, they just turned around and tried to run me down. I pulled off the beach and didn't go back for two years. When I did, the same thing happened. This continued until 1981, when I had a very bad afternoon and decided to go to the sea coalers' local to reason with them. They said "Listen, we get photographed by the dole. They sit in the van and they spy on us, and then when we go to get welfare they produce these photographs and we won't get any money. For us photographs are bad news, and we don't want any."

The final question I had was whether sea coal was a purely natural phenomenon, from exposed veins on seashores, or whether it was somehow a byproduct of the transportation of coal in barges or other vessels.  The answer came from this Wikipedia entry about Cresswell, Northumberland:

Snab Point, 500 metres south of The Carrs, is a sheltered bay with the Alcan aluminium smelting plant on its south side. Embedded in the small cliffs of Snab Point are the remnants of fossilised trees. The beach area is littered with the remnants of fossilised wood and small seams of coal can be seen in the cliffs. Depending on the tides and wind, vast swathes of sea coal is washed up within the bay.

A photo at the link shows a beach strewn with sea coal.   There's more on the history of sea coal at The Public "I":

“In the last four decades of the thirteenth century, the cost of wood increased about 70 percent, while sea coal increased only 23 percent… Londoners had no choice but to resort to sea coal, which was rapidly becoming known simply as "coal." By 1300, London's total annual wood fuel demand was 70,000 acres. By 1400, it was only 44,000, despite prodigious industrial, commercial and population growth.” The street in London where merchants sold their cargos still bears the name “Seacoal Lane”...

The Durham County Council has this probably Victorian-era photo of the gathering of sea coal:

and the BBC shows the modern equivalent:

Sadly, this photo from the Science Photo Library is also relevant:

"...coal waste being dumped into the North Sea from Easington Colliery, County Durham (background). In the foreground is a discharge pipe emptying effluent from the mines into the sea. The sea is discoloured for several miles around the dump and the beaches are black with coal waste."

You learn something every day.

Aeroecology

From the BBC:

Meteorologists once treated the signals from flying animals as a nuisance that complicated their measurements. But recent improvements in computing power and networking of radar stations have turned that nuisance signal into a valuable data source on animal ecology.

A panel told the AAAS conference that radar could spot a single bee at 50km...

"One of the things that's most exciting to me is that we sometimes see an airmass that's moving, like a weather front, and insects actually get trapped up in that - you can see the insects pooling up along this air mass. If this happens to pass over the bat caves at sunset, the bats come out and distribute themselves right along that gust front and presumably gobble up those insects. Marine biologists probably think that kind of thing happens all the time in the ocean, but we've never been able to see that in the aerosphere."

See also: Mayflies seen on radar.

The trailer for Yann Arthus-Bertrand's "Home"

I have featured Yann Arthus-Bertrand's photos before.  His website is here, and some sample still photos here.  The video above is a trailer (with German subtitles) for his 2009 movie Home, which you can watch at the movie's website.

Via Gizmodo, which has the full movie embedded.

Forest loss slowing worldwide

I remember reading taht the United States has more forest land now than in the 1920s, and more hardwood now than 50 years ago.  But I hadn't realized that similar changes have occurred in other countries. The BBC presents some information from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) State of the World's Forests report:

Forest loss across the world has slowed, largely due to a switch from felling to planting in Asia. China, Vietnam, the Philippines and India have all seen their forested areas increase in size.

There are also gains in Europe and North America, but forests are being lost in Africa and Latin America driven by rising demand for food and firewood...

Although 52,000 sq km were lost per year between 2000 and 2010, that was a marked improvement on the 83,000 sq km annual figure seen during the previous decade.

Europe traditionally has been the region with the biggest increase; but now, Asia has overtaken it. A net loss of forest in Asia during the period 1990-2000 has been transformed into a net gain in the decade since.

"China has increased its forest by three million hectares (30,000 sq km) per year - no country has ever done anything like this before, it's an enormous contribution," said Eduardo Rojas-Briales, assistant director-general of the FAO's forestry department.

"But we can also highlight the case of Vietnam, a small and densely populated country that's implemented very smart and comprehensive forest reform - or India, which has not controlled its population as China has and where standards of living are even lower.

"Nevertheless India has achieved a modest growth of its forest area, and the Philippines has turned things around as well - so we're seeing improvement across Asia except in the weakest states," he told BBC News.

Many severe problems remain, especially with regard to old growth forests. Discussed at the link.

"Sudden oak death"

The phrase refers to a disease caused by Phytophthora ramoru, a fungus that affects oaks and other plants.  The Guardian had an article today about the devastation occurring in parts of the U.K. -

In woodlands around the UK, just as here in Afan Valley, south Wales, the race is on to fell thousands of trees in a desperate effort to contain a new disease which poses a threat to British forests on a scale not seen since Dutch elm disease wiped out millions of trees, changing the landscape of the country for ever.

Already 3,000 hectares of larch forest – one hectare is about the size of a football pitch – in Wales, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Northern Ireland are known to be infected by Phytophthora ramorum – sudden oak death – which comes from the same family as the potato blight organism that caused the Irish famines in the 19th century...

In 2003, it turned up in a handful of oaks, but they seemed to have resistance and the outbreak did not seem to be too worrying. Then last year, taking everyone by surprise, the phytophthora jumped species and rapidly began infecting and killing the commercially important Japanese and European larch trees. It has also been found in several conifer species, including Douglas fir...

"I think we can forget eradicating it; we have to work with nature and we're going to have to live with it. The question is whether or not we're lucky and have a fighting chance at containing it," he added. "Unfortunately we are very fond of exotic plants from other parts of the world, and that leaves the door wide open to risk."..

The disease may have arrived in the U.K. from the U.S., where it has been present for years.  This map shows areas in this country at risk for the disease:

Those interested (or potentially affected) can read more at Wikipedia, and at this resource page for the Northeast Plant Diagnostic Network.

"Winterkill" explained

From a report in yesterday's StarTribune:

Those big December snowfalls have crews on some Minnesota lakes heading onto the ice earlier than usual this winter in an effort to prevent mass fish kills.  They're on a rescue mission to install aerators and create open water before oxygen levels plummet to the point that fish essentially suffocate under the ice. Some lakes are already showing faster-than-usual oxygen depletion...

Winterkill is a natural process that happens when fish don't have enough dissolved oxygen in water, he said. Because of the ice cover, oxygen in winter comes mainly from aquatic plants, which receive enough sunlight through ice to grow.  But in years with lots of snow, sunlight penetrates ice less and plants stop growing. Instead of producing oxygen in water, the plants consume it as they die and decompose...

Sometimes it kills all the fish in a lake, he said, and sometimes it only affects part of a lake or some species of fish. It is more of an issue in southern Minnesota, he said, where more lakes tend to be shallower.  Trout require the most oxygen, followed by bluegill and largemouth bass, according to fisheries managers.  Walleye, northern pike, carp and crappies can tolerate less oxygen, and bullheads and fathead minnows need the least amount of oxygen to survive...

The DNR grants about 300 permits for cities, lake associations, park districts and even some sportsmen's clubs to install and maintain aerators on lakes. The purpose is to keep open water during winter so fish will have a fresh source of oxygen...

Man's effect on the Arctic

Rusting gasoline, oil, and diesel fuel barrels litter a previous worksite.  Not all of them are empty, and some of them are leaking.

Selections from a rather depressing set of photos of Wrangel Island (not to be confused with Wrangell Island), taken by wildlife photographer Sergey Gorshkov, via English Russia.

80% of U.S. antibiotics are used in animals

From a report at Wired, citing the Center for a Livable Future, which used data from the FDA:

Most important to note: Most of the drugs used in animal agriculture and in human medicine are functionally identical. That’s one reason why the overuse of antibiotics in animals is such a concern: When organisms become resistant on the farm to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact same drugs used in humans. (One major drug category used in animals, ionophores, do not have a direct human analog...)

The next battle, which industry has already begun, is defining what non-therapeutic use will constitute. Producers are already claiming that the use of antibiotics for growth promotion has decreased, maintaining current low-dose usage is aimed at disease prevention. Regardless, all low-dose usage of antibiotics can lead to a significant increase in antibiotic resistance.

Additional data and discussion at the links.

The dark side of Christmas greenery products

One of the first posts I wrote for TYWKIWDBI when I started the blog in December 2007 was a piece about "Balsam bough thieves" (content below).  This week I notice that PBS has addressed basically the same problem with a short video, which I've embedded above.  Here's the summary from PBS Newshour:

It's a familiar sight this time of year; the live Christmas wreath on a door or a bit of holiday-themed greenery on a table. Those products are a big business in the Pacific Northwest, where forests are harvested for greenery, boughs, moss, ferns and other plants for holiday and other gift giving.
Our PBS colleagues at KCTS in Seattle reported recently on the seamier side of this industry, which involves forest product smuggling in Washington State. Lesley McClurg looked into how illegal harvesting of forests harm businesses and workers in the short term and the environment in the long term.

And here's a repost of my 2007 item:

One of the classic sensual pleasures of the holiday season is the scent of balsam permeating a home or place of business. Balsam trees, wreaths, and swags are used to decorate living rooms, doors, windows, and mantelpieces. In doing so, we probably never question where the balsam comes from; if we give it any thought, we assume it is harvested from commercial tree farms or represents a reuse of forestry waste products.

This fall I visited a lot (in a platted subdivision) where I’ve been clearing brush in preparation for building, and encountered two young men with a pickup truck. I thought they were hunters, but when I greeted them and saw no guns they told me they were searching for “balsam balls” (which I interpreted as “witches brooms”). I told them they were on private property, and cordially suggested that in the future they make use of a plat book to ascertain which properties were public and private. They indicated that they would continue searching, but wouldn’t disturb anything near the driveway, and they headed into the woods.

When I returned the next day I was shocked by the devastation they had wrought on the property. About a dozen balsam trees - all within a few yards of the driveway - had been stripped of branches. After a moment’s reflection I realized that they had been hunting “balsam boughs” for the holiday decoration trade.

Perhaps more disappointing than the theft itself was the technique they had used:

This wasn’t a matter of pruning a few branches from each tree; rather, the trunks had been stripped bare to the height reachable by a grown man wielding a lopper. Each of these trees is now essentially standing deadwood. And this from two young men whose heritage should reflect a deep respect for the natural environment.

The Minnesota DNR reported in 2004 that approximately 4000 tons of balsam boughs are harvested annually from our forests, each ton yielding roughly 400 wreaths; the state’s balsam bough industry had annual retail sales in 2004 topping $20 million. The vast majority of this trade is managed well, with bough-collecting permits obtained at state, tribal or county offices, depending on where the worker plans to gather material. As my experience shows, there are at least a few “rogue” workers who respect neither private property rights nor the environment.

Update 2009:  Originally posted in December 2007.  I've subsequently barricaded the driveway of my lot, but on other private lots in the woods I've seen the "topping" of large balsams to create Christmas trees - sawing off the top 6-8 feet of a 20 foot tree.

They shoot pets, don't they?

From an article at Audubon Magazine about the increasing popularity of "canned hunts."

In most canned hunts tame or semi-tame game species, reared in captivity, are placed in enclosures of varying sizes, and the gate is opened for the client, who has been issued a guarantee of success. Canned hunts are great for folks on tight schedules or who lack energy or outdoor skills. Microchip transponder implants for game not immediately visible are available for the proprietor whose clients are on really tight schedules. And because trophies are plied with drugs, minerals, vitamins, specially processed feeds, and sometimes growth hormones, they are way bigger than anything available in the wild. Often the animals have names, and you pay in advance for the one you’d like to kill, selecting your trophy from a photo or directly from its cage. For example, Rachel, Bathsheba, Paul, John, and Matthew were pet African lions that would stroll over and lick their keepers’ hands before they were shot in Texas...

There have been major changes in canned hunts since I last wrote about them 19 years ago. For one thing, they’re vastly more popular... One of the club’s most prominent members is rock star Ted Nugent, who runs his own canned-hunt operation in Jackson, Michigan. Five of Nugent’s kills have made it into the club record book, including a feral boar he shot during a canned hunt in Texas and a bison he shot on, of all places, Alaska’s Kodiak Island, where they’re being raised to be crossed with cattle for “beefalo.” “Lunatic fringe” is how Nugent describes people who think canned hunts “degrade the heritage of American hunting.”

Another big change in canned hunting since 1992 has been the composition of its critics, which now include more fair-chase hunters. Because the general public has scant understanding of canned hunting, it frequently doesn’t differentiate it from real hunting. “If we don’t protect our image, we may not have a heritage,” says the Colorado Wildlife Federation’s treasurer and board member, Kent Ingram, a leader in the recent well-fought but failed battle to ban canned hunts in the state.

He reports that he was informed by a Denver taxidermist that half the elk coming in to be mounted had tattooed lips, which identify captives. Ingram also said he had reliable information that one canned-hunt customer had flown into Colorado and paid $40,000 to kill a Minnesota-raised bull that had been trucked in for the one-day shoot...

Not all product is shot. What’s considered “best” for canned-hunt production is sold to other breeders. Russell Bellar of Peru, Indiana, paid $100,000 for Xfactor, a yearling whitetail with a freakishly large rack. Some bucks are plied with antler-growing concoctions and as they age are kept on life support with meds and surgeries. Their function is to produce semen for other breeders who buy it for as much as $28,000 per standard unit, or “straw.” A prime buck might produce 500 straws a year. And there’s additional income from photographers who sell phony wildlife images to outdoor magazines and calendar publishers. Old, decrepit males with waning semen and antler potential are sold to canned-hunt operations as shooters...

Finally, there’s the disease issue. Game farms and the canned-hunting operations they supply are spreading bovine tuberculosis, brucellosis, chronic wasting disease (the wildlife version of mad cow), and brain worm (carried by white-tailed deer and fatal to ungulates that didn’t evolve with it, such as moose, elk, caribou, and pronghorn). So far the worst epidemics have been in Canada, but they apparently were touched off by animals imported from the United States...

So terse and tight is the prose of Montana’s fair-chase hunters that they were able to pack everything I’ve been trying to say in this column into a single sentence. Maybe you’ll read that sentence this month on one of their trucks, if you venture into Montana’s wild, beautiful deer and elk country, because MADCOW adopted it for a slogan during its ballot-initiative campaign. It goes like this: “Real Hunters Don’t Shoot Pets.”

More at the link, via The Daily Dish.

Gull swallows plastic bag

Found at Wanderin' Weeta, who found it at Clean Seas and Beaches.

For related material, see the "Death by Plastic" photographs of bird carcasses on Midway Island, Werner Herzog's video "I wish you had created me so that I could die," and the sickening video here of a Romanian river.

An unprintable file format

The World Wildlife Federation announced the creation of its first file format, WWF, designed as a replacement for PDF.  It's essentially identical to PDF, except for one key difference: It can't be printed. The WWF hopes this will reduce unnecessary paper use, or at least bring some attention to the fact that lots of paper use is unnecessary...

The WWF format is essentially a plugin (Mac-only for now, but coming to Windows soon) that allows the user to save any document as a WWF. Those files can be opened and viewed in most programs used to open PDFs, except they can't be printed (and they add a little note about saving paper to the bottom of documents).  

Via PopSci, where the commentary is generally dismissive.

California's beaches in the 1920s

Photos of Huntington Beach, California, in 1928.  Credit to Jerry Person, Huntington Beach Historian, and The Washington Post (where there are a half dozen more pix) via LindsayFincher.  I also found the photo below, of "offshore" wells, at Alterdestiny.

Award-winning wildlife photograph

This photograph of Leeds City Center by Paul Hobson won an award in the Gesellschaft Deutscher Tierfotografen (GDT) [Society of German Nature Photographers] photography competition for 2010, in the category "Man and Nature."

Don't see the wildlife?  Keep looking... (or see the caption at the Guardian link).

Via a gallery at The Guardian.

With your iPhone you can help to improve water quality

What I love more about internet is the ability to mobilize millions of people towards a common target. I'm one of those. who think that web and new technologies will save our world.
In California, every citizen with an iPhone can make his contribution to monitor water quality and alert  authorities to problems:
A new iPhone application, called Creek Watch and created by IBM, is now available in Apple’s App Store. The first state to partner with IBM to use this data to monitor the thousands of miles of creeks and streams in their jurisdiction is California’s State Water Control Board.
Developed by IBM Research and available for free at Apple’s App Store, Creek Watch is an easy-to-use application that allows community members to snap a photo of a creek or stream and answer three simple questions about the particular waterway. The data is uploaded in real-time to a central database, accessible by water authorities responsible for monitoring local water supplies.
According to the United Nations, contaminated water kills more people than all wars, crimes and terrorism combined; every 20 seconds, an infant dies from polluted water. While most agree that water is among our most precious resources, what many do not realize is that we walk over and drive past our drinking water everyday, making valuable observations about the water’s condition as we do so. Creek Watch makes it easy to capture these observations, providing water resource managers with additional insight and data to better ensure a sustainable water supply.
Creek Watch uses a combination of the iPhone’s built-in location sensor and user contributed data to provide information that is valuable for water management analysis – e.g., at what times of the year specific creeks begin to run dry or when the water levels are at capacity.
Contributing water data with IBM’s Creek Watch app requires just four easy steps:
· Use the iPhone’s built-in camera to snap a photo of a waterway
· Specify the Water Level: Dry, Some or Full
· Specify the Flow Rate: Still, Slow or Fast
· Specify the Trash Level: None, Some or A lot



some screenshots
 
“Creek Watch lets the average citizen contribute to the health of their water supply – without PhDs, chemistry kits and a lot of time,” said Christine Robson, IBM Research. “Harnessing the crowdsourced data movement for a cause people care about is a win-win-win for citizens, local water boards and IBM’s desire to solve big data challenges.”
In many cases the organizations charged with monitoring local water conditions are over-extended and unable to physically monitor creeks and streams on their own due to the sheer volume of waterways.
"With about 800 miles of creeks in Santa Clara County alone, we need innovative technologies like this one to empower the community to help us continuously improve our water quality and the environment," said Carol Boland, Watershed Biologist for the City of San Jose. “An amazing characteristic of IBM's Creek Watch app is that it's accessible to anyone that has an iPhone and doesn't require a huge commitment to do something that will really benefit the creeks."
Capitalizing on the phenomenon of crowdsourcing for data collection, IBM researchers hope that this and other applications will launch a new sense of environmental awareness within the community.

What will it take before we respect the planet?

Another WWF advertising campaign entitled "What will it take before we respect the planet?" for Biodiversity And Biosafety Awareness


Advertising Agency: Ogilvy, Paris, France
Executive Creative Director: Chris Garbutt
Art Director: Emmanuel Bougnères
Copywriter: Edouard Perarnaud
Art Buyer: Laurence Nahmias
Illustrators: Mathieu Javelle, Stephane Balesi
Photographer: Raphael Van Butsele
Typographer: Sid Tomkins
Advertiser's Supervisor: Jacques-Olivier Barthes
Account Supervisors: Benoît De Fleurian, Elie Sicsic, Nathalie Avedissian, Laurent Janneau





This is a list of previous WWf campaigns in SeaWayBLOG archive:

• Stop the climate change.. before it changes you!
• Panda Attack!
• WWF anti-pollution campaign
• Stop the global warming

"Wait - use a knife. It's greener."

From this week's cartoons in The New Yorker.

The last brilliant Banksy's masterpiece

Photo: Banksy.co.uk
Banksy, the famous British graffiti artist, political activist and painter, whose identity is unconfirmed, has always had environmental issues as one of his favourite themes.
This time he has cleverly "reconditioned" a dolphin shaped kiddie ride in a anti-BP statement with the help of an oil drum and a tuna net.



Here there's a video to see the coin-operated dolphin ride in action: