Environment Demands Lifestyle Changes
Nothing like an environmental issue to bring out vigilantes. People want free choice but, having made their own, want everyone else to choose likewise.
The choices aren’t always easy. A recent column on disposable diapers, for example, reported on the downsides of both disposable and washable diapers. Disposables first use up raw material (trees) and finally, space in our landfills. Washable cotton diapers use up water and energy in manufacture and use and cause more water and air pollution. “Both generate costs and environmental impacts,” says Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Neither choice is clearly superior, except to those who have chosen sides. The clear choice is theirs.
The conviction of those in business is understandable. They want their Cottontails and Bunnies and Tushies (I kid you not) out there with Huggies and Luvs and Pampers, entering the competition with compostable degradable insides, disposable insides and washable outsides, 40% less plastic, 60% cotton and no detectable dioxin.
Many environmental activists and their consumer supporters have even stronger convictions. Most support washables, speaking for the trees and the landfill. They reject any possible problems of energy and fuel and water, because some diaper services use only 4 1/2 quarts of water “per child per day” and run trucks on propane. Disposable users, they say, can easily switch.
Apparently not. For all the studies indicating that environmental concerns are a priority for most Americans--including diaper buyers--disposables continue to hold 85% to 90% of the market. Even ardent advocates of washables continue to buy disposables, justifying the seeming contradiction because their child has diaper rash or because they only use disposables “away from home.”
Nevertheless, they can be unusually self-righteous, even bellicose, toward anyone who chooses “plastic” over its “natural fiber” alternative. Of all the activists he meets, only washable diaper advocates get personal, says Hershkowitz, demanding that he reveal and defend what he puts on his own children.
Like many products, diapers present further, less obvious environmental considerations as well. Those wanting only washables on the market must deal with the use of pesticides in growing cotton and with the fact that washables are a worse problem in areas of severe drought. Those pushing biodegradable plastics must consider that nothing degrades in a dense and airless landfill; those pushing compostable plastics must admit that very few areas of the country do any composting.
“It’s very difficult to make appropriate and moral decisions,” says Jeffrey Rayport, an environmental management specialist at Harvard Business School, “because there are few answers independent of your local infrastructure.”
It’s difficult even for experts. When McDonald’s, under pressure from the Environmental Defense Fund, announced that it would switch from polystyrene to paper boxes, everyone immediately applauded, assuming, says Rayport, that “paper is better because we know what a tree is, and that plastic is bad.”
But studies indicate that polystyrene packaging is better. Such plastics can lighten the weight of packaging, consume less energy in production and be incinerated and/or recycled better than paperboard--a premise McDonald’s was about to start testing with a new recycling program.
To add a further perspective: The particular material is less the problem, says Rayport, than “the packaging intensity.” Given all the fast food Americans consume, it should be possible to “buy so we don’t use so much packaging.” Why use any for the 40% of McDonald’s orders that are eaten in the restaurant?
Similarly, the environmental problem behind diapers is the total amount of solid waste we generate (agricultural, industrial, mining, etc.), not just the 16 billion disposable diapers that constitute almost 2% of municipal waste--itself only 2% of the total, says Hershkowitz. Why argue endlessly--and people do--whether that’s relatively much or relatively little, while ignoring everything else?
The overriding problem is consumption, an economy built on, now overwhelmed by goods, packaging, unnecessary things. Unfortunately, they’ve become necessary: A ban on disposable diapers could cut more jobs than the preservation of the spotted owl.
Environmental decisions must take into account all possible effects and trade-offs, but who is capable of such an unbiased, cosmic view? Government could play more of a role, says Rayport, “disseminating technical and scientific information. Government also has to figure out what we should do, not just now but years years hence.” But government agencies work piecemeal, and legislators are primarily political.
Industry is even more suspect, and environmental organizations as well, each business having a bias tied to its fortunes. Indeed, environmental advocates automatically reject industry-sponsored studies, and vice versa.
As the diaper question demonstrates, significant change requires consensus on both problems and solutions. It also requires not just little changes in materials, but what Rayport calls “quantum leaps” into doing things differently.