4 - Wednesday, February 21,

1990 - North Shore News

IF YOU'D asked me a couple of decades ago to review
a magazine titled Garbage, I would have assumed you were
referring to some kind of psychedelic publication out of

Haight-Ashbury or Kitsifano.

In fact, there is anew magazine
out called Garbage, but rather
than being a pulp hippie thing, it is
a glossy, intelligent, rigidly-
utilitarian, hard-nosed eco-guide
out of Brooklyn, New York, sub-
tided The Practical Journal for the
Environment.

Its cover this month features a
photo of a water-saving toilet
hovering in space as mysteriously
as the monolith in Space Odyssey.
The title piece is AFTER THE
FLUSH.

I would call this magazine a
cross between Harrowsmith and
Omni, aimed at people who are
seriously involved in environmen-
tal issues, i.e. nearly everyone,
from househusbands to the
chairperson of the board.

The contents of the Jan./Feb.
issue, in addition to in-depth looks
at low-flush,‘no flush toilets and
The Next Generation of the device
invented by Mr. Crapper at the
dawn of the Industrial Revolution,
include items on Diaper Hype
(Disposable, degradable,
recyclable ... Get a load of this,
folks: they’re garbage unless
they're cloth’’), Greywater: Why
Throw It away? (*‘House can be
plumbed to make use of greywater

— household water not from the
toilet — for gardening. If only it
were legal’), and Bottled Water:
Fads and Facts (** Worried about
your drinking water? Buying it
bottled is no guarantee of
heathfulness’*).

Okay, I’m hooked.

For those who have advanced to
the highly-evolved state of starting
to worry about where, exactly,
one’s doo-doo ends up, what it
does to the unfortunate neck of the
waste-treatment system where it
comes to rest (to say nothing of the
natural world ii passes through en
route), and what has to be done to
incoming water to protect it from
one’s aforementioned you-know-
what, this magazine is a must.

There are an amazing number of
rumors and weird tales going
around in this era of mass en-
vironmental paranoia,

People who should know better
repeat tips from the gospel picked
up by someone else, and wild fan-
tasies become commion truths.

The ‘‘gospel,’’ alas, hasn’t been
written, or at least it certainly isn't
finished being written. New data
comes in all the time. We seem to
be discovering our world anew,
and it is a changed — and rapidly
still-changing — world, its pre-

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dictable ecological inclinations
warped by humanity’s casual but
massive chemical, molecular and
nuclear experiments.

Thus, we end up thinking that
plastic is a bigger landfill problem
than telephone books, that PCBs
are a bigger problem than
trihalomethanes, and that

a complex water-treatment plant
where it’s purified, them pumped
via a costly distribution system to
your home — all to whisk away a
small ‘load’ (pardon the
euphemism).

“Only the Western industrial
mind could conceive of something
as complicated as using costly,

[, t’s been estimated that the average American uses
3,000 gallons of drinking water each year to dispose of a
mere 130 gallons of excrement and urine.”’

disposable diapers are a worse
menace than day-to-day industrial
emissions into our water and air.

Garbage gives you the facts, at
least so far as it is possible to know
them. And does so compellingly.

I quote from Robert Kourik’s
lead article on toilets:

“Are you reading this from
America’s favorite reading room?
itso, before you finish, consider
the absurdity of the situation.
Water from underground
aquiliers, costly dam projects, or
distant rivers, lakes and streams is
routed through expensive pipes to

de [CU OVIER
ee. ae ‘

LUBE OIL Se

chemically treated drinking water
to wash away human waste. Many
of America’s commodes use five to
eight gallons of water to flush
from one cup of urine to several
cups of feces.

"It’s been estimated that the
average American uses 3,000
gallons of drinking water each year
to dispose of a mere 130 gallons of
excrement and urine. Flushing ac-
counts for over one-third of
domestic water consumption.’”

The article moves from there in-
to a comparison of conventional
and ultra-low-flush toilets (ULFs),

a subject 4 get into (if youl ex-
cuse the expression) in another
column,

| found the article on Diaper
Hype to be personally meaningful.
I don’t plan on having another
kid, but | have gone through the
experience of raising two children
during the pre-disprsable diaper
era and another two during the
disposable diaper era itself.

fam something of an expert on
the subject. The memory of trying
to burn ‘‘disposable” diapers in
the rain on my Ahmore Valley
farm by pouring on gallons of
kerosene, and still getting only a
fitful, horrible plastic bubbling
and biack smoke, will be forever
etched in my mind.

Those damned diapers are nearly
indestructible!

In another Garbage article,
Francesca Lyman notes that “there
are some !6 billion diapers, made
of woven cellulose and
polyethylene, buried in landfills
each year. By weight, they repre-
sent 12,300 tons of waste a day.”’

So, they may not be as bad as
the ubiquitous telephone books
(which can’t be recycled yet
because of the heavy-duty glue
with which they are held together),
but they are still incredibly bad
news,

And so on. The bottled water
article is possibly worth your life
to read, especially in view of the
benzene scare that just resulted in
legendary Perrier itself recalling its
products: a case of the chemical
chickens coming home to roost for
the Yuppies, if there ever could be
one!

Garbage! An absolutely great
read@

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