The green movement is coming in full force. It seems that almost every commercial or television show now is at least mentioning something about the environment. With that said, is America’s wastefulness on the brink of extinction? Hardly, in fact, last year this country recycled only twenty-one percent of its bottles, cans, and paper. To put this in perspective of other nations, Germany, a more environmentally conscious country recycled an impressive eighty-six percent of the same materials. Spain, France, and Italy were all well over fifty percent. America has the technology available to help combat this wastefulness. For example, Medina County is leading Ohio in the area of waste management technologies. Medina County residents have the satisfaction of knowing that every recyclable that gets thrown away is likely to be taken out, sorted, and picked up by companies which reuse this material. The Solid Waste Transfer Facility on Lake Road does just that, incorporating highly efficient building design processes in order to ensure proper sorting and categorizing of wastes. Every bag of trash is torn open and a series of conveyor belts and sorting processes achieve an approximately 50% reduction in solid waste going into the landfill. Much of the small waste is composted in a design process that reduces the waste to a material suitable for using as landfill cover, which otherwise would be topsoil. The technologies in place in this building are a step away from the idea that if it’s in a trash bag, it’s waste.
The idea of taking an existing way to handle solid waste, water and wastewater, and energy resources, and making it more efficient is gaining in popularity. One of the leaders of ingenuity concerning this topic has been Amory Lovins.
He is a physicist famous for developing The Rocky Mountain Institute and his theory of the “Soft Path.” This way of thinking incorporates increasing efficiency in a process to reduce waste and also rethink materials chosen for production. For example, what if all cars were built with a strong carbon-based material, responsible for reducing the weight and thus an automobile’s fuel consumption and wear of brakes? Mr. Lovins and his associates at the Rocky Mountain Institute have done just that and are currently working with automotive corporations as consultants to consider the scope of such manufacturing processes. The RMI website offers excellent information on how stormwater resources should be handled. For example, the concept of daylighting is discussed, through which culverts are actually removed and streams restored, which can improve watershed quality. Regardless of your interest, their website can be used as a great educational tool for making environmentally-conscious decisions as a consumer, citizen, and homeowner. Here is the big shocker, and the core of the RMI theory, reducing environmental impact by utilizing new and more efficient products and processes can actually be profitable. If you aren’t familiar with the Rocky Mountain Institute and Mr. Lovin’s theory of the soft path, I suggest you visit www.rmi.org.