Reading to be done before Class: AE Article 28 "A Littel Rocket Fuel with Your Salad" Gene Ayres, World Watch, November/December 2003, CES Chapter 14,Chicago Recycling Coallition, April 2006, Turning Blue Into Green. Available at http://www.chicagorecycling.org/
Come to class with a basic familiarity with the following concepts and ideas: Hazardous Waste, recycling, minimizing, Woburn, Mass case study, cluster, epidemiology, superfund, National Priority List, minamata Bay, Love Canal.
Additional Assignment: Hazardous waste recycling argument due next wed.

Today we start off with a discussion of recycling. This is probably what most of you think of when you think of helping to conserve envrionmental resources. Often it seems as if environmental activism gets reduced to recycling. This is because it is a simple thing that you as an individual can do to help the environment. However, it is awfully difficult to recycle if one lacks the means to do so. While the City of Valparaiso recycles much of its waste (diverting 45% of waste from the landfill) other cities have not done as well. Chicago's "blue bag" recycling program is currently under fire. Residents purchase blue bags, put recycleables in them, and then place them on the curb. The bags are included with the other trash and then the recyclables are picked out at sorting facilities. Furthermore not all of the trash goes to facilities that sort the recylables out and allegations of political corruption abound. These revalations may serve to discourage participation in recycling in Chicago even if a better program is put in place.

Some claim that we really do not need to recycle because there is really plenty of landfill space. While this may be true in some places, a particular concern for those communites surrounding big cities like Chicago is the possiblity that trash from a neighborhing big city may be imported to their towns. As you may know, just such a controversy over a landfill site in Porter County was faught a few years ago. While the developers suggested that they would limit the landfill to local trash, they conceded that they would import trash from out of state if local trash weren't profitable enough. 2000 people turned out to protest the landfill in part because Native American burial mounds are located on the proposed site.*

Disposing of waste can be approached as technical and scientific problems. Afterall, science and engineering can help us find way of re-using our waste products. Many of the gains in efficiency in both the use of materials and energy are the product of technical advances. What is also clear from the readings this week and throughout the course is that manging waste is also a social, political, and economic problem. While recycling is a way that you can contribute to "saving the planet" much more needs to happen before recycling is widespread, economically feasable, and politically popular. Helping the environment then has to involve more than just individual action. As the case studies we read this week show, collective political organizing and community activism is responsible for building political support for many of the environmental laws and ammenities that we enjoy today. The next time you recycle a pop can, think about not just the good that you are doing by recycling, but also about everything that had to happen to put that recycling bin there for you to use.

Questions we will discuss:

1. What are the rules and facilities for recycling where you come from? Why are recycling systems different? Do some sound better than others?

2. What toxic waste products do you have in your home? What is the best way to dispose of them?

3. Why are controversies over where to put landfills so contentious? Where is the best place to dispose of solid waste? If NIMBY where?

4. What should Chicago do to improve its recycling program?

5. What should Valparaiso do to improve its recycling program?

6. What should VU do to improve its recycling program?

7. What role does gender play in the Woburn, Massachusetts case? To what extent is science "coded" as a male realm? How come?

8. To what extent did Anne Anderson gain legitimacy for her cause by marshaling scientific facts and measurements? What are the limits of science in making policy?

*A claim supported by Professor Ron Janke of Valparaiso University and Mark Schurr of the University of notre Dame and accepted by the state archeology office. The claim was contested by the company that wanted to build the landfill.