Wallet Mouth

Compost conniptions

Here are two local items that are hotter than an aerobic biosolids compost treatment tank. (Thanks to Josh and Mr. Wallet Mouth for the tips!)

Yesterday at its second annual Eco-Fair, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission gave members of the public free bags of biosolids compost, touting the stuff as high-quality, nutrient-rich, and great for fruit and vegetable gardens.

It's safe to assume, though, that the folks at the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, based in D.C. but with an office in San Francisco, were not among those standing in line for their three free bags. As staff attorney Paige Tomaselli put it, "This is no gift. City residents could be at serious risk of poisoning" from using the compost in their gardens. The organization contends that the compost "is heavily contaminated with hazardous and toxic material" because it contains treated sewage sludge. It has petitioned the city to stop the compost giveaways. [Link.]

At issue seems to be whether the SFPUC tests its compost for nasty things like heavy metals, flame retardants, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disruptors. The SFPUC says it does (and that levels of the concerning materials are low enough to pass muster in Europe); the Center for Food Safety says it doesn't.

Who's right? I asked that question in a comment on the Center for Food Safety's webpage, linked to above.

(The EPA, by the way, does not require publicly owned treatment works to conduct such tests. It did, however, this year release a survey detailing the chemicals it found in sludge from across the nation, which the Center for Food Safety points to in its reasoning about S.F.'s sludge. But I can't tell from the overview document whether our facility was one of the 74 tested.)

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On a related note, as this article details, three and a half years ago, San Francisco was poised to become the first city in the nation to turn a common urban annoyance, dog poo, into something useful: natural gas.

Unfortunately, the pilot project never got adequate funding, and now Ithaca, N.Y., has (poop)-scooped us and San Francisco has its tail between its legs.

And now for a bit of enveloping minutia

Ever wonder about the recyclability of envelopes with plastic windows in them? I know some people throw them in the trash because they think the plastic renders them useless for paper recycling. I don't do that, because my understanding is that the envelopes are still recyclable, but I have always wondered why.

In her blog Fake Plastic Fish, Beth Terry sheds some light on the subject: recyclers "accept the plastic windows because they are easily separated from the paper during the pulping process, and the plastic washes away." (Of course, then, as she notes, there is that niggling little question about where "away" is.)

Another thing I didn't know is that some of those plastic windows aren't actually plastic, but specially processed paper called glassine, and that some envelope makers nowadays offer windows made of corn-based PLA, which is compostable in certain (limited) facilities but still problematic.

Government publishes list of child- and slave-made goods

Not that anyone's about to curl up in an armchair and read this thing cover to cover, but pages 37 through 44 of the U.S. Department of Labor's recently issued report on child labor and forced labor could make for some interesting browsing. That's the product-by-product list of which countries use which of the two types of labor.

Change.org (which pointed me to the report) highlights some of the worst offenders here, and notes the need for more analysis. To whit, what specific companies source problematic goods and sell them in the U.S.?

Carrot Mob event in San Francisco tomorrow!

To all my Bay Area readers: Want to do something fun and social that will also make you feel good about harnessing your economic power?

Tomorrow, Sept. 10, 2009, from 5 to 10 p.m., the pocketbook activists at Carrot Mob invite anyone and everyone to show up at Epicenter Café, at 764 Harrison between Third and Fourth streets in SOMA, and spend some money there as part of a group effort to help the café earn some extra bucks to improve its already quite laudable green credentials. More details can be found here.

I'm going to try to make it on the early side with Mini Mouth. Maybe see you there!

Why Italian olive oil isn't always best

I was talking to the olive-oil guy at the farmers market the other day, and he told me something shocking: that just because a bottle of the green stuff says "extra virgin" doesn't mean it's even pure olive oil. What?! He said regulations are in the works but that currently it's a labeling free-for-all.

Then comes this post from Grist. Apparently olive oil production is big business in southern Europe (makes sense, given how popular it is), and that it's "drawing down the water table, squeezing out biodiversity, and drenching the earth in chemicals." Meanwhile, the small-scale artisans responsible for the world's embrace of olive oil in the first place are getting their prices undercut by the big bad guys.

The piece goes on to echo what my local olive-oil maker told me: that a huge percentage of the product that appears on our supermarket shelves as extra-virgin olive oil "is actually cut with cheap sunflower and hazelnut oil, as this 2007 New Yorker exposé shows. These counterfeit oils, too, are no doubt grown under ecologically devastating circumstances."

So buy local if you have the option!