by T.H. Culhane, Ph.D.
Applying proven decentralized waste management techniques to high altitude tourism destinations
To paraphrase the song "Spinning wheels", which, if we really want to stop spinning our wheels and get somewhere in the world of waste management, we should rewrite and turn into an anthem for the "Circular Economy": "What goes up, must NOT come down"...
Movement up and down the “gravity well” presents the greatest challenge facing proper waste management. The irony is that while the problem of carrying heavy packaged goods UP the mountain has been solved economically due to the high retail value of the solids and liquids being transported, the issue of how to economically move what then has essentially become “packaged air” back down the well has not, even though the load has been so dramatically lightened by consumption at the top of the gradient. This, of course, is because the packaging materials themselves are considered to be of extremely low marginal value.
In economics, we are told that “Marginal value looks at the increased amount of value that can be achieved by providing an additional source of output. " To solve the problem, we need to provide additional sources of output, and this proposal, based on the author’s lived experience over the past decade, seeks to do just that.
Problems with recycling emerge when the costs of recovery exceed the benefits from recycling; the high cost of transporting “empty” single-use packaging up and down mountainous terrains thus quickly wipes out any gains that might come from selling the packaging material in a distant market. But fortunately solutions can emerge when we can find additional IN-SITU “outputs” for that material.
Hence, what goes up, must not come down. The wheels of recycling need to spin up at altitude and just as they say "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas", if we don't want to gamble on our common future, what goes on in high places should stay in high places. As I teach in our USF "Waste Not, Want Not Repurposing Refuse as Resource" course at the Patel College of Global Sustianability, we need to radically lower the transaction costs of waste disposal. And since there really is no "away" to throw things away in or to, particularly in the jagged and limited available terrain of mountainous regions, the most obvious solution is to do our "repurposing of resources" is to do all the necessary transformations at altitude.
This is not without its challenges, particularly because the same gravity well that discourages movement up and down makes the provision of heavy machinery to create local recycling industries untenable. This is particularly true where there are no immediate markets for recycled products to recoup investment in a factory or operation. Therefore we have to be more creative when seeking to construct a local circular economy at altitude, thinking always of what the simplest and LIGHTEST solutions to the problem can be -- as they say "gravity is a b!tch!".
And there really is no point in, say, trying to turn a beverage bottle back into a beverage bottle, or really turning any packaging back into packaging, since the products they packaged are not found at altitude.
It really isn't recycling we are after then, but reformation, transformation, transduction. The "in-situ outputs" need to match the needs of the local economy or infrastructure.
Two localized solution movements that I’ve been actively participating in for the past 16 years use "Nexus Thinking" and strive to add that “in-situ” value for what can be classified as “consumption residuals,” further delineated as “organic residuals” and “inorganic residuals.”
The organics—food and toilet waste—are the easiest to extract positive value from. Whether through aerobic digestion, anaerobic digestion, or various combinations of the two techniques, turning these residuals from bads into goods is technically trivial. The biggest barriers we have faced are primarily cultural and the greatest of them appears to be a reluctance to separate organic wastes from inorganic ones. Once separated, it becomes easy to transform the organics into compost (aerobic process) or fuel and fertilizer (anaerobic process) and then preserve the inorganics for value-added processing. An additional barrier has been the reluctance to mix food and toilet wastes and a poor understanding of the need to maintain a proper carbon-nitrogen ratio. Fecal material and animal product wastes, representing high N, tend to decompose poorly in the absence of high C food wastes and vegetation; much better results are obtained by mixing ALL organic residuals from the home kitchen, toilet, restaurant, and garden and providing the proper conditions for rapid and full decomposition.
The other movement this author has participated in concerns the inorganic fraction, viz. “What to do with all the packaging?”—mostly various plastics, papers and cardboard, glass, and metal cans. Cardboard and paper make great liners for compost operations, and metal cans have a high recycling value or can be fairly easily melted in-situ or oxidized into powders. The “intransigent problems” are generally considered to be the plastic and glass fractions.
By working with simple “Precious Plastics” and Glass Crushing machinery we have demonstrated at the Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center (affiliated with the University of South Florida) that we could keep 8 years worth of post-consumer “garbage” on-site and transform 100% of it into value-added products.
Since the organic residuals are considered ‘precious” for soil formation and nutrient recovery, 100% of these “contaminants” are always removed from the containers and packaging which are cleaned before they are binned and can be stored indefinitely or made immediately available for crushing and shredding.
With simple household and community-scale shredders and crushers (costing between 5K and 10K each), volume reductions of greater than 80% are achieved. The localized “shredding, grinding and granulating” solution we have employed for nearly a decade and that we propose for high mountain tourist areas reveals that most of what we are transporting is high-volume “packaged air.”
Once the “garbage” is turned into granulated particles, the volumes are radically reduced, making transport easy if desired. This means that if there was a good reason to remove these inorganic residuals from the mountain, whether by human or animal carriage or by zip-line, balloon, auto, truck, rail, of plane, they would no longer take up valuable space. If these residuals were to be landfilled they also wouldn’t take up much space. However in our own “life-tested” research we have found no incentive to remove the shredded/granulated residuals from the property. Instead we have found immediate value added output uses for these materials that we think would easily scale to the high mountain tourist sites.
1) Much of our ground up “glass cullet”, simply sieved through a screen to remove the fraction with the labels (no pre-crushing removal needed) is immediately used as soil amendment because it is simply a very safe sand. It can also be used to shore up riparian areas damaged by flood.
2) Some of our shredded plastic bottle caps, bags and detergent and milk jugs, being primarily HDPE, LDPE and PP, are turned into bowls and plates and cutting boards using simple low temperature melting and reforming.
3) The vast majority of our glass cullet and shredded plastic (ALL plastic types, #1 - #7, including wrappers and mylar coated snack packaging considered “unrecyclable”) are used as the “aggregate”, mixed with cement to create what we call “TrashCrete” – a durable and effective concrete replacement for non-load-bearing structures. We use it for paving and paving stones, for fence posts, for benches and, most spectacularly for artistic and educational life-sized sculptures of wildlife and other environmental features (much as one sees in theme parks and tourist attractions). The irony here is that such uses of the formerly difficult trashed materials reveals that we often don’t have enough – shredded and granulated, with all the air removed, it turns out that most of the solid-waste we are trying to get down the mountain is, as stated earlier, packaged air.
When one considers the dramatically reduced need to haul sand and gravel and other heavy aggregates up the gravity well, and the resultant savings in cost, the added marginal value of using in-situ processed packaging as outputs with new input value to offset material costs as well as eliminate transportation costs of materials both up and down the mountain flips the script on tourisms’ impact on remote regions. The tourists end up paying for or subsidizing the costs of bringing precious materials “up-grade” (up the mountain) and the simple machinery needed to process those materials (layered aerobic and/or anaerobic pits or tanks for composting, food grindings and plastic shredders and glass crushers) literally upgrades the former waste materials into higher value outputs for robust upcycling.
The solution we are offering is a "reconsideration of refuse as resource" that defies the conventional logic of trying to transport "trash" down the mountain. Instead, we find value added reasons to keep everything brought up the gravity well in the local area.
Nonetheless, in mountainous regions, there is still the issue of moving goods locally. Simply moving materials from one part of a farm or village itself can be quite burdensome. But here too we believe we have found a possible solution.
After a trip to the highlands of Colombia, working with a cacao-producing farm in the mountains, we developed a low-cost “Garrucha” system for transporting diseased fruit pods up zip-lines along the switchbacks and fertigation water down the switchbacks that could be adapted to various mountainous regions and purposes.
Our system tackles waste management and transport simultaneously by using IBC tank biodigesters as the anchor points for 100-foot sections of ¼ inch zipline served by a trolley/pulley system holding a 20 kg bucket. Each IBC tank holds a metric ton of fertigation water sufficient to anchor the zipline via 2x4 braces that can carry up to 80 kg (coasting between 5 and 1 foot above the ground).
Various materials could be transported up and down the switchbacks in this way, and people managing the buckets can hook themselves via carabiner to the line for extra security while moving the goods. If needed, up to one bucket of Fecal and organic material could be deposited in each anchoring tank daily.
Images show zip line anchored by IBC tank biodigesters with 2x4 pieces creating sufficient height for clearance of a 30 kg load.
