Charitable Efforts for the Environment
By Carlton Meyer
Aug/16/2007
While modern nations focus efforts on reducing pollution, little effort is directed at poor nations, which include most of the world’s people. Controlling pollution in poor nations is a low priority, and understandable considering the challenge to provide food, clean water, and basic health care to all citizens. However, there are simple steps that can greatly reduce pollution in poor nations at little cost. Environmentalists should push government and charitable organizations on three issues: the mass production of solar cookers, ban plastic shopping bags, and force refiners to produce clean diesel fuel.
Millions of Solar Cookers
There are over six billion people on Earth who eat cooked food and drink purified water daily. In poor countries, most cooking heat is provided by firewood, dry brush, leaves, and trash. This denudes the local landscape of vegetation and produces continual clouds of smoke that cover villages and cities. While the pollution from these small fires seems insignificant, there are nearly a billion fires burning at any give time, fueled by the world’s dirtiest fuels.
A simple solution has been available for years in the form of solar cookers.[1] These do not require expensive solar cells, just reflective metal that focuses the sun’s thermal energy on one spot. People are surprised to learn the heat becomes so intense that it can boil water or broil chicken. Several charities have discovered the joy of providing solar cookers to poor refugees, who are often skeptical yet eventually delighted by their simplicity. This eliminates the chore of collecting wood, and is healthier for families whose habitat is now polluted with smoky air.
Charities have found people are more excited about donating money to provide an obviously useful device that also helps the environment. Governments and more charities should market and mass produce millions of solar cookers for all the world’s citizens. With mass production and government subsidies, high-quality solar cookers could be produced for just a few dollars each.
Solar cookers should be mass marketed in modern nations as well. People concerned about the environment would use them. Poor people would use them to save on their utility bill. Some may use solar cookers for their outdoor barbeque since wood and charcoals are known to transmit carcinogens into the meat. Public solar cookers should exist in every park and campground, especially where campfires are banned as fire hazards. Unfortunately, solar cookers remain unknown in the world, even though they reduce air pollution, reduce deforestation, reduce carbon emissions, and provide energy independence. This must change so that solar cookers become as common as televisions throughout the world.
Ban Plastic Shopping Bags
The city of San Francisco made news this year by becoming the first American city to ban plastic shopping bags.[2] It joined a number of countries, such as Ireland, that already have outlawed plastic bags or levied a tax on them. It was estimated that the million citizens of San Francisco used 180 million such bags annually, which required some 800,000 gallons of oil to produce. The ban was not for that reason alone, but because the city spent millions of dollars a year cleaning these non-biodegradable bags off trees and out of storm drains.
The situation is far worse in poor nations because these bags are the most common method of disposing household trash. They are often tossed in a small, unofficial neighborhood landfill, which is more like a “landhill,” because local trash service is unavailable or unaffordable. In other cases, people are too lazy or frugal to properly dispose of trash, and find it easy to leave an innocent looking shopping bag on a sidewalk or roadside.
In other cases, bagged trash is tossed into rivers, bays, or the ocean where it sloshes around and ends up on beaches. Since they are not biodegradable, millions pile up everywhere. Scuba divers are often astonished to find the waters near nice beach resorts infested with plastic shopping bags. The plastic bag handles catch on everything, and the bags are very strong and durable. This is a major cause of clogged storm drains, sewage lines, sewage treatment systems, water purification systems, and fouled boat propellers and fishing lines. In windy areas, trees and bushes are decorated with bags since they hang on forever.
Banning these bags would surprise local people, but they could easily adapt by bringing their own baskets or cloth bags to carry groceries, or by paying a tiny bit more for paper bags.[3] Meanwhile, communities can begin a campaign to collect the decades of plastic shopping bags lingering everywhere, while the nation’s oil imports dip slightly. Two poor nations have already banned plastic shopping bags for all these reasons - Zanzibar and Bangladesh. Amazingly, this effort requires no money, except for small sums needed to educate (or bribe) political leaders.
Force Refiners to Produce Clean Diesel
Oil refineries can produce “clean” diesel with additional refining that reduces the sulfur content from the 500 parts per million (ppm) found in conventional (low sulfur) diesel, down to just 15 ppm for what is known as “ultra-low sulfur” diesel. This increases the fuel cost by 5-10 cents a gallon. A California mandate for clean diesel took effect last year, while the rest of the USA and Canada is required to comply by the fall of 2010. The European Union adopted an even stricter standard of 10 ppm by 2009, while China allows a dirty 2000 ppm.[4] Less sulfur greatly reduces the black soot produced by diesel engines, and allows the use of pollution control devices like filters or catalytic converters that become clogged by conventional “dirty” diesel.
The air pollution in poor nations is horrific. Busy streets are covered by a cloud of smoke while everything is covered by a thin layer of black soot. Respiratory illnesses among those exposed to this poison on a daily basis is extremely high. Smog control devices like catalytic converters are not required. Many vehicles are locally produced and lack modern engine control systems, so they often belch black smoke. If laws are passed to reduce vehicle emissions, they are ignored because people haven’t the funds to comply and their culture ignores government initiatives. If governments push vehicle pollution enforcement, violent street protests may erupt, while corruption expands as drivers pay officials a small bribe to issue a compliance certificate, while others buy counterfeit certificates on the black market.
However, governments can easily control the output of oil refineries and the import of refined products. Most of their refineries are owned by large, foreign oil companies that already produce clean diesel in the USA and Europe. They have the proven technology, but will not spend the money to upgrade their refinery unless forced. Since they have significant local political influence, political leaders see no reason to force them to produce clean diesel since if will cause fuel prices to rise, thus inviting anger from the general public who are unaware that clean diesel is possible.
Citizens and political leaders cannot grasp how much their environment will improve if clean diesel were mandated. They need education and perhaps some external political pressure. Oil refiners could be allowed to raise fuel prices a couple years prior to a clean fuel mandate to provide funds for the required upgrades. In addition, most of these refineries are owned by major western oil companies, so environmentalists can bring political pressure on their executives to produce only clean diesel. Finally, most wealthy oil exporting nations have a political conscious. They could refuse to export oil to refineries that do not refine oil to the clean diesel level required in the USA and Europe.
The world is complex and change is difficult. However, the three ideas presented here can be implemented at little cost with profound effects. The pollution in most major poor cities is so bad that tourists stay just a few days and return home with stories of bad air and trash heaps. Millions of people are forced to live in that nasty environment their entire lives. These three changes would greatly improve the health of these people, increase local tourism, and decrease global pollution.
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[1] “Solar Cooker”, Wikipedia, accessed Aug. 6, 2007.
[2] “S.F. First City to Ban Plastic Shopping Bags”, San Francisco Chronicle, Mar. 28, 2007.
[3] Numerous groups have formed to address this issue, like resuablebags.com.
[4] “Ultra-low sulfur diesel”, Wikipedia, accessed Aug. 6, 2007.
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