Dispatches from the War on the Environment

Recently we have been treated to the spectacle of members of the government front bench joyfully fondling a lump of coal, with Deputy Prime Minster Barnaby Joyce displaying an expression of such manic lust that your first instinct is to check that there are no sharp objects within his reach.

But while big attacks on the environment like this grab our attention, a termite-like army of smaller attacks quietly undermine us.

Here are some that have recently come to my attention:

Battery Bullshit

At first glance one would think these were the "World's First Recycled Batteries". (In itself a strange claim since lead-acid batteries have been recycled since approximately forever.)



but read the fine print...

 

Energizer are presumably claiming a dubious World First in producing alkaline batteries with an incredible "4% of total weight" being made from recycled ingredients. Can you contain your excitement?

Bear in mind here that a large portion of the world's steel production is (and always was) from recycled steel, as it's much cheaper to melt down scrap steel than smelt it from ore. So it's possible the metal casing and end caps of the battery already contribute a substantial amount towards this 4%.

Toilet Paper Scandal Redux

On reading a recent article in Choice Magazine, it turns out that I was too generous in my post "The Great Toilet Paper Scandal"

I had assumed that the paper labelled as "made from 100% recycled paper" did contain at least contain 30% of recycled paper as per the FSC certification.

It turns out that even this not necessarily true; the 30% requirement actually applies to the entire production run (of an unstated but probably fairly large number of products) covered by the FSC certificate. It is actually possible that the paper itself contains no recycled paper, as long as other products in the same line contained proportionally more.

I know many people don't think this is important ("who gives a shit" is one of the extraordinarily witty comments I've heard), but this is a product that everyone uses every day and none of it can be recycled. There are 24M people in Australia, if a toilet roll lasts a person 6 days on average, that's 4M rolls being flushed daily. Which is a lot of trees.

Garbage Bag Garbage

It would be fair to assume that recycled plastic, like recycled paper, is of lower quality than the virgin article. Since a garbage bag is intentionally something that's going to be disposed of in landfill, it's surely something we want to make out of the lowest quality of recycled materials, or out of something that bio-degrades, or preferably both.

So how do the supermarkets respond to this challenge?



Coloured and Scented garbage bags of course!

Looking in one small suburban Coles, there were eight different types of these abominable things being sold.



Of course none were made from recycled materials and all were non-biodegradable. They were however apparently recyclable - which I'm sure is a useful property for something that is intended to be disposed of in landfill.

(Finally) A Reason to Fly QANTAS

Virgin, until now my second least favoured airline, are asking me to "Celebrate our new partnership with EnergyAustralia".

 

That name sounds familiar...

Apparently they're in the planet killing business:

"Energy Australia, responsible for the Yallourn coal-fired power station in Victoria, is the worst offender at number one with a 20.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases."

Congratulations, Virgin, you've regained the hotly contested place of my No. 1 least favoured airline by teaming up with Australia's equally hotly contested No.1 polluter.

Even Environmental Organisations Are At It

It is sad that even an organisation like the Australian Koala Foundation is willing to resort to Greenwash tactics. They are selling these signs.

And they write:

"Protect your trees for koalas!  Bright yellow to stand out, made of degradeable polypropylene - lasts for years but will eventually breakdown and return to the earth.  Attach to your tree with a small tack or nail, or tie it on."

"Degradable" is not the same as "biodegradable"! It just means the stuff breaks down into small pieces. Small particles of polypropylene are in fact a considerable environmental problem; they end up in the sea where they're ingested by plankton and enter the food-chain. Recently, cosmetics containing polypropylene micro-beads have been banned for this reason.

OK, these signs are few in number and will ultimately (probably) end up in landfill where they won't do much harm, but, really, an environmental organisation should know better than to be party to this sort of misinformation.

Also, it's not clear why the signs can't be recycled. Polypropylene (recycle code 5) is definitely recyclable.

RoHS Complaint

[For the uninitiated: RoHS stands for "Restriction of Hazardous Substances" and is an initiative to reduce the use of stuff like lead and cadmium in electronic devices. And, yes, there is a typo on the label above which has deliberately been replicated in the title of this post.]

One thing that puzzles me about a lot of technical people - that is to say, people with a trade/technician/engineer background - is that they seem to hold an extreme faith in the ability of science and technology to overcome any and every problem, yet they can at the same time be intensely resistant to technological change when it comes to environmental issues.

A specific example of this is lead-free solder.

Lead is a problematic substance. As a solid metal, it's fairly inert and arguably tolerable for some applications, but under the right (or should I say wrong) conditions it can be converted to soluble salts which are really bad news. It's a cumulative poison and toxic to just about every living thing. Consequently, you don't want to go pumping lead into the environment unnecessarily.

Now these days, there are an extraordinary number of short-lived consumer electronic devices available. Many are specifically designed to last only a short time and virtually none are repairable in any way. Regardless, pretty much all become superseded within a very few years.

The old units need to be disposed of. You're meant to take them to special recycling centres, but they're few and far between in many parts of the world. I'd say that well over half end up in landfill.

To say, as some do, that "no one has ever died from lead pollution caused by consumer electronics" is most probably wrong but in any case is disingenuous. It's a cumulative poison - by the time that there's enough of it floating around in the environment that people start dying, we are already totally screwed.

It therefore makes sense to eliminate lead (and similar toxic materials) from electronic devices where possible. Lead-free solder has been in use for many years now and works successfully in all sorts of increasingly complicated devices.

I use lead-free solder.

A quick guide to soldering: The most important thing with soldering is to have the items you wish to join clean, but a close second is to use the right amount of heat. Too much and you burn flux, melt insulation, lift PCB pads and damage components (in roughly that order). Too little and the solder doesn't wet the metal properly. The usual beginner error is to have things too cold.

Lead-free solder makes this process more difficult because it melts at a significantly higher temperature than lead/tin solder, meaning there's a smaller temperature window to operate in.

However, the difference isn't really that great. If you can solder properly using leaded solder, you'll also be fine with lead-free. To use a car analogy: the level of difficulty in moving from one to the other is not like moving from an automatic transmission to a manual; it's more like parking a sedan when you've previously only had to park a mini. That is to say, the same problems apply and you still use the same technique, but there's less margin for error.

For soldering components onto a PCB the difference is barely noticeable. For soldering difficult items the difference is greater; you will for instance have to go to a higher temperature setting (or get out the propane torch) sooner when soldering thicker wire; but it's still fair to say that anything that gives trouble with lead-free solder will also give trouble with the leaded variety.

Now I have had an electrician, who had never used lead-free solder, rant to me about stuff. His attitude was like that of a radio shock jock who'd just been kicked in the groin by an unemployed Muslim asylum seeker.

He told me of the horror of "tin whiskers" (an effect only seen with some very early tin-only solders) and that lead-free solder was the primary cause of the (non-existent) plague of unreliable electronics that supposedly now besets us.

As proof of his point, he mentioned a computer monitor he had purchased which had failed. He had opened it up and found the cause was a defective electrolytic capacitor.

:Sigh: Anyone who has repaired electrical equipment will be aware that electrolytic capacitors are notoriously one of the least reliable electronic components. They have been consistently so ever since they were first invented - decades before lead-free solder had been heard of - and this is due to the electrolyte they contain, which tends to dry up over time. The current ones don't even use solder internally. Blaming the failure of an electrolytic capacitor on lead-free solder is not merely akin to blaming a road accident on the use of unleaded petrol, but doing so when the vehicles involved were both diesels.

The guy must have known this, yet his visceral loathing of lead-free solder was such that he felt justified in telling a flat-out lie to bolster his position.

So it would seem that in the minds of some, lead/tin solder - a substance unchanged since Roman times - is the be-all and end-all of solder and it is not possible for modern technology to improve on it.

But on the other hand, technology can apparently overcome every other possible problem. Permanent manned base on Mars? Fusion power? Tsiolkovsky tower? No problem! The only thing holding us back is the lack of political will.

Anyway...

What I think is quite revealing is that there is nowhere near this level of hatred directed towards surface mount components. Surface mount components are at best diabolically difficult, and at worst impossible, to solder by hand. To continue with the motor vehicle analogies; if using lead-free solder is like parking a sedan as opposed to a mini, then hand-soldering SMDs - even with your beloved lead/tin solder - is like trying to reverse a three-unit road train into a parking space.

Although I expect this will have precisely zero effect on anyone, I would suggest to anyone in the anti-lead-free solder camp to have a good hard look at yourself: Are you being manipulated into an "environment = bad" mindset by those who have a vested interest in being allowed to pollute? Or is it just that you don't know how to solder?

He who lives by the chainsaw...

Recently, in a breathtaking piece of doublespeak, Tony Abbott has praised loggers as being the "ultimate conservationists".

Let me tell you about some of these "ultimate conservationists".

In the Victorian Central Highlands lives the Leadbeater's Possum, an incredibly cute native animal related to the Sugar Glider. It is currently listed as Endangered, a classification under consideration of being upgraded to Critically Endangered.

A Leadbeater's Possum [Photo from Healesville Sanctuary site] 
What kind of monster would want to hurt this animal?

Unfortunately, this possum requires trees of a certain age to provide nesting hollows. This puts it in conflict with loggers (VicForests in this case) who wish to cut these trees down. The usual story.

However, where things become really nasty is that VicForests are not merely damaging Leadbeater's Possum habitat incidentally, but deliberately and systematically going out of their way to destroy it, in a calculated effort to wipe out the Leadbeater's Possum. The logic being that when the possum is extinct, there will no longer be any impediment to widespread logging.

One trick was bulldozing wide and unnecessary fire breaks directly through prime Leadbeater's Possum habitat (and in fact even bulldozing monitoring stations constructed for the possums in the process). This happened in 2007 and extensively in 2009. Another good trick is "accidentally" logging the wrong area; usually the damage is done before anyone notices and the remarkably compliant DPI merely shrugs their shoulders. According to an insider, regulations are regularly flouted with impunity.

MyEnvironment has specific details on much of this, but even they don't have the full story.