Hannah Wallace

All Aboard the Electric School Bus!

 

This story ran on Reasons to be Cheerful September 16, 2024.

Across the country, fall is synonymous with the new school year: sharpened pencils, new bento-style lunch boxes and, for many, the return of the iconic yellow school bus. Only this year, millions of students will be transported by yellow school buses that are electric. 

This change was several years in the making, and it’s a welcome one: Diesel buses — which comprise the majority of school buses in use today — spew exhaust that has been linked to serious physical and cognitive issues in children. 

“Diesel school buses are incredibly polluting, not just for the environment — for air quality — but for children’s health. They are very harmful to children’s respiratory health, lung health, you name it,” says Carolina Chacon, the coalition manager for the Alliance for  Electric School Buses. Studies have shown that diesel fumes, one of the most toxic forms of air pollution, are associated with heart and lung conditions such as asthma as well as cognitive performance issues. Even students who ride buses that have been retrofitted with cheap engine modifications like “diesel particulate filters” perform better on tests, according to researchers at Georgia State University. “The science behind it is really clear that diesel is harmful, period. But for kids, whose lungs and brains are still developing, it is especially bad,” Chacon says. 

The transition from diesel school buses to electric ones has been several years in the making.
Credit: California Energy Commission

When the Alliance for Electric School Buses formed in 2018, members were focused on demanding governors use the Volkswagen settlement funds [from the Volkswagen emissions scandal, aka Dieselgate] to purchase electric school buses. But in most states, the governors or their environmental departments chose to use the funds to swap out older diesel buses for “clean diesel” buses. This was a move in the right direction, but a lower bar than what the Alliance for Electric School Buses was fighting for. 

Then, in 2019, the Alliance switched its focus to policy. It began working with the office of then-Senator Kamala Harris to introduce the first electric school bus bill to Congress. “Her office actually drafted the Clean School Bus Act of 2019,” Chacon says. The bill didn’t advance far, though, and Harris ended up running for president in 2020. “But the need for electric school buses did become a talking point during the primary,” Chacon says. “It was something Harris brought to the table, and that [Washington] Governor Jay Inslee brought to the table.” 

 

 

Eventually, when Biden and Harris were elected, they made electric school buses a priority of their administration. Members of the Alliance for Electric School Buses continued to work with members of Congress to help create a program modeled on the Clean School Bus Act. That ultimately became the EPA Clean School Bus Program, a $5 billion program that was part of Biden’s signature Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021.  Its funding, which ends in fiscal year 2026, is being used to replace diesel school buses with either zero-emission buses (electric) or low-emission buses (alternative fuel buses, powered by propane or natural gas).

Chacon and all the members of the Alliance have been thrilled by how successful the program has been. The EPA has done three funding rounds since April of 2022 and each time, it has been inundated with applications. “To date, the federal government has distributed nearly $3 billion that has resulted in 8,500 new clean school buses,” Chacon says. (Some of those are propane or compressed natural gas, but 90 percent of the requests for funds have been for electric school buses.)  

 

One of the grant recipients has been Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which passed a resolution last year for full fleet electrification. Daniel Kang, director of transportation for the district, says he currently has 56 electric school buses on the road with another 180 on the way — arriving in increments this fall and winter. “All 180 will be on the road starting April 2025,” Kang says.

 

These 180 electric school buses are expected to remove an estimated 780,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the environment per year. The district will also save a yearly average of $10,000 per bus in maintenance and fuel costs combined (depending on local electric rates, which fluctuate due to demand). That’s a total savings of nearly $2 million per year. 

Some school districts have noticed that charging hundreds of buses at the same time puts too much pressure on the grid. Credit: California Energy Commission

The reaction thus far has been very positive, Kang says. Not only is the air surrounding schools and children much cleaner, the buses are quieter. “It’s a night-and-day difference,” Kang says. “There are some drivers — human nature, opposed to change — who were like, ‘I love my diesel — it’s powerful, I can go up the mountain.’ But once they get in [the electric school bus] it’s really hard to deny the benefits because there’s less noise, less heat. They’re saying the experience is peaceful.”

Isaac Aquino, who has driven a bus for LAUSD for the past six years, says he prefers his Lion electric bus to diesel. He loves many things about it, but foremost is how quiet it is. “With the conventional ones that have the hood and the engine up front, the motor is loud. You have your two-way radio on, the kids are making noise — it’s hard to hear. It’s very rattly in the front,” he says. But on the electric model there is no noise. “It’s completely silent.” That is, except for the chime that turns on automatically when it goes 20 miles per hour or slower, which is a safety feature. (Like electric cars, electric school buses emit a recorded noise to alert pedestrians to their presence.) Aquino knows he and his students are breathing cleaner air because when his electric bus is getting maintenance and he has to take a spare diesel bus for the day and mops his brow with a tissue, he sees dirt on it. “It’s like dirty air!” he says. He says the Lion buses also have superior air conditioning systems, which both he and the students appreciate. 

 

Switching 236 buses to electric models comes with some challenges, though. One piece of the puzzle that LAUSD hasn’t solved for yet is infrastructure. At the moment, the district only has enough charging stations at its bus yards to charge 56 buses. That was an important learning experience for Kang and his colleagues. In the first round of EPA funding, LAUSD only applied for funding for the buses, but in subsequent rounds, they’ve requested half of the money go for new buses and the other half for charging stations. 

There may also be unanticipated issues once electric bus fleets reach a certain size. When the number of electric buses reaches into the hundreds, some school districts have noticed that charging them all at the same time puts too much pressure on the grid. “The utility partners are saying, ‘We didn’t know about this but there’s a pulsing because there’s so much demand,’” Kang says. 

Kang thinks it will be sorted out soon. It’s just that the technology is so new. “In regards to this large-scale electrification, we’re still in the iPhone 2 stage,” he says.   

Some school districts are using the electric buses to power the grid during peak energy use times. Credit: California Energy Commission

There are also sometimes compatibility issues between the buses and the chargers, which are made by different companies. “Sometimes they won’t talk. They’ll sit all night connected but in the morning the driver finds out it wasn’t charging. Everyone is scratching their head: ‘Is it the bus? Is it the charging manufacturers?’” Kang says. Because bus manufacturers don’t necessarily want to get into making charging stations — a very specialized technology — the industry answer at the moment is to introduce charging management software that will sync up bus and charging station. 

Aside from these speed bumps, the greatest limitation of electric buses is that they don’t have the longer range that diesel buses do. That’s one of the reasons that — for now at least — Kang plans to hold onto some diesel buses. “We gotta keep some of them at our yards because they are the only buses with a 300-mile range,” he says. Some of the longer field trips, like from Los Angeles to Bear Mountain, exceed the range for an electric bus (which can get only 150 to 162 miles on one charge). But this may be easily solved by better infrastructure, he says: “In short, we need chargers everywhere.” 

But for most districts, the range isn’t an issue. For the Cherokee Central School System in North Carolina, the longest route is 40 miles. “And we can do both of our runs — morning and afternoon — on one charge,” says Donnie Owle, service manager and vice president of the Cherokee Boys Club. The Boys Club, a tribal entity for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, has six electric buses right now with another 15 on the way — via EPA funding. Their first bus came via the VW settlement money and the next four came from a partnership with Duke Energy, the local electric company. The tribe bought the sixth. “Duke Energy did a pilot program and they’re testing using our buses for V2G — vehicle-to-grid,” Owle says. That is, they’re using the buses, which sit idle for many hours each day, to power the grid during peak energy use times. This practice, which LAUSD is also looking into, could be a win-win for school districts, which would be paid by the electric company for the energy. 

Currently, the greatest limitation of electric buses is that they don’t have the longer range that diesel buses do. Credit: California Energy Commission

As in Los Angeles, Owle says most Cherokee Central School System drivers have been won over by the new buses. “Some of the drivers don’t want to drive electric, then when they get on and drive it, they don’t want to get out of it!” he says, laughing. They like that the bus accelerates a lot faster, so that pulling out onto the highway is safer, he says. And he echoes LAUSD driver Aquino’s appreciation of the quiet: “You can actually hear the kids talk. You can hear what the kids are saying about you!” 

In addition to the lack of noise — and the fact that his bus is clean and brand-spanking-new — there’s something else Aquino loves about his electric school bus: It’s the talk of the town. “Our bumpers and rims are lime-green, so it makes the electric buses stand out. Everybody looks at the bus when we’re at a stop sign and you can see them talking about it!” 

And it’s fun to see the students so excited, too, he says. “Especially if they haven’t been on the electric bus before they come in and are like, ‘Oh my god! Is this a new bus?’” 

Climate-friendly wine: Four tips for sustainable drinking

If you’re concerned about the climate crisis and you drink wine, there are some things you need to know. Curl up with a glass and read our guide.

I wrote this article for Imagine 5, a new Europe-based storytelling platform inspiring you to live a planet-friendly life. 

 

It’s bleakest January, snow covering the sidewalks, and you see a watermelon in the grocery store. You don’t have to be a sustainability expert to see there’s an issue here: we know that produce shipped from far away has a higher footprint than local, seasonal food.

But what about wine? After all, the wine section of any store is a veritable tour of the planet. Can it be kind to the planet at the same time?

“Growing grapes and making wine is probably one of the lowest impact agriculture crops in the world,” says wine climatologist Greg Jones, Ph.D., who recently became the CEO of Abacela, his family’s winery in Southern Oregon. But “the fact that wine is shipped all over the world is just as bad as the watermelon being in a store in New York City in January.”

Working out the real impact of the wine you drink – all the way from the grapes to the bottle to the truck that brought it to your local store – requires paying a little attention. Lucky for you, there’s a lot more “sustainable” wine now than ever—and data from International Wine & Spirits Research shows that consumers are willing to pay more for it. So, refill your glass. Here’s our guide.

1. Buy locally-made wines

When it comes to food, most climate warriors know that, as well as avoiding the foods with the biggest climate impact, like most beef and dairy, it helps to buy food that is grown locally and in season. If your food comes from a nearby farm or ranch, you’re reducing the “food miles” that it takes to get it from its source to your dinner plate.

But while we’ve learned to value local food, that’s not how we tend to look at wine. “We’re in a system that’s selling geography,” says Greg Jones of Abacela. “Wines should be bought locally just like everything else should be.” 

If you live in a state like Oregon, California, Washington – or even New York, Texas, or Virginia – that has a wine industry, you’re in luck. Buy directly from local winemakers or from shops that feature them. If you don’t, try to find wines that are from your region. 

But here comes an important caveat. Most wine from overseas is transported by ship, so it’s less carbon intensive than if it were flown. “Far more important are the road miles—a bottle of wine transported by road across the U.S. will have the highest footprint, no matter where it was originally shipped from,” says Mike Berners-Lee in his book The Carbon Footprint of Everything.

2. Buy wines without chemical inputs 

Pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture seep into our waterways, contaminating ecosystems and building up in creatures, some of which we eventually consume. They’re also dangerous to the workers who farm the vineyards. In the U.S., there are at least three different farming certifications that eschew chemical inputs and commercial fertilizers.

“Anything with a ‘cide’ appended to it [herbicide, pesticide, fungicide] is intended to kill things,” says Eric Lemelson, owner of Lemelson Vineyards, one of the first Oregon vineyards to be certified organic. “And we are a biological life form, so I don’t want my crew spraying something that I wouldn’t want to spray myself. Period. End of story.” Lemelson’s vineyards were certified organic in 2004.

“Organic grapes don’t automatically mean organic wine”

A wine made with organic grapes (certified by a third-party organization that works with the United States Department of Agriculture), means that most synthetic pesticides, herbicides or any chemical fertilizers are forbidden in the vineyard. Organic grapes don’t automatically mean organic wine: to get a wine certified organic, a winemaker must go a step further, not using any sulfites during bottling. (Sulfites, also known as sulfur dioxide, are a chemical compound that preserve freshness and prevent oxidation.) 

The United States also has over 80 biodynamic vineyards, certified by an organization called Demeter. These eschew synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and also stick to a further set of guidelines. Biodynamic wineries must integrate livestock and compost on their vineyards, to increase the fertility of the soil, plant cover crops, and use approved natural methods to look after soil and plant health.

Like with the ‘organic’ label, biodynamic grapes don’t automatically mean biodynamic wine. To call your wine biodynamic you also need to use no imported yeasts, no pasteurization, no plastic containers as storage vessels, and a limited amount of sulfite for bottling, among other strictures.

If you’re a wine drinker, you’ve probably noticed the term natural wine on restaurant menus and at wine shops lately. While there’s no universal definition or set of requirements for natural wine, the ethos is simple: sourcing organically-grown fruit and using minimal intervention in the cellar. Most mass-produced wine is made with additives, ranging from added sugar and dry powdered fish bladder (for fining purposes) to something called Mega Purple (a grape concentrate used to “plump up” the color of a pale red wine and add a jammy flavor). And because there are no labeling requirements in the United States, these don’t need to be disclosed on the bottle. Natural winemakers eschew such additives, even relying on native yeasts instead of commercial yeasts. Occasionally natural wines have a cloudy appearance or a funky flavor, but in the best hands it yields a fantastic terroir-focused vintage.

And finally there are regenerative wineries. The Regenerative Organic Alliance, formed in 2017, has certified 19 regenerative wineries both in the U.S. and abroad. Like organic and biodynamic viticulture, regenerative has a ban on synthetic pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers. But it also includes measures to minimize disturbances to the soil, and to ensure animal welfare and social justice.

They even do a worker audit to ensure that people are being paid fairly, that there’s a pathway for filing grievances without fear of retribution, and that there’s no child labor. Some of the U.S. wineries to receive certification are Grgich Hills Estates in Napa Valley, Tablas Creek in Paso Robles, California and Ambar Estate and Troon Vineyards, both in Oregon. 

There are also plenty of wineries that farm regeneratively, without tilling (which releases carbon into the atmosphere) or using synthetic pesticides, but that don’t go to the expense of getting certified, so talk to your winemaker or wine shop owner.

3. Buy wine from vineyards that don’t irrigate

Grapevines, like all plants, require a certain amount of water to flourish. Traditionally, in the Old World wine regions of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, supplementing with irrigation was — and still is — a no-no. In fact, in France, your appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) — the industry’s stamp of terroir — is revoked if you irrigate. In Italy, recent droughts have forced officials to relax the rules, but the philosophy is that adding unnatural quantities of water meddles with a wine’s unique expression of place.

In the United States there is no such rule, and watering means bigger yields and bigger profits, so vineyards here tend to be irrigated — even in regions like Oregon’s Willamette Valley, which gets an average of 35-63 inches (89-160cm) of rain per year.

“What people who irrigate don’t really want to talk about is that they get their vines in production quicker and they get a bigger crop by irrigating,” says John Paul, founder and owner of Cameron Winery in the Willamette Valley’s famed Dundee Hills. “That immediately alerts you that that fruit probably isn’t so great.

Paul and Russ Raney at Evesham Wood co-founded Oregon’s Deep Roots Coalition back in 2004. Today, the coalition is a group of 45 Oregon and California winemakers who pledge not to irrigate their vineyards, except in the first three years of establishing new vines. (If the winemaker doesn’t own a vineyard, they pledge to source grapes only from non-irrigated vineyards.) The Deep Roots Coalition can therefore include wineries like Brick House and Johan that own their own vineyards as well as urban wineries such as Love & Squalor and Teutonic. You can find member wines in top wine shops.

Climate concerns were a motivating factor in founding Deep Roots — and a recent investigation by the New York Times showing that aquifers are being depleted nationwide, especially in Oregon, makes judicious use of water even more urgent. 

But there’s another reason to buy wines made from dry-farmed grapes. Both Paul and Raney (who died in 2022) believe that dry farming yields more complex-tasting wines — in part because the vine roots go deep into the soil to seek out moisture, minerals, and microbiota. Irrigating not only prevents the true expression of terroir, Paul believes, it results in fruit that contains more sugar, which translates to higher-alcohol wines. (Not necessarily a good thing if you’re looking for a complex, terroir-driven wine.)

Dry farming is also a sensible approach if you want to be resilient in the face of climate change. Since non-irrigated vines sink deeper into the soil in search of moisture, they tend to do better in dry, drought-like conditions than vines that rely on artificial irrigation. 

“You know, when the water’s gone, the game’s up,” says Paul.

4. Pick sustainable packaging

According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Wine Institute in California, glass bottles account for 29% of wine’s carbon footprint — the single biggest factor. As a result, there’s been a lot of buzz around boxed wine lately. There are indeed environmental virtues to “bag-in-box” wines. For one: It is lighter than glass and therefore takes less fuel to transport. That said, each cardboard box is lined with an aseptic bag that contains three different types of plastic. Just like most potato chip bags, this wine bag has a foil-based liner and is therefore not recyclable. 

Traditionally, wine has come in glass bottles, which are infinitely recyclable. That said, not every state has a robust recycling program like Oregon does. And making new glass is energy-intensive. 

A new reusable wine bottle company called Revino is hoping to make wine more sustainable. Keenan O’Hern and co-founder Adam Rack have created a bottle that can be cleaned and reused up to 50 times. This not only reduces waste, it provides a local and affordable source of glass bottles, and obviates the need for ordering new glass bottles from, say, China. The bottles, which will be made by O-I Glass at one of two west coast plants, will also be slightly lighter than the average 500 gram wine bottle.

“Light-weighting is an exceptional step towards sustainability—it’s what everyone should be doing and practicing. But what if you could lightweight and also have a reusable bottle?” asks O’Hern. “What if you could do both those things and have the most sustainable solution on the shelf because you’re reusing it?” 

So far, 60 Oregon wineries have signed on including Bethel Heights, Cameron, and Et Fille. Revino’s bottles are already in use; Revino will start collecting bottles from winery tasting rooms this summer, delivering them to their wash facility for a thorough cleaning. Then Revino vans will re-deliver the bottles to member wineries, and so on. Wineries will receive a 10-cent credit for each bottle returned through Revino’s pick-up route.

One Canadian life cycle assessment, written by Julian Cleary and published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, found that a reusable glass wine bottle had 83% less emissions than the lightweight single-use glass wine bottle. A report by the Belgian nonprofit Reloop, based on 32 research articles, found that bag-in-box wines were responsible for less carbon emissions when the wine was transported over long distances (500 km, or 311 miles) but at 100km (61 miles), the two were matched – and that’s before you even start to consider the non recyclable waste from those bags. 

If all this talk of packaging, plastic, and transport takes you away from the romance we all associate with wine, never fear. With a reusable wine bottle, you’ll still be able to deftly uncork the bottle and pour it into your loved one’s glass. Just save the corks: there are plenty of ways to re-use or recycle them.

Bicycles used to be Made in the U.S.A.—a New Bill Aims to Bring them Back

Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer talks about his push for American-made bicycles and the power of bikes to make cities more livable.

I did a Q&A with Congressman Bluenauer for Fast Co. in July.

 

After 28 years in Congress, Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) has announced he’s retiring at the end of 2024. A cycling enthusiast known for his advocacy on everything from public transportation to cannabis legalization, Blumenauer isn’t leaving the halls of Congress without a final fight. Last month, he introduced legislation that would reinvigorate bicycle manufacturing in the U.S.

In March 1974, Fortune magazine documented the country’s “Bicycle Craze,” citing homegrown manufacturers like Murray and Huffman (Ohio), Schwinn (Chicago), and AMF (Ohio, Arkansas, and Illinois). But after demand fell off in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, brands looked for ways to cut costs and ultimately shifted production to other countries, like China. In 2022, 97.8% of bikes sold in the U.S.—electric and people-powered—were imported. Blumenauer’s Domestic Bicycle Production Act aims to incentivize American companies to make bicycles again through a mix of tariff suspensions, tax credits, and loans. Fast Company spoke to Blumenauer about his first bicycle memory, how bicycles have the power to bridge the political divide, and why America can and should be a powerhouse of bicycle manufacturing once again.

[Photo: Office of Rep. Blumenauer]

You’ve long been a cycling advocate. What turned you on to cycling, and when?

I remember being 5-years-old and learning to ride a bike. I actually rode a bicycle to school in first and second grades [in Portland]. I’m not a monster cyclist like some. But I’ve enjoyed cycling for recreation purposes and for transportation purposes. Some of my favorite vacations were peddling. I continue to walk or bike to work every day.

What’s your commute like in D.C., where you are right now?

It’s nothing! I live less than a mile away [from the Capitol]. It saved time and money not bringing the car back here.

Has it gotten safer in recent years as D.C. has improved its cycling infrastructure?

Yes. That’s one of the things I’m most proud of: being part of developing the bike infrastructure on Capitol Hill. I led the charge to put bike lanes down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a really terrific addition to the city landscape. But putting a bike lane down the middle of one of the most well-known streets in America also had a very powerful symbolic benefit.

 

When I first came to D.C., there was only one other member of Congress who regularly rode a bike—a guy named Dave Minge from Minnesota. I’d mostly encounter a few random bike messengers. That has changed dramatically. Part of it is the expansion of the city bike program. But part of it is that we’ve promoted it here on Capitol Hill. Every day, you see staffers walking past with their helmets and their backpacks. People recognize that it’s a healthy, fast, economic way to transport—and it’s fun. And when you pull up to somebody at a stop light on a bike, there’s no road rage, there’s no snarling.

Portland is world-renowned for its bike culture. I love the bike “greenways” like Salmon and Ankeny—lower-traffic streets where bikes and cars share the roadway. What can other cities emulate about Portland when it comes to cycling safety and infrastructure?

Bike boulevards are something that are taking hold, in part because they work. They promote safer bicycle transportation but, also, when you put facilities like that in—it encourages others to ride a bike.

The bike and traffic-calming strategy on Harrison & Lincoln [in southeast Portland] has not only made it safe to cycle but it has made a difference in terms of the quality of life in the neighborhood. Since we put in that facility [a designated space engineered for bikes], property values went up. Not only is it more attractive, pleasant, and safe—people recognize it and it’s a more valuable place to invest.  

What can Portland and other cities do better, as bike and pedestrian accidents are rising?

Part of what we’re seeing is the hangover effects of COVID. People are less attentive, less patient. It’s disturbing. We are watching an epidemic of bike and pedestrian injuries and fatalities. We’re losing ground when we shouldn’t. We’re investing huge sums of money now through the infrastructure legislation we passed [the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act]. There are 473 communities that have a federally-funded planning process for bike and pedestrian activity. We’re putting an extra $1 billion per year into facilities. And it’s really encouraging.

[Photo: Office of Rep. Blumenauer]

Let’s talk about your bill, the Domestic Bicycle Production Act, which would incentivize U.S. manufacturers to produce bicycles here—specifically e-bikes. Why is domestic manufacturing so important? What is your ultimate vision for this bill?

Early manufacturing efforts for bicycles really were the cornerstone for the manufacturing [transformation] in the United States. In fact, the bicycle was also the foundation for the aeronautics industry. It was a couple of bicycle mechanics—the Wright Brothers—who developed the airplane. Over 110 years ago, there was a bicycle messenger service in Seattle that grew into UPS. There are a whole host of jobs related to the manufacturing function of bicycles, and we’ve lost that. We have a tiny percentage of bicycles made in the United States these days: less than 2%.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We want to make sure that we make it easier to manufacture bicycles here. First, we suggest in this legislation: Place a 10-year tariff suspension on the importation of components needed to build a bike. This is an important cost benefit. We want to encourage companies to manufacture electric bikes by building a transferable e-bike production tax credit. And finally, we want to help expand our existing manufacturing base by providing loans to purchase equipment and increase capacity for domestic bicycle manufacturing facilities.

We think if we can take these steps, we can help build the momentum again for manufacturing bikes in the United States. And in Portland, as you know, there are a number of firms that make handmade bikes. They tend to be pricey—well, not as expensive as your first car or your first house. They’re really fabulous. We want to build on that momentum.

But also make bicycles that are more affordable for everyone, I’m assuming.
Yep!

The Biden Administration is planning big tariffs on Chinese goods, including e-bike batteries and other components. Your bill wants to exempt these items from such tariffs. Why are tariff exemptions a crucial part of this plan to build up domestic infrastructure? 

 

We have a significant tariff burden, in terms of what we’re trying to do to push back some on the Chinese. I don’t want to fight that battle. I just want to make sure we’re not putting the burden on U.S. manufacturers as we’re trying to get this off the ground. This is something strategically that’s been done in the United States for 120 years—back to when Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft were presidents. Giving domestic manufacturing a bit of a break with tariff rates.

Do you really think it needs a 10-year suspension? Couldn’t it be done in five years?

We’re not talking about a temporary, short-term initiative. We’re talking about readjusting the mindset to domestic bicycle manufacturing. We want to build up the infrastructure, we want to create a market, have people thinking about a bike that’s made in America. We ought to be able to provide that benefit, so these companies can get established and grow. I think in the course of 10 years, they’ll be able to function on their own. We’ve got a real problem competing with bikes from China. They are massively subsidized by the Chinese government. And this is a way to help offset that.

Does the Domestic Bicycle Production Act have a chance of passing this divided Congress? 

I don’t know. We’re building support; we’re urging people to help us. There are people who are eager to be doing domestic manufacturing. We’re adding their voices. It’s not something that gets massive pushback from big organizations and special interests. So if things go right, it might be possible to tuck it into legislation that’s going to pass toward the end of the year. This is the most efficient form of transportation in the world, and we want to make sure the United States is part of this growing movement. 

You launched the Congressional Bike Caucus in 1996. What does it do? Who else is on it?

I founded it to make the federal government a better partner for livable communities: places where people are safe, healthy, and economically secure. This agenda does not have to be partisan. I talk a lot about “bike-partisanship” because I believe bikes are something that can bring us together rather than divide us. My friends Vern Buchanan (R-Florida) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) co-chair the Caucus with me. It’s made up of more than 80 members across the political spectrum. 

How have the Caucus’s goals changed over the last 30 years? It seems like general bicycle awareness has gone up but also cars have gotten bigger and safety hasn’t improved. Most cities are totally blowing their Vision Zero goals.

When I first came to Congress in 1996, bike infrastructure only received a sliver of all federal transportation spending. Today, we’ve created a national movement shaping communities large and small. There’s a gusher of funds available to build out pedestrian and bike infrastructure. This is the first administration where we’ve had a president that is so committed to rebuilding America. Now it is about implementation, helping communities take advantage of the funding to build safer, more connected networks.

Despite this progress, the transportation industry has not done its part. Cars are bigger, which makes it harder to see pedestrians. And as I mentioned earlier, we haven’t fully recovered from the recklessness seen during COVID.

We need to take seriously the safety of all road users, not just motorists. Many places are just starting to build out cycling infrastructure, and we should double down on these investments. We can also do more to harness technology like automatic emergency breaking for cyclists and pedestrians that would prevent crashes from happening in the first place. 

What are your plans after you retire from Congress?

After 28 years in Congress, I’m looking forward to spending less time on airplanes and more time in Portland, helping the city regain its balance. As a local elected official, I helped Portland become one of the most livable cities in America. I’m convinced we earn back that reputation. There are important projects that can help revitalize our community. I look forward to continuing this work as a civilian. 

Shattered Glass

Oregon's glass bottle recycling rates may be some of the highest in the nation, but with the state's only glass recycling plant temporarily shuttered, where is the rest of our used glass being carted off to? And is glass recycling as green as environmentalists once thought? 

Hannah Wallace reports for Oregon Business Magazine.  Click here to read the full story on OBM's site, or see below.

Oregon’s Bottle Bill, passed in 1971, is famous for being America’s first bottle bill. It was also the country’s first “extended producer responsibility” program, before that term was even coined. In the bill, legislators made beverage distributors (or manufacturers who self-distribute) responsible for reimbursing grocery stores for the refund value. Consumers then pay the deposit when they buy beer or other beverages, but they recoup that when they return the bottles. 

The whole point of the deposit is to incentivize consumers to reliably return the bottles and cans — and it has worked. The Bottle Bill has undergone many updates over the years:   adding bottled water (2009); the Green Bag program (2010); juice, tea, coconut water and other beverage containers (2018); and canned wine (2022). In 2017 the deposit doubled to 10 cents per bottle, resulting in a spike in returns. According to the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative (OBRC), Oregon had a bottle redemption rate of 85.5% in 2022. 

A driver from Thompson Recycling unloads about 42,000 pounds of glass trucked up from Newport to the Glass To Glass facility in North Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

Nine other states have followed Oregon’s lead, but when it comes to cans and bottles, Oregon still has the highest recycling rate in the country. In August the Container Recycling Institute, a national beverage container recycling think tank, announced that Oregon’s redemption rate is the best in the nation, followed by Maine, with a redemption rate of 78%. 

Much of this success has to do with OBRC, the not-for-profit formed in 2009 by Oregon beverage distributors to efficiently collect empty bottles and cans from retail partners and consumers and sort them by material. OBRC does this via 27 full-service redemption centers across the state, six of which are also processing plants. 

“We have a statewide network for return infrastructure, the Green Bag program at redemption centers, all coming back through one fully integrated stream,” says Eric Chambers, vice president of strategy and outreach at OBRC. All of this means cleaner bottles and cans, which are a desirable commodity. The glass bottles that OBRC collects from across the state are crushed into “cullet” and sold to Portland-based glass recycler Glass to Glass. 

Clear glass cullet at Glass To Glass. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

But what about the glass that doesn’t have a deposit on it — the used pickle jars, peanut butter containers and wine bottles that Portlanders (and residents of other Oregon cities) put in our glass-only bins each week? None of those are collected by OBRC. And what do rural Oregonians who don’t have curbside recycling do with their used glass bottles? 

I’d heard whisperings that much of that glass ends up in landfill, since low-income Oregonians can’t afford to pay additional fees for recycling services — and some can’t easily drive to recycling depots. If that’s true, then glass, I realized, is not the environmental best choice many of us think it is. It takes a lot of energy to make. Glass cullet, limestone, sand and soda ash are heated to 2,600 to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit; the process of making glass emits toxic pollution; and it’s heavy, which means it’s both expensive and puts more carbon into the atmosphere to truck it across the country. According to a 2014 study commissioned by the Wine Institute in California, glass bottles account for 29% of wine’s carbon footprint — the single biggest factor. (That’s not even factoring in that some winemakers order their glass bottles from China.) 

Wanting to get to the bottom of where and how Oregon’s glass is recycled, I first called Bob Hippert, Sustainability Strategy Leader at O-I Glass, the Ohio company that owns Oregon’s only glass furnace. Hippert confirmed that all the glass that OBRC collects at six of its processing plants around the state is crushed, then taken to an O-I subsidiary, Glass to Glass, where the cullet is sorted into three different color streams: amber, green and clear. Typically, the sorted cullet is sent to the O-I Glass plant, five miles down the road, but since midsummer, that facility has been on a “hot hold.” (Hippert says that’s due to a lack of interest from the Oregon wine industry in recycled-glass wine bottles, which is what the plant typically makes.) Instead, the amber and green cullet is currently going up to O-I’s facility in Kalama, Wash., 45 minutes north, where it’s used to make green wine bottles. Currently, the flint (clear) cullet is being shipped to out-of-state O-I plants—typically in California and Colorado—and remade into glass bottles there. 

Graphic by Joan McGuire

Hippert sings the praises of OBRC, which recovers 45,000 tons (90 million pounds) of glass from Oregonians every year. “Oregon is the best state in the country as far as recycling glass,” he tells me. “I wish I had 50 Oregons around the country. We wouldn’t be struggling to hit some of our aspirational goals when it comes to recycled content.”  

When Portland’s O-I Glass plant was operational, it made bottles with 70% recycled glass — a very high percentage. (The industry average in recycled glass bottles is nearly 40%.) Lange Estate Winery in the Willamette Valley is a client; winemaker Jesse Lange says he’s proud to support domestic glassmakers. In June 2023, the O-I plant in Portland laid off 81 employees and began a “hot hold” of its furnace. In 2021 regulators at the state Department of Environmental Quality fined the company $1 million for repeated air quality violations at its Portland facility. O-I agreed to install new equipment to control pollution (and the DEQ reduced the fine to $662,000), but Hippert insists that’s not the reason for the hot hold. (The company was fined another $213,600 in August for violations from July 2022 and this past May.) The company needs to install pollution controls by May 2024, per their 2021 settlement with the DEQ.  

Glass To Glass facility in North Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan

But, I realized, I still didn’t know where our non-Bottle Bill glass goes. Oregon Metro — the regional government elected by voters in Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties to oversee land use and waste collection in the greater Portland area — sets the standards for recycling and manages the trash and recycling system in cooperation with local governments, which award contracts to haulers. So I called Rosalynn Greene, the strategic initiatives director at Metro’s Waste Prevention and Environmental Services department. Metro has two transfer stations: one in Northwest (Metro North) and one in Oregon City (Metro South). But those only process a fraction of the Portland area’s trash. Trash haulers — including Heiberg, Portland Disposal & Recycling Inc., and Waste Management of Oregon — are the entities that collect our trash and our glass (at least in the Portland area). Heiberg sells its glass jars and bottles directly to Glass to Glass; glass containers collected by Waste Management are taken to Environmental Fibers International and Far West Recycling, both of which deliver it to Glass to Glass. Outside of the Metro area, San Francisco-based Recology collects glass curbside in 30 Oregon cities and counties — including Ashland, McMinnville and Tillamook County. It also operate material recovery facilities (MRFs) and recycling drop-off depots. All of the glass it collects is consolidated at Recology transfer stations and then transported to O-I’s Glass to Glass facility in the Portland area. So far, it was sounding like most of Oregon’s glass — at least the glass that’s collected curbside — is sold to Glass to Glass, to be made into new bottles either in Kalama, Wash., or O-I plants in other states. 

The U.S. has an abysmally low glass recycling rate: 31.3% of glass is turned into a recycling program according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In Oregon that number is better: 75% according to the DEQ. (That figure includes Bottle Bill recycling.) Part of that has to do with the Bottle Bill infrastructure, but also it has to do with Metro fighting for a separate glass bin, at least in the greater Portland region. 

“We have advocated for it and required local governments to separate glass because of the material quality issue,” says Metro’s Greene. Even in Seattle, which is in a Bottle-
Bill state, residents throw their glass into a mixed-recycling bin. “As you can imagine, when all the materials go to a MRF [Materials Recovery Facility], it’s hard to pull out glass from paper when it’s wet,” Greene says. “There are issues when it’s commingled and getting that material out of it.” 

When people throw everything from soiled food containers to used Keurig pods into the commingled bin, the glass ends up in a sorry state. So in states that don’t have a separate sorting mechanism for glass, the dirtier glass from MRFs ends up as cover for landfills (literally, a top layer to keep other trash from blowing away), according to Peter Spendelow, a natural-resource specialist at the DEQ. 

“That’s a pretty worthless use,” he says. The clean stream of glass OBRC and trash haulers supply to companies like Glass to Glass means that most of Oregon’s glass actually gets recycled and not thrown into landfills.

According to the DEQ, about 70% of Oregon’s population has access to curbside recycling and another 13% has access to depots only, where people can drop off their recycling. That leaves 17% of Oregonians who don’t have convenient access to glass recycling of any kind. In those remote corners of the state  — places like Malheur or Lake counties — it’s likely that most people’s trash ends up in the landfill.  (These figures do not include Bottle Bill glass, which OBRC collects weekly in all parts of the state.)  The consistency of recycling across the state will improve when the new Recycling Modernization Act goes into effect in 2025. Passed during the 2021 Oregon legislative session, the RMA is a producer-responsibility law that will require the formation of producer-responsibility organizations (PROs) that will be responsible for making sure their packaging materials are recycled in “responsible end markets.” (Rule-makers are still working out how to enforce this.) The RMA will expand recycling services across the state, upgrade recycling facilities, and create a uniform statewide collection list so that whether you live in Burns or Astoria, the same materials will be collected for recycling. In November, rule-makers at the DEQ approved a uniform statewide collection list.  

One of the things that makes glass superior as a packaging type is that it can be recycled  an infinite amount of times. 

“There’s not a maximum amount of times glass bottle can be remelted,” says Hippert at O-I. But even better for the environment than recycling glass is refilling it, which you can do up to 50 times. In 2018 OBRC launched a refillable bottle program for beer bottles. 

“Because of our high redemption rate, and our vertically integrated system, we have a high degree of confidence that they’d come back into our system,” says Chambers at OBRC. 

OBRC created two custom bottles (12 ounce and 500 ml, both made by O-I) embossed with the words “Bottle Drop” and debossed with the words “Refillable” and “Please return.” Right now they have 11 partners, mostly brewers, including Double Mountain, Gigantic, Ancestry and Buoy. They even have two winemakers — Pierce Wines and Coopers Hall Wine — and one cidermaker, Röder Apfelwein. Collectively, these 11 partners have 137 individual SKUs in the OBRC system totaling 2.8 million refillable bottles. While that’s a small percentage of the overall market, it’s the only statewide refillable-bottle program in the nation. For Chambers, this pilot project is proof of concept. 

One of the biggest evangelists for refillable bottles (and also OBRC’s first refillable partner) is Matt Swihart of Double Mountain Brewery in Hood River. He’s done his homework. Experts he’s interviewed say that not only do refillable glass bottles have a 90% lower carbon footprint than single-use bottles, they are far superior to aluminum cans, which rely on bauxite (a rock that needs to be strip-mined from the earth) and are lined with plastic. Finally, he says, beer out of glass bottles tastes better, because less oxygen gets in during the bottling process. On the OBRC website, Swihart explains a big perk of the refillable-bottle program during COVID: “During the pandemic, almost every brewer I knew was panicking [about] package supplies with shortages of both aluminum and glass,” Swihart said on the OBRC site. “But we’ve been great with a bunch of stock in Clackamas, so we haven’t had major interruptions or changes in pricing.” 

The same supply-chain issues hit the wine industry. Chinese-made wine bottles were either stuck in ports or delayed due to pandemic shutdowns, which meant, in many cases, that U.S. winemakers couldn’t bottle their wine. A new venture has sprung up to offer a local refillable wine bottle program here in Oregon — at a much larger scale. Keenan O’Hern and Adam Rack are the passionate duo behind Revino, which will be introducing a refillable wine bottle in the Willamette Valley in 2024. 

From left to right: The prototypes for Revino’s refillable screwcap and cork bottles; refillable (“multiuse”) bottle; and an OBRC BottleDrop refillable bottle. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

There are many reasons why winemakers want refillable bottles: One, they want a reliable supply of locally made glass. (The Revino bottle will be made by O-I.) Others want the bottles for environmental reasons. That’s the case for Donna Morris and Bill Sweat at Winderlea Vineyard & Winery, who have been working to find a lighter bottle. (The heavier the bottle, the higher the carbon emissions.) In 2006, when they made their first vintage, their bottles were 830 grams. The ones they order from Saverglass’ facility in Mexico are 600 grams. Revino’s will be 495 grams. They plan to start using Revino bottles for a few select wines they sell in the testing room, but hope to go big as Revino grows. “It would be our goal that 100% of our glass will be in refillable,” Sweat says. 

Pat Dudley at Bethel Heights Vineyard, who is a co-founder of the Oregon Oak Accord (her husband, Ted, founded the LIVE Certification), is also switching to Revino, at least for four wines the winery serves exclusively in the tasting room.  

She says the concept has been proposed in the Valley before but the hurdles have thus far been insurmountable. “I hate to say this, but I think one of the main holdups has been the attachment of winemakers to the bottle styles,” she says. The other challenge is re-collecting the bottles. Both of those would be solved by Revino. 

When Revino is up and running this spring, it’ll have regular collection routes through the Willamette Valley.  The company, which already has its first van, will collect empty Revino bottles from tasting rooms and take them to a facility to wash them. (O’Hern and Rack will store the bottles at a warehouse until their wash facility is up and running.) Wineries would receive a credit on future glass purchases for each bottle returned through Revino’s pick-up route. The duo estimates that a case of Revino bottles will cost $12. O’Hern and Rack are also in discussions with OBRC to include Revino bottles in the OBRC return system. If that happens, then any consumer could return their Revino bottle to an OBRC redemption center, and OBRC would sort them out from other bottles. Revino would then pick up the bottles from OBRC and send them to their own facility for cleaning. 

The second hurdle — wine bottle style — is something that O’Hern and Rack are working on. They plan to have one style initially: an antique green Burgundy bottle (both cork and screw-cap finishes). But depending on interest from the Finger Lakes wine region and other areas they’re in talks with, they may do a Bordeaux-style bottle or a riesling bottle after that. A sparkling-wine bottle may even be on the horizon. “We’ll let the market and winery partners influence our decisions,” Rack says. Ultimately, if all goes well in Oregon, they hope to have multiple facilities across the country so that eventually wineries could use refillable Revino bottles even for their far-flung wine-club sales. 

Dudley thinks Oregon winemakers are finally ready to embrace this refillable program and notes that in Europe, these programs have been in place for a long time. “I think there has been enough push in that direction [sustainability] that winemakers are starting to feel obliged to give up that silliness about the bottle weight and the bottle shape,” Dudley says. “Let your label be your brand!”

Many prestige Willamette Valley brands, in addition to Bethel Heights and Winderlea, have committed to ordering Revino bottles including Adelsheim, Brick House, Brooks, Cameron, Illahe, Walter Scott and Soter. So far 56 winemakers from up and down the Willamette Valley have signed on with 60+ more showing interest.

Keenan O’Hern, left, and Adam Rack, the founders of Revino bottles, show prototype bottles at Coopers Hall in Southeast Portland. Photo by Jason E. Kaplan.

O’Hern, whose mom is Dutch, grew up regularly visiting Holland, where no one thinks twice about bringing their reusable glass bottles back to the store. “It’s just a way of life over there. You put it back in the crate, bring it back to the shop and they wash it and reuse it,” says O’Hern, who got his MBA at George Fox University and has worked in digital marketing education and as a management consultant. Rack was the operations manager and assistant winemaker at Coopers Hall, an urban winery and wine bar that has exclusively put wine in kegs since it opened in 2014. (Thanks to Rack, it also joined the OBRC refillable program in 2019 with Coopers Hall wines.) 

With glass prices continuing to rise, using the same wine bottle over and over again also makes financial sense for wineries. “If you think about it, the glass wine bottle has value already,” says Rack. “We wash our glassware, we wash our wine glasses. We pay a lot of money for them. Pint glasses at a restaurant or wine glasses are used hundreds of times! These bottles that don’t break when you throw them in the trash because they’re so heavy and thick—we throw them away. And they’re gone. There’s value there!”

Portland's Art of Feel-good Densification

I wrote this piece back in June for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's publication.  

When it comes to the US housing crisis, Portland was early to the party. Well over a decade ago, in 2009 and 2010, Oregon’s biggest city had the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country. The years since have brought little relief: From 2013 to 2018, median rent in Portland rose 29 percent, and the average home price rose 46 percent. Since 2015, the city has been under an official housing state of emergency.

Portland’s housing crunch has many roots, from multi-decade population growth to the broader affordability crisis sweeping the nation. But one factor stands out: Most of the city’s residential neighborhoods had been zoned exclusively for single-family homes since the late 1950s. That is, in most neighborhoods, new duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes (let alone apartment buildings) have not been allowed.   

Four new townhomes built using Portland’s Residential Infill Project in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

But in 2020, all that changed when Portland’s city council tossed out 60-plus years of low-density mandates by voting in favor of housing reform that ended single-family zoning. The new rules were game-changing: a package of zoning shifts known as the Residential Infill Project (RIP for short) laid the groundwork for more residential density than in most American cities. RIP made new single-family homes of over 2,500 square feet illegal. It erased bans on “middle housing” — a term describing duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and townhomes — across the city. And it allowed for two accessory dwelling units (ADUs) on any lot, removed residential parking mandates, and permitted three-story apartment buildings of up to six homes on any lot as long as they met deep affordability standards. It amounted to a transformation in Portland’s approach to urban density, and is, to this day, one of the most pro-housing reforms that any US city has passed.

“This reform ultimately became the most permissive update to low-density single-dwelling zones in the country,” urban planning consultant Neil Heller, who helped do some of the financial modeling for RIP, writes in the latest issue of Southern Urbanism Quarterly. 

This is the story of how Portland got it done.

 

Many cities have attempted to increase density. Nearly all have been met with fierce opposition. 

The reasons behind these objections are many. Sometimes it’s a fear that proximity to denser housing will decrease the value of single-family homes. Other times opposition stems from a desire to preserve historic neighborhoods. (“Stop Demolishing Portland” was a popular yard sign among the city’s anti-RIP contingent.) But objection to density is often racially coded. Multi-unit buildings, because they cost less to rent, often attract more low-income and non-white residents to neighborhoods. 

Portland at the turn of the century, when the city was still developing. Credit: TriMet

Explicitly racial zoning has been illegal since 1917, but racial covenants — clauses written into deeds that bar the (white) owner from selling to non-whites — existed for decades beyond that. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants couldn’t be enforced, and in 1968, the Fair Housing Act made them illegal.

But that didn’t stop racist zoning practices — cities that couldn’t ban non-white homeowners instead started banning the types of housing they believed non-white homeowners would buy. In some cities, duplex bans and even apartment bans became popular in wealthier neighborhoods. In 1959, Portland went even further, banning construction of duplexes and other attached housing in almost every neighborhood. (Portland’s loophole to this was that duplexes were allowed on corners.) “One effect, in many cities a primary goal, was to segregate people by class, race, age and income,” writes Michael Andersen, a senior housing researcher with the Sightline Institute, a progressive Seattle-based think tank. These bans on so-called “middle housing” remain in force in many cities to this day.

 

“There’s this pretty big presumption that you don’t mess with single-family zones,” says Eli Spevak, a developer of small-scale housing and one of the Portlanders who pushed for zoning reform. “People love their homes to be investments they make. Understandably people get attached to things not changing.” 

Not all of the opposition to Portland’s reforms was self-serving. Some objected to tearing down beautiful historic homes—and the resulting environmental impact, since most tear-down detritus goes to a landfill. Others worried that the RIP would encourage developers to tear down affordable single-family homes in outer neighborhoods—where people of color have long owned their own homes—and build market-rate townhouses instead. Since the RIP wasn’t tied to comprehensive affordability mandates, these people feared that “affordability” would be an elusive promise, dictated by invisible market forces, and inadvertently fuel gentrification in these areas. 

 

Houses of Portland. Credit: Cheryl Juetten

These reservations aside, a loose-knit coalition that included developers, pro-tenant rights groups, an anti-displacement coalition, environmental groups, and transit and mobility advocates came together under one unified voice. This group, Portland for Everyone, helped to change the tenor of the conversation and persuade the City Council that more density was exactly what Portland needed to alleviate its housing crisis. 

One of the leaders of Portland’s zoning reform was Spevak, who had worked for Habitat for Humanity and consulted for other affordable housing projects. In 2014, Spevak, wanting to see a broader palette of housing choices in Portland, drafted a letter to the director of the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) asking for a code update to meet Portland’s future housing needs. 

The letter, signed by nearly 40 building professionals, local organizations and Portland residents, asked the Bureau to encourage accessory dwelling units (ADUs), permit existing homes to be divided internally, allow small “cottage cluster” developments, eliminate household size definitions from the zoning code, and more. Demographic shifts had left Portland with smaller households that looked different than traditional nuclear families, the letter argued, and the city code needed to catch up. 

The letter was an opening gambit to the BPS, where both the then-director and her long-range planner were looking for ways to increase density and discourage so-called McMansions. 

In 2016, Spevak came to the realization that if they wanted to win the fight for zoning reform, they needed a dedicated advocate who would lead the fight. “The people who were going to oppose the changes have a lot of time and are self-organized. If we were going to create a ground game, we had to have a staff organizer,” says Spevak. “So that was pivotal. We were going to lose unless we had staff.”

Spevak saw the ideal coalition organizer in his employee, Madeline Kovacs. A then 29-year-old Portland State University grad student interested in the links between density and decarbonization, Kovacs had been active in the youth climate movement, eventually becoming co-director of a group called Project Survival Media. After graduate work in urban and regional planning, she interned for two years at BPS and then came to work for Spevak at his firm Orange Splot, LLC.

Kovacs, a passionate organizer, also had affordable housing connections. “Plus, everyone likes her,” Spevak adds.  The anti-sprawl nonprofit 1,000 Friends of Oregon was willing to host Kovacs and her emerging coalition of pro-housing groups under its banner. (Eventually the organization even helped fund her position.)

Kovacs set to work launching a coalition called Portland for Everyone. She and representatives from nonprofits and organizations throughout the city met frequently and determined what they had in common. “One of the things I’m very proud of is that the pro-housing advocates really un-siloed ourselves,” says Kovacs. Indeed, Kovacs gathered some unlikely bedfellows: affordable housing providers and nonprofit land trusts sat at the table with members of the Portland Homebuilders Association, a trade association representing builders and remodelers of single-family homes. Environmental groups like Sunrise PDX started talking to folks from Anti-Displacement PDX. The coalition even included a handful of progressive neighborhood associations, which historically have not been supportive of denser zoning.

“So I think when people look and they’re like, ‘Oh! You have affordable housing builders, tree canopy advocates and bicycle advocates — and they’re all signing the same letter?’ That makes a policy maker pay attention,” Kovacs says. 

 “We all worked and talked together and we adopted a very holistic approach. It’s not just upzoning and it’s not just funding, it’s not just stability — it’s all three of those things,” she says. “And we need a housing strategy that’s going to provide a range of solutions working across that spectrum.”

 

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There was seemingly no one that Kovacs and her coalition members wouldn’t talk to. They did education and outreach with neighborhood, business and community-based associations. “We presented to 3,000 Portlanders face-to-face!” she says, laughing. They also partnered with and presented to organizations as varied as AARP, OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon, and Business for a Better PDX. They got inspiration from the YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) movement. “It was nice to be able to learn some lessons from colleagues in other places — share ideas, share strategies,” Kovacs says.

By 2018, when the project came before the city’s Planning Commission, some 38 organizations had already endorsed the coalition’s principles in advance. The result? Over half of the testimonials before the Commission were pro-density — a dramatic departure from such meetings in many other cities, where anti-density voices are often the loudest in the room. 

The same thing was true at two City Council meetings in early 2020, where people in favor of the new law outnumbered anti-housing testimony more than six to one.

Portland for Everyone had successfully educated Portlanders en masse about the benefits of the zoning changes. (Kovacs left Portland for Everyone to work on state zoning reform at the end of 2018.)

In August of 2020, the City Council passed the RIP by a vote of three to one. It no doubt helped that two of the newer City Council members — Chloe Eudaly and Jo Ann Hardesty — were both renters. 

Meanwhile, down at the State Capitol in Salem, then-Speaker of the House Tina Kotek had just helped push through a groundbreaking zoning bill, making Oregon the first state in the nation to effectively ban single-family zoning. House Bill 2001, passed in 2019, required cities larger than 10,000 residents to allow duplexes in single-family zones and cities larger than 25,000 to allow even more types of multi-family housing like triplexes, fourplexes and “cottage clusters.”

“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region.

“The neat thing about the timing is that Portland passed residential infill in 2020, and there were neighborhood associations on the west side raising money to sue the city over that,” Spevak says. But by the time Portland adopted the RIP, the state’s own zoning reform required cities of Portland’s size to densify, defanging the legal challenges being prepared by some of the city’s neighborhood associations. “So the city was never sued. That worked out nicely,” Spevak says. Kotek, who is still a vocal champion of density, is now Oregon’s governor.

Other cities and states around the country have passed similar reforms. Statewide “middle-housing” bills have been introduced in nearly 20 states since 2019 and have passed in at least two beyond Oregon: Maine and California. Minneapolis and Vancouver, Washington both re-legalized duplexes and triplexes citywide before Portland did. Seattle eliminated single-family zoning in 27 neighborhoods in 2019. And Austin passed a zoning reform allowing sixplexes with affordability the year before Portland’s RIP passed.

“That presumption [that you don’t mess with single-family zones] is getting blown away faster than you’d ever guess,” says Spevak. Now, roughly a dozen states allow cities to add ADUs to residential lots, even red states like Montana. (Texas’ state house just narrowly voted down a bill that would’ve allowed ADUs statewide.)  

Most developers and city planners say it will take at least a decade before we see measurable results of Portland’s RIP. That said, from August 2021 to July 2022 — the first 12 months the RIP was in effect — 367 middle housing units were built, according to Morgan Tracy, Senior Planner at the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. During that same time period, just 107 single-dwelling houses were built. (28 of those had a single ADU on the property, but those were permitted prior to RIP passing.) So, in the first year of the RIP, 3.4 times more middle housing units were built than single-family houses.

“I think this is really brilliant legislation that will have long-term impact,” says Steve Messinetti, the President and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Portland Region. “Where I think we’ll see the greatest impact is in the 10 to 20 year horizon.”

Development — especially for affordable housing projects — can be slow. You have to buy the property, get funding approved, clear additional zoning hurdles, and so on. That said, Messinetti is overseeing two low-income housing projects that wouldn’t have been possible prior to these zoning changes. In Northeast Portland’s Cully neighborhood, Habitat bought a three-quarter acre lot that had a derelict home on it. Prior to the RIP, a developer might have torn down the home and subdivided the lot for five expensive single-family homes. Now, however, Habitat will be able to build 15 affordable units on that parcel — a mix of duplexes and triplexes. The second project, in Southwest Portland, was a former church on 1.9 acres. Habitat is currently building 17 detached homes there. (Cottage clusters, which state legislation allowed in 2019, were added in an update to the RIP in 2022.) “This is a good example of an area where not a lot of affordable housing has been built,” he says. 

While he acknowledges that some of the triplexes and townhomes are not as affordable as the activists who helped push through RIP probably would have liked, he does think they will be the most affordable housing in the city in the future.

“The long-term benefit is we’re creating more housing for middle and low-income folks, helping to desegregate neighborhoods,” Messinetti says. “And that’s a good thing overall.” 

Phil Knight ponied up $400 million to help historically Black areas of Portland. Meet the woman investing it.

I wrote a story for Fast Co. about Rukaiyah Adams, CEO of the new 1803 Fund. 

When Rukaiyah Adams took the podium at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, two weeks ago to announce Phil and Penny Knight’s $400 million donation to the 1803 Fund her voice wavered with emotion. It’s understandable why: Thanks to the contributions of the Nike founder and his wife, the scale of the assets she’ll be managing as chair of the newly formed fund will be game-changing for Portland’s Black community, which her family has been a part of for four generations.

“At $400 million, I’ll be managing almost more than all Black women in venture capital,” Adams tells me by phone a week later. “I don’t think there’s a Black woman who has ever raised more than a few million dollars for a historically Black community.”

The 1803 Fund, a public benefit nonprofit, is dedicated to rebuilding and strengthening the historically Black community in North and Northeast Portland. “It’s like a private equity fund for the people,” Adams says. The fund will have three focus areas: education, culture and belonging, and place. Its first project, Rebuild Albina, is focused on investing in the Black neighborhood that was partially razed in the 1950s to make way for Memorial Coliseum, I-5, and Legacy Emanuel Hospital, displacing a vibrant business district and residential community of bungalows, jazz clubs, corner groceries, and churches.

Continue reading here.   Or email me for a copy of the PDF! 

The Snack Bag of the Future Won’t Be Made from Plastic

Companies from Frito-Lay to Kettle Chips are experimenting with corn starch, calcium carbonate and other materials that eschew plastic but preserve taste.

I wrote this story for Bloomberg Green. 

Florencio Cuétara is the kind of person who crosses the street to tell people to pick up their litter. One day, Cuétara, an avid diver, was swimming in the Mediterranean when he came across a plastic cookie bag. “This bag hits me in the face as I’m swimming. And I’m cursing whoever put it in there, as if it’s somebody else’s fault,” Cuétara says. “Then I realized that the bag was one of my bags — with my last name on it.” 

Cuétara’s family business is Switzerland-based snack company Cuétara Foods, which makes 25 brands of cookies, biscuits and crackers sold all over the world. For Florencio, who was CEO for the Americas at the time, that moment was a turning point. “I was like, ‘I want to blame everybody else for this,” he says. “But I’m not an innocent party here. I’m part of the problem.’” 

Most bags for potato chips and other crispy snacks are made with three layers of polymer materials: a moisture barrier on the inside (usually biaxially oriented polypropylene), low-density polyethylene in the middle and an outer layer of thermoplastic resin. From an environmental standpoint, polymers — like all plastics — have two marks against them: They’re made from petroleum, and they’ll never decompose.

 

Today, according to the UN Environment Programme, humans produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. Half of that is single-use plastic, like potato chip bags, that ends up in landfills or in waterways, where it breaks down into microplastics that are consumed by aquatic life, and eventually by people. At the behest of consumers and under the shadow of potential regulation, snack companies big and small are now looking for a way to break that cycle with alternative packaging materials. The only question is who will succeed. 

The great repackaging

Florencio Cuétara swam into his cookie bag in 2015, setting off a four-year quest to find a different packaging material that didn’t rely on fossil fuels. In 2019, Cuétara and Dr. Russ Petrie, an orthopedic surgeon in California, founded Okeanos, which uses calcium carbonate to create bags for snacks, rice, coffee and salt, as well as wraps for flowers. 

Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a mineral naturally found in stone or rocks, has been used as a filler in packaging before, but only in small percentages. Cuétara and Petrie developed a technology they called “Made from Stone” that is up to 70% calcium carbonate; the rest is made of resin. The company’s bags are both flexible and light — they float on water — and the technology is now used by manufacturers in 15 countries including Brazil, India, Canada, the Philippines and the US. “We were called crazy a number of times,” Cuétara says. 

A flower wrap using Made from Stone packaging.

Courtesy of Okeanos

For Sean Mason and Mark Green, co-founders of British crisps company Two Farmers, it took five years to find a packaging material that would both biodegrade and keep their chips crunchy. “Obviously the single-use plastic that’s in crisp packets is blighting the landscape and the seas,” Mason says. 

Mason also saw a need for consistency. Two Farmers sources all of its potatoes from Green’s farm in Herefordshire, where cover-cropping (planting a crop like clovers or alfalfa after the cash crop) is used to nourish the soil. The farm also has an anaerobic digester that converts farm waste into bio-methane — which in turn produces more than enough electricity to run the entire operation. “Our difference was sustainable farming, so we thought we should see that through to the crisp bag,” Mason says.  

When it came to identifying an alternative material, though, Mason and Green were stumped. First, they considered cardboard boxes. “We suddenly realized that we would still have to put a plastic bag inside to keep it fresh,” Mason says. “So we were effectively just over-packaging; packaging for packaging’s sake.” Next they looked at tins — “too expensive and probably too much waste for a small 40-gram packet.” Finally, at a packaging trade show they came across eucalyptus cellulose films in their raw state, and started talking to the producers about their potential for crisps bags. 

What on Earth?

The duo found a laminator, which helped them figure out how to add plant-based glues and inks for printing. After producing the film, they sent it off to TŪV Austria — a third-party certifier that verifies whether packaging is compostable — to have it tested for compostability and eco-toxicity. Following some trial and error, their material passed muster, and in 2019 Two Farmers officially launched its gourmet potato chips in 100% compostable packaging made from eucalyptus cellulose. Mason, who credits David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II with helping put single-use plastics on Brits’ radar, says his company’s bags take 30 to 36 weeks to decompose in home composting systems, or 11 weeks in an industrial composter. 

The eucalyptus film is much more expensive than plastic — over 10 times the cost, to be exact — and each packet retails for £1.20 ($1.40). But quality hasn’t been an issue: Last year, Two Farmers’ Woodland Mushroom & Wild Garlic and Herefordshire Sausage & Mustard flavors won the Great British Food award in the Savoury Snacks category. 

Big Chip

There are thousands of companies making snacks all over the world, but any progress on plastic packaging will have to involve a few big ones. In the world of US potato chips, for example, Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo Inc., has a whopping 60% of the market share, according to data analytics firm IRI Worldwide.  

Frito-Lay North America began its own foray into alternative packaging over a decade ago, with the 2009 debut of a 100% compostable bag for SunChips. Made from 90% polylactic acid, the bag was notoriously noisy when opened or handled — up to 95 decibels, by some accounts — and Frito-Lay discontinued it in 2010. 

Frito-Lay has made quieter headway since, and the company has a goal of making all of its packaging 100% recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable by 2025. In 2021, it debuted a bag made of 85% polylactic acid — typically composed of corn starch — for two of its Off the Eaten Path veggie chips. (The rest is made of aluminum coatings, inks and adhesives.) 

The Off the Eaten Path bag is industrially compostable, which means it can be put into city compost systems. The bags can also be sent back via a free shipping label to New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which partners with Frito-Lay on the venture. (Though questions have been raised about the effectiveness of TerraCycle’s plastics recycling program, which involves third-party facilities.)

“We’re going through a test and learn phase [with Off the Eaten Path] as we work towards our ultimate goal of designing 100% of our packaging to be either recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable,” says David Allen, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Pepsi-Co Foods North America. 

Also in the US, Salem, Oregon-based Kettle Foods Inc., which makes the popular Kettle Chips brand, will debut a Made from Stone bag this spring, starting with its sea salt flavor. 

The Off the Eaten Path bag can be put into a city compost system.

Off the Eaten Path

Looming regulations

Companies that aren’t moving towards plastic-free packaging yet may be forced to in the future, as regulators start to step in. Last year, the European Union proposed new rules that would require companies selling products in EU countries to make their packaging easier to reuse, recycle or compost. The rules would also limit unnecessary empty space in packaging, part of an overall goal to to reduce packaging waste by 5% by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. If effective, the EU could set a standard for other nations to follow.

But the hurdles remain enormous, and snack bags are just one piece of a much bigger problem. Most developing countries don’t have recycling or composting facilities, and in the nations that do, those systems are often broken or dysfunctional. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates a US plastic recycling rate of just below 9%, while Beyond Plastics, a project out of Bennington College, pegs it at an even bleaker 5% to 6%. In the EU, almost 38% of plastic was recycled in 2020, and regulations imposed in 2021 halted the sale of the 10 most common plastics to wash up on European beaches, including bottle caps and straws. But addressing plastic packaging writ large will require changes at every part of its life cycle: from raw materials to duration of use to the nature of disposal. “Even with recycling, you increase emissions,” says Cuétara at Okeanos. “And remember: You can only recycle a number of times.” 

Those hurdles are part of why Cuétara says Made from Stone bags are catching on: Packaging manufacturers can keep using their existing equipment, and calcium carbonate is naturally abundant with relatively stable pricing. 

“If somebody came to my potato chip company and said, ‘I want you to change everything and get rid of your suppliers and it’s going to cost you more,’ the answer would be, ‘Thank you, but we have no interest,’” he says. “I have to tell you, there’s been almost no calls of, ‘We don’t want to do it.’ It’s an impossible thing to say no to.’”  

 

 

Zero-Waste Stores are Helping Consumers Cut Back on Plastic

Across the U.S., a growing number of new retailers are selling mostly in bulk to customers toting reusable containers. 

I wrote this piece about zero-waste stores for Bloomberg Green on Aug. 18, 2022.   See PDF here: Download ‘Zero-Waste’ Stores Are Helping Consumers Cut Back on Plastic - Bloomberg

7 Green Tech Startups With the Innovations—and the Funding—to Help Save the Planet

From growing kelp forests to making packaging out of mushrooms, these companies are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from every angle. 

I wrote this round-up for Inc.'s Carbon Neutral package, in the May/June 2022 issue. 

Entrepreneurs coast to coast are coming up with innovative technologies showing not only that we can live without carbon-based energy, but also that we can thrive without it. From a Maine startup that's growing kelp forests (which can sequester gigatons of CO2 for centuries) to an electric vehicle company in Eugene, Oregon, that's making affordable electric cars with flair, these green tech startups show that our carbon-free future actually looks pretty cool. Wave energy? Batteries to store renewable energy that are more environmentally friendly than lithium? Biodegradable mushroom-based packaging? These aren't merely futuristic notions. They're happening now, and they've got the funding to prove it.

 

A Running Tide kelp microforest.

 

 Courtesy of Running Tide

 

 

 

An Acrimoto FUV.Courtesy of Acrimoto

Arcimoto

Tech: Builds right-size EVs for less than $20,000
Founder: Mark Frohnmayer
Home base: Eugene, Oregon

Not everyone needs--or wants--a Tesla. Arcimoto is on a mission to democratize electric vehicles. The startup, founded in 2007, makes a series of right-size EVs that are ideal for urban eco-drivers. The Fun Utility Vehicle (FUV), for example, is an open-air (yet covered) car with three wheels. Doors optional. It's ultra efficient and--unlike so many EVs--actually affordable. The company is growing, having just moved into a new 250,000-square-foot plant, a fivefold increase over its former digs. Next off the line will be a series of specialty vehicles, including the Rapid Responder, outfitted with sirens and lights for emergency services, and the Cameo, designed to create a smooth camera vehicle for the film and influencer industries.

Running Tide

Tech: Grows kelp to capture carbon
Founder: Marty Odlin
Home base: Portland, Maine

Like trees, kelp naturally fixes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere--only kelp does it exponentially faster than land-rooted trees and plants. So founder Marty Odlin decided to build a business selling carbon credits around this fact. Running Tide scientists amplify the process by growing the seaweed on wood buoys layered with ground-up seashells that sit on the ocean surface, allowing the plants to capture carbon via photosynthesis. The buoys themselves are made of carbon-rich wood, and when they get waterlogged over the course of several months they sink to the bottom of the ocean--carbon, kelp, and all--where they will sit for centuries. The potential is enormous: Some suggest kelp farms like these, if scaled in our oceans, could collectively sequester over 270 gigatons of carbon. Shopify, Stripe, which just launched a new $925 million carbon removal initiative, and Frontier (along with Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey) were early purchasers of Running Tide's carbon credits. Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital is also an investor. The first deployment of algae is happening in late summer 2022, off the coast of Iceland.

Rye Development's Swan Lake Energy Storage Project

Tech: Uses hydropower to store renewable energy
CEO: Paul Jacob
Home base: Boston

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are critical to our carbon-free future, but since it's not always windy and/or sunny, they require storage mechanisms to green the grid. When it opens in 2026, the Swan Lake energy storage project, based in Klamath County, Oregon, will be the first pumped storage hydropower project built in the U.S. in 30 years. The system uses excess renewable electricity from the grid to pump water to an elevated reservoir, where it sits as stored energy until it's needed. During peak demand, the water is released, spinning turbines that generate electricity. Swan Lake, which is being built by Boston-based Rye Development, will generate 400 megawatts of clean electricity, vastly increasing the storage capacity for the grid's wind and solar electricity.

ESS Energy Warehouse battery system.Courtesy of ESS

Energy Storage Systems

Tech: Builds a better battery
Founders: Julia Song and Craig Evans
Home base: Wilsonville, Oregon

 

These husband-and-wife founders started in their garage in 2011, cooking up so-called "flow" batteries, which store more energy and cost less per kilowatt-hour than lithium-ion cells. That's because they're made of environmentally benign materials: iron, salt, and water. A bonus: Iron batteries have a longer lifespan than lithium batteries--they can operate for 25 years or more with daily use versus lithium ion's 8 to 10 years. This kind of long-duration battery storage, which has been installed at San Diego Gas & Electric and other locations, will be crucial to reliably power a grid that relies on intermittent renewable resources like wind and solar.

 

AquaHarmonics

Tech: Tunes buoys to the waves to generate power
Founders: Alex Hagmuller and Max Ginsburg
Home base: West Linn, Oregon

Solar and wind energy will be essential for a carbon-neutral future, but the amount of time they produce energy is low. Solar produces energy just 25 percent of the time and wind produces energy 35 percent of the time. Wave energy, by contrast, has the potential to produce energy 60 percent of the time, and AquaHarmonics' founders believe they can increase that capacity to at least 80 percent. They will do this by using many smaller devices rather than a single large device as most other wave energy startups have done. Not only are small devices cheaper and easier to deploy, they can also generate more consistent power because they move out of phase with one another. For a variety of reasons, they can also survive storm conditions better than most bigger devices can, and continue to generate similar amounts of power. AquaHarmonics is designing cylindrical buoys with a mooring line that reels in and out with the waves. Depending on where they're deployed, the average capacity is 300 to 600 kilowatts, about the same as a big wind turbine. In 2017, the startup won the $1.5 million Wave Energy Prize and has since received $4.4 million in grants from the Department of Energy. It will soon deploy a device in Hawaii at a Navy Wave energy test site to demonstrate that the technology works. Grid-connected testing should follow in 2023.

 

Harvested air mycelium (left) and a faux leather jacket made from mycelium.Courtesy of Ecovative

Ecovative

Tech: Makes biodegradable packaging from mushrooms
Founders: Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre
Home base: Green Island, New York

Polystyrene foam, otherwise known as Styrofoam, is made from petroleum. But what if you could use a plant-based version that you could also break up into bits and throw in your garden, knowing it would become soil in a matter of months? That's the solution pioneered by Ecovative, with its 100 percent natural and biodegradable packaging material made from mushroom mycelium, the root structure of fungi. The company uses a patented growth chamber to guide mycelium into enormous sheets, and then forms it into everything from wine shippers to packaging for beauty brands like Ulta Beauty Retailing. Next up? Projects for the fashion industry including shoe insoles and mycelium leathers. The company, which has licensees in many countries, is ramping up production, with plans to open a 20,000-square-foot facility on the East Coast in August 2022.

Products made with Perfect Day animal-free milk protein.Courtesy of Perfect Day

Perfect Day

Tech: Makes faux milk that's nearly identical to the stuff from cows
Founders: Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi
Home base: Berkeley, California

Methane is 28 times more potent at trapping heat than CO2, and a single dairy cow generates about 220 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year. The founders of Perfect Day engineered a way around the climate-warming impacts of the 10 million-cow strong dairy industry in the lab. By introducing the genetic code for whey protein into a fungus, Trichoderma reesei, they get a whey protein that is molecularly identical to the whey protein in cow's milk. As such, it mimics the creamy mouthfeel of dairy, making it a viable substitute. The protein is already used in a handful of popular ice-cream brands including Midwest ice cream manufacturer Graeter's and the Keto-friendly line Nick's. The company also partners with General Mills on a cream cheese and Betterland and Starbucks on an alt milk that the coffee giant is still trying to name.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How San Francisco Cracked the Urban Composting Code

California’s environmental achievements are something to behold. The state ranks first in the U.S. for growth in solar power generation and battery storage. It’s the national leader in cumulative electric vehicle sales and public EV charging stations. And it’s one of a growing number of states that aim to run entirely on carbon-free energy in the coming decades – a goal it briefly met, for about 15 minutes, on April 30.

Now, California is once again setting the pace on a critically important (if somewhat less glamorous) climate imperative: urban composting.

On January 1, a law went into effect making it mandatory for every city and county in California to provide residents a means to separate and recycle their organic waste. The impacts could be enormous – according to climate experts, composting is one of the simplest low-tech measures humans can take to reverse climate change. Allowing food waste to decompose in landfills creates methane, a greenhouse gas dozens of times more potent than carbon dioxide. And landfills are the third-largest source of methane in the U.S. Composting has other benefits as well, from sequestering carbon and helping farmers create drought-resistant crops to creating long-term revenue streams for city governments.  

Yet few big American cities have successful city-wide composting programs, particularly on the East Coast. How does a city fully integrate composting into its sanitation stream? Perhaps nowhere offers as clear a path forward as San Francisco, the first big U.S. city to offer composting to all of its residents. Twenty-six years later, its system remains the gold standard.

Building a system scrap by scrap

In 1990, when curbside recycling was still new to many communities, San Francisco was already recycling over 25 percent of its trash. Nevertheless, the city’s Department of the Environment was concerned about all the garbage still being sent to faraway landfills, so it authorized a “waste characterization” study in 1996 in which engineers looked at exactly what was being sent to the dump. What they found was shocking: 33 percent of it was organic material that could have been composted.

“It was a combination of food scraps, sticks and leaves,” says Robert Reed, public relations manager at Recology, a resource recovery company that partners with the city. “We have 5,000 restaurants here, so we’re generating a lot of food scraps.”

All those scraps add up to a heap of emissions, plus the associated costs of disposal. “When you put materials in a landfill, you eventually fill that landfill and you have to build another landfill. And now you have to ship to greater distances,” says Reed.

So, at the city’s request, Recology, which has collected San Francisco’s refuse since 1921, launched a compost pilot program. It started at the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market and on residential routes in the Richmond District. Soon after, it expanded to include some large convention hotels. By 2000, it had gone citywide. 

Nine years later, when cities like Seattle were just beginning their voluntary residential composting programs, San Francisco made composting and recycling mandatory for all residents and businesses. 

Mandatory participation scaled things up dramatically. Recology began offering free composting pails, bin labels, signs, multilingual trainings and toolkits for commercial buildings. It also meant occasional fines from the city for non-compliance. All of it was part of the city’s ambitious plan to be “Zero Waste” by 2020.

Today, San Francisco’s pioneering program is world renowned. Over 135 countries have sent delegations to study the city’s compost and recycling systems first hand. The city collects more than 500 tons of compostable materials from its ubiquitous green bins every day, according to Reed, helping to divert some 80 percent of the city’s waste from landfills. All these organic scraps are turned into high-quality compost in just 60 days at a Blossom Valley Organics facility east of the city, and then sold to local farms, vineyards and orchards.

The curbside composting and recycling bins used in San Francisco. Credit: Recology

The revenue from these sales helps offset the cost of the program. “If something goes into the landfill, there’s no sale!” laughs Reed. The system also creates jobs. According to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, composting sustains four times the number of jobs as landfill or incineration disposal operations. In Maryland, a 2013 study found that composting operations provided more total jobs than the state’s three trash incinerators combined. 

And of course, all that compost enriches the region’s soil with nutrients, minerals and microbes, helping farmers grow healthy crops with fewer commercial fertilizers. Compost also acts as a natural sponge – Pennsylvania’s Rodale Institute found that farms can grow up to 40 percent more food in times of drought when they use compost and follow other organic practices. In the West, where drought is common, this is a boon to both commercial farmers and backyard gardeners. Compost can even mitigate the threat of wildfire by retaining moisture from rain and irrigation. 

All of which begs the question: With the many obvious benefits and few apparent downsides, why, 26 years after San Francisco started composting, haven’t other major cities like New York, Boston, or Chicago followed suit?

New York’s composting conundrum

Not long ago, New York City briefly had its own in-home composting program. In 2015, then New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced a Zero Waste initiative similar to San Francisco’s. Composting was its cornerstone. Pandemic-related budget cuts forced the city to suspend the service in May 2020. But even before that, the program was anemic, only diverting 43,000 tons of food scraps in 2017 – just five percent of the city’s total food waste. 

A New York City curbside composting bin in 2017 before the program was discontinued. Credit: Wikipedia

Theories abound as to what went wrong. One big one has to do with a lack of public outreach. Even the chairman of the city council’s sanitation committee admitted that no one in his own building knew how the system worked. “In my building, we received the brown bins, and some fliers,” he told the New York Times. “I guarantee I’m the only person in my building who knows how to use them.” 

Simply convincing residents to change their long-standing garbage habits was another hurdle. Former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia told the Times, “The biggest challenge is asking New Yorkers to do something different.” She related a story about how, when the department was handing out brown bins one man didn’t want one. “But we were handing out compost at the same time, and he definitely wanted the compost. We said, ‘We really need your banana peels in order to make this in the future.’” The man took one of the bins, illustrating the importance of education and outreach.

New York re-launched its composting program in August 2021 in neighborhoods where interest was most concentrated, according to Vincent Gragnani, press secretary at the city’s Department of Sanitation. Soon, there will be 100 bins at schools across the city that can be accessed with a smartphone app or a key card. “Within the next two years, every public school in the city will be separating their organic waste for collection,” Gragnani told RTBC. New Sanitation Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch is in the process of reviewing what has and has not worked with the city’s program in the past, but is not ready to share this publicly.

Can California strike ‘black gold’?

Now, inspired by San Francisco’s trailblazing composting success, California is set to enact statewide composting for all. (Only a small handful of states mandate statewide composting). The goal of the law is to reduce the landfilling of compostable materials by 75 percent by 2025, thereby reducing methane emissions on a massive scale. CalRecycle, the department that oversees the state’s recycling and waste reduction programs, estimates about half of the state’s communities had food and yard waste collection programs at the start of 2022.

“We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” says Reed. Credit: Sacramento State

There are several things the remaining cities and counties around California can do to emulate San Francisco’s success. One is to stay on message. In 2000, when Recology made green bins available to every resident in San Francisco, the response was mixed. “Some people said, ‘Come and take it back.’ Other people embraced it right away,” recalls Reed. “We were doing a lot of outreach and education in promoting the program and why we think it’s important for people to participate.” 

For instance, San Franciscans speak over 100 different languages, so Recology opted to put photographs on the green bins (in addition to a few words in English, Spanish, and Chinese), showing what can and can’t be composted. The company also produces a customer newsletter that comes with its bills, filled with articles about the benefits of composting and recycling. In addition, Reed, a former reporter, worked closely with journalists to get stories published early on about restaurants embracing composting and vineyards relying on compost from the city. 

But according to Reed, the key to composting success is getting kids on board. “The best way to get adults to compost is to get composting programs running in schools,” he says. Recology donates compost to school gardens, which makes a big impression on children. “Those kids go home and say, ‘Why don’t we compost at home?’ The very next day the dad has a pail on the kitchen counter, and they’re rolling.” 

Prior to the pandemic, classrooms would visit the Recology Environmental Learning Center and even take tours of the composting and recycling plants. During Covid, Recology’s programming for students has shifted online. The company leads virtual field trips via Zoom and has produced educational videos and games about composting and recycling for kids from pre-K to high school. There’s even a “Better at the Bin” coloring book.

Finally, Reed says regular and frequent communication with the city is key to the composting program’s success. Every week, Recology staff members meet with a team from the Department of the Environment. “We all have the same goal: to send as little as possible to the landfill,” Reed says. At these meetings, they compare the tonnage that the city is sending to compost versus sending to the landfill, brainstorm ways of getting more residents to compost, and discuss messaging. 

One conundrum recently tackled in these meetings was how to encourage more participation in apartment buildings, which have lower rates of composting and recycling, and where 65 percent of San Franciscans live. Their solution: recruit volunteers at these buildings to distribute Recology’s monthly newsletter, as well as encourage composting in neighborly ways, like with composting contests or quizzes. “These are very creative people!” says Reed. “They keep composting part of the conversation.” There are now advocates in 100 buildings around the city.  

One of these is Madeleine Trembley, who lives at the Gateway Complex in the city’s Financial District. A year ago, Trembley, who refers to compost reverently as black gold, started a newsletter for her 1,255-unit building called Trash Talk. “The newsletter immediately got a lot of peoples’ attention,” Trembley says. “It was educational, practical. We give tips that people can implement easily, understand easily.” As a result of her newsletter and the topics it covered, more young residents have gotten involved in the Board — and one of them is even making video tutorials about composting to share with residents. “It just makes no sense to create more methane gas to stow it away in the landfill. And I think a lot of people realize that.” 

 

Household Recycling Made Easier — For a Price

I wrote about Ridwell, the Seattle startup that's building a business around collecting all the old batteries, clamshell containers and lightbulbs that most recycling programs leave behind, for Bloomberg Businessweek.   

 

Jill Fransen considers herself a serious recycler, the kind of person who knows the difference between various plastics, takes care to sort them, and drives five miles from her home in Portland, Oregon’s, North Tabor neighborhood to drop off refuse at a recycling center.

Over nearly a dozen years, Fransen’s routine was pretty well established. Then in late 2020, she heard about Ridwell, a subscription-based recycling service that had just been introduced in Portland. For about $12 per month, Ridwell would pick up items — stuff that many recycling programs won’t accept, like certain plastics and spent lightbulbs — right from one’s front porch, and take everything to its local plant to sort and redistribute for recycling or re-use.

“I was skeptical at first because of the monthly charge,” says Fransen. But seeing Styrofoam and #1 PET plastics — for polyethylene terephthalate, most known as the plastic used to make clamshell and other food containers — on Ridwell’s collection list persuaded Fransen to give it a try. “You have no idea how much #1 PET plastic you use,” she says. (According to the Michigan-based consulting firm Resource Recycling Systems, just 9% of the 1.5 billion pounds of PET-made items circulating in the U.S. are recycled.) “And driving out to East Portland got to be a pain in the neck.”

Taylor Loewen, general manager of Ridwell’s Portland operations, sits atop plastic bales at the warehouse.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Fransen is among the nearly 300 early adopters of the service in Portland, where operations started in November 2020. Since then, the number of subscribers there has grown to 22,400. Ridwell launched and established itself first in Seattle before expanding to Portland, Bellingham, Washington, Denver, Minneapolis and Austin. The total subscribers collectively is about 60,000. The company is among a small group of environmental startups that are working to eliminate plastic packaging and create compostable plastics from mycelium, a mushroom root.

Ridwell’s growth has coincided with Americans’ redirecting much of their anxiety and restlessness over the pandemic into online shopping. That in turn has generated huge amounts of garbage. “So many people were getting stuff delivered from Amazon, Instacart, and takeout,” says Taylor Loewen, Ridwell’s Portland general manager. “People were stuck at home realizing: ‘There’s just so much packaging in my house!’”

The effort started well before the Covid pandemic. Generally, consumers don’t have many easy options for properly disposing of things like plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and clamshell containers. In January 2018, China banned the import of most plastic recyclables, leaving many U.S. cities without a place to send what they’d collected. Before then, processors in China had handled about half of the world’s recyclable waste. Greenpeace has estimated that more than 90% of the plastic ever produced has not been recycled. 

Ridwell founder and CEO Ryan Metzger at the company’s Seattle warehouse.

Photographer: Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg

Those types of items had accumulated in Ridwell founder Ryan Metzger’s basement in his Seattle home. One weekend in the fall of 2017, he and his then 6-year-old son Owen started to clear the house of the refuse. “Every weekend, Owen and I would pick a category — Styrofoam, batteries, lightbulbs — and we would find a local partner,” he explained — someplace willing to take the haul. Before long, Metzger, then a marketing consultant for startups, was also hauling neighbors’ expired batteries and lightbulbs to various drop-off centers and recycling facilities around Seattle, along with his own trash. He’d post messages to the  neighborhood message board Buy Nothing, sharing tips about how to get rid of stuff — “I found a place that takes Styrofoam!”

The project, initially dubbed “Owen’s List,” caught on quickly. By October 2018, with 99 customers, it was officially named Ridwell. Within a year, the subscriber list had grown to 2,400 in the greater Seattle area.

For a monthly fee of $12 to $16, depending on the length of commitment, a square white Ridwell box is collected every two weeks. The box comes with reusable cloth bags, one for each item category — batteries, lightbulbs, threads, plastic, and a rotating “featured category” which ranges from old printer cartridges to holiday lights. Metzger estimates that, as of February, over 4.6 million pounds of waste from just Seattle, Portland, and Denver have been diverted from landfills.

Finding local partners, a key piece in the project from the beginning, has helped the expansion. Metzger worked to connect with businesses and other organizations that might re-use or recycle some of the collected items. Today, Loewen, the Portland general manager, and other employees with similar roles in Ridwell’s various locations spend a good chunk of time connecting with nonprofits and organizations like Free Geek, a Portland area technology nonprofit that facilitates the reuse of small electronics. The partners and categories vary from city to city.

Ridwell offers Portlanders a way to recycle plastic film, batteries, lightbulbs, and plastic clamshell containers.

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

Four years in, the venture also has become a fuller recycling business in its own right. At Ridwell’s 10,000 square foot warehouse in northeast Portland, employees sort plastic bags and blue Amazon wrappers (recyclable) from manila padded envelopes (not recyclable). A baler is used to compress plastic film into compact bundles. Industrial-sized bins spill over with second-hand clothes which ultimately will be donated to the city’s Pioneer Wiping Cloth, one of several organizations Ridwell works with.

Ridwell’s work has drawn investor interest. Metzger says the company has received three rounds of funding, though he won’t disclose the amounts. The business, he adds, is largely customer-supported.

Dylan de Thomas is vice president for external affairs at The Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving recycling systems across the country. De Thomas, who is based in Portland, is a fan of Ridwell — with one caveat. “I think it’s a neat concept. For all the materials — minus one — it’s a convenience service,” he says, referring to PET thermoforms, which are not only not accepted by the city’s recycling program but aren’t taken by any of the free recycling centers in town, either.

An unanticipated development has been a clash with Portland trash haulers, particularly in Clackamas and Washington counties. There, the sanitation workers have protested that Ridwell is stepping on their toes, even though those municipalities don’t currently accept the items that Ridwell collects. (Portland doesn’t have a municipal sanitation department, so private companies are contracted to collect garbage.) Another big challenge has been logistics. “It’s a logistics business that is growing quickly,” Metzger says.

Employees collect and sort items from Ridwell members at the Ridwell warehouse in Portland, Oregon

Photographer: Moriah Ratner/Bloomberg

The Recycling Partnership’s de Thomas says ideally, what Ridwell collects and helps to redistribute or recycle should be part of any municipal service. “I prefer recycling programs that serve all of the residents equally and equitably,” he says.

Metzger is working to address the imbalance, he says, and is aware that the service Ridwell offers is not something everybody can afford. To that end, the company launched a pilot project over the December holiday season: for every gift card sold, Ridwell contributed $10 towards a six-month community-supported membership, of which there are now 100. “We hope to make it a more regular and larger part of Ridwell,” Metzger says.

Education also is part of Metzger’s game plan. The company sends out regular emails explaining what items are and are not included in each category. For example, a link might take you to the Clamshells page , which specifies that #1 PET plastic includes everything from plastic egg cartons and deli containers to plastic cookie trays. Not included in the category? Plastic bottles, blister packaging for batteries or electronics and colored plastics. Photos on each page make it easy to determine what is and isn’t included.

Last October, Metzger launched a transparency page. The company already had been sharing the names of their local partners, but on the transparency page, they also post each category’s contamination rates (how much collected material can’t be recycled or reused because it’s too dirty). On the website, you’ll learn that plastic film is the company’s most popular category in all six cities and goes to Trex in Nevada, where it’s transformed into composite decking.  Also that batteries, which go to EcoLights, have the highest recycling rate: 100%. 

“Transparency is something that consumers are very interested in,” Metzger says.  “It reinforces the behavior they’re making and shows the impact that we can all have by recycling and reusing properly.”

California’s Floodplains Are Coming Back, and So Are Their Salmon

Farmers and ecologists are partnering to restore the state’s natural flooding patterns, allowing native fish to thrive.

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

Until just a couple of centuries ago, inland California was a lush tapestry of wetlands and floodplains that nourished a thriving ecosystem of fish. But as the state — and its vast agriculture industry — has grown, its waterways have been modified drastically. Rivers have been drained, fields dried out, levees and dams constructed. These engineering feats, coupled with extreme drought, have decimated natural habitats. Today, a shocking 83 percent of native fish species in the state are in decline.

Chinook salmon is one of these. “Winter runs used to have returns in the hundreds of thousands. Now a good year would be 10,000 fish,” says Andrew L. Rypel, a professor of fish ecology at UC Davis where he co-directs the Center for Watershed Sciences. Today, two of California’s three recognized Chinook salmon runs are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. “We have had years that have just been in the hundreds. It’s a species on the precipice of extinction.”

Now, Rypel and his colleagues are helping the Chinook rebound by working with California rice farmers to recreate the natural floodplains in which the fish used to thrive.

“One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival. Do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

The so-called “salmon-rice project” began a decade ago, when a motley group of scientists, rice farmers and conservationists joined together to answer a simple question: if they were to flood rice fields with water from the Sacramento River — effectively mimicking the region’s original ecological rhythms — would juvenile salmon take to the fields and grow? 

First, they conducted some basic experiments to see whether salmon even lived in floodplains. Turns out, they did. The Nigiri Project – which began in the early 2000s, is still ongoing and involves some of the same people working on Rypel’s project — set out to determine whether salmon can survive on rice fields. In Asian countries, freshwater fish are often raised on flooded rice paddies, but it wasn’t known if salmon in particular were suited to that environment.

“The answer was that they not only survive, they grow extremely well,” Rypel says. “The fish were feeding on lush zooplankton that develop off the decomposed rice straws.” Rice straw is a rich source of carbon, and Rypel says that the density of zooplankton (normally microscopic) that develops in these winter-flooded rice plains is so high that you can actually see them with the naked eye, swimming around. 

“It turns out that this kind of food is like an awesome steak for the growing salmon,” he says. UC Davis scientists found that these juvenile salmon survived at high rates in the flooded rice fields — 50 to 80 percent over the course of a month. “That’s excellent for baby fish,” Rypel says. They also grew two to five times faster than they grow in the Sacramento River.

With these data points in hand, Rypel and his colleagues teamed up with the California Rice Commission and California Trout in 2018 and began studying the viability of raising juvenile salmon in small experimental fields. The work was funded, in part, by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a wing of the United States Department of Agriculture that pays farmers and ranchers to do conservation work. 

The researchers found that juvenile salmon grew two to five times faster on the rice fields than they grow in the Sacramento River. Credit: Center for Watershed Sciences

In 2021 the California Rice Commission and the UC Davis scientists got an additional $550,000 grant from NRCS to continue and expand upon their work. (The California Rice Commission and its partners are matching this grant.) Though this is the first year scientists are trying this out on production-scale rice farms, preliminary data is encouraging. For instance, in years like the past one, when the rice fields around the Sacramento River don’t flood naturally, farmers flood their fields with water from the adjacent canals and then scientists stock them with hatchery fish. They then track the fishes’ growth, survival and movements. Data so far indicates that these fish survive at a rate four to five times higher than lab-raised fish. 

In the coming months, they’ll continue to track these hatchery salmon with tiny acoustic transmitters as they make their way out to sea. “One of the critical parameters that salmon managers are interested in is out-migration survival,” Rypel says. “That is: do they make it to the ocean? And how many?” The plan is to track 600 of the salmon to see if they make it to the Golden Gate Bridge and conduct a side-by-side comparison with lab-reared fish of out-migration survival.

 

Rypel says it boils down to two words: Big and early. “Being a baby salmon kind of sucks!” he laughs. “It’s really hard. Most of the fish die. You are dodging predators, you have to migrate a super-long distance. You need fat reserves.” Giving the salmon a head start while they’re still very young can have huge knock-on effects. “We think that by rearing them on these rice fields, we can get fish very big, very quick. If the fish can become smolts [juvenile salmon] earlier in the winter, they can ride the flows better and have better survivorship.”

Raising fish in rice paddies is nothing new. Rice farmers from China, Thailand, India and Northern Vietnam have been doing it for centuries – according to some evidence, for as long as 2,000 years. 

According to Rypel, the unusual collaboration between farmers and ecologists is “a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.” Credit: Center for Watershed Science

But the project in California is actually more directly inspired by a series of bird conservation efforts dating back to the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time, Pacific flyway birds — ducks, snow geese, egrets and all the other migratory birds that over-summer up in Alaska or Canada, and over-winter in the Central Valley — were in decline. For decades, rice farmers in the area regularly burned their leftover rice straw after the fall harvest. “People who lived in the area at that time will remember when the skies were black with smoke,” Rypel says. The air quality was poor, and carbon was being released into the atmosphere, as well.

Residents frustrated by poor air quality campaigned to stop this practice, and in 1991 a state law banned it. “Some smart people got together at that time and figured out that if you re-flooded the rice fields, you could naturally decompose the rice straw,” Rypel says. “At the same time, you could potentially provide habitat for the migratory birds that were on the Pacific flyway.” The NRCS began a program where they paid rice farmers to flood their fields instead of burn them, which was a win for the locals, a win for the birds and a win for the farmers, as it gave them a new revenue stream.

“I’m not a bird ecologist, but I work with a lot of bird scientists who have worked on this, and it’s probably one of the big conservation success stories in our country’s history,” Rypel says.

It was that program’s success that got fish ecologists scratching their heads. “Hey, if you can do this for birds, why can’t you do that for fish?” Rypel recounts. “We’ve got 83 percent of species declining in California. We know salmon use the floodplains. Is there a way to do this with fish?” 

The answer appears to be a resounding yes. There are roughly 500,000 acres of rice under cultivation in the Sacramento Valley. “That’s a lot of habitat that’s potentially on the table there,” notes Rypel. He and his colleagues at UC Davis hope to replicate the model on more farms in years to come. “It’s a good example of how farms can work together with conservation scientists to make a difference.”

Canndor: the world's first cannabis herbarium

 

Two California women—Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law—have created the world's first archive of preserved cannabis specimens.  I wrote about their project, Canndor, for Broccoli, the magazine for cannabis lovers. 

Here's a short snippet of the article:  

When botanists or naturalists need to identify a particular plant, they head to the local herbarium to cross-check existing identified specimens of the plant.  Think of a herbarium as a library, only instead of books, it contains dried and labeled plant specimens. In the United States alone, there are hundreds of herbariums—from the Missouri Botanical Garden’s herbarium (one of the world’s most famous, with nearly 7 million specimens) to the one at Harvard University. Worldwide, there are more than 3,000 herbariums. 

But until recently, there hasn’t been a single herbarium dedicated to cannabis.

When plant geneticists Eleanor Kuntz and Kerin Law launched their botanical identification company LeafWorks in 2016, they quickly realized the need for one. 

At LeafWorks, Kuntz and Law do DNA sequencing tests for the natural products industry, which helps ensure accurate labeling and combats fraud. Herbal companies such as Traditional Medicinals will send small samples of herb particulate to LeafWorks be sure that it is what their suppliers say it is.

“If we’re going to do a test on ashwagandha or gingko, we’ll go to an herbarium and get vetted samples that occur throughout the plant range,” says Kuntz, who studied with renowned American herbalist Rosemary Gladstar. Through their connections at the Missouri Botanical Garden and Kew Gardens in England (where Kuntz interned for a summer), the two scientists are able to access fingernail-sized pieces of dried plant matter so they can sequence its DNA.  (In some cases, herbariums have their own DNA banks, in which case they can share the plant’s sequence with LeafWorks.) Kuntz and Law then uses those samples as a baseline for future tests on that species of plant.

To continue reading, get your copy of issue #10 on newsstands now or download a PDF of my article here:

Download 42-45_HERBARIUM (1)

Deepa Iyer Is Farming for Social Justice

This story appeared on Civil Eats on Sept. 18th. 

In Ghana, when a person passes a farmer in the field, they call out, “Ayekoo,” which loosely means “I see you” or “I acknowledge you farming the land.” In response, the farmer says, “Aye,” to thank the passerby for the acknowledgement.

When naming their new farm in rural Washington, Deepa Iyer, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and her partner Victor Anagli, who grew up in the Volta region of Ghana, wanted to honor this call and response tradition, so they christened their 21-acre property Ayeko. Located in the town of Enumclaw, Washington—40 miles southeast of Seattle—Ayeko is covered with fruit trees and raspberry and blueberry bushes and bisected by a creek.

“It’s magical,” says Iyer, who grew up in New Jersey.

 

The couple—who between them have two children and one full-time, off-farm job—are currently growing organic vegetables on one acre and have started a U-Pick for the berries. But in the future, they hope to invite other farmers and families who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join them.

“We want to share this land with other people,” Iyer says. “Our vision is village-style, everyone growing food—a life where kids can run out the door and don’t have to make an appointment to have a play date.”

As of today, however, Iyer and her family and community—along with others across Washington state and along the entire West Coast—are largely sequestered indoors as a result of the wildfires that are burning around the state and region. “We are concerned because there are fires very close to here . . . we are surrounded by dry grass and anything could happen,” Iyer told Civil Eats in an email. “Crops are looking affected by smoke; nothing has been lost to fire, but it feels like the season is over in many ways.”

A group of people work in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Before the fires, Iyer found out she’d been chosen as one of 12 recipients of the Castanea Fellowship, a two-year program that helps support a racially just food system. The fellowship comes with a $40,000 grant and a connection to a network of experienced farmers who get together for six “learning immersion journeys.”

Farzana Serang, executive director at the Castanea Fellowship, says Iyer is a valuable part of the cohort. “What’s incredible about Deepa,” Serang says, “is she’s been farming for 20 years, making culturally relevant food more accessible, and still considers herself new to the work.”

Discovering a Love of Farming

Iyer fell in love with farming the year after college, when she took a six-month soul-searching trip to India. While there, she visited botanical sanctuaries and worked on intentional farming projects. When she returned home, she found an internship with a watershed organization, Stony Brook-Millstone (now the Watershed Institute), which also had an organic farm.

It was there that she discovered environmental education. She would take school children to the pond and collect water samples that were full of tadpoles and dragonfly nymphs. “I didn’t even know that this type of work existed,” Iyer says. “You can be out in nature with kids as they discover their love of nature?!”

She also got hooked on organic farming. “I would stand on the truck and the guys would come in with the harvest and throw pumpkins at me,” says Iyer, who describes herself as “a tomboy to the death.” She caught all the pumpkins.

Now, at 42, Iyer still relishes manual labor. “Bending over and pulling weeds all day? I love that!” she says.

Iyer also spent a year as a teacher-in-residence at Slide Ranch, an educational farm on the coast north of San Francisco that connects children to nature. That experience put Iyer more firmly on the path of food systems education and led her to launch an urban farm collective in Oakland called (SOL), which she ran for six years before heading to Michigan State University to study the intersection of social justice and the ecological impact of our food and farming systems.

Anagli, who she met in Michigan, comes from a long line of farmers in Ghana. One of the first questions he asked her was, “How do you want to change the world?”  

“I’d never been asked that before,” Iyer says.

Eventually, the couple moved to Oakland with their young son and began the hunt for a plot of fertile land.

Twenty-One Acres in Enumclaw

They started searching for land with some friends, but everything they found within a two-hour drive from Oakland was out of their price range. Iyer, who has family in Seattle, shifted the search to Washington and in early 2018, she found the property in Enumclaw.

Sunflowers in the fields at Ayeko Farm. (Photo by Sharon Chang, courtesy of Ayeko Farm)

Iyer also landed a full-time job at the International Rescue Committee in Tukwila, where she heads up a community agriculture and food security program with refugees from Burma, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Through this, she runs four community gardens in South King County, as well as two market garden production sites, and she co-runs the Tukwila Village Farmers Market.

At Ayeko, the couple farms using organic methods—like composting and minimal tillage—though they’re not certified organic. They grow the usual suspects—beets, carrots, kale, lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, and tomatoes—as well as foods that have roots in Iyer’s family food traditions, such as bottle gourds, which are light-green, smooth-skinned and so neutral tasting they’re “almost bland,” says Iyer. They’re also growing amaranth greens, or callaloo, as well as long beans, fenugreek leaves, and peanuts.

This kind of “cultural rescue” is very important to Iyer, who earned her master’s degree studying the food and farming practices of elder women in the Himalayas. “If we lose a vegetable type or variety, then we lose all the things that go with it—words, celebrations, colors, stories—so much richness,” Iyer says.

Not long ago, Iyer invited a group of her mom’s friends to Ayeko and one Indian-American woman in her 70s saw the long beans in the fields and grew animated. “All these conversations started happening about these recipes,” says Iyer. “‘Oh, my grandma used to make those!’ she said. Those are my dream-come-true moments.”

Because theirs is such a bare-bones operation—the crew is just Iyer and Anagli, and Iyer maintains a full-time off-farm job—they don’t yet have a booth at the farmers’ market or even a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

So for now, their method of selling produce is very casual: they send e-mails to their community inviting them to come to the farm and get it or to access it at one of a few drop-off points in and around Seattle. They also started a U-Pick earlier this summer for their 400 raspberry bushes and hope to add blueberries soon. They have a number of fruit and nut trees as well, but those aren’t producing fruit yet.

Navigating Racism with a Dream of Bringing People Together

The Castanea Fellowship has been a boon, she says—both financially and emotionally. The grant will help with basic support operations like fixing the well and purchasing supplies and equipment, like a tractor. Iyer also hopes it will help launch some of their more ambitious projects, like creating an outdoor school for BIPOC kids or a co-op venture with other farmers.

Additionally, the Fellowship’s learning immersion journeys, which, for the foreseeable future, are all being conducted on Zoom, have been incredible, says Iyer. “It’s been super inspiring,” she says. “These are people who have been through so much and doing so much amazing work.”

The 2020 Castanea fellows, who include farmers, chefs, community organizers, and more, have been a source of inspiration for Iyer. Some, for instance “have been able to take [challenging life] experiences and build themselves into strong, positive people with a deep critique of our system and strong analysis of systemic racism and how it manifests in the food system.”

And although the work of running a farm in rural Washington has been deeply satisfying, living in a rural area as people of color has its challenges. “There are very, very few Black folks out here,” Iyer says. When they moved to Enumclaw, she jokes, Anagli and their kids doubled the town’s Black population. “All Lives Matter” signage abounds.

Two months after moving to the farm, Anagli was walking home from the bus stop when a white woman harassed him and threatened to call 911 because she didn’t think he lived there. The family also had their house robbed on the same day. “We went into a deep state of fear, and I just started feeling guilt, regret, and doubt,” Iyer says.

And yet, she holds out hope for reconciliation and healing within their community. “I keep thinking we can build community anywhere. If somebody is racist, it doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. We’re in a society that’s committed to systemic racism—it’s everywhere.”

Iyer is hopeful that the land and the food it brings forth can draw folks together. Before pandemic-times, the couple hosted the first of what they’d hoped would become an annual cooking and capoeira event called Grounded in Freedom. Though they cancelled the event this summer, they hope it’s safe to host it again next summer. In the meantime, Iyer hopes to connect with the Muckleshoot Tribe, which has a reservation nearby. “There’s a lot of opportunity to build community,” she says.

Lately, Iyer’s vision of subdividing the property and inviting other families to live there in a cooperative farming village is also much on her mind. She imagines there would be a shared meal once a week. Except for the indigenous folks, Iyer says, “The reality is that everyone’s grandma or great grandma is from somewhere else—we can all share those stories of our grandmother’s recipes.”

A New Generation of Black Farmers Is Cultivating Self-Determination

By going back to the land, Black farmers are resuming a journey toward “food sovereignty” that began centuries ago.

I wrote this piece for Reasons to be Cheerful on August 21st, 2020.  

When Malcolm Shabazz Hoover and Mirabai Collins broke ground on the Black Futures Farm in January, it was the first time either of them had farmed on their own. On their one-acre plot in Portland’s Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood, the couple — with the help of a few interns — grows everything from purple king pole beans and heirloom tomatoes (trellised on string so they’ll climb upwards) to delicata and patty-pan squash, corn, okra, cabbages and zucchinis. 

“So many zucchinis. It might as well be a zucchini farm!” Mirabai laughs. They sell their produce via a small CSA program and several BIPOC farmers’ markets around town. 

Hoover and Collins are part of a new generation of Black farmers returning to the land to exercise their right to Black food sovereignty. Formally defined in 2007 at the Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty in Mali, food sovereignty is the right of people to determine their own food and agricultural systems, and have healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods. People who have food sovereignty reject the notion that food is a commodity, and support local farmers and food providers instead of large agri-businesses. Charlie Smith, co-director of the Portland-based Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, puts it more succinctly: “Food sovereignty is people, place and economic opportunities.” 

Mirabai Collins and Malcolm Shabazz Hoover on their wedding day.

Hoover, 50, found his way to farming almost by accident. A U.S. Navy veteran, he worked in city government and as a school teacher in Oakland before taking a job at the Oregon Food Bank in 2017. Adjacent to the Food Bank was a farm named Unity Farm run by Art Shavers and Shantae Johnson. During his breaks, Hoover would walk over and chat with them, and help them weed when they asked him to. “Bro, we love talking to you, but this is hard work,” Hoover remembers Shavers saying. “If you’re going to be out here, you need to help.”

Though both his parents had grown up on farms, it wasn’t until these afternoons spent digging in the soil with his friends that Hoover realized how therapeutic gardening could be. He was hooked. 

Hoover also works at Impact NW, a homelessness nonprofit with offices across the street from a 13-acre farm. “I felt a real connection to the land and asked what it would take for us to occupy it,” says Hoover. With the help of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, who provided advice and infrastructure, Collins and Hoover took over stewardship of one of the 13 acres, and Black Futures Farm was born.

 

The couple did have some farming experience. Hoover, who took Oregon State University’s Master Gardener program, helped run a VA pilot program to teach veterans to be farmers. Collins had interned on several organic farms and worked on cannabis farms in Humboldt County, California. She also teaches horticulture classes in prisons for a nonprofit called Growing Gardens. Though their CSA is small by most standards — only 17 families are enrolled this year — all are Black or have Black children, and one third of these members pay with SNAP assistance (food stamps). It’s important to both Hoover and Collins that their CSA benefit those most in need. Hoover’s dad was a Black Panther and his parents were involved in the Black Arts Movement. For him, farming is personal and political. 

“I love growing food. It’s incredibly healing to me,” he says. “It’s been said that if you can’t feed the people, you can’t lead the people. So in these times, we are creating something for what’s next, for Black people.”

Cultivating farmers

Black Futures Farm belongs to the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition (BFSC). Founded in 2018, it builds on a decade of work by local Black farmers, food justice activists and community organizers. It serves as a hub for Black and brown communities, helping them confront the systemic barriers that make food, place and economic opportunities inaccessible. 

BFSC provides technical and professional assistance to farms and food businesses and helps them incubate their ideas, says co-director Eddie Hill. But Hill and his team at BFSC are also looking to make systemic changes. “If we’re looking at the larger food system and best practices, it’s not just: ‘Hey, if you get Black people to start farms, that will solve the problem,’” says Hill. “No, you have to have them participating in all parts of the food system: manufacturing, composting, packaging, branding, transportation.”

Black farmers and food purveyors need concrete support for basic business and logistical challenges: storage, distribution and financing; Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification; and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) training, an internationally recognized method of identifying and managing food safety-related risk. “These systems don’t exist in our community right now,” says Hill. 

In addition to helping Black-run farms with lease agreements and food safety protocols, the BFSC works with Mudbone Grown to organize an annual “Back to the Root” conference for Black growers, producers, educators, advocates and ranchers. It also runs programs like Grandma’s Hands, where Black grandmothers in Portland share family recipes and food traditions, cook together and, these days, take turns hosting a monthly community dinner on Zoom. The program, funded by the Oregon Department of Agriculture, allows the grandmas to buy all their produce for the monthly community meal from Black- or brown-run farms. BFSC is also in negotiations for a centrally located food processing facility in Portland, where Black and brown farmers and food entrepreneurs can process vegetables and make and package products like salsa, juices, and bone broth for local grocery store chains.

The roots of sovereignty

Black farmers were once far more prevalent in America than they are today. Following Emancipation, even after the “40 Acres and a Mule” promise was overturned by Andrew Johnson in 1865, formerly enslaved Blacks were able to own land — and many did. By 1920, according to the 1930 Census of Agriculture, there were roughly one million Black farmers in the U.S., comprising 14 percent of all the farmers in the nation.

Black farmworkers till a 575-acre plot of land owned by Dave Lewis, an African-American farm owner in Alabama, in 1940.

Today, there are just 48,700 Black farmers in the United States, making up roughly 1.4 percent of the country’s 3.4 million farmers. There are many reasons for this decline, but as Vann R. Newkirk II recently wrote in the Atlantic, much of the land was wrested away from Black farmers by White people via legal, coercive and sometimes violent means. “A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of Black agricultural landowners in America,” according to Newkirk. 

Perhaps surprisingly, much of that was taken away during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Black farmers lost around six million acres of land between 1950 and 1969, according to Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund. “That’s a staggering amount of land loss during the heart of the Civil Rights period, when African Americans were struggling for social and political and economic rights,” says Savi Horne, founder and executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina.  

There have been some attempts at land reparations, most notably a lawsuit against the USDA in 1997 that awarded a $2 billion settlement to thousands of Black farmers and their families. Horne and others who are actively helping Black farmers keep their land say that this lawsuit did not go far enough. Tens of thousands who lost their land and, along with it, their food sovereignty, have still never been compensated for it.

An encouraging sign is more localized efforts at helping Black farmers like Collins and Hoover reclaim food sovereignty in their communities. Many organizations and farms came together to help Black Futures Farm operate with almost no overhead in its first year. The property — which came with 18 fruit trees including apples, figs and cherries — is being leased to the couple at a low cost by Portland Parks and Recreation. The starts and seeds were donated by MudBone Grown, Red Barn Farms, Side Yard Farms, Portland State University, the OSU Master Gardeners and Territorial Seed, among others. The couple also has subsidized water bills this year.

“A lot of people gathered around the idea of letting go of what had long been a White-held space, and handing it over to the stewardship of Black people,” Collins says. “The farm has become what it is because people worked hard and believed in what it could be. We had no money or resources starting out, so all of what you see there is the result of people pulling together — or, essentially, what real community looks like.”  

Next season, they’ll have to buy their own seeds and starts and pay more rent. “It’ll be more organized for that reason,” Collins says. “We’ll have a crop plan, we’ll order the things we want to grow. This season was very much a space, really hard work, and community. And probably some lunacy. And definitely some arguments.”

“Yeah. We’re going to have an argument today,” Hoover teases.

“We are,” Collins agrees, both of them laughing.

The couple were married two months ago — on the farm, dressed in overalls. They often finish each other’s sentences. 

They seem ideal partners in other ways, too. Both are passionate about growing their own food and feeding Portland’s Black community. Once they are more established and have a stronger foundation (and once the pandemic is over), they plan to bring more Black and brown folks onto the farm for education, community-building, art, training, certification and other pathways to food sovereignty. Just last week, Vanessa Chambers from Grandma’s Hands came to Black Futures Farm with two of her granddaughters to pick produce and be filmed for a segment to promote Oregon-grown foods in public schools. The farm has even had interest from an investor: Tampa Bay Buccaneers football player Ndamukong Suh, who attended Portland’s Grant High School and whose mom lives in the city.  

An urban farm with a CSA in the Pacific Northwest is nothing unique, Collins points out. “But a Black-centered, Black-run horticultural space that is wide open to the imaginings, hard work and possibilities of Black people, is — and I think that is more what Black Futures is about.”

Portland's Food Hub Keeps Local Food Stocked During COVID-19

When our convoluted national supply chains broke down during COVID-19 and meatpacking facilities shuttered due to outbreaks, The Redd on Salmon was able to pivot, helping Portlanders weather the pandemic with ample supplies of local food and locally-made hand sanitizer.  I wrote about this unique food hub's myriad projects for Reasons to be Cheerful. 

It’s Friday afternoon, and people on bikes and in cars are pulling up to an enormous red-brick warehouse in Portland’s Central Eastside to pick up their “Greater Good” boxes. Packed with local food, the $50 boxes are organized by local grocery chain New Seasons and wholesaler Organically Grown Co. A similar pick-up parade occurs on Wednesdays, when people cart away “Dock Boxes” of fish, shrimp and crab from popular Oregon Coast seafood restaurant Local Ocean. And on Monday evenings, Farm Punk, a farm in nearby Gresham, drops off its 50 community-supported agriculture (CSA) shares here, to be delivered the next day to eaters’ front porches via electric-assist trikes. 

This is the “new normal” at the Redd on Salmon, an enterprise that’s optimizing Portland’s local food system and helping farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk adapt to a post-Covid reality. Even in the before times, the Redd on Salmon served as a solution to the infrastructure dilemma for small and mid-size farmers, who face all kinds of logistical challenges as they try to get food to consumers. Without the production volume to justify large-scale storage and transport systems, small farmers often spend a full day on the road each week, burning precious time and money driving to restaurants and supermarkets, dropping off their wares one at a time. They also need to market and often sell their own goods — skills many farmers don’t know the first thing about. 

With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, small food producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices. Credit: The Redd

The Redd solves all these problems in one fell swoop, acting as a distribution hub, an affordable storage space and a shared industrial kitchen. Ecotrust, the environmental think tank behind the Redd, also hosts a business accelerator, helping small farmers to scale up. Currently, the Redd supports more than 150 small to mid-size food-related businesses. From 2018 to 2019, the facility’s core tenants saw a 45 percent increase in job creation and a 12 percent increase in jobs at or above the living wage. 

Medium-sizing small farms

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the failures of the industrial food system. Grocery stores have run short of pasta, canned beans, flour, yeast and meat. Farmers, unable to sell to school cafeterias and chain restaurants, are dumping their milk and plowing under their onions. When 20 gargantuan meat processing plants were shuttered by coronavirus outbreaks, farmers were left with no choice but to euthanize hundreds of thousands of pigs and millions of chickens. 

As Michael Pollan noted in his recent piece in the New York Review of Books, our industrial food chain is broken, but local food systems, like the one championed and supported by the Redd on Salmon, are proving to be more resilient. “The advantages of local food systems have never been more obvious, and their rapid growth during the past two decades has at least partly insulated many communities from the shocks to the broader food economy,” Pollan writes.

 

The Redd on Salmon is an integral part of this system. It is what is known as a food hub, a centrally located space that facilitates the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution and/or marketing of regionally produced food products. Not only does the block-long space provide farmers a 2,000-square-foot cold storage facility (half freezer, half refrigeration), it has offices and “dry storage” space so local companies like Ground Up PDX (nut butters) and Hoss Sauce (hot sauce) can stash boxes and product at a central location closer to their customers. 

The Redd solves the transport conundrum, too, with its main tenant, B-Line. A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Trike drivers load up their insulated trailers with up to 600 pounds of product and drop off food at restaurants, grocery stores and corporate cafeterias like AirBnB and Google. (B-Line also has one truck for deliveries that are further than three miles away. Founder and CEO Franklin Jones is saving up for an electric one.)  

By providing an all-in-one distribution hub to farmers who could never afford one on their own, the Redd was conceived as a way to support what food systems experts call “the agriculture of the middle.” Ag of the middle producers are larger than those who sell via local farmers’ markets or CSAs, but smaller than those supplying globalized commodity markets. With logistical and marketing support from the Redd, these producers can scale up and eventually serve institutional outlets like schools, hospitals, grocery stores and corporate offices.

A short-haul service with a fleet of electric-assist trikes, B-Line executes “last-mile” delivery without spewing carbon dioxide or jamming up the roads at delivery sites. Credit: The Redd

And lest you think this is a quirky boutique solution unique to Portlandia, know that there are over 350 food hubs around the country—from Durham, North Carolina to Traverse City, Michigan. A traditional food hub offers aggregation, marketing and often distribution for agricultural products. It might also serve as an incubator for micro-businesses. But the Redd takes it a step further, offering shared kitchens, a co-working space and even (across the street in the Redd East) an 8,000-square-foot event space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Jim Barham, an agricultural economist at the USDA, calls the Redd a food hub on steroids.

Founded by Ecotrust, which has long been a champion of ag of the middle producers, the Redd runs a two-year Ag of the Middle Accelerator Program that helps smaller-scale farmers, ranchers and fisherfolk learn the basics of marketing, accounting, taxation and business structure — as well as helping them apply for USDA value-added producer grants. As part of their orientation, participants in the accelerator tour the Redd’s facilities; graduates often end up using the space in some way. Over 70 producers have either graduated from the accelerator program or are in it right now. The current cohort of 17 businesses increased their sales by $1.5 million, collectively, after one year in the program. 

Keeping it local

Pre-pandemic, 30 to 40 percent of B-Line’s deliveries were to restaurants, corporate cafeterias or downtown businesses like Office Depot. Now that most of those are closed, the company has had to pivot, doing more frequent deliveries to New Seasons’ 18 area grocery stores, as well as serving as a physical hub for new direct-to-consumer services like the DockBox and Greater Good boxes. 

“When the pandemic hit, there was a flurry of ‘panic buying,’” says B-Line founder and CEO Franklin Jones. As it did at many supermarket chains, demand skyrocketed at New Seasons, causing a backlog with mainline distributors like KeHE, UNFI and Supervalu. As a result, says director of brand development at New Seasons Chris Tjersland, these distributors limited the amount of product that could be shipped to each store, leaving them with empty shelves. 

But because B-Line has pre-existing relationships with local farmers and producers, Jones was able to funnel products straight from these vendors through the Redd and into the aisles at New Seasons. Working with B-Line also allowed Tjersland and Jones to work directly with the producers of New Seasons’s private label line at a moment when traditional distribution channels were breaking down. While industrial farms were dumping perfectly good fruit and milk, B-Line was storing and delivering thousands of cases of Shepherd’s Grain flour, 800 cases of Rallenti Pasta and over 400 cases of Scenic Fruit frozen berries. Tjersland even worked with local companies Brew Dr Kombucha and Straightaway Cocktails to make New Seasons hand sanitizer, which was stored at the Redd and delivered via B-Line. 

The pandemic prompted other positive developments at the Redd. Redd Campus Manager Emma Sharer was tasked with how to optimize the Redd East event space, normally booked with weddings, natural wine fairs and food-focused conferences. In late March, she was doing an ab workout on the waterfront when she ran into Jacobsen Valentine, founder of Feed the Mass, an affordable cooking school that teaches people how to make healthy meals from scratch.

For the past month, a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. Credit: The Redd

The two struck up a conversation. “He was like, ‘My nonprofit is really struggling and I have this idea: how can we make meals for people who are missing access to them? Who are forced to buy fast food or packaged food?” 

They cooked up a collaborative plan. Ecotrust would donate its Redd East kitchen to Valentine two days a week, and he would cook meals for unhoused and food insecure folks around town.  

The FED Project was born. For the past month, Valentine and a handful of volunteers have been cooking two meals a week at the Redd’s kitchen; each meal can feed 200 people. The meals are packed up individually and delivered to folks around town who need them. 

Ecotrust gave Valentine a small food budget and stipend. Plus, Sharer scored a huge food donation from Airbnb when the company’s Portland offices, including its cafeteria, closed in March. Since the company had been sourcing via the Redd, much of the food was high-quality and local. “There was cheese, sour cream, Camas Country flour, a lot of spices, chicken from Marion Acres, pork products from Campfire Farm, confit garlic, frozen berries,” says Airbnb’s food program manager Abby Fammartino, who estimates that the donation was worth $10,000 in total. Jacobsen and his crew made mac and cheese the first week and channa masala the next. 

Sharer and Valentine hope that this particular project will live on even after the pandemic is over. “If we were to get more funding, could some of that go towards paying BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) farmers to purchase more product, supportive of the sourcing side of farming?” asks Sharer. “That’s our next step.”

One thing is clear: the Redd campus — and its robust local food community — helped keep flour and hand sanitizer on New Seasons shelves while mainline distributors couldn’t keep up with the spike in demand. 

“What it [the pandemic] made me realize is that the supply chain infrastructure is broken,” Tjersland from New Seasons says. Jones, who hasn’t had to lay off anyone at B-Line as a result of his increased business with New Seasons, agrees. “The whole pandemic really shone a spotlight on how resilient the local supply chain could be.” 

 

 

 

This ‘Carbon-Negative’ Burger Is Fighting Climate Change

I wrote this story for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new online magazine. 

As fake meat floods the market, some fast-food joints are insisting that their ultra-sustainably raised beef is better for the planet.

Burgerville's No. 6 Burger uses regeneratively farmed grass-fed beef, wheat from farmers who plant cover crops and practice low-till agriculture, and cheese from a creamery in Southern Oregon that gets it milk from small, family-run farms.

 

Everyone from Miley Cyrus to Trevor Noah is raving about the Impossible Burger, the vegan beef with the trademark “bleed” that debuted in 2016. It’s one of a handful of plant-based meats that have surged in popularity on claims that they can “drastically reduce humanity’s destructive impact on the global environment,” as Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has put it.

But what if there’s another, earth-friendlier option? What if a juice-dripping burger from an actual cow could be better for the planet than vegan-but-you’d-never-know-it imitation meat? A few burger chains are tacitly suggesting as much, offering real beef burgers that, by some measures, are more sustainable, and show how farming, done correctly, can be good for the earth.

Carbon-negative beef

Burgerville, a 60-year-old fast-food chain in the Pacific Northwest, launched the No. 6 Burger in September, so named for the sixth element in the periodic table, carbon. The No. 6 is a lesson in regenerative agriculture, a holistic land management practice that reverses climate change by rebuilding soil’s organic matter and restoring its biodiversity. 

The 100-percent grass-fed beef burger is from Carman Ranch, which practices rotational grazing on pasture, sequestering carbon back into the soil. (More on that later.) The brioche bun is baked at Grand Central Bakery from wheat grown on two Northwest farms (Small’s Family Farm and Camas Country Mill) that practice minimum tillage, which prevents erosion and carbon loss. And the aged cheddar melted atop is from Face Rock Creamery, which works with small-scale dairies within 15 miles of its facility. Every one of these enterprises is based in Oregon or Washington. The burger is currently sold at nine of Burgerville’s 41 locations. (It was slated to roll out at 16 additional locations in March, but then the coronavirus pandemic hit.) 

“Soil health is the core principle of what we do,” says Cory Carman, the 40-year-old owner of Carman Ranch. The pasture at Carman Ranch is rich with deeply rooted perennial grasses and nutrient-dense cover crops like winter pea, oats, sunflowers and a brassica mix—all plants that feed soil microbes as well as the cattle, eliminating the need for trucking in carbon-reliant feed like corn. The cattle are rotated on pasture and cycle the nutrients through their bodies, nourishing the soil with their manure, which in turn feeds the next cover crop. After they graze, that area is left fallow for as long as a year so it can regenerate. Crucially, the grasses and cover crops that the cattle munch on also pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil. 

Though Carman doesn’t have funding to test how deep a carbon sink her grazeland is, other ranches that practice regenerative grazing have. White Oak Pastures, a Bluffton, Georgia-based farm, recently had an outside firm conduct a “Life Cycle Assessment” of its rotationally grazed beef. The results show that the operation produces a net total of negative-3.5 kilograms of carbon emissions for every kilogram of beef produced. In other words, the cattle of White Oak Pastures have a net-negative impact on the environment—the very process by which they’re raised reduces climate change.

A partnership, rare and well done

Back in 2017, before the No. 6 Burger was on their menu, a few Burgerville executives visited Carman on her family’s ranch in Wallowa County, Oregon. The company wanted to put its money where its values were—fostering a more resilient regional supply chain. But the executives were wary, in part, because of the premium price that Carman Ranch beef commands. 

Cory Carman on her ranch in Wallowa, Oregon. Credit: Steven Jackson / Flickr

Carman convinced them that supporting her ranch would help bring the operation to scale, allowing her to lower her prices —a virtuous cycle of its own. “I told them, ‘Listen, if you want us to scale up so we can become one of your suppliers eventually, you can’t just sit around!’” she recalls. The Burgerville execs agreed, and committed to making the ranch’s grass-fed beef about seven percent of the beef in all their burgers.

The partnership worked. Burgerville’s commitment to buying a steady weekly volume allowed Carman to scale up, doubling the ranch’s production from 20 head of cattle a week to 40. Today, the Carman Ranch beef Burgerville buys goes first to the No. 6 Burger, and if anything is leftover, they’ll use it in the grind for the regular burgers. (The chain uses Country Natural Beef, which is grass-fed and corn finished, for its other burgers.) And even though the coronavirus pandemic shuttered all Burgerville restaurants to dine-in customers (38 remain open for drive-through or delivery business), they’ve stuck by their weekly order from Carman Ranch. 

Despite its $8 price tag — several dollars more than Burgerville’s $5.39 Northwest Cheeseburger — the No. 6 has been a hit. “I thought there was going to be all this pushback on pricing, but there wasn’t,” says Michelle Battista, the chain’s senior vice president for brand and marketing. From September to April 5, Burgerville sold nearly 50,000 No. 6 Burgers, nearly 14 percent of the company’s quarter-pounder burger sales. 

Impossible in nature

The No. 6 Burger is a story of long-game sustainability, in which shared risk and commitment lead to scaled-up carbon-negative farming.

The Impossible Burger’s story is different. A Silicon Valley food-tech triumph, its genetically engineered soy-based “heme” compound (the part that makes it “bleed”) has won over even un-woke fast food chains like Burger King and White Castle. But as critics like Anna Lappé, author of Diet for a Hot Planet, have pointed out, the company’s reliance on genetically modified soy is problematic in ways that have nothing to do with animal rights. 

GM soy is genetically engineered so that it can be sprayed with Bayer-Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup. Not only has glyphosate use been linked to the decline in honeybee and monarch butterfly populations, it has been classified by the World Health Organization as a probable carcinogen. The company’s reliance on a monoculture crop — genetically modified soy — also perpetuates one of the worst aspects of the industrial food system. Growing one crop year in and year out degrades the soil and contributes to erosion — because there are no cover crops to keep the soil in place — and also requires chemical fertilizers and other fossil fuels to harvest and transport. According to the World Food LCA Database, soybeans have a footprint of two kilograms of carbon for every kilogram of beans produced.  

Rachel Konrad, the chief communications officer at Impossible Foods, says that the company routinely scans for pesticides and herbicides and that there is no glyphosate in the Impossible Burger (though she did not deny that glyphosate is used on GM soy crops). She also disputed that relying on soy would perpetuate a monocultural food system, saying, “Animal agriculture is the No. 1 reason we’ve developed dangerous, biodiversity-killing monocultures… For what it’s worth, if you want to avoid soy for some reason, then you must eliminate animal products from your diet since livestock consumes the vast majority of all soy.” This is entirely true of the cheap feedlot beef raised in America, which is what most fast-food chains depend on. However, it is not true of ranches, like Carman’s, that practice regenerative agriculture, since their cattle is grazed on only pasture; they never eat soy or corn.  

There is also the question of whether heme, made from fermenting a genetically engineered yeast, is safe to eat. Konrad cites conclusions from the U.S. FDA and third-party food safety scientists “that the heme in the Impossible Burger is totally safe to eat.” But organizations like the Center for Food Safety and Moms Across America argue that we don’t really know, since this is the first time humans have ever consumed this unique lab-made form of heme. 

But the biggest impact of these products may be how quickly they have shifted focus away from more sustainable methods of farming and toward tech-based solutions instead. Before fake meat made a splash, at least one fast-food chain had just begun committing to more sustainably raised beef. In 2015, Carl’s Jr. introduced an antibiotic-free burger sourced from free range, grass-fed cattle. It’s no longer on the menu — now the chain sells the Beyond Burger instead. 

While some regional chains like Elevation and Bareburger have continued to source grass-fed beef from smaller family-run farms, most are still sourcing their beef from confined animal feeding lots, which are devastating for the environment, horrific for the animals and not great for human health. (Cows evolved to eat grass, not corn, which tends to make them sick). This, at least, is something that Impossible CEO Brown and proponents of regenerative agriculture agree on: our addiction to cheap feedlot beef is harming the planet. 

Burgerville’s business has been crucial to Carman Ranch’s growth. But more important than revenue, the chain has given Cory Carman — and the other farmers behind the No. 6 burger — a chance to share her mission with the wider world. “We want to get the message out: Why should you pay a premium for grass-fed beef? Why is our species dependent on the health of the soil?” She, like other practitioners of regenerative agriculture, is concerned that lab-based meat perpetuates monocultures. “The integration of animals, in some way, is critical to all ecological systems,” she says.  

The benefits of regenerative agriculture are complex, but once customers are educated, says Battista, they’re on board. “As a marketplace, we got people to grass fed,” she says. “We got people to see the difference between grass-fed and conventional feedlot beef. And people are like, ‘Yeah, I get it!’ And they connect the dots back to their own health and wellness.” 

 

The Oregon County that Stopped Big Water

I wrote this story on March 2nd for Reasons to be Cheerful, David Byrne's new publication. 

As Washington State moves to ban companies from selling its spring water, the story of Hood River County shows how even a small place can stop the extraction of its most precious resource.

Two weeks ago, Washington State took a major step toward shutting off the tap for companies that want to haul away its spring water and sell it around the world. The state senate passed a bill that would prohibit companies like Crystal Geyser and Nestlé from extracting, bottling and selling water from spring-fed sources. If enacted, it would be the first state law in the nation to declare that “any use of water for the commercial production of bottled water is deemed to be detrimental to the public welfare and the public interest.” 

Governor Jay Inslee hasn’t taken a position on the bill, but observers say he will likely support it, setting a precedent for other states like Maine and Michigan that have pushed back against water bottling operations in recent years.

Washington’s law would be the toughest restriction on water bottling operations in the U.S. so far — but it wouldn’t be the first. Across the Columbia River from the state’s southern border, Hood River County, Oregon, won an improbable victory against a Nestlé bottling operation in 2016, setting the stage for efforts like the one in Washington today. Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé took a decade, but in the end it stopped the company from opening up a facility in the small town of Cascade Locks and banned commercial water bottling in the county entirely. The lessons of that fight offer a roadmap for similar efforts elsewhere.  

An extractive industry

Despite the snowy mountain peaks and sparkling waterfalls that adorn their labels, nearly two-thirds of all bottled water sold in the U.S. come from municipal tap water. Not only is this water no safer or purer than water from the faucet (tap water is actually tested more frequently) it is 2,000 times more expensive. In addition, the bottled water industry creates millions of single-use plastic bottles that will never be recycled. In 2016, four billion pounds of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic was used for bottled water production. 

But it’s bottled water from spring-fed sources that can have biggest ecological impacts. “Bottling spring water can be disastrous to the water table because the company sucks a large amount from a small source,” says Julia DeGraw, who was the senior Northwest organizer at Food & Water Watch during the decade when Nestlé was trying to open a bottling facility in Cascade Locks.

DeGraw says that communities in Mecosta County, Michigan have seen their wells run dry, their springs stop flowing and their fish die off because of Nestlé’s aggressive water pumping operations. A spokesperson from Nestlé Waters North America does not directly deny this, but points to data from Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy showing that the state’s nearly 40 bottled water companies account for less than .01 percent of water used in the state.  

A fish ladder at Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Credit: J. Stephen Conn / Flickr

Hood River County’s fight against Nestlé began back in 2008, when the multinational company approached Cascade Locks with plans to open a $50 million bottling plant that would have extracted more than 100 million gallons of water a year from Oxbow Springs, which feeds a salmon hatchery.  

DeGraw remembers those early days clearly. “We were the lead organization… really early on when we were trying to build a coalition,” she says. That coalition ended up being big, a fact that was key to the effort’s success. It included not just environmental groups like Food & Water Watch and the local Sierra Club chapter, but also public sector unions, Native American tribes, activist nuns, pro-bono lawyers, ultra runners, a hunger striker and ordinary people turned activists. 

Also critical was the fact that although the effort was grassroots, it was also well-resourced. Food & Water Watch put money behind the campaign, hiring DeGraw to be the local organizer and helping to pay for the county ballot measure. And in 2012 the Crag Law Center donated its services, filing two protests challenging the Oregon Water Resources Department’s (OWRD) approval of Nestlé’s water exchange permit. 

The broad reach and resources of the coalition, which named itself Keep Nestlé Out of the Gorge (KNOG), allowed it to confront the company’s U.S. water division, which has a pattern, the organizers say. They claim it seeks out economically distressed towns like Cascade Locks, which was once a boom town when the timber industry was thriving. In 2010, the town had a median income of just $42,917 and an unemployment rate of 15.5 percent, according to data from the U.S. Census. 

“When the mill closed down, it really had a profound effect on the economy,” says Aurora del Val, a retired English teacher who got involved in the campaign to keep Nestlé out. “Cascade Locks is a town that has the profile that I think a lot of these water companies are looking for. And they’re saying all the right things. The Nestlé guy would shake hands with all the business people and gave money to the food bank. He made all these promises. There is a real standard way that they operate in a small town.” Nestlé’s spokesperson confirmed that the company makes significant economic contributions in areas where they operate. “We support many community organizations, locally and nationally, through donations of water, food, supplies, and money,” he wrote via email. 

In Cascade Locks, Nestlé promised jobs and economic prosperity while playing down potential environmental consequences, and local officials took it at face value, del Val says. 

“It’s kind of like the tobacco industry saying ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t give you cancer!’” she continues. “The water plant might’ve provided a few jobs locally, but in terms of — for the larger economy — it would’ve put the water supply at risk.”

Resistance coalesces

Concerned about the negative repercussions — depleting groundwater that farmers and residents depend upon, siphoning off the cold creek water that’s essential for fish habitat — del Val started to talk to her neighbors, many of whom were also concerned. In the spring of 2015, she helped found a group called the Local Water Alliance, eventually becoming the group’s campaign director. Even though she calls herself a “reluctant activist,” del Val went door-to-door and talked to Democrats, Independents and Republicans alike. 

In Cascade Locks, she and others were able to persuade long-time residents and independents Kathy and Bob Tittle, who own the Chevron station in town, as well as Joseph Shelley and Lynn Pruitt — a Libertarian and Republican, respectively — who felt so strongly about the campaign that they allowed their photos on the Local Water Alliance’s materials. In Odell, in the heart of orchard country, Butch Gehrig, a registered Republican, endorsed the Alliance’s campaign, too. “Water matters, and it doesn’t matter which political affiliation you are,” she says. 

The Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia River between Cascade Locks, Oregon and Washington State. Credit: C. Hanchey / Flickr

The Yakama Nation opposed the bottling plant at around the same time. Chairman JoDe Goudy spoke on the steps of the Oregon Capitol saying that the Yakama Nation would sue the state of Oregon if Nestlé was authorized to bottle water from Oxbow Springs. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and Umatilla and Nez Perce tribes also sent Governor Kate Brown letters opposing the bottling facility and critiquing the process. 

“Our natural resources are important and we can’t be extracting them,” says Carina Miller, who was a member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs’ tribal council at the time. Miller says that tribal treaty rights were disregarded when the Nestlé deal was set into motion, and was troubled that this wasn’t what motivated Governor Kate Brown’s late-in-the-game decision to oppose the deal. On the other hand, Miller says, the fact that area environmentalists and conservative white farmers alike recognized that tribal people needed to be at the table was huge. “To go and have shared values — just that there was an acknowledgement that tribes should be included. That was a win.” 

Even though Nestlé spent $105,000 to oppose the Hood River County Water Protection Measure — more than double what backers of the measure raised — it passed in May 2016 by nearly 70 percent. “It was democracy in action,” del Val says. “The power of the vote was pretty inspiring. Even though this is a real dark time, people do really make a difference.” 

Even so, perhaps because Governor Brown hadn’t taken action, Nestlé, Cascade Locks and the ODFW continued to pursue a water rights swap, in violation of the voter-approved measure. (At question was whether a county government has the authority to tell a city government what it can and can’t do with its resources.) After a new round of emails and phone calls from local residents and a damning story from a local news affiliate, Brown finally told ODFW to halt its water exchange in October of 2017, putting the kibosh on the Nestlé facility for good. 

Today, business is booming in Cascade Locks, according to del Val. A Basque cidery called Son of Man recently opened, sharing space with two natural winemakers. Thunder Island Brewing just broke ground on a 10,000-square-foot facility on the main street. And Renewal Workshop, a startup that takes discarded apparel that would normally go into the landfill and transforms it into new products or upcycled material, opened in 2016. “Those are the kinds of companies that are opening here,” says del Val. “They’re green and sustainable… and they’re hiring!” 

Now Hood River County is passing on the lessons it learned from its epic battle. DeGraw and del Val have recently shared tactics and strategies with resident-turned-activists in Randle, Washington, who have been fighting a similar effort by Crystal Geyser. “You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says del Val. “Not everyone involved is a career activist. We’re just ordinary people who care.”