The World: Science, Tech & Environment

As China gets tough on recycling, will America get cleaner?

PRI's The World — Wed, 18 Jul 2018 10:25:14 -0400

In recent years, the model for US recycling has been to send it overseas to China. China gets a raw material worth money; the US gets rid of its rubbish.

But since the start of this year, China has been refusing to take contaminated recycling, forcing communities across the US, like Lynn, Massachusetts, to quickly take action.

China’s new anti-pollution campaign — dubbed the National Sword — refuses some items outright and demands extremely clean recyclables for the rest (0.5 percent contamination).

That's why Julia Greene, recycling coordinator for the city of Lynn, is spending her summer looking through recycling bins.

She rifles through Lynn resident Diane Thomas’ bin. It’s filled with plastic bottles — a good thing, except for one problem: The bottles are filled with liquid.

Greene explains why that’s an issue. The liquid can leak onto perfectly fine recyclables and ruin them.

“I’m going to have to tell my niece,” says Thomas, explaining why some of the plastics are still filled.

The bin also has used paper towels — which although they're paper, aren’t recyclable. They're covered with food that can further contaminate other products in the bin. “That’s my grandson,” mentions Thomas.

Greene says most residents, like Thomas, have good intentions but they simply don’t know some of the rules to recycling.

Later, Greene broadens her explanation about the problem with liquid-filled bottles. “When you put those into those bales and then they sit there for weeks and months, as they go to be made into other materials then you’ve got all kinds of problems with mold, etc. That’s why we want to clean it up as best as possible.”

Americans are going to have to clean up their bins, as best as possible, in a hurry.

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Julia Greene, center, the recycling coordinator for the city of Lynn, Massachusetts, gives resident Diane Thomas, left, a brief tutorial on recycling. Cody Marshall, with the Recycling Partnership, looks on, offering words of encouragement.

Credit:

Jason Margolis/PRI

The city of Lynn had an audit of its recycling program in April — the bins had 26 percent contamination, 3 percent of which was electronic waste.

“So that meant people are throwing TVs in there, their computers. It’s a nightmare,” says Greene. “When we saw that on the report we said, ‘Wow we’ve got a huge problem.’”

In Lynn, when there’s nobody around to teach Recycling 101, Greene puts a tag on the cart that explains the basics of how to recycle better. (The tags are, of course, also recyclable.)

“So, why this was tagged? ... It has — what we’d say — a lot of ‘yuck’ in it,” says Greene, putting a tag on a bin. “It has Styrofoam cups and food waste on the napkins and bags.”

To be clear, Lynn isn’t sending recycling with 26 percent contamination directly to China. A truck first delivers the recyclables from the bin to a local sorter called a materials recovery facility, or MRF.

“From there, different equipment and people kind of sort the trash out,” says Cody Marshall, with The Recycling Partnership, an organization that’s working with cities across the country to help them clean up their recycling. His organization developed the tags to put on green bins and helps municipalities educate people how to recycle smarter.

Still, it’s much easier for the sorter to get to 0.5 percent contamination if bins are cleaner in the first place.

But let’s stop picking on Lynn. Marshall says communities around the country typically produce contamination levels between 10 and 20 percent. And we’re not just talking about greasy pizza boxes. Marshall says people also routinely throw wood, propane tanks and garden hoses in their bins, thinking the items must be recyclable.

“They think it's plastic,” says Marshall, giving some examples: dog chains, ropes, extension cords.

Those large items would hopefully get weeded out at an MRF before being sent overseas. Still, they can gum up the machines, losing the sorters time and money — extra costs that inevitably get passed down. Today, many cities that used to get paid for their recycling are now paying recycling facilities to collect it.

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Julia Greene with the city of Lynn, Massachusetts carries “Oops!” tags to put on unclean recycling bins, explaining some basic rules for better recycling. The tags were developed by The Recycling Partnership.

Credit:

Jason Margolis/PRI

Those in the recycling industry grumble that China has set the bar too high with an impossible standard of purity. But there's also another response.

“It’s been a wake-up call, no question,” says Brooke Nash, with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

“It’s an opportunity for us re-educate folks and get back to basics. And let’s face it, recycling is confusing,” says Nash. “What we get at the grocery store, our packaging is constantly changing; packaging innovations make it all the more confusing. Is this recyclable or is it not? Twenty years ago, eggs came in paper cartons. That was it. Now you can buy eggs in Styrofoam cartons, you can buy them in clear plastic cartons. Well, what do you do with those things?”

Most throw it in the recycling bin and hope it’s recyclable. Within the industry, they call it “wish-cycling.” Adding to the confusion, cities and towns sometimes have different rules for what can and can’t be recycled.

So, between varying standards, ever-changing packaging, our bad habits and China’s crackdown, where does this leave us? India and nations in Southeast Asia are picking up some of the slack. But Nash says they’re also following China’s lead.

“Nobody wants to be the recipient of material that is 20 percent trash. So we’re going to see a domino effect that markets around the world are going to demand a cleaner product,” says Nash.

And just giving up on recycling is not an option. In Massachusetts and other states, it's also against the law to put bottles and cans in landfills. Recycling is not only good for the planet, it's good for the economy: Recycling in the US generates more than $100 billion in economic activity annually. Just imagine what it could be worth if it were actually clean.

Britain built an empire out of coal. Now it’s giving it up. Why can’t the US?

PRI's The World — Mon, 11 Jun 2018 14:40:04 -0400

Audio Part One: A divisive national strike in the 1980s stripped the once-dominant UK coal industry of its economic and political influence.

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UK ditching coal

PRI's The World

Monday, June 18, 2018

The UK built an empire out of coal. Now it's giving it up. It's pledged to stop burning coal for electricity by 2025. How did this happen in Britain at a time when leaders in the US are promising to end the "war on coal"? The answer lies not in technological innovation, but in a profound cultural shift that began decades ago in coal field communities across England. In the first part of a two-part series, The World's Livable Planet reporter Carolyn Beeler went to England's coal country to interview coal miners about the demise of their industry, an economic shift that paved the way for a transition to a low-carbon future.

Audio Part Two: 30 years after the strike, a ground-breaking climate law meets almost no opposition and leads to an almost total phase-out of coal.

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How the UK dumped coal while the US can’t

PRI's The World

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

The country where coal power was born is moving rapidly away from the dirty fuel, while the US is still arguing over the issue. What accounts for the difference? The World's Livable Planet reporter Carolyn Beeler digs into the question in the second of her two reports on the end of coal in the UK.

The UK, perhaps more than any other country in the world, was built on coal.

The first successful steam engine was invented to pump water out of British coal mines. Coal powered the railroads and ships that built the British empire. It helped the country survive two world wars, and at its height between those wars, coal mines employed 1.2 million people.

So this winter, when the United Kingdom announced its plan to stop burning coal for electricity by 2025, the shift was seismic.

The announcement signaled the dethroning of King Coal in a country where it had reigned for more than a century, and where just six years prior it provided more than 40 percent of the nation’s energy.

How did this happen in the UK at a time when leaders in the US were moving in the opposite direction by promising to end the “war on coal”?

The answer lies not in technological innovation, but in a profound cultural shift that began decades ago in coal field communities across the UK.

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A country built on coal

The historic shifts were felt nowhere more acutely than in Yorkshire, the country’s largest coal region and a part of northern England where farms and villages sit on top of vast coal reserves.

It’s been called England’s Texas, but without the sun and guns.

For generations, entire communities there were built around the coal pits. Mines had their own social clubs and brass bands. Coal companies sponsored bus trips to the seaside and swimming nights at local pools for mining families.

As a third-generation miner, it was a way of life Shaun McLoughlin knew well.

“Where I lived in particular, when people went to the local schools, it was sort of taken that unless they went on to university, they would just move into coal mining,” says McLoughlin, 57, who grew up in public housing in Castleford, a small West Yorkshire village that was surrounded by mines. The son and grandson of miners, he followed in their footsteps at age 16.

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Shaun McLoughlin at Kellingley Colliery, the last deep mine in the UK. It closed in December 2015 and is being demolished.

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler/PRI

McLoughlin, who today has neatly trimmed gray hair and an efficient, matter-of-fact way with words, enrolled in an apprenticeship program that paid for college and put him on a track toward management.

He started in the industry in the 1970s, at a time when its future looked brighter than it had in years.

The UK had hit peak coal production back in 1913. By the 1920s, jobs started declining as mechanization, decreasing demand and competition from other fuel sources started to impact the industry. The decline in mining jobs continued for decades.

But in the 1970s, when McLoughlin was graduating high school, an oil crisis sparked by embargoes gave the coal industry a temporary reprieve. The mines stopped hemmoraging workers, new investments in the industry were promised, and for a few years, at least, things started to look up again for King Coal.

“When I started in the industry, I was told you’ve got a job for life. You’ve got a job for life, lad, as they say ‘round these parts,” says David Murray, who grew up near Manchester and also started in the industry in the 1970s.

“Things started changing in the early 80s,” Murray says.

A coal strike in 1984 and 1985 divides a nation

In 1984 the government-backed National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 inefficient coal pits, and most of the country’s miners went on strike to protest. The yearlong strike that resulted divided the country and would change both organized labor and the energy industry in the UK.

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At the time, Yorkshire miner Shaun McLoughlin was recently married and had a mortgage. Making ends meet was tough, but he dared not cross a picket line.

“Being a third-generation miner, you knew that it was a sin to break the strike,” McLoughlin says.

But the strike lacked nationwide consensus, and some miners kept working. Police trying to help them get to work clashed violently with picketers on the streets. News coverage showed lines of picketing miners facing off with police in riot gear. Miners threw bricks and marbles. Cops put picketers in headlocks and dragged them from the front lines.

The country, watching all this on TV, was bitterly divided. Some supported the police, while others backed the miners.

“It split families, it split brothers,” McLoughlin says.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had run on a platform of busting union power, waged a public relations battle against the picketers.

She called them “the enemy” and their tactics “intimidation” and “unlawful assembly.”

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The acrimony between Margaret Thatcher and coal mining communities persisted even after her death. Here, protesters march in a demonstration against the former British prime minister on the day of her funeral, in the former coal mining village of Goldthorpe, northern England April 17, 2013. Thatcher, who was Conservative prime minister between 1979 and 1990, died on April 8 at the age of 87.

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Nigel Roddis/ Reuters

“All the publicity on TV was showing the miners as being basically thugs,” McLoughlin remembers. “There was a lot of bad feeling toward the miners.”

Despite the mining union’s hopes that a strike would bring the country to its knees, the lights stayed on in the UK. And the violent clashes with police turned public opinion against their cause.

After a year, the striking miners admitted defeat and went back to work.

“There was a sense before the strike of the industry being so important, and I just think the industry lost that importance politically, economically, and everything,” Murray says.

“And the government was free then to carry out the pit closure program at an accelerated rate,” McLoughlin says.

Declining domestic mining industry leaves coal powerless

In the decade that followed the strike, most of the country's deep mines closed and the number of people employed in the industry plummeted from 139,000 to about 7,000.

At the time, however, the motivation was economic, not environmental. The UK was still burning coal in power plants, it just increasingly relied on cheaper, imported coal.

But the shift to foreign coal had a major political impact. As local miners were laid off, the domestic coal industry lost its power.

“Their ability effectively to lobby was reduced over time,” says Grant Wilson, an expert on energy systems at the University of Sheffield. “One can see the miners’ strikes as being really quite a momentous change for the United Kingdom.”

This momentous change would later help make it possible for the UK to establish a national policy of decarbonization, but it would take more than two decades for that policy to emerge.

Climate change lands on political radar in the UK

By the turn of the millennium, environmentalist and lawmaker Baroness Bryony Worthington says, the issue of climate change was starting to work its way into the UK's politics.

“There was a real sea-change in attitude toward climate change,” says Worthington, who today is a member of the House of Lords and heads the Environmental Defense Fund’s European branch.

“You definitely saw more discussion, papers being published, and it started to get political attention in a way that it hadn’t,” Worthington says.

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Baroness Bryony Worthington, currently head of the Environmental Defense Fund Europe, helped draft the 2008 Climate Change Act.

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Courtesy of the Environmental Defense Fund Europe

Worthington worked for an environmental nonprofit called Friends of the Earth in the mid-2000s. At the time, coal still produced about a third of the country’s power, and the UK struggled to meet established greenhouse gas emission targets.

To try to bridge the gap between the country’s green ambitions and its coal-reliant reality, Worthington helped write what would become the UK’s Climate Change Act, the most sweeping law of its kind in the world.

The legislation set a legally binding target of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050, and required five-year plans to help keep the government on track.

With little industry pushback, the UK passes landmark climate legislation

Around the same time that public consensus for climate legislation was forming in the UK, things were moving in the opposite direction in the US.

Climate change was becoming a politically polarizing issue.

In 2009, fossil fuel companies were spending record amounts lobbying Congress as it considered climate change legislation. Years later, US coal companies fought fiercely against the Clean Power Plan, which, had it gone into effect, would have closed coal-fired power plants to reduce carbon emissions.

Viewed through the lens of American experience, passing climate legislation in the UK was an astonishingly frictionless experience.

Worthington says while lawmakers were working to get the Act passed, there was no real opposition from fossil fuel companies or workers.

“That was not the main problem,” she says.

Some government officials worried about the economic impact of the law. But Worthington can’t remember any pushback from coal interests. And oil companies Shell and BP had actually been lobbying for similar legislation for years.

“There were not the same level of climate skeptics that we see today, we didn’t have that very well-resourced, very highly organized opposition,” Worthington says. “That was not a feature.”

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The cooling towers at Eggborough power station, a coal-fired power plant built near Yorkshire’s coal mines that is closing this year.

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler/PRI

Across the pond in the US, a few big coal companies still had outsized political influence in key states, and employed more than 130,000 people. But the coal industry in the UK was a shadow of its former self, and employed only about 6,000 workers.

So the UK Climate Change Act passed into law in 2008.

Carbon tax “flips a switch” in UK energy sector

To meet the requirements of the act, the UK established a carbon tax in 2013. That tax eventually made coal more expensive than natural gas, and when that happened, Wilson says, it’s like someone flipped a giant switch.

“I think one of the things that really has taken many people by surprise, myself included, was just simply the rate of that change, the tipping point,” Wilson says.

Under-used natural gas capacity that had been built up during a “dash for gas” in the 1990s was turned on, and coal-fired power plants were turned off. From 2012 to 2017, coal dropped from supplying more than 40 percent of the UK’s electricity to just 7 percent.

“For any modern industrial economy to change a third of its electricity supply in a six-year period, it is really astonishing,” Wilson says.

Renewable energy also picked up some of the slack: It soared from producing about four percent of the country’s electricity to almost a third.

Last deep mine in the UK closes, ending a way of life

The writing was on the wall for the end of coal in the UK, and in November of 2015, it got a date on the calendar.

Just ahead of the UN climate change summit in Paris, the UK’s Energy Secretary Amber Rudd announced the country would stop burning coal for electricity in a decade.

“It cannot be satisfactory for an advanced economy like the UK to be relying on polluting, carbon intensive 50-year-old coal-fired power stations,” Rudd said. “Let me be clear: this is not the future.”

A month later, the very last deep mine in the UK closed.

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Miners leave after working the final shift at Kellingley Colliery on its last day of operation in north Yorkshire, England, December 18, 2015. Kellingley was the last deep coal mine to close in England, bringing to an end centuries of coal mining in Britain.

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Nigel Roddis/Pool, Reuters

The mine was Kellingley Colliery, which at its height employed more than 2,000 people. It’s where McLoughlin, the Yorkshire miner, started his career in 1977 as an apprentice and ended it nearly 40 years later as the mine’s manager.

“We were the last miners,” says McLoughlin, who remembers fielding media interviews all day after the mine sent the last shift of workers underground at 6 a.m. that December day.

“It was very emotional, there were lots of tears on site,” McLoughlin says. “Saying goodbye to a lot of colleagues that I’d worked a long time with, (it was) a very sad day, really.”

McLoughlin visited the site of the mine one morning early this spring, when it was quiet enough to hear birds chirping in the parking lot.

He remembered what it was like during the boom years, when he would have to jockey for a parking spot during shift changes and cars would be backed up down the road.

The morning he visited, the parking lot was nearly empty. The few cars there belonged to demolition workers.

“(It’s) really sad to look at this great industrial site as a state of demolition,” McLoughlin says.

The mine shaft has been plugged with concrete.

Most of the buildings have been razed, including McLoughlin’s former office building, which is now just a pile of rubble.

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Coal-fired power plants closing as well

This year, the UK government finalized its plan to phase coal out of the UK’s power mix by 2025.

This is good news for the environment. But the turn away from coal has been rough for those living in the coal fields, who are still more likely to be unemployed and have lower wages than the national average.

McLoughlin for one doesn’t think the pain inflicted on coal country is for a good cause.

“I’m a bit of a skeptic on this one,” he says. “I think the small amount of coal that the UK burns isn’t going to make much difference to the climate change.”

The good wages, overtime and bonuses McLoughlin earned in the mines launched him out of public housing and provided a good life for his family, including his two adult sons. Today, he thinks the government is turning its back on people like him.

“I look at the wages the mining industry paid, and I looked at what a really good living it’s provided me with. And I see my youngest son now is a schoolteacher, and he just works five days a week and has no means of boosting his income, so they do struggle,” McLoughlin says. “I really feel sorry for young families of today wanting to bring a family into the world.”

But McLoughlin seems to be in the minority, even in Yorkshire.

Even as the coal-fired power plants that were built near the UK’s mines start closing, bringing more layoffs to coal country, local communities don’t seem too worried.

Walking down the main street in Eggborough, which sits in the shadow of a Yorkshire power plant set to close this fall, coal doesn’t seem like a vibrant industry or a major employer.

It seems like history.

“It’s inevitable isn’t it?” says Robin Heath, who retired not long ago from a job working at another coal-fired power plant nearby. “(Coal) has been on its way out for years. It’s a shame, but time moves on, doesn’t it?"

Three friends drinking coffee with Heath at a café in the village of Eggborough, friends who also spent their careers working at coal-fired power plants, say they feel the same.

“I think it’s inevitable,” says Dave Wiles. “Coal has had its day. If you believe all the scientists and experts on the damage its doing, which I think there’s enough evidence there now to support it, I think we are going the right way.”

Coal remains part of the UK’s heritage

Shaun McLoughlin and his colleagues at Kellingley have moved on since the last deep mine in the UK closed with much fanfare in 2015.

After nearly four decades working in mines, McLoughlin started working at a museum dedicated to the industry, the National Coal Mining Museum, which operates on the site of a mine that closed in the 1980s.

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Shaun McLoughlin pets a horse at the National Coal Mining Museum in Yorkshire.

Credit:

Carolyn Beeler/PRI

The symbolism is not lost on McLoughlin.

“It is ironic, yes,” he says, after showing me an old-fashioned cage elevator that still drops down a shaft opened up for mining in the late 1700s.

The elevator no longer transports miners going to work underground, of course. It carries kids on school trips — kids whose grandfathers might have worked in the mines but who often have never seen coal before.

“There’s children now growing up that don’t know what coal is,” McLoughlin says. “Once (the country) stops burning coal, they’ll not realize that coal fueled the industrial revolution of Great Britain and put us where we are on the map.”

McLoughlin hopes that won't be true for the kids he meets at the museum. Coal may have quickly fallen from favor as a fuel source in the UK, but he wants them to know it was an important part of the country's history.

This story was updated to change references to Britain and the United Kingdom.

The early impact of solar tariffs: Fewer American projects, fewer American jobs

PRI's The World — Thu, 24 May 2018 13:48:30 -0400

Cypress Creek Renewables builds and manages large-scale solar farms across the US, which supply power to utilities. The company’s CEO Matt McGovern said “it’s very difficult, if not impossible” to find all of the solar equipment it needs from US manufacturers.

So, McGovern says he has to turn to Asia to import equipment: “Malaysia, Vietnam, South Korea, some out of China.”

Since January, imports of solar cells and modules (basically a panel) have come with a 30 percent tax.

“It’s been meaningful,” McGovern says. “The impact, direct for us, has been the cancellation or delay of around a gigawatt-and-a-half of projects.”

That could’ve supplied power to about 250,000 households for a year.

Tariffs, basically taxes on imports, have become a favored tool of the Trump administration. President Trump is now asking for an investigation into whether imported autos pose a threat to national security. If it's found they do, the Trump administration could impose tariffs.

The administration has already imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum and washing machines, and has been threatening a lot more. Back in January, the administration imposed tariffs of 30 percent on imported solar cells and modules, aimed at Chinese and Asian competition. The tariffs decrease annually, falling to 15 percent in the fourth and final year.

It’s only been four months, but the US solar industry is putting off a lot of projects this year because of the tariffs, says Abigail Hopper, the CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“So what does that translate to in terms of jobs? We think about 23,000 jobs will either be lost, actual people will lose their jobs, or jobs that won’t be created [this year],” Hopper says. “Companies would have grown and would have invested in their workforce, and they’re not going to do that now because of the impact of these tariffs.”

Hopper’s association is working with a bipartisan group in Congress to repeal the tariffs. She’s not optimistic. Hopper says their best chance could be when the United States International Trade Commission re-evaluates the tariffs in two years.

“Two years is an awfully long time,” Hopper says. “And the worst part about it is that it’s just opportunity lost, it’s opportunity lost for no apparent gain.”

Not everybody agrees with that. Two American companies argued last year that Chinese-owned firms were engaged in unfair competition, over-supplying the US with solar cells and modules that have been heavily subsidized by the Chinese government. They argued that China’s solar strategy has nearly wiped out American manufacturing.

The Obama administration had already put tariffs on solar imports from China; the Trump administration broadened them because China was getting around the duties by setting up shop in other nations.

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In 2017, 90 percent of solar modules were imported to the US, though built domestically, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

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SEIA

One of the two companies that brought last year’s trade case was Oregon-based SolarWorld Americas. A month ago, the Silicon Valley based company SunPower bought it. SunPower’s CEO Tom Werner said the tariffs made the Oregon factory an attractive acquisition.

“I felt it was better to swim with the current, so to speak,” Werner says, referring to the Trump administration’s policies that “strongly desire” American manufacturing.

But large companies like SunPower are global — the company is majority-owned by the French company Total — and SunPower also builds solar cells in the Philippines and Malaysia. And Werner said its Asian manufacturing isn’t relocating to Oregon.

“The challenge of moving large-scale manufacturing anywhere is that you’ve invested, in our case, over a billion dollars, and you’ve not gotten the full return on that investment,” Werner says.

So, if his company now manufactures in Asia and Oregon, where does that leave Werner on the tariff question?

“I’d say that my experience as an operator of a company is that tariffs are difficult to work,” Werner says. “They get implemented quickly and then they’re super hard to react to, and so they distort the market. So I’d have to say as an operator, I find them difficult.”

He says his company is also now paying between $1.5 million and $2 million a week for import tariffs.

Werner adds that tariffs focus on yesterday’s battle: “I think the objective should be to win in the next wave of innovation in solar, which is the integration of solar with batteries.”

The other company that brought the trade case was Georgia-based Suniva. The company, which is majority Chinese-owned, didn’t respond to interview requests.

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A solar farm built by Cypress Creek Renewables in Henderson, North Carolina. The solar industry’s trade group, SEIA, estimates that 23,000 jobs this year will be lost or not created due to recent tariffs.

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Cypress Creek Renewables

MJ Shiao, who researches renewables and emerging technologies with the research and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, agrees that tariffs are a “fairly crude” way to encourage American manufacturing.

Shiao says the US needs a long-term vision, not tariffs that phase out over four years.

“These other countries like China have invested in their manufacturers, whereas in the US, we don’t really have a clear and coherent solar manufacturing policy,” Shiao says.

Shiao would like to see more workforce development programs and government incentives to invest in research and development in tomorrow’s innovations.

And remember, the argument over solar tariffs isn’t just about jobs; it’s also about climate change. Shiao said that as solar imports become more expensive, fewer will get installed. And fewer solar panels could mean continued reliance on fossil fuels in the short-term, and more greenhouse gas pollutants in the atmosphere.

“Around 7.7 gigawatts of solar energy that could’ve been installed over the next five years — that is no longer economically attractive,” Shiao says.

That would’ve been enough energy to supply all the households in a city roughly the size of Chicago.

This British company is turning food waste into beer

PRI's The World — Tue, 01 May 2018 12:54:11 -0400

It’s a Wednesday night in central London and the trendy Temple Brew House pub is packed with people out for after-work beers and burgers.

A crowd in one corner is sipping intently from half-pint tasting glasses, savoring a beer they helped brew about a month earlier using an unusual ingredient: leftover bread.

“We got a lesson in brewing as well as a lesson in using the bread for it,” says Michael Mulcahy, who helped tear up about 200 loaves of bread into chunks to make the amber ale he’s sipping. “Today, we get to taste what came out of it.”

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Toast Ale’s small-batch brew is on tap at the Temple Brew House in central London at a March 2018 tasting event. It was the seventh collaboration between the pub, Toast Ale and The Flour Station.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

The beer was brewed at the pub’s tiny in-house brewery in collaboration with Toast Ale, a British craft beer company that uses waste bread to make beer on a commercial scale.

“In the UK, 44 percent of all bread is wasted,” says Toast Ale’s chief brand and finance officer Louisa Ziane. “So we take surplus bread from bakeries and sandwich makers, and we replace a third of the barley that would otherwise have been used to brew, upcycling bread that would have otherwise been wasted.”

That bread provides some of the sugars that turn into alcohol during brewing, cutting down on the amount of fresh barley needed.

Using beer to raise awareness about food waste

The tradition of brewing beer with bread goes back thousands of years, but Toast drew its inspiration from a modern batch made by the Brussels Beer Project.

Toast launched in 2016 and sells its commercial ales at grocery stores and restaurants around the UK. Once the company starts turning a profit, it plans to donate those profits to Feedback, a charity that fights against food waste and shares a founder, Tristram Stuart, with the beer brand. (The company says it’s been able to make donations to Feedback already through its local collaborations.)

“Beer is a really fun medium to engage people on what is globally a very important problem,” Ziane says.

Around the world, about one-third of the food that’s produced ends up going to waste. That’s a big problem for the world’s hungry, but it’s also a big contributor to climate change: Producing that food emits as much greenhouse gases as many individual countries.

Toast’s commercial beers are produced at a brewery in the north of England that uses the heels of bread normally discarded by a catering company that makes sandwiches.

But Toast is also trying to spread the gospel of brewing with waste bread by sponsoring smaller, local collaborations like the one in March at the Temple Brew House.

“We recognize that there are bakeries up and down the country who are left with surplus bread at the end of the day, and there are also over 2,000 breweries in the UK,” Ziane says, so Toast is playing matchmaker with these local bakeries and breweries.

Leftover bread is especially hard to donate

The Flour Station, a small London chain with two retail locations and a wholesale bakery, donated a van full of leftover bread for the beer that was on tap at the recent tasting. It was the seventh batch the Flour Station and Temple Brew House have brewed together.

“If a customer cancels an order or if a mistake is made on an order, there’s nothing we can do once the dough is mixed to take that back again,” says The Flour Station’s Tara Griffin, who estimates about 1 to 2 percent of the bread the company bakes ends up going to waste.

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Tara Griffin, with The Flour Station bakery in London, says about 1 to 2 percent of the bread her company bakes goes to waste.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

A food charity picks up unsold loaves at the chain’s two retail locations in London, but the company hasn’t found anyone interested in the large and irregular batches of mistakes from their wholesale bakery.

"Because bread has a short shelf life it’s not the easiest product to move on to someone else,” Griffin says. “A lot of homeless shelters look for cans or packaged food that is easier to keep for a longer period.”

Toast says it works with bakeries to make sure they’ve exhausted the options to get bread to people who would eat it before agreeing to turn it into beer.

“There is so much bread being wasted that we don’t need to take it away from people who could eat it, and our priority is to get it to people,” Ziane says.

Brewing with bread requires strong arms

Vanesa de Blas, head brewer at the Temple Brew House’s Essex Street Brewery, says as long as she uses bread with neutral flavors — wheats, whites, sourdoughs and the like — replacing some of the malted barley with bread in a beer recipe doesn’t change its taste much.

During brewing, the bread gets ripped up into chunks and thrown into the hot water along with barley to make what’s called the “mash.” Most of the bread dissolves in the hot water, and the crusts are strained off along with the malted barley solids prior to fermentation.

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Toast Ale says 44 percent of the UK’s bread ends up going to waste.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

De Blas says the biggest difference between brewing just with barley and adding bread to the mix is that it’s a lot harder than usual to stir up the mash.

“It floats on top and it makes it really difficult [to stir],” de Blas says. “It’s really hard work. So instead of mashing in about half an hour, it takes you an hour and a half to mash, and it’s quite a lot of effort.”

Michael Mulcahy, who helped stir up that mash with a red plastic shovel, called the work “back-breaking.”

But he likes that the result, a beer brewed with surplus bread, is bringing conversations about food waste into the mainstream.

“It takes it away from being a hippie environmentalist thing,” Mulcahy says. “It’s the pub. It’s the guys at the bar drinking beer, it’s football and baseball.”

Toast’s beer recipe is online for home-brewers to try, and the company has franchised or licensed its brand in South Africa, Brazil and Iceland.

Last year they expanded to the New York City area, where Toast Ale is sold in bars, restaurants, and grocery stores.

Take a tour of the City of London’s tiny, protected green spaces

PRI's The World — Mon, 23 Apr 2018 14:34:58 -0400

Every day, nearly half a million workers stream into the white stone banks and office buildings in the City of London, a single square mile at the historic core of greater London.

It’s the financial capital of Europe, but it’s not all business.

Hidden behind courtyard walls and through narrow passageways are roughly 200 open spaces designed to provide the workers of the city some respite from its hustle and bustle.

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Colin Buttery, director of open spaces for the City of London Corporation.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

Most of the spaces are tiny, less than half an acre. Some are relics of the twisted medieval grid in the city, which is governed independently of greater London. Others sit on land cleared by the Great Fire of 1666 that was never rebuilt.

Some were established during Victorian times as the city grew more crowded and smog-choked and leaders began to formally recognize the value of outdoor spaces.

Colin Buttery, director of open spaces for the City of London Corporation, says an 1878 act of parliament gave the public right of access to existing open spaces within the city.

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Open spaces have been set aside for the public since Victorian times.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

At the time those spaces were mostly churchyards. (Even today, more than 40 of the roughly 200 public spaces still are.) The churches retained ownership of these yards, but the city managed them for public use.

“I think the Victorians, they recognized the health and well-being benefits of open space,” Buttery says, “sitting quietly reading a newspaper or reading a book in a nice environment.”

The Victorian ruling class understood intuitively what modern science has since proven with brain scans and demographic studies: that being in nature is good for us, and makes us more productive workers.

“I think it was very foresighted for them to have recognized this,” Buttery says.

The yard in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, with its iconic 300-year-old cupola, was one of the spaces made public in the 1800s.

“I like to think of all the people who have sat on the churchyard, eating their sandwiches, the numerous generations enjoying exactly the same view that we’re enjoying today,” Buttery says while standing in front of St. Paul’s on a recent afternoon.

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A portion of London's ancient defensive wall sits amid modern buildings.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

Rising from the ashes of World War II

The next large batch of public spaces emerged from the ashes of WWII.

Planners set aside green spaces as they rebuilt large portions of the city that were flattened by the German Blitz.

“I think the planners straight after the war were very imaginative in trying to make the best of what had been left after the World War II bomb damage,” Buttery says.

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The interior of a church in central London was destroyed by bombs during WWII and eventually re-established as a park.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

A good example is Christ Church Greyfriars, a church across the street from St. Paul’s Cathedral that was nearly flattened in the war. Today parts of the exterior walls still stand, but the interior has been replaced by a garden. Raised planters sit roughly where church pews used to be, and trellises with climbing vines stand in place of columns.

The church is still consecrated ground and benches placed around its perimeter provide spaces for quiet reflection.

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A fountain in the middle of an apartment complex built in a part of London that was flattened by WWII bombs.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

The Barbican, a complex of brutalist performing arts buildings with adjacent apartment blocks, was also built after the war with an eye toward open spaces: An elevated walkway connects some of the buildings and allows pedestrians to head north and south through the city without battling traffic below. Underneath the walkway, at the center of a large apartment complex, sits a large pool with fountains.

“This helps to be a bit like an air conditioning system for the city,” Buttery says.

Today, Buttery manages these historic spaces with 21st century environmental concerns in mind.

A set of temporary planters near the Barbican complex are full of shrubs and evergreens that are particularly effective at filtering polluted city air.

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Temporary planters in London stocked with species that help improve air quality.

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Carolyn Beeler/PRI

Buttery's team is also planting species that will thrive as the weather in London grows increasingly variable.

“I want to ensure that … I can pass on to future generations something that’s in as good or better condition [than what we have now],” Buttery said, “not let small things like climate change get in our way.”

Buttery says some native species will actually fare well in both drought and periods of heavy rain — weather extremes expected to be more common in a changing climate.

In the ancient City of London, it turns out even some of the plants are good at adapting.

The rivalry between two Mexican towns could be responsible for the loss of a language

PRI's The World — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 15:06:46 -0400

The town of Santa María del Mar, Mexico, hasn’t had electricity for more than three years. At night a generator hums in the town plaza, powering a few pale streetlights.

Santa María, population 800, rests at the end of a skinny peninsula sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and a shallow lagoon that locals call the Dead Sea. Most days tempestuous winds drawn off the hot plains of Mexico’s Oaxaca state billow across the peninsula out toward the cool Pacific.

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Locals in Huave communities have traditionally fished from small boats in a wide lagoon known locally as the Mar Muerto, or the Dead Sea.

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Levi Bridges/PRI

This windswept peninsula is home to the Huave, an indigenous people believed to have come to Mexico centuries ago from Central America or even as far south as Peru. The Huave still speak a language isolate that is unrelated to any other language on Earth. Most of the remaining Huave speakers live in Santa María and a neighboring town, San Mateo del Mar, which is further down the peninsula. These are two of the last remaining towns on Earth that speak Huave, and yet the people in these two towns don’t talk to each other anymore. The reason? The wind.

Nearly 10 years ago, Santa María decided to let a renewable energy company build a wind farm here. But San Mateo opposed the wind farm. Many felt that their neighbors were giving away the Huave’s land. And for the Huave, land is everything — it’s sacred.

“A Huave without land isn’t Huave,” said Bety Gutiérrez, 49, a schoolteacher in San Mateo.

San Mateo eventually set up a permanent roadblock to stop construction of the wind farm. Suddenly people up the peninsula in Santa María became cut off from the outside world.

“We’ve been held here against our will, like we’re kidnapped,” said Martincito Ramírez, 80, one of the last Huave speakers in Santa María.

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Small boats transport food and other supplies from mainland Oaxaca to the town of Santa María del Mar. Locals here lost access to the only road out of town nearly a decade ago during an ongoing conflict about clean energy.

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Levi Bridges/PRI

Ramírez said that people here have traditionally survived by fishing and once sold their catch by traveling out of town on the road. In addition to putting up the roadblock, Ramírez says that locals in San Mateo steal animals from farmers in Santa María.

“We’re fisherman,” Ramírez said, “but our neighbors in San Mateo fish from the earth.”

The stalemate between the two Huave towns has continued for nearly a decade. People in San Mateo eventually cut off Santa María’s electricity and water supply. Locals in Santa María are essentially trapped: No road, no electricity and no wind farm.

With all the fighting, the clean energy project never got off the ground. But locals in the town opposing the wind farm have kept the roadblock up — they worry that the project isn’t canceled, it’s just stalled.

Some of the few people who study Huave believe the clean energy conflict has accelerated the loss of Huave speakers. Huave is far more widely spoken in San Mateo. And residents from both towns used to communicate in the language while participating together in traditional activities like fishing.

“Locals from Santa María were usually more exposed to Huave from people in San Mateo than their own family,” said Samuel Herrera, a linguist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who studies Huave.

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Martincito Ramírez, 80, is one of the last people in the town of Santa María del Mar who can still speak Huave fluently.

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Levi Bridges/PRI

Huave is slowly dying all over the Pacific coast of Oaxaca as younger generations increasingly move to the mainland to seek education and jobs.

“People here keep telling me to forget about the language,” said Vladimir Martínez, 26, a teacher from Santa María who teaches Huave.

Martínez lives on the mainland but works with linguists from Mexico and the United States to create a Huave alphabet and a dictionary. As a result of the conflict, Martínez can only reach Santa María by boat. The winds often make it impossible for the ferry to operate. Boats have overturned and locals drowned.

“I try to do my work in Santa María,” Martínez said, “but the wind usually makes it impossible.”

In San Mateo, the town that opposed the wind farm, locals have started a bilingual school to teach children in both Huave and Spanish. Kids sing songs in Huave. And students get scolded for speaking Spanish. But despite these efforts, the language is also disappearing here.

“Fewer children can speak Huave than ever before because they’re more exposed to Spanish through television and the internet,” said Bety Gutiérrez, 49, a teacher in San Mateo. “The language is being displaced.”

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Vladimir Martínez, 26, has tried to document the Huave language in the town of Santa María del Mar, but a conflict among Huave speakers over a proposed clean energy project has complicated his work.

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Levi Bridges/PRI

As a resident of San Mateo, Gutiérrez has mixed feelings about the energy conflict. Gutiérrez tried to start a program that would give pregnant women or those in need of urgent medical care permission to pass through the roadblock, but her proposal was shot down. Many people on the peninsula worry locals in Santa María who become ill might not reach doctors in time. But at the same time Gutiérrez doesn’t want the energy companies to build wind farms here, so she also supports some of the drastic measures taken against Santa María.

“A true Huave would never sell their land,” Gutiérrez said.

On the other side of the roadblock in Santa María, Vladimir Martínez continues to work on his Huave dictionary, recording the words of the older generation.

“The language will never disappear,” Martínez said, smiling, “thanks to my dictionary.”

And for the moment, life in this small fishing community will proceed close to the way it always has. The attempt to keep the language alive, in its spoken form, may have almost been lost. But the battle to keep out the wind farm has been won.

Lights are out in Puerto Rico again. But for some, the power's been out since Hurricane Maria.

PRI's The World — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 11:27:20 -0400

Puerto Rico's power company said it had restored power to more than 1.1 million homes and businesses by Thursday morning after a transmission line failure cut service to almost all of the island's 3.4 million residents the day before.

The Puerto Rican Electric Power Authority, known as PREPA, was working to restore power to the less than 30 percent of customers in the US territory still without power after Wednesday morning's blackout.

However, the issue of power outages post-Hurricane Maria is not a novelty to a large portion of the island’s residents. Prior to the islandwide blackout — nearly eight months after the hurricanes — more than 44,000 customers were still without electricity.

“People have been waiting for power to be restored for seven months now, and it’s horrible that in many rural towns, they don’t even have an end-date to this power cut, so there’s no way people can trust what the government is saying," says journalist Carla Minet, executive director of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico. "It seems they’ve been so aloof on the issue of the past months. People have no trust in them.”

Puerto Rico’s power grid remains destroyed. Massive generators put in place by the Army Corps of Engineers provides much of the power to those who do have it.

Photojournalist Alex Wroblewski was in Puerto Rico five months after hurricanes Irma and Maria tore through the island. At the time, one-third of the country was still without electricity. He visited the forgotten pockets to see how residents grappled with life post-Maria and post-power.

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Manuel Morales, owner of Colamba Barra Encanto, in Coamo, at his home in Puerto Rico, in February.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

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Irma Torres guides herself by flashlight at her home in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, where she lives with her husband, Jose Morales. In February, they had been living without power for more than six months. They spend most of their time at home, sometimes listening to the radio.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRi

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The kitchen of Irma Torres and her husband, Jose Morales, is lit by a battery-powered lantern. The two had been lighting their kitchen with this lantern for more than six months.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

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Car headlights illuminate a boy on his bike in the town of Utuado on Feb.18, 2018, where residents were without electricity nearly six months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. Residents developed a system of pulleys and PVC pipes to bring water to the town.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

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Students at the Jose R. Barreras school eat lunch in a dark cafeteria in Morovis, Puerto Rico on Feb. 19, 2018.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

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A man works on his home in Morovis, Puerto Rico, as residents in the neighborhood wait for power to come back on.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

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Damaged power lines in San Juan, Puerto Rico, photographed on Feb. 19, 2018, six months after Hurricane Maria.

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Alex Wroblewski/PRI

Reuters reporting was used in this story.

Russian authorities want to ban Telegram in the country. But it's not going as well as they had hoped.

PRI's The World — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 15:17:14 -0400

This week, Russian officials began implementing a planned ban on the popular messaging platform Telegram after the company refused to hand over access to its users’ encrypted messages. But it appears the implementation of the ban is not going as smoothly as Russian authorities had hoped.

Media regulator Roskomnadzor (the Russian equivalent to the Federal Communications Commission in the US) began implementing the ban on Monday. A court in Moscow cleared the way for the ban last week, ruling that the company’s founder failed to comply with legislation that required the company to hand over users’ encrypted messages to Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

Writing on his Telegram channel on Tuesday, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov downplayed the impact of the ban and pledged to create workarounds for users who want to continue accessing the platform.

“Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far,” Durov wrote, adding that Russians are bypassing restrictions through the use of virtual private networks and proxy servers.

Durov added that his company has moved some of its infrastructure to third-party cloud servers “to remain partly available for our users [in Russia].” That appears to be why millions of IP addresses belonging to Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud were blocked on Tuesday. Services linked to Microsoft were also taken down, according to the Moscow Times.

The companies did not respond to a request for comment on whether they plan to continue hosting Telegram.

Retailers, online games and other web-based services, including the messaging app Viber, also saw their services affected because of the broadly enforced crackdown, according to the BBC.

As part of the effort to ban Telegram, Russian officials have also asked Google and Apple to remove Telegram from their app stores, Reuters reports.

PRI reached out to both companies for comment on how they plan to respond to the reported request, but did not receive a timely response.

In his statement Tuesday, Durov praised those and other US-based tech companies for “not taking part in political censorship.”

Threats to block Telegram unless it gives up private data of its users won't bear fruit. Telegram will stand for freedom and privacy.

— Pavel Durov (@durov) March 20, 2018

Russian authorities say they need access to the messaging data of those who use online services, including Telegram, for counterterrorism purposes. (In 2016, Russia passed a package of anti-terrorism measures — the so-called Yarovaya law — that effectively granted Russia’s security services the right to demand access to encrypted services.)

For his part, the 33-year-old Durov has long held that complete user privacy is a priority. "I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” Durov said back in 2015, when questioned about how the terrorist group ISIS was using the platform, and what he saw as his responsibility to act. “Ultimately ISIS will always find the way to communicate within themselves. And if communication ends up being not secure for them, they’ll switch to another [app] ... I think we’re … doing the right thing — protecting our users’ privacy.”

On Tuesday this week, Durov stood firmly by that sentiment, writing in his statement, “We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.”

Internet rights activists in Russia and beyond have praised Durov’s firm and consistent stance on user privacy. The CEO even got a shoutout Tuesday from NSA contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden on Twitter.

I have criticized @telegram's security model in the past, but @Durov's response to the Russian government's totalitarian demand for backdoor access to private communications—refusal and resistance—is the only moral response, and shows real leadership. https://t.co/KtZDpu33wh

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) April 17, 2018

The Russian government’s move to block the platform appeared to be — at least initially — largely unsuccessful, with users reporting on Tuesday they were still able to use the app, a full 24 hours into the ban’s announced implementation. Still, some say enforcing the ban sets a new precedent for online censorship in Russia.

The #Russia-#Telegram clash threatens to change the rules & create a new kind of censorship: until now the regulator pretended it was blocking information banned in Russia, while users pretended they couldn't access it, says a @novaya_gazeta opinion piece https://t.co/scnwqtTc0y

— Angel Petrov (@angel_a_petrov) April 17, 2018

Others in the country worry the move sends a negative signal to homegrown tech and other talent in Russia.

“Durov was an inspiration for me personally and for my generation,” says Andrey Mima, the founder of a St. Petersburg startup and a former employee of VKontakte, another company Durov founded. “We are sad about our future and … being in St. Petersburg and understanding that we cannot do big things and create some influential web service or some tool that won’t be, in some way, suppressed by the government.”

Durov, a Russian native who lives in self-imposed exile abroad, is widely admired by Russia’s youth and those in the country’s tech scene.

Before founding Telegram in 2013, Durov launched Vkontakte (or VK) a social media website often likened to the Facebook of Russia. Durov left the wildly successful platform and fled the country following clashes with Russian authorities. The company is now under the control of one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies.

Telegram representatives have previously said they would appeal a ruling immediately blocking the platform in Russia.

According to figures released last month, Telegram currently has 14 million users in Russia — making up about 7 percent of nearly 200 users worldwide.