What's the true cost behind a tin of tiger balm? That organic California avocado you purchased yesterday for your salad in Boise, Idaho? What about those $4 generic blood pressure meds you picked up at Walgreen's which were manfacured by Raxbury Pharmaceuticals in India?
The sad fact is that what we see in the store, what we put in our homes, what we use every day, all those objects, all those friendly products that we're so used to, have a hidden legacy — which has to do with their impacts on the environment, on our health, on ecosystems, on the people that made them — that starts from the moment that they start to extract the ingredients. And what if we forced the global marketplace to include 'externalities' into the price of every product in the global marketplace to tell the ecological truth? Daniel Goleman. Bill Moyers Journal, May 15, 2009.
Go figure! It was the Coca-Cola Company that conducted the very first Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) back in the 60s to answer the question "plastic or glass?" Well, we know how that one turned out. Forty years later, massive technological advancements, a burgeoning world population, climate change, a shrinking world, vast consumerism, outsourcing and trade treaties have necessitated the development of a holistic scientific metric to evaluate the true cost of products. Today, LCA is a complex multi-faceted procedure, engaging scientists, environmentalists, marketing experts, NGOs, businesses, stakeholders, and consumer advocates in a highly intricate evaluation of a product, a process or activity to determine its human health and environmental impacts.
Example of a life cycle assessment chart
Life cycle assessment means "assessing the entire life cycle of the product, process or activity, encompassing extracting and processing material; manufacturing, transporting and distribution; use, reuse and maintenance; recycling and final disposal." (The Society of Environment, Toxicology and Chemistry, 1993)
Working from this definition, conducting an LCA assessment on, say, a can of garbanzo beans, could reveal it takes close to 2000 steps just to assess the can: all the resources and energy it uses along the way, and all it will use once it's thrown away.
The LCA process breaks a product's cost into its component parts and traces each one and the actions associated with it up the production line.
Example of an LCA Calculator
A Case Study - Loup Valley Diary
Two farmers from the Loup Valley Diary in central Nebraska decided to tackle problems with erosion and the chemical impacts on wildlife by undertaking a multi-year process to conduct an ICA, based on the Institute for Environmental Research and Education (IERE) ISO 14000environmental management system standards.
IERE provides eco-labels to farms based on their products' environmental performance.
Goals for 2000:
* Eliminate confined feeding;
* Eliminate the use of 'sub-clinical' antibiotics;
* Eliminate the use of artificial hormones;
* Minimize the use of grains in feeds;
* Return pasture to native grass species;
* Protect waterways from cattle access;
* Greatly reduce the use of fossil fuels;
* Minimize the use of irrigation;
* Minimize external inputs;
* Repair and regenerate the soil through intensive management grazing.
Results:
* The use of artificial hormones and sub-clinical antibiotic feeding has been eliminated;
* More land area is covered with native grasses;
* Fallow periods of at least two years have been established, during which the land can be recolonised by native species;
* A reduction in the amount of winter feed purchased;
* Progress towards a completely grass-fed approach;
* A reduction in the amount of herbicide used to control weeds.
You are what you eat!
"What we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer," writes Bryan Walsh in Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food (Time, August 21).
Yet, while O magazine's recent article The Costs and Benefits of Buying Organic Food discusses that going organic can definitely be a pricey issue which doesn't necessarily ensure a healthier product, they totally miss the point: It's better to pick a pepper harvested just 25 miles from your home than one which has been imported from Argentina. Even if it isn't certified organic.
Michael Pollan, who does a better job than anyone talking about 'real food' also recently discussed the true cost of 'cheap food.'
"Cheap food is actually incredibly expensive. If you look at the all the costs, you are talking about the farm subsidies. That's $25 billion a year to make that food cheap. You look at the pollution effects. The quality of the water all through the farm belt, nitrates in the water, moms who can't use tap water because it, you know, blue baby syndrome from nitrogen in the water. You look at the public health costs. You look at the cost to the atmosphere. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases ... when you have a big globalized food system based on a very small number of crops, you're first, you're moving food everywhere. I mean, the supply chains of food are just absurd. You know, we're catching so-called sustainable salmon in Alaska. We ship it to China to get filleted and then we bring it back here." Link
Colorado Peppers, South Pearl Street Farmer's Market. Denver, 2009 Photo by Lizzy Phelan.
The True Cost of Ethanol
In a January, 2009, Grist article on an EWG study regarding the government's allocation of three-quarters of all federal renewable-energy tax credits to ethanol, author Tom Philpott points out that by 2010, taxpayers will be spending more than $5 billion a year on ethanol-- more than is spent on all U.S. Department of Agriculture conservation programs to protect soil, water and wildlife habitat.
Philpott quotes extensively from a report by Iowa State University's Emeritus Professor Dennis Keeney, Department of Agronomy and Agriculture and Biosystems Engineering, whose calculations reveal that ethanol from corn will do nothing to boost net energy supplies
"Had ethanol expansion been subject to environmental assessment guidelines and or life cycle analyses, the ethanol support policies, in my opinion, would never have been adopted. However, as I have stated, money, not science, has driven ethanol fuel policy."Kinney
In the Works: A Global Sustainability Index
Last Month, Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas announced plans to work with Wal-Mart to develop a Sustainable Product Index for Consumer Products World-Wide. A collaboration of NGOs, universities, businesses and government agencies will work together in the design and development of the index, which will quantify "the sustainable attributes of a product by examining them from raw materials to disposal."
From the Press Release:
Walmart officials emphasize that their intention is not to "own" the index and consider its strength in success to be its design as a globally shared and open platform tool. The index will drive innovation, highlight opportunities for cost savings and waste reduction, and create a common playing field for all. Further, The Consortium will be able to track how the index is reducing environmental impacts and driving innovation and green jobs.
"Developing indices to reliably compare products on their environmental performance, in addition to an open source database to support this, is a key step in the transition to a green economy. The EPA is very interested in this project and will follow it closely," said Clare Lindsay of the
U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery. link
I emailed Dr. Jonathan Fink, director of the ASU's Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS), to ask him about the validity problems related to multinational corporations such as Wal-Mart, Cargill and Monsanto sponsorship of GIOS projects.
Fink said that although Wal-Mart has been criticized by many for being anti-competitive because of its low prices and its labor practices, "the positive environmental influence of their corporate activities in the past four years or so has resulted in endorsements from most leading environmental and conservation NGOs." The other sponsors, Fink said, are Wal-Mart suppliers.
"For our part, ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability seeks solutions to sustainability challenges that will have the maximum impact," says Fink. "Wal-Mart’s scale and influence are so huge that positive changes in their practices can affect more consumers and more ecosystems than the actions of virtually any other non-government organization. We feel fortunate that we are able to provide input to the practices of Wal-Mart, and through them to many of their 66,000 suppliers. It is only through this type of leverage that society has a chance of preserving a decent quality of life for future generations."
True Cost Pricing: The Adbuster's Campaign
Adbusters' September/October issue "Thought Control in Economics" focuses on such avant-garde theories as the role of modern physics in influencing the globalized economy, chaos theory and the interconnectedness of nature, and the post-autistic movement in economics.
"True-cost pricing is fraught with daunting, seemingly insurmountable problems," writes Adbusters' editor Kalle Lasn. "For conventional economists, it's a frightening concept that would slow growth, reduce the flow of world trade and curb consumption. It would force us to rethink just about every economic axiom we've taken for granted sine the dawn of the industrial age. It could turn out to be one of the most traumatic economic/social/cultural projects that humanity has ever undertaken. And yet ... and yet ... the idea of a global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth has a simple almost magical ring, and it's totally nonpolitical." True Cost..
Deep in a recession and with scary ecological scenarios looming, now may be the ripest moment we’ll ever have to power-shift global capitalism onto a new path. Adbusters #85 asks economics students around the world to join the fight to revamp Econ 101 curriculums and challenge the endemic myopia of their tenured neoclassical profs. Read a few articles, download the Kick it Over Manifesto (and other posters) and whack them up in the corridors of your campus. Make sure your university is at the forefront of the paradigm shift from neoclassical to ecological economics now underway.
Kick it Over. Sign the Manifesto!
The End of LCA: Degrowth & Ecologial Citizenship
Can Masdeu, Spain. A small squat community on the outskirts of Barcelona, a prototype of sustainable cooperative living, features low-impact appliances (a bicycle propelled washing machine), compost toilets, eight types of recycling, solar heated showers, and bountiful fields of vegetables and fruit trees.
"Much of what we see in the universe," said Hugo, "starts out as imaginary. Often you must imagine something before you can come to terms with it."
"The Highway of Eternity" - Clifford D. Simak - 1986
In 1971, Romanian economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, first suggested that the very act of exploiting the Earth's limited resources negatively impacted the Earth's total store of energy. His Entrophy Law stated that once a product is created, the energy that went into its creation is transformed and can never be returned to its original state. Even when recycled, energy is degraded. Unregulated growth, development, accordingly, results in less and less usable energy which inevitably leads to entrophy or 'waste.'
ICA & You: Start Walking the Walk
GoodGuide. A comprehensive analysis of the health, environmental and social impacts of over 70,000 food, toys, personal care, & household products to inform you about "what’s really beneath the label."
Wyoming Windmills. Summer 2009. By Lizzy Phelan
Wattzon. Track the total amount of energy expended to support every facet of your chosen lifestyle. The average user's power consumption = 3,008W.
CarbonFund.Electricity Data: The Devil in the Details. A five star online tools for determining your carbon footprint, including analysis for emissions from just about everything you use, not just those biggies like cars, planes and household appliances.
Water Foot Print & Virtual Water
Your H20 footprint represents every drop of water involved in producing the services and goods you consume. Calculations per unit of product are available based upon your country of residence.
Redefining Progress: Ecological Footprint
Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz to discover the 'global hectares' (gha) or 'global acres' (ga) required to support your consumption of food, goods, services, housing, and energy and assimilate your wastes. Each footprint is analyzed along four parameters - home energy use and transportation, food, housing, and goods and services - and four ecosystem 'biomes':cropland, pastureland, forestland, and marine fisheries.
GreenRoots is a new environmental series created by Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily for Daily Kos. This series provides a forum for the discussion of all environmental issues, including the need for sustainability and the interrelationship between environment and salient issues of our lives, including health care, family, food, economy, jobs, labor, poverty, equal justice, human rights, political stability, national security and war.
Please join a variety of hosts on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday afternoons and early evenings. Each Wednesday is hosted by FishOutofWater.