This is the Environment Show. Welcome.
It's a comprehensive, complicated, expensive bill.
There will be extensive debate on it because there's a lot of controversy
but it's something we simply must do.
We're going to take it up when we start and stay on it until we finish.
And what we really discovered is that bacteria make natural plastics, natural polymers
and particularly polyesters of a wider variety with a wider variety of properties
than we ever imagined possible from the chemical world of petroleum.
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell giving his unqualified support
and a promise on the clean air bill pending in the Senate.
And Dr. Clinton Fuller describing some pioneering work in the field of biochemistry.
We may have, finally, truly biodegradable plastic.
Two of our guests this time on the Environment Show.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC made possible by the J.M. Kaplan Fund of New York
and this is Bruce Robertson.
Very shortly now, the U.S. Congress could begin serious floor debate on bill S-1630.
That's the clean air bill. Now, if Congress were an advertising agency,
it might say the new improved clean air bill.
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell has said he will introduce the new measure
in fact, on opening day. Well, that's what we had heard anyway.
But for the Environment Show, we had to know for sure. So we called him.
Do you plan to introduce S-1630 when Congress reconvenes?
Yes, I've already announced that that will be the first item of business
when the Senate reconvenes on January 23rd.
We'll take the bill up. It was approved by the Senate Environment Committee last November
and it's a comprehensive, complicated, expensive bill.
There will be extensive debate on it because there's a lot of controversy
but it's something we simply must do.
And we're going to take it up when we start and stay on it until we finish.
The vote was a 15-1 out of committee with Senator Sims of Idaho Descenting.
He said it was rushed through committee and yet it's really been debated for nine or more years.
How do you see it really? Was it rushed or is this something well way overdue?
It's long overdue. I introduced the first acid rain control bill nine years ago.
Since then, we've had dozens of hearings in the committee.
We've had dozens of committee markups that is writing up various bills.
Senator Sims participated in many of them as opposed to all of the previous bills.
This is anything but a rest job. It's just the opposite.
I don't think there's been a subject that's been more thoroughly discussed,
more extensively debated in committee with hearings and a great deal of expert testimony than has clean air.
It hasn't been debated on the Senate floor in 12 years.
And so I think it's overdue and we're going to do it.
You are a Senator in a quite unique position as a Senator from Maine.
You represent your own state and by extension somewhat the Northeast as well.
But as majority leader, you are really charged with leading all of the Democrats from all regions of the country
to ameliorate a rough situation as regions clash with each other, especially over a topic as acid rain.
How do you plan to lead the way?
Well, I hope in what is a firm and fair way.
First, I made very clear long ago what my intention was in this regard.
Indeed, when I ran for majority leader before I was elected,
I said publicly and privately that if I were elected materially,
I would bring a clean air bill to the floor of the Senate.
But no one can or should be surprised at what I've done. I announced it in advance.
Secondly, I'm trying very hard and we'll continue to try to accommodate the concerns of those who are worried about some provisions in the bill.
Are the senators representing their constituents just as I'm trying to represent mine?
They're fighting for what they believe are the best interests of the people they represent.
We have to figure out a way that gets the job done, but does it in a manner that doesn't adversely affect any one state or any one region of the country?
I think we can do that and that's my intention.
Well, there you have it.
The main senator, majority leader, George Mitchell, and we will be watching the new session.
The first major clean air act was passed in 1970 and amended in 1977,
but has not been touched essentially since.
And as Dick Ayers says, a lot has happened in these intervening years.
That period we have learned about acid rain.
We learned about the ozone hole. We learned about global warming.
And a great deal has happened in terms of the technology of pollution control for automotive emissions and other things.
Ayers is chairman of the National Clean Air Coalition, one of many organizations working to bring this bill out of committee for national debate.
Debate over the Clean Air Bill in some sense epitomizes all of the controversy in all of the environmental issues we face.
There has been a lot of finger pointing, one region blaming another for its poor air quality.
At least that is what we've always been told, but Ayers has heard it differently.
I don't think there are major regional conflicts among Americans on these subjects.
When I say that, I think for example of tolls that have shown that almost identical percentages of Midwesterners and Northeasterners believe that we have to have important new pollution control programs to control acid rains.
So I don't think there is a real disagreement here.
There are disagreements along regional lines in the political elites and more importantly among some of the industries.
And that's why there are political problems in trying to get legislation through in some respects.
But I think Americans strongly support much strengthened clean air legislation, pretty much uniformly across the whole country.
Ayers says disagreements in various industries, the real culprit in the nine-year delay in getting a clean air bill passed.
The auto industry for example, Ayers says, has been very clear in its opposition to propose tougher standards on tailpipe emissions and greater miles per gallon.
The auto industry is out trying to tell Americans that this is going to cost a fortune.
Most of us have got used to the auto industry doing things like that.
Every time new pollution controls have been proposed for the last two decades, they always say, we don't know how to do it and even if we did it would be too expensive.
But the truth is that these are proposals which are not going to affect the price of automobiles in a major way.
The California Air Resources Board for example, estimated that reaching the standards in this bill by the mid-90s would cost about $100 a car on the sticker price of a new car.
Compare that for example with power windows which sell for maybe $250 a car.
And the same is true, he says, for the utility industry proposed tighter controls on power stations have been met with counter arguments that such controls will mean higher utility generating costs.
Again, Dick Ayers.
The truth is quite different. The analysis done by EPA and others suggests that the average cost of the kind of acid rain control program Congress is considering would run to about $1 to $2.5 a month on the average electric bill.
So the question is, are we going to be willing to pay these higher costs and even higher costs in the future as cleanup and preservation programs in turn cost even more? We as consumers.
But what about the industries that would be additionally regulated by this new legislation? Well, Ayers says...
These industries are going to be telling people that we can't afford the clean air amendments that are pending in the Senate. They're going to be telling them that they're impossible and they're extreme.
And I expect that. I think that is something we've seen in the past.
But I think that we should all take it with a very large grain of salt. These are the industries that are going to be affected.
And we're, as I said before, we're used to them complaining and telling us that if the new pollution control legislation has passed, it will be the end of western civilization.
I said to one person, these are the industries that always like the last clean air act, but not the one that's under consideration now.
Dick Ayers, chairman of the National Clean Air Coalition.
The state of California long has led the way in legislating and enforcing tighter emission standards for automobiles.
Many in the auto industry who oppose the proposed new federal standards say an acceptable compromise would be a national application of the California standards.
So says Tim McCarthy of the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association.
California has always led the parade. They had pollution requirements for motor vehicles in California before there were federal requirements.
So when the federal law passed first back in 1970, they made an exception that allowed California to continue to be the ones leading the parade and be stricter than the rest of the country because they had a particular air quality problem there.
Everybody's heard of the California small. Well over the years, the difference between the California standards and the federal 49 state standards has continued to narrow.
And what I am saying seems to be the most cost effective way to go is to adopt standards which will go into effect in California in 1993 to become the national standards.
And how do those exceed what is being proposed right now for the federal standards?
What the Senate bill has done is take those standards that will go into effect in 1993 and come up with a tier 2 level and the tier 2 level takes those standards that will go into effect in 1993 and cuts them in half again.
And that is what you see is either technologically and or financially impossible both.
We're talking here about new car standards. What do we do about cars already existing of 5, 6, 7 years old, certainly with the cost of cars going up people are attempting to hold onto them even longer.
Those cars that were manufactured prior to any of these new standards are not going to be holding to those standards. What do we do about those continuing to spew out from the tailpipe and also have differing mile per gallon ratings?
Bruce, you bring up a very good point and one we have tried to address to people for example a 1977 car produces 13 times and this is one that's in perfect operating condition produces 13 times more carbon monoxide than a 1988 car.
God knows what it produces if it's not in tune and only about 35% of the cars and trucks on the road today meet the tightest standards. In other words they were built before these stringent standards went into effect.
And so they contribute to a lot of the air pollution and one of the things that we think should be done is a significant improvement can be obtained by improving on states inspection and maintenance programs to make sure there are good programs to get these high polluters either tuned up or off the road.
I do a little role playing here you've got a moment to speak before the Senate subcommittee on environmental protection or the full Senate itself addressing Senator Mitchell or any of the other key members who are working this bill through. What would you say to them at this point?
Well I'd like to say two things and one of them is I think a very productive thing can be done by the Senate by adopting provisions which are realistic and will still provide air quality improvements with regards to emission standards.
The other thing I would like to address to Senator Mitchell is one that I promised to address earlier and did not and that is the carbon monoxide dioxide standard that translated is in effect a fuel economy requirement and what that does is it requires industry to ultimately meet a 40 mile per gallon standard which on its face sounds like a good thing to do.
But people should realize that number one the clean air bill is one that in the past and in the present has based upon health effects and that is not a health standard it should be dealt with in a different arena and secondly a 40 mile per gallon standard would result in an absolute restructuring of the whole market of what vehicles are available to the Senate.
So essentially what you're saying then is that the cars that we are accustomed to using in that we are asking for would not be practical under these new standards and we would have to either accept that or if we wanted to drive large station wagons and jeeps and that type of thing we would have to forego the higher gas mileage.
If we want the mixture of vehicles that are available to the public both for personal use and business use today to be available in the future the CO2 carbon dioxide provision should be stricken from the bill and people have just got to realize that it's going to affect them.
It's going to affect realtors, it's going to affect the floors, it's going to affect rental car companies, it's going to affect families who want to go on vacations, it's going to affect people who want to pick up their kids soccer practices.
There is not going to be the fleet on the road tomorrow that is on the road today if we have to meet a 40 mile per gallon standard.
Timothy McCarthy, Director of Federal Relations at the Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association. Automobiles in New York State soon will have to answer to tougher regulations.
State Environmental Conservation Commissioner Thomas Jorling says the state has begun the process to enact tougher auto emission standards that could take effect for 1993 model vehicles.
The proposed standards are modeled after California's they would reduce harmful ozone pollution and could add $150 to the price of a car.
New York State is one of eight states in the Northeast that have agreed to the stricter standards and is the farthest along in the regulatory process.
The six New England states and New Jersey also have agreed to seek tougher emission standards.
The regulations will be the subject of public hearings across the state in the month of March.
At the University of Massachusetts in the spring of 1986, Dr. Clinton Fuller and Dr. Robert Lenz met while waiting for an elevator to their offices at the Graduate Tower.
Clint, Jack told me to speak to you. I've interested in starting a new research area.
I've been contacted by the Office of Naval Research about relating biotechnology to material science and one of the areas in which this might be done is in studying polymers that are produced by bacteria.
Jack has told me that you've done quite a bit of work with bacteria and some of them may include the types that produce these polyesters. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
You say bacteria is that produce polyesters. That's a new one on me. I've been working in field of microbial biochemistry for 30 years and I was unaware of the bacteria produced polyesters.
What polyesters are you referring to?
Well, maybe you know them better as polyhydroxybutyries. I actually Jack Norton and I department was right. I worked on polybid and hydroxybutyric acid and metabolism in bacteria 20 years ago.
But I didn't know it was a polyester.
Well, on the other hand, I didn't know that bacteria were producing the kind of materials that we work on every day.
Sure. There's a company in England called ICI which is growing these bacteria in fairly large quantities for the purpose of getting sufficient amounts of these polymers to evaluate them for industrial and commercial applications.
It would be eventious to me as a polymer chemist to know a little bit more about how the bacteria produce them, what the structures are, what the properties are and can we do things that haven't been done before by working with special bacteria?
I'm not sure we can but I know the bacteria apparently can and I can grow the buds and make and produce polyesters. If you can tell me what the polyesters do in analyzing, let's go to work.
And so began a project that has attracted the attention of DuPont, Johnson and Johnson and several other major chemical companies.
Though the research at the University of Massachusetts actually began three years ago, Dr. Clinton Fuller says his work with his colleague Dr. Robert Lenz is unique because they are now looking into natural materials.
Now people don't often think of polymers as plastics as natural materials, by natural materials I mean materials made by organisms like you, like me, like plants or like bacteria which are by far the widest variety of organisms on this planet.
And actually it's been known now since 1925 that bacteria make compounds that are a debacle to the synthetic chemical compounds that are made by chemists and have sparked for the last 25 years the plastic, what I call the plastics revolution and all the marvelous and wonderful things we can make out of plastics and do with plastics.
But the interesting discovery made many years ago that bacteria actually produce this products is where I and Dr. Lenz and myself is going in, I as a biologist to see how we can look at the bacterial materials and what we've really discovered is that bacteria make natural plastics natural polymers and particularly polyesters of a wider variety with a wider variety of properties than we ever had.
Now this is astounding what we are talking about here is truly biodegradable plastic, truly so because the material is not synthetic as in man made but biomass organic stuff.
With a brief biochemistry lesson Dr. Lenz explains what he and Dr. Fuller are working with.
But as we've described the bacteria produce what we call polyesters these are polymeric materials that contain ester linkages along the polymer chain.
Polyesters are a very broad family of polymers and include the textile polyesters, the textile fibers that we refer to as polyesters.
Also our polymers which are built up with ester units along the chain but the structure of the units are much different than the structures of the units in the bacterial polyesters.
The textile fiber polyesters it's of course made synthetically it's an oil based polymer.
It's based on monomers that you obtain from fractions from petroleum through a complicated chemical processes.
These are synthetic polymers they don't exist in nature they're not recognized in nature and they're very different in structure of the specific units along the chain.
Basically they're both the same in that they're made by creating ester bonds between monomers so that the long polymer chain that results contains an ester unit in every repeat.
Well Dr. Lenz essentially is saying is that well here's an analogy once we are looking at a huge painting mural with just a little flashlight.
Now someone has turned on the light now the bright light of research is shining on the whole mural in all of its hugeness and as well we see how everything is now related.
Well back to the chemistry Dr. Lenz says the whole ester production line is based on bacteria using certain enzymes.
Enzymes are a natural catalyst which can vastly speed up a reaction and make it very specific.
The enzymes create very high molecular weight, very large molecules of these polyesters within the bacterial cell.
In fact the bacteria do a much better job than we can do in the laboratory.
We have yet to be able to produce polymers as long and as specific as the bacteria produce in their polyesters.
Initial research into these materials began in the 1920 when DuPont looked into the possibility of making some type of durable inexpensive material.
They were actually looking along this ester chain but abandoned the research when it was felt there was no practical application for what they saw.
Instead they turned to research that eventually led to discovery of nylon.
But says Lenz.
Do you know about the bacterial polyesses and how they actually looked at those they would have found that they make excellent fibers.
In fact these fibers are being looked at today and investigated today as suture materials because not only are they excellent fibers but they also are fully biodegradable.
Which is the real point of our story here, the search for a biodegradable plastic.
So how does this work? Dr. Fuller.
Let me use the analogy that I have often used and we have often both used of the beer going into hibernation.
The some signal out there that tells the beer is getting cold, the temperature of the day length changes, we get signals of day length, they are very important in biological cycles.
This says winter is coming.
And the beer literally changes his metabolism or it's changed for him by genetic control.
So he converts a tremendous amount of the food he's eating to fats and stores it up as fats.
Just like people do, only they don't do it the same purpose in mind unfortunately.
But so there's a signal, there's a stress coming on, there's cold weather coming on, the beer makes fats.
It crawls into a cave and digests by that definition.
Biodegrades those fats as metabolic projects to live on very low key in the winter.
It's exactly what the bacteria do, only not with the kind of fats and lipids we in the Bayer store but with polyesters.
In other words, the bacteria are using the polyesters as food, storing up the material for use in the future when conditions are less than ideal.
But what is this less than ideal condition? Are we going to be walking down the street with our biodegradable plastic bag and suddenly have our groceries fall out on the pavement because the bacteria decide now is the time to start breaking down?
Well says Dr. Fuller. No. The reason for this is that very specific conditions must be met. In fact, three basic conditions.
We need water, we need what we call an ambient temperature that is biocompatible which is anything above freezing and below boiling in most natural conditions.
And time for the bacteria to grow and reproduce and use the compounds.
And I envisage under ideal conditions you could toss a polyester that is completely biodegradable like the ones we're making into a sewage disposal plant that's full of bacteria, the right temperature, it would be gone overnight.
But it would store in that same pile of stored in the shelf somewhere would last indefinitely.
The reason the UMass scientists plastic is truly biodegradable where so-called biodegradable plastic bags at your grocery store are not is that those types of bags are constructed in a patchwork design with some of the quilting actually biodegradable, some of it constructed of a petroleum-based ester, some of the bag degrades, some of it does not.
The Lens Fuller bag would completely biodegrade into carbon dioxide and water.
What is especially attractive about this type of natural plastics as Fuller and Lens is that scientists now know a great deal about the biological structures of these bacteria and can get them to develop a whole range of plastics from very soft, pliable to very rigid.
And the ultimate uses are nearly limitless, from pipes to medical sutures.
So what are the drawbacks? Fuller says nothing really. The only thing in the way of developing this process fully and commercially is a matter of priorities.
We already have the skills to make the bacteria and we also already have the skills to break them down.
But until the social and legal pressures and that's where government and society have to come to bear, we're not going to, we haven't got a bottom line yet.
It's not worth anybody's while to do it. And that includes recycling and things like that.
We're not addressing the long range problem of getting rid of it.
Until, unless we have the role of government and industry and social pressure, ecology is doing a marvelous job at this right now.
I've got to say, cease and desist, convert your industry to a completely biosynthetic, biocompatible and biodegradable product.
The technology and the laboratory stuff is there, it's a matter of engineering, scaling up and making new discoveries about new materials that that's the future.
Dr. Clinton Fuller, Department of Chemistry and Dr. Robert Lentz, Department of Polymer Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
This is the Environment Show and I'm Bruce Robertson.
Dr. Krampton joins us on the line now from the Institute for Solid Waste in Chicago.
We've got some people tearing down a front porch and they're involved in putting up a second edition of a new bedroom.
We've got some, what we call construction and demolition debris. What do we do with the broken boards and the glass and the bricks and such we want to get rid of?
Well, if it's not in just splinters and terrible shape, you can put it out of the street at the curb along the road where you live and put a little sign on it that says free.
And you'll be amazed, I've done this and the stuff disappears fast, assuming that it's in anything like usable shape and construction material lasts a long time.
It can be used again and again and again in projects if you don't cut the boards too short.
So let's say you have an old door, a cabinet that has been taken out or a window frame or something like that.
If it's in usable shape, I would advertise it as free to good home and see how fast it disappears. You'll be surprised.
If it's absolutely in the worst shape of anything, I guess your only alternative is to break it into small pieces would, of course, you can burn in a fireplace.
Your problem would be the mortar and bricks and things like that. And they could form a pretty good base around a foundation if it's clean. Or you could use it for drainage in a swampy spot.
Okay, Norm Crampton at the Institute for Solid Waste in Chicago, joining us on the line to give us some helpful tips on how to get rid of construction and demolition debris.
Dr. Laird, Norm.
Okay.
Norm Crampton is author of Complete Trash, how to get rid of practically everything around the house, published by M. Evans and Company, New York, New York.
And these are regular guests on the Environment Show.
Funny today, a huge recycling center said to be the largest in the country has been built to handle 60,000 tons of paper, glass, and metal and has open now for operation in Springfield, Massachusetts.
The Massachusetts recycling facility dubbed the MIRF includes two large hanger-like buildings, and it will handle garbage of 85 cities and towns throughout western Massachusetts.
One side will sort out and bail paper, the other side crushes glass into small cubes and separates and crushes aluminum and metal cans as well. All of it will be sold to manufacturers for use in production.
Well, next week a conversation with Peter Beuth, director of Greenpeace, and a piece on incinerator ash as a building material.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, soil, wildlife, and people of our common habitat.
The Environment Show is a production of WAMC, Dr. Ellen Shartock, executive producer, and this is Bruce Robertson.
The Environment Show is made possible by the JM Kaplan Fund of New York.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, and soil.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, and soil.
The Environment Show is a program about the environment, the air, water, and soil.
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