We drove to Dallas from Southwestern on Friday in the early afternoon. Since we arrived at the hotel at only four, we decided to go to Fair Park and check out the venue and parking for the next day. We arrived to the convention around six, having taken a rest before leaving and then been caught in the throes of Dallas rush hour, and everything was in the midst of shutting down. However, it was still helpful for the next morning.
Saturday we arrived around eleven and immediately headed into one of two massive buildings housing visiting companies. My computer has an extremely hard time attempting to load the EarthX website, so I am unable to give a specific number but there were well over two hundred booths in the two buildings combined.
Before I begin talking about our day. I will admit that when we first heard about EarthX, we were extremely excited about the prospect of a convention dedicated to sustainability. However, some slight digging into the history and financials of EarthX introduced the possibility of large scale greenwashing. Greenwashing can generally be defined as a company claiming or insinuating that they are sustainable while being just as damaging to the Earth as any other business. For an example, I would encourage you to watch a commercial for Fiji water and then google their business practices and bottling process in the country of Fiji. Essentially, we were very excited while going into this but were still wary and certainly looking out for greenwashing.
We first approached a booth run by the biofuel company, Poet. The man running the booth explained that Poet uses field corn to create a biofuel that additionally produces a healthy feed for cattle as a bonus byproduct. We were slightly skeptical of the feed, as he told us that the powder produced is very high protein while containing very little starch. I am not an expert on cows but this powder seemed an awful lot like it was still just feeding the animals corn when they ought to be eating a more varied diet. The man explained that because there was no starch in the feed, it was actually good for the cows. I wasn’t sure about this but decided not to push it. As for the fuel, he explained that the company has been lobbying for an increase from 10 to 15% ethanol in regular gasoline because it leads to the car burning ‘clean CO2’. In addition to cows, I am admittedly shaky in my intellectual grasp of gasoline, however, the phrase ‘burning clean CO2’ didn’t sound right to me. Additionally, he had originally told us that Poet’s biofuel only burned off water vapor, however when we inquired further, he stated that it burned off water vapor as well as CO2. Perhaps he simply misspoke, I don’t mean to cast blame unfairly, but something seemed a bit odd about the companies claims overall.
We pushed on to a company by the name of Ecos. A man by the name of Brad pitched the company as creating clean, ethical, and sustainable soaps, detergents, and cleaning products. I found the backstory fascinating. The company was started in America by a fifty-two year old Greek immigrant who worked in a restaurant washing dishes. He became upset with how the detergents were ruining his hands and ended up creating the formula for one of the current products. He began to sell the soap to his boss at the restaurant and eventually left to start his own business. I don’t want to get political or expose myself as a Hamilton fan but ‘immigrants, we get the job done’. I found this company so interesting because they seemed so genuine and I couldn’t find any hint of greenwashing. The company is completely water and carbon neutral as well as being platinum waste certified (meaning they reduced their waste by 95%). Brad emphasised that before becoming platinum waste certified, the company already only put out around six dumpsters per year total for all four factories. That number had been reduced to two. He explained that this was done, essentially, by just being mindful of so-called trash. Broken items or waste are sorted into sixteen categories, only one of which actually ends up in the trash. Being carbon and water neutral means that for the little carbon or water they do output or use in factories, money is invested in a project of equal caliber, such as the clean up of the Sacramento River Delta. The company is aiming to be plastic free by 2020, pay their workers a minimum of seventeen dollars an hour at forty hours a week, and pay bonuses for sustainable actions such as moving closer to the factories to reduce travel time. They implement ideas that seem expensive but pay off in the long run, such as hiring an in house chef who tends a garden to produce healthy food for the workers. This provides a cheap and delicious alternative to fast food that the workers would have otherwise gravitated towards and has been successful in lowering insurance costs. I later searched for their products online, expecting them to be wildly expensive, but was pleasantly surprised. Amazon prices their laundry detergent at roughly .13$/load while Tide retails for about .15$/load.
Our final large scale booth we spoke to was Tetra Pak, the main sponsor of EarthX. We were particularly interested in speaking to their representatives as they seemed to be a fairly legitimately sustainable corporation, however there was some talk online of the opposite being true. The company produces food containers, think of the little Horizon milk cartons you can buy at Starbucks with the extendable straw. They additionally provided all the water for the event, aside from that which could be bought at food trucks. These cartons are meant to be completely recyclable, however, we found some articles indicating that there was a problem, particularly in Vietnam, of the cartons ending up as litter on beaches rather than in a recycling center. The cartons are made of two layers of a very thin polymer, a thin layer of aluminum, paper, and a plastic lid made from sugar cane. Set up in the booth was a demonstration of how these cartons are recycled. In a recycling center, the cartons, sans plastic lid, would be crushed, soaked in water, and blended into a thick pulp. This pulp would be separated out into its components, which would be shipped out for different purposes. For example, the paper is frequently made into insulation for buildings. The problem revealed itself when we spoke to a representative. In America, there are only four centers equipped to handle this specific process. Michigan and Wisconsin have centers that can break down the products and Colorado and Iowa can give them a second life, such as insulation. While there are far more centers in Europe, there is not enough demand in the United States to warrant building more. I asked where the waste from EarthX would be going, and the lady replied, “On a train from Dallas to Wisconsin.” The company does have some interesting aspects, such as a barcode on each container that can track it from production to recycling. They can even tell which forests each bottle came from. It is unfortunate that the United States is not equipped for their containers, however, we were told on their website that consumers can help the process along by breaking down the bottles into their components ourselves. I attempted to and the video can be found on this website. Spoiler alert: I wasn’t able to. I think overall, the product is a great idea but the recycling centers need to step up. I didn’t ask, but I am curious about the energy use of the recycling process versus disposal.
A final point of interest was a 20x30 foot scuba tank housed outside the building. We saw this advertised on their website and were hesitant, as we were curious and a bit concerned as to how this fit into the theme of water conservation. The booth was fairly busy, but it seemed that visitors had the opportunity to have a short scuba lesson in the pool. I didn’t see it, but Olivia told me she saw one of the divers holding a crab in the pool. The booth was fairly busy, but we managed to speak to one of the people running it for a few moments. We asked how scuba fit into the theme of water conservation and she explained that it was largely about cleanup and appreciation. Divers often carry bags with them in order to pick up trash seen while in the water as well as small knives to free animals trapped in litter. Additionally, the bottom line is that people can’t appreciate what they don’t experience and you can’t conserve something if you don’t appreciate it. Scuba diving is just a way to experience the ocean and all it’s life. Divers additionally help with invasive species, such as lionfish. I am scuba certified and have been on a handful of dives although I admittedly don’t enjoy it. It gives me migraines. Nonetheless, I have seen the dive masters leading us spear lionfish and seem extremely proud. I believe there is a sort of bounty on them in the Caribbean, like hogs in Texas, due to how extremely destructive they are to the native wildlife. I still felt that the tank was a bit wasteful, since it’s not like they could give the intensive hours of training necessary to become certified. However, I suppose that it could inspire some to go out and find new ways to appreciate the ocean.
Our final event of Saturday was a movie screening. EarthX is also an environmental film festival that runs for around two weeks before the conference and we picked a film called Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. We were in a small theater with perhaps twelve other people, including the director of the fim. The film itself was fascinating and somehow funny while also being heartbreaking. It centered around the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Don’t recall it? That was the point. Why did a natural disaster that killed 739 people go essentially unnoticed? The deaths were entirely preventable and the answer boils down to race. The majority of the deaths were of older people of color living in dangerous neighborhoods that lead to them being afraid to open the windows, despite their lack of air conditioning. The mayor refused to accept that the deaths were all heat related, pointing to the causes of death: asthma, flare up of chronic illness, heart attack, etc. I.E. heat related deaths. This lead to the event not being seen as seriously. The director contrasted the same neighborhoods, largely unchanged in the past few years, to a disaster preparedness event occuring a block away during her visit. I don’t want to give away the whole film, as it is coming out on PBS next year, but her message was that we should not be having expensive, yearly hurricane preparedness events in states like Iowa, when you could actively save lives by giving the money to the next neighborhood over. One of the most prominent scenes to me was of a thirty year old man trying an apple for the first time in his life. He lived in a food desert, not shockingly in the same neighborhood where many of the deaths occured, and had never had the opportunity to try one. I could continue on about all the striking scenes in this movie but instead I urge you to watch it when it comes out next year. We got a chance to meet the director after the film and I told her about my connection to it. My home is in south Houston and, while my family was lucky enough to not be affected, life definitely did not continue as normal in the months after. I connected to the film in how angry I was that the mayor of Houston only announced midway through the crisis that illegal immigrants would not be punished, detained, or deported for calling the police or hotlines for help or evacuation. Even then, and I certainly don’t blame them, many people were too wary to do so. The film was absolutely incredible and I will be thinking about it for months to come. I don’t have the words to do it justice.
-Nicole