{"id":8389,"date":"2016-02-12T15:44:03","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T20:44:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/?page_id=8389"},"modified":"2017-02-07T15:24:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T20:24:34","slug":"garbage-man-2","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/garbage-man-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Garbage Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former UMaine undergraduate found educational gold in heaps of trash<\/em><\/p>\n

By Joe Rankin<\/p>\n

For Travis Blackmer, the summer of 2011 was a summer of garbage. And it changed his life.<\/p>\n

While classmates at the University of Maine were waiting tables, pounding nails, or painting houses to make tuition money, the 20-year old undergrad was pawing through trash. Tons and tons of trash.<\/p>\n

But he didn\u2019t really mind. After all, he was getting paid well, or let\u2019s just say it was quite a bit more than minimum wage. \u201cFor a 20-year-old with no degree, I was pretty happy. I didn\u2019t have any better summer job offers,\u201d said Blackmer.<\/p>\n

These days Blackmer is still working on trash issues as a part of a long-range effort supported by UMaine\u2019s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions to\u00a0 help craft a total makeover of the state\u2019s \u201cmaterials management<\/a>\u201d system, as the solid waste disposal system is now known.<\/p>\n

\"Landfill\"<\/a>The trash analysis that got Blackmer interested in waste in a big way as an undergraduate — technically the Maine Waste Characterization Study — was directed by professor George Criner, the director of the university\u2019s School of Economics, and paid for by a Maine State Planning Office grant. The aim was to determine how the composition of Maine\u2019s household waste had changed in the 20 years since a comprehensive solid waste law went into effect.<\/p>\n

To accomplish the task, Blackmer and the other members of Criner\u2019s team donned Tyvek coveralls, gloves and goggles. Over the summer and fall, they picked through 20,000 tons of garbage from 17 municipalities from Houlton to Ogunquit. They sorted it into 68 categories. There were big categories — paper, plastic, and glass, and sub categories of 11 kinds of paper — magazines, newsprint, mixed paper, cardboard and so on. There were even sub-sub-categories.<\/p>\n

Going through peoples\u2019 household trash isn\u2019t glamorous by any means, but Blackmer found that the smell, which is one thing you might think would be bad, generally wasn\u2019t. \u201cBut on hot days it was worse.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Blackmer, the experience getting down and dirty with trash was eye-opening. Up to that point in his young life he hadn\u2019t given garbage much thought, beyond seeing it as, well, garbage.<\/p>\n

But as the job went on he found himself amazed and intrigued by the topic he was delving into. Twenty percent of the trash they pulled out was recyclable, he said. Another 40 percent was compostable organics but it wasn\u2019t being recycled or composted. \u201cIt made me think about what I throw away,\u201d he said. \u201cIt made me wonder what\u2019s the barrier\u201d to diverting that 60 percent from the waste stream and putting it to use.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had thought that every little bit of garbage was useless, but that\u2019s not the case. Some is easily recoverable, some is stuff that we could pull out but we don\u2019t have a strategy yet for doing it, and for some we just haven\u2019t figured out how to avoid using in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

His summer job of garbage has continued to shape Blackmer\u2019s life, and the course of his academic career.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I had something to do for work or school I went to waste\u201d for a subject, he said. He figures he\u2019s done four to six major papers or projects on aspects of materials management in the process of getting his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees. He had questions, for instance, about how citizens view Pay-As-You-Throw, where residents pay a fee based on how much garbage they create, and what happens to the waste that \u201cevaporates\u201d from the waste stream when total waste volumes are reduced but the difference can\u2019t be accounted for through, say, recycling or reuse. So, he did a survey, turned the research into a paper, then presented his results at the Maine Resource Recovery Association\u2019s annual conference this past April.\"Reduce<\/a><\/p>\n

Blackmer, now 25 and with a masters in economics, is a lecturer in economics at UMaine and a research associate at the Mitchell Center where he is helping guide an interdisciplinary effort to come up with a long-term solution to Maine\u2019s materials management issue. The team includes an environmental and economic anthropologist, an ecologist, economists, engineers, a community social psychologist, a modeler, and a water specialist.<\/p>\n

Blackmer said the issue begs for an interdisciplinary approach. \u201cYou can\u2019t look at these things from only one angle. The system is too complex,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For example, looking at the problem from a few different angles, how would you reconcile a town\u2019s budget limitations, a company\u2019s need for policy certainty to justify a multi-million investment in waste handling technology, and an individual\u2019s desire not to clutter up his or her apartment with a stack of recycling and waste sorting bins?<\/p>\n

\u201cEconomics is good at analyzing things with data,\u201d said Blackmer of his chosen discipline. \u201cBut by no means would I want only economists looking at a solid waste issue. I think we\u2019d miss something. We could come up with the perfect plan from a financial or resource point of view, but then wouldn\u2019t look at the social acceptance part of it. It\u2019s so much easier to have people with different perspectives. It\u2019s too much for one person, or one discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what is it that really intrigues him about the country\u2019s trash stream?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no clearly defined problem, but lots of people view it as an issue,\u201d he said. Improving materials management would undoubtedly use resources better and could save on disposal costs as well as reduce the need for more landfills. But there are a lot of questions to be answered. In many cases the data aren\u2019t available, or the systems are inefficient or lacking crucial support, he said.\u00a0 \u201cHow do we take that and move the process along? It just makes me curious — how do we get from point A to Z?\u201d<\/p>\n

And, speaking of curiosity, if you wondered what the 2011 study showed about Maine\u2019s trash, plastics more than doubled from 20 years earlier, and glass and paper, both easily recyclable, were down.<\/p>\n

Looking back, Blackmer realizes he got quite an education in the summer of his 20th year. \u201cIt was kind of fun. I\u2019ve got a lot of interesting stories. And I had no idea when I started that this was where the whole thing was going. I thought it was just a summer job and then I\u2019d be done with it but it ended up defining my young career.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former UMaine undergraduate found educational gold in heaps of trash By Joe Rankin For Travis Blackmer, the summer of 2011 was a summer of garbage. And it changed his life. While classmates at the University of Maine were waiting tables, pounding nails, or painting houses to make tuition money, the 20-year old undergrad was pawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":957,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-8389","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"taxonomy_info":[],"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"mitchellcenter","author_link":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/author\/mitchellcenter\/"},"comment_info":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/957"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8389"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11655,"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/8389\/revisions\/11655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/umaine.edu\/mitchellcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}