The Greening of America and the World Chicken Crisis

By Timothy Allinson, P.E.

Murray Company, Long Beach, Calif.

It's all around us. Every magazine you open. Every newspaper you read. Every article, advertisement, and political statement. I don't know about you, but I can't take any more of it. I am absolutely sick and tired of hearing about green buildings, sustainable products, global warming, environmental responsibility and so on.

As I write this, I am on an airplane, and the flight attendant is telling us, "Ladies and gentlemen, in a few minutes your flight attendant will be coming around to collect your trash. We do recycle here at Environmentally Correct Airlines [as we spew tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere every second], so the first trash collection will be for cans only, followed by plastic and then paper." What ironic timing. Oh, and the in-flight magazine cover article is about Julia Louis-Dreyfus and how she and her husband have been trend setting environmentalists since they met in the 70s. They may have two huge homes in the same county, but they drive hybrids, and their second home has a teeny tiny carbon footprint, because it has solar panels.

Don't get me wrong, I am all in favor of environmental responsibility, but it is the pervasive, excessive, bandwagonness of it that drives me crazy. I got my LEED credential seven years ago because at the time I thought it had value. Now everyone and his sister have LEED after their names, so who cares? Nowadays it is more about the business of green than about the actual planet. What really kills me is that  people don't think things through before stepping onto their green soap box. I'll explain, but first let's talk about how LEED impacts our industry.

To be realistic, there are basically two areas where the plumbing engineer can readily participate in the LEED process -- stormwater management and water conservation. Stormwater design is usually trumped by SUSMP (the Standard Urban Stormwater Mitigation Plan), such that it inherently limits what we can contribute to the process. Water conservation can be achieved in most buildings almost by default, because the baseline of the calculation is fairly generous.

All that is required to achieve a 30% theoretical water savings in a commercial building are dual flush toilets in the women's room and 0.5 gpm sensor faucets in both the men's and women's facilities. This will achieve well over a 30% reduction from the baseline calculation and earn two LEED points. For residential buildings, this reduction can be achieved with dual flush toilets, 1.75 gpm showerheads (that the user will replace immediately), 1.5 gpm lavs and standard 2.2 gpm kitchen faucets. I'm sorry, but those changes are not going to save the planet for my children's children. Forgive my cynicism.

The other day a local "organic" food store got a great deal of free television advertising because they had made the corporate decision to ban the use of plastic bags in their stores. Only paper. So what's worse, using plastic bags and recycling them or using paper bags and recycling those? I don't see why plastic is worse than paper, or vice versa for that matter. There are drawbacks to both. What might make a significant difference is stopping the use of bags altogether and making people bring their own, but that would make the store pretty unpopular, wouldn't it?

Recently we were having a discussion in my office about the price of gas and oil, and how Brazil has converted almost completely to the use of ethanol powered cars. Why don't we do that in the United States? Well, one reason is that an ethanol engine doesn't produce much horsepower, and that wouldn't go over too well in the land of the HP-gobbling free.

But there is a more important reason why this hasn't and shouldn't be done from sea to shining sea. Ethanol is made from corn (or sugarcane, but we can't grow that here). Guess what? If every car were powered by corn, we would have a shortage of corn in the world. The price would increase, every farmer would start growing it because of the demand, drought would ensue because there wouldn't be enough water to irrigate all that corn, and many parts of the world would enter a famine. The price of chickens would skyrocket because chickens are fed with corn, and eggs would become a luxury, like giant caviar.

Pretty soon every magazine article, advertisement and political statement would be about the global chicken crisis. Eventually, our children's children would come up with the ingenious idea of powering cars with fossil fuels, thus solving the world's corn-chicken-egg crisis and saving the world for <I>their<I> children's children.

I've got a better idea about how to save the planet for our children's children: Stop having so many of them. Population growth does more to harm our environment than anything else we do. If every couple had no more than two children, the population growth would drop to zero, because people would merely be replacing themselves. Now I have probably offended everyone reading this article with more than two kids: I happen to have two, so I am "populationally correct." But nobody talks about this, or even suggests it (except the Chinese), as a solution to our environmental problems. Why not? Partly because it is offensive to certain religions and cultures. Partly because it would be restrictive of people's freedom -- like having to carry grocery bags to the grocery story. And partly -- a large part -- because there is no money to be had in it. But it is the unspoken, would-be- unpopular solution to our environmental crisis.

To be fair, we in the United States are doing better in this respect, in that we aren't having as many kids as were before 1972, although we still have the highest population growth of the industrialized world. The U.S. net population growth resulting from births is only about 0.5%; this percentage would be lower except for the fact that people are living longer. But we also have another 0.5% growth due to immigration. Ironically, the very same politicians who preach environmental responsibility tend to be the ones who have open arms with respect to immigration. I am not judging that, but our population growth due to immigration is probably the number one threat to the environment in this country. The current U.S. population is about 291 million people. By the year 2050, at its present rate, that number will grow to between 400 and 600 million (depending on immigration policies); all those people will do more to harm our environment than green buildings will ever do to save it.

The other day I read one of the billions of LEED articles in a competitive magazine saying that the plumbing engineer can contribute to the LEED process by "reducing materials such as piping." This author must think we are a bunch of idiots, designing systems with more pipes than necessary. Why put in one pipe where two would be better? Or perhaps she thinks we only need cold water and no vents; that would reduce the piping by 50%! Great idea! She neglected to mention the little known, valuable fact that copper pipe is made from 80% recycled material, and that as such it can contribute to the LEED recycled material credit.

Rather than ending this article on a sour note, I will say that LEED is a good thing and that there are creative ways that the plumbing engineer can contribute to the process, such as rainwater recycling, gray water systems and so on. Those of you who read are surely already familiar with these issues because of the aforementioned plethora of green articles. Too much of a good thing, I suppose, and you know what they say; too much of a good thing can be wonderful (according to Mae West, anyway). But, as Ford prepares to roll out its new line of ethanol-powered cars, I wouldn't want to be a hungry chicken.

Timothy Allinson is a Senior Professional Engineer with Murray Company, Mechanical Contractors, in Long Beach, Calif. Prior to entering the design-build industry he worked for Popov Engineers, Inc. in Irvine, Calif, and JB&B in New York City. Tim holds a BSME from Tufts University and an MBA from New York University. He is a professional engineer licensed in both mechanical and fire protection engineering in various states, and is a leed Accredited Professional. Tim is a past-president of ASPE, both the New York and Orange County Chapters, and sits on the board of the Society of American Military Engineers, Orange County Post.