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Collection: Making Sustainability Legal

Decriminalizing Graywater

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“In most places there is a legal requirement to intentionally pollute drinking water with human excrement.” That’s how the Cascadia Green Building Council frames the problem with recycling water. By law and by practice, the region has historically made it illegal, or at least highly impractical, to reuse water, even for uses that obviously don’t require clean drinking water such as flushing the toilet or washing the car. There’s no good reason why we should fill our toilet bowls with clean drinking water rather than lightly used recycled “graywater.”

The Northwest’s water reuse policies are changing, and not a moment too soon. Even in the rainy west side of the region, population growth is pressuring water supplies, just as climate change begins to yield weather mayhem. Water supply problems can be even more intense in the region’s drier places, and in much of the world.

Long ago, health concerns motivated strict no-contact rules for used domestic water: Every ounce of it must leave the area and flow to a waste treatment plant. The laws have scarcely changed until recently. That policy may have made sense when building trades were not very sophisticated in the Northwest, when inspectors were scarce, and when water was bountiful. Now, plumbers and plumbing inspectors are highly professionalized, many builders are creative and green-minded. Plus water is increasingly scarce and expensive.

Fortunately, several jurisdictions in the Northwest are leading the way to legalizing sensible, low-cost water-recycling solutions.

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Puppies, Kittens, and Toxic Couches

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Readers have been answering my call to send in photos of the creatures most exposed to toxic flame retardants in couches. These chemicals lace our furniture, because of an obscure and counterproductive California regulation called the “12-second rule.” Today, in a shameless attempt to tug on your internet weakness for pet photos, I offer you nine puppies and kittens who have lived their lives on and around these upholstered menaces. I also list nine reasons to repeal the 12-second rule.

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An Obscure California Regulation Fills Homes with Toxics

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The test is simple: 12 seconds exposed to a small flame like a cigarette lighter. If the furniture foam doesn’t burn, it passes the test and can be sold. If it burns, it fails and cannot. That’s been California’s trial by fire for furnishings—its “flammability standard”—since 1975.

It sounds reasonable enough. Unfortunately, though, this obscure rule turns out to cause an inordinate amount of toxic harm to people, the environment, and pets. Worse, it does this harm without providing any benefits. The rule may have made sense in 1975, when fire-safety science was young, but it’s long past its sell-by date. Simply deleting it from the law books in Sacramento would send benefits rippling up the coast to the Northwest and far beyond as well.

The 12-second rule applies to the foam in couch cushions—not the fabric, just the foam. It also governs the foam in other furnishings such as chairs. And it covers foam-padded child-rearing equipment such as crib mattresses, nursing pillows, and strollers.

Because California is the biggest US market, manufacturers tend to treat the 12-second rule as a North American standard. They don’t want different polyurethane foam formulas for different states and provinces, so most of them make everything to pass the 12-second rule. Consequently, if you check under your couch cushions anywhere in Cascadia, you’re likely to find a tag saying that your sofa satisfies the California flammability standard. (That’s what my couch tag says, below.) Even if you do not find a tag,though, you’re still probably sitting on foam manufactured to pass the 12-second rule.

by Alan Durning
by Alan Durning

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Unchain Bike Sharing

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flickr, Jason Pier

Imagine for a moment that cities around the world are rolling out fleets of magic carpets and that those carpets are having truly wizardly effects: improved public health and safety, reduced traffic congestion and carbon emissions, and reduced dependence on foreign oil. City dwellers can check them out or drop them off at stations everywhere, and they are free to use for up to 30 minutes. After that, they cost something, but not much. Picture literally millions of citizens using these carpets for short, speedy trips all over town. Now imagine being in the Northwest and watching this opportunity fly by because fanatical carpet helmet laws discourage would-be riders.

This is exactly what’s happening. The magic’s not in carpets, though: it’s in the humble bicycle.

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Freeing Taxis, Addendum

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Last week’s article on the way taxis are regulated in the Pacific Northwest has generated a lot of attention and raised a lot of questions. (We’ve seen some conversations on Reddit feeds for Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver; been on the front page of 24 Hours Vancouver; and been heard on several radio and TV stations.) It’s a complex issue, and I’d like to revisit a few points that could have been covered in a longer article.

Many observers focused on the price differences, pointing out that the correlation between cab availability and price is not direct. That’s right. It’s not a one-to-one relationship.

Sightline and Great City on Regulatory Reform

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Sightline is co-sponsoring a brownbag panel this Thursday, August 11, on Seattle’s new regulatory reform initiative. The event will be hosted by Great City as part of their regular lunchtime series. They’re held at GGLO’s space on the Harbor Steps in downtown Seattle at 1301 1st Avenue.

I’ll be speaking on the panel alongside Dave Freiboth from the M. L. King County Labor Council, George Allen from the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and Diane Sugimura, director of the city’s Department of Planning and Development. The panel will be moderated by land use attorney Chuck Wolfe.

The event is free and open to the public. Hope to see you there!

Freeing Taxis

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Update 8/11: I have an addendum to this post published here. Also, the chart was altered to reflect a slightly higher number for Vancouver.

What if the Northwest’s cities legally capped the number of pizza delivery cars? What if, despite growing urban population and disposable incomes, our Pizza Delivery Oversight Boards had scarcely issued new delivery licenses since 1975? Pizza delivery would be expensive and slow; citizens would rise up in revolt.

Substitute “taxicab” for “pizza delivery” and you have a reasonable facsimile of the taxi industry in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, BC: tightly restricted taxi numbers, high fares, and low availability.

Plentiful, affordable taxis facilitate greener urban travel. They help families shed second cars, ride transit more often, and walk to work on could-be-rainy days. They fill gaps in transit systems and provide a fallback in case of unexpected events.

(click for larger image)

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Getting Smart on Sewage

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WARNING: possible sewage overflows

A rainstorm—a real gully washer—hits the Northwest. In numerous cities with antiquated public plumbing, the rain seeps into cracked sewage lines and flows into stormwater drains that link to the sewer system. From Port Angeles to Seattle to Spokane, treatment plants are overwhelmed by the deluge, causing raw sewage to spill into Port Angeles Harbor, Puget Sound, and the Spokane River. The sewage carries bacteria, viruses, and other pollutants that pose a risk to beach goers hunting clams or swimmers taking a dip.

Spewing sewage into waterways is potentially dangerous to people, and just plain gross. So Seattle and King County alone are preparing to spend $1.3 billion on projects to fix the problem.  The navy town of Bremerton on Puget Sound’s west shore recently finished a project costing more than $50 million to staunch the annual flow of hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage-tainted waste. Outside of the state, Vancouver, BC, is working to separate its sewage system and Portland this year is scheduled to complete its $1.4 billion Big Pipe projects to control sewage spills.

But there’s increasing concern that the regulations driving these costly fixes are based on an arbitrary benchmark. A recent article that I wrote for Crosscut and last Sunday’s piece by Lynda Mapes at the Seattle Times both called into question the sewage rule and the priority being placed on shrinking the number of combined-sewer overflows (CSOs) at a time when the region faces arguably more urgent water-quality challenges.

Washington’s leaders need to reconsider a rule that limits the number of sewage overflows to an average of one per outfall. Instead, they need to craft rules grounded in the actual harm being caused by the spill by considering how much and what kind of pollution is being dumped. By focusing the regulation on the environmental and human health effects, cities, counties, and utility rate payers will be able to direct their time and money to projects that will have the greatest benefits to the region. Reshaping the CSO rules could save money by shifting restoration dollars to projects that pay the largest dividends.

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Letting Cities Slow Traffic

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Update: The Washington Legislature passed the Neighborhood Safe Streets bill in April 2013, finally cutting red tape that cities and towns previously faced when they chose to set speed limits at 20 miles an hour on residential and business non-arterial streets. This common sense win for pedestrians, kids, and the elderly had overwhelming support in the House (86-10) and Senate (45-2), yet took three years to clear the roadblocks embedded in our political system.

A shorter version of this item ran on the Seattle Times’ op-ed page on August 2, 2011. This version includes links, a chart, and additional analysis.

On Thursday afternoon, I got a pit in my stomach when I found strings of yellow police tape blocking the bike commute on Seattle’s Dexter Avenue. I learned over the hours that followed, with all of Seattle, that an SUV had struck and fatally injured Mike Wang, a PATH photographer of my age, in his forties. Mr. Wang had been riding in the Dexter bike lane at Thomas Street when the SUV sped across traffic, slammed into him, and fled the scene.

Such calamities are far too common. In 2009, traffic collisions killed 1,095 people—including 106 pedestrians and cyclists—in the Northwest states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Car crashes are the number one cause of death among American children and young adults, and the group of pedestrians most in jeopardy is seniors. The pedestrian traffic death rate is more than twice as high among seniors as among others in Oregon and Washington. It’s three times as high in Idaho. (Sources for this paragraph and the next are at the bottom of this post.)

In almost all of these deaths, traffic speed is a critical variable. Some 91 percent of 2009 Northwest traffic deaths occurred on streets with speed limits of 30 mph, like Dexter, or higher. That’s a big number. Let’s make it more real: A new mapping tool allows you to pinpoint the exact locations, with street-view photos, of every scene where a motor vehicle killed an American pedestrian in the last decade. The map is harrowing. In a few short minutes of clicking and zooming, for example, I saw the death scenes of an 89-year-old man, a 73-year-old man, a 16-year-old boy, and a 1-year-old boy in Spokane; a 75-year-old woman and a 37-year-old man in Federal Way, Washington; and a 13-year-old girl in Sumner, Washington. Every one of these deaths was on a local street, the speed limit of which is dictated by state law at either 25 or 30 mph.

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