Fairhaven, The River

Paper Recycling

The 2008 figures for paper recycling in the US are out.  The impact of a full year of recession is a decrease in per capita paper utilization, but no drop in the recycling trend.  Since the 1970's the trend has been an increase of about 0.75% per year in recycling content.  The recession did not interfere.  2008 saw an overall 57% recycling rate.  The US remains on target for the goal of 60% by 2013.

Next year will need examining also.  The municipal recycling efforts are much harder to subsidize than before.  Revenues from all sources are down.  But recycling is still less expensive per ton than trash disposal.   It's tougher for towns to use revenue to cover collection costs, but most towns realize that pushing recycling efforts is still a cost reducer.  If the word gets out to the public properly, the percentage improvement should hold.

I saw the latest figures for some of the local paper collecting bins.  The net income is pennies per ton.  The best money is from corrugated boxboard.  It gets both repeat use as boxes and excellent recycling yield.   Our town curbside collection contract is a mixed contract covering containers and paper with no further breakdown.  We pay for each ton collected, but it's about $50 less per ton than the regular trash disposal.

CFL Safety

Since the blog world is temporarily full of gross misinformation about CFL safety, it's time for all of us to link to the actual EPA safety statement. The blogs are being filled with mis-information from the ignorant. Maybe with lots of independent links the google effect will neutralize it.

Another CFL Update

2006 CFL sales for the US were announced. About 95 million were sold. This is a little bit less than one per household, there being 105 million households.

So it is time to abandon the "If everyone were to buy just one .... " advertisements in favor of "Now that we are saving .... " advertisements. This will be an interesting transition. The early adopters and holier than thou eco-fanatics don't like it when the unwashed masses accept a technology. It becomes so plebian and ordinary. But CFLs are making that change. With current models offering a variety of color balances, shapes now being reasonable, and prices becoming quite low, the CFL sales are transitioning to the basic mass market approaches. 2007 will easily exceed 2006. I think price changes were the primary factor. The price is now low enough that you recover the cost within a year. This means that renters and leaseholds now consider CFLs to be a reasonable purchase. (I doubt that this is a conscious careful accounting analysis, but renters do hesitate to spend money on things that will be left behind when they move.)

The next CFL challenge will be dimmers. I saw my first successful CFL dimmer installation a few weeks ago. It didn't have nasty flicker and did have a reasonable range of dimming. It did not require an exotic dimmer control either. The CFLs were not as cheap. They cost about $15. This is still a money saving choice, but nowhere near as attractive as non-dimmable CFLs.

After that is the challenge of the candelabra bulbs (those little ovoid things), track lighting, and reflector bulbs. These have both more difficult shape and size issues, plus usually need dimmers.

CFL Update

The 2006 figures are out.  CFL sales were 91 million, which is 10% short of one per household in the US.  Some of these are replacement units, but estimates are that more than half are new fixtures.  So CFL is basically mainstream.  This does mean that advertising needs to be more aimed at mid- and late- adopters.  It needs to be more along the lines of "come on in, the water's fine" and less of the "be first, be smarter" type.

Other changes:

• The first cardboard packaging is in use.  Back when the CFL price was high (above $10) the blister pack was needed because buyers of expensive items like to see them.  Also, back then there was significant variation in shape and a real need to look at the CFL to determine whether it would fit a fixture.
• The color temperature varieties are well established.  The old harsh blue flourescent is now soft white, bright white, or daylight with equal efficiency.  (This also applies to the traditional tubes.)

Prices continue to fall.  List is under $5, and real prices are $1-2 as loss leaders.  This shifts the cost breakeven time under a year. 

CFL status reality

Seth asks: How many bloggers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?. There are several answers. First, his "only 6% of homes have CFLs" is simply wrong. That figure is from a 1999 report. Sales of CFLs have increased steadily and somewhat dramatically since then. Getting accurate market share figures is hard. There was a conference session on that difficulty at the 2005 Energy star conference. But unit sales have increased from the roughly 0.4% unit percentage in 1999 to somewhere between 1.6 and 2.5% in 2004 of unit screwins being CFLs. Translating that into homes with CFLs is hard, but the home percentage has probably increased proportionally. That would mean from 25-40% of US homes having at least one CFL.

The figures for MA in 2004 were: 67% of homes had at least one CFL, and there were an average of 6.7 CFLs in homes that had at least one. MA had 12% of home lighting from CFLs, or 20% if you include fixtures like under-shelf lighting. Of the all the lighting sockets it was estimated that about 60% remain candidates for CFLs. The rest are either already CFLs, or have a functional reason why CFLs will not work. Some of this background and related reports are available as PDFs reference in the 2005 ENERGY STAR Lighting Partner Meeting Agenda : ENERGY STAR.


There is also a lot more analysis of why people do and don't like CFLs, together with historical analysis that explains some of the CFLs baggage at EERE News: EERE Progress Alerts, which links to another PDF. It is actually good news that the list of problems is now down to things like "It's too hard to open the package." That is quite an improvement.

By all means sell the CFL concept. New CFL designs are increasing the candidate sockets and there are a lot of candidate sockets to sell.

But it helps to tell a story that is closer to the truth. Obvious errors like "only 6% of homes have a CFL" really hurt credibility. The better story is that CFLs save a lot of money, they save energy, the current models are suitable for 60-80% of the sockets, and only about 20% of those are presently CFLs.

The two biggest functional barriers remaining are: 1) failure to work properly with dimmers. The CFL makers are working on this, but have not solved the problem for most dimmer systems. and 2) Color temperature of the white is much better, but still not a replacement for many spot lighting systems. A lesser problem, but one that forces people to shop around, is that CFLs are not the same shape as incandescents. There is usually a CFL that fits, but finding it may require extra shopping that is not needed for incandescents. Describe these failing also. It is much better to not sell an unacceptable product, than to sell one and give CFLs a bad name.

Hostility to risk analysis

I found this old quote in Nature:

The widespread hostility to the use of benefit-cost and risk assessment analysis is based on an absolutist health-only positionj that virtually no one is willing to embrace in the real world. 

Hammond, P.B., and Coppock, R. (eds) Valuing Health Risks, Costs, and Benefits for Environmental Decision Making (National Academies Press, 1990)

In this case the issue is particulate pollution, but the same hostility can be found in all sorts of health related policy discussions.  It's very hard to get any kind of rational discussion of risk, or cost-benefit, or even simple concepts like maximizing return on investment.  The polemics of win/lose and absolutist evaluations seem to dominate.

(A frustrating Thanksgiving of fruitless political arguments may be part of the inspiration to post.)

What's wrong with medicine

Dr Rangel is looking for comments on medicine, so here is my view of the primary problems. From time to time I discuss details. This is the framework within which those details fit.

The overall problem with the medical system is that it is not meeting the goal of delivering a high level of patient health at a reasonable cost. Major contributing factors are:

1) Medicine lacks a mature quality system. There are some early efforts like evidence based medicine and early efforts at process improvement, such as those found at Mayo. But on the whole there is no widespread understanding of the processes used in a quality system.

This is not very surprising considering how recently these efforts started. It takes many decades for an industry to develop a mature quality model. The Japanese auto industry began theirs about 1950, and even now there is regular improvement visible in Japanese automobiles. The American automobile industry started their efforts in the 1960's and although improvement is visible, they still have a long way to go.

2) The quality system invented by the politicians and lawyers has proven ineffective at meeting this goal. This is hardly a surprise. They've not had success anywhere. The tort system never delivered high quality in automobiles, electronics, or anything else. The tort system is primarily effective as a means of controlling the sociopaths that are also high functioning individuals in society.

If we used the medical malpractice approach to automotive quality we would discover who worked on a lemon car, pick a selection of those workers, empty their bank accounts, and fire them. This practice of blaming the workers was tried (somewhat less dramatically) for quite a while in the auto industry. It was a complete failure and has been replaced by a more effective quality system.

3) There is a mismatch between the decision making, financial responsibility, and beneficiary. For example, the primary beneficiary of employee medical insurance is the employee. The decisions about what coverage is obtained are made by the employer. Even with the best of intentions, there will be an inefficiency due to the mismatch between employer perceptions and actual employee desires. In practice, this mismatch is severe and made worse whenever financial pressures significantly influence the decision making.

I think that the emerging concierge medicine is the leading edge of a change towards matching these back together. The HSA's may also encourage a better matching of roles and responsibilities.

4) The ignorance and naivete of the patients leads to a misunderstanding of responsibilities, made worse by external societal factors. The patients' own failures often cause substantially worse health. Some of this is ignorance. Some of this is the naive belief that "there will be a pill for that". Only a small part is patients' mental deficits, e.g., Alzheimer's. I see little indication of significant change here. There are responsible people and irresponsible people, about the same mix as when I was growing up. Before antibiotics and immunizations the diseases of irresponsibility were a minor health factor. Now they are a major health factor.

5) The expectations of patients are unrealistic. You will get old and die. There are incurable diseases. Bad things do happen. General anaesthsia is occasionally fatal. Diseases don't always respond as expected.

6) Direct providers (especially doctors) are not accustomed to working in a team, are not well trained for teamwork, and their work structures are very badly designed. Effective teamwork is more often punished than rewarded by their employers, payers, etc. Yes, everyone thinks that they are an effective team, but start looking at the reality. In a high functioning team would patient handoff and transfer be a major problem?

7) The notion that "someone is to blame" interferes substantially with all the efforts to make improvements. Blame is useful when controlling sociopaths. Blame gets in the way of improving a quality system. Dealing with this will require changes in societal attitudes.

Solutions? There are many small steps that can be taken. I'm involved in some of them. The global strategy is to restructure the system so that a modern and effective quality system can be made operational.

More on Load Factors

Oak Ridge just released their annual energy use report, the following is from chapter 2.  It will be published in all sorts of misleading uses and summaries I'm sure.

There will be lots of discussion of the transit consuming 3,228 BTU/passenger mile versus the car consuming 3,549.  But what matters is what question people want to answer.  If the question is what should I personally do, load factors matter.  That figure for the automobile includes a load factor of 1.57, so about half the cars include more than one person.  If you will be driving alone it is the 5,572 that matters.  But that is for an average car with average conditions.  Will your car be better or worse than average?  Will you carpool to increase the load factor?  The van pool figures show how large the load factor difference can be.

As for the alternatives, note how much the load factor matters there.  With rail the additional people add very little to the per vehicle consumption.  So up until your use triggers an increase in frequency, number of cars, etc., the BTU per additional passenger is extremely low.  But the increased energy consumption for additional cars and more frequent runs comes in big additional chunks. 

These figures are important for policy planning, but they need to be used in proper context.  If policy changes the use pattern without changing load factors, then you can use the per passenger figures.  But if policy changes also affect the load factors, you need to take that into account.  Changes that reduce load factor are a bad idea.  Changes that increase load factor are a good idea.

This is part of why the Republicans (who for some reason really hate railroads) have repeatedly tried to outlaw Amtrak's use of load management.  Amtrak has been using variable pricing to encourage train use during low load periods with low prices, while charging high prices to gain revenue during peak loads.  This does improve load factors.  The Northeast Corridor has been seeing steady improvement.  The Republicans have introduced congressional micro-management to prohibit load management every year, but so far it has been fought off each year.  A successful Amtrak is not something that they could accept.

A Congressional Meeting

I went to a meeting and presentation by the ACLU and a local Democratic congressman last week.  He was making a reasonably adult and non-partisan argument against the current domestic spying programs.  I thought he did a decent job of tackling the issue like an adult and presenting an understanding of the various perspectives on the issue.  He was trying to convince the swing voters and the open minded Republicans that there are viable alternatives.

He must have been very disappointed by the reaction of his Democratic core supporters.  They hated this adult behavior, and it showed in the question and answer period.

First, there was naive guy.  He wanted to know whether the congressman would sign the "impeach Bush" resolution.  Congressman did a decent job of dancing and being politic while trying to explain that he wanted to actually get the laws and behavior changed.  Doing this means building coalitions.  I.e, "no".

Next, there was tantrum boy.  He thought that this diplomatic, work together, approach was unsatisfactory.  He wanted outrage.  He want noise.  Forget working to get agreements, let's get some emotional satisfaction with repeated giant outbursts.  Congressman tried again, but the audience made it clear that they agreed and wanted noise.

Next, there was psychotic lady.  She had some conspiracy theory about voting machines and was going on into her delusions.  There are real issues around voting machines.  She was obviously disconnected from reality.   I left while she was still ranting.  I wonder whether the real voting machine conspirators hire actors to go to meetings like this and pretend to be psychotic.  Or perhaps they prep the real psychotics and turn them loose.  It's fairly effective as a way to hide a conspiracy in plain sight if you convince the public that it's just psychotic delusions.

But it is clear to me that any Democrat who tries to act like an adult and deal with important issues seriously risks being shot in the back by his upset supporters.