Grid Magazine March [083]

SHOPPING WITH CHEFS

A N EW CSA DE L I V E RS CU L I N ARY S ECRETS

4 EASY RECIPES FOR NONTOXIC CLEANERS A ROOM-BY-ROOM GUIDE TO A HEALTHIER HOME TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE PHILADELPHIA MARCH 2016 / ISSUE 83 GRIDPHILLY.COM

2 RECYCLING MISTAKES YOU NEED TO STOP MAKING

waste land THE UNDERBELLY OF RECYCLING IN PHILADELPHIA

INSIDE: SCRAPPERS, GLEANERS AND DUMPSTER DIVERS路 RECYCLING, THIRD FOR A REASON 路 CHESTER COUNTY: BIOGAS CAPITAL OF THE WORLD?

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CONTENTS D EPA RT M E N TS

INSID E THE ISSUE

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38

To-Do List

The Gleaners

Put away that winter gear and get out your garden rakes and shovels

Stretching food further with a time-honored tradition that started in the fields of Europe

10

41

Comings and Goings Find out which doors are opening and closing, and who deserves kudos

The Deep End A look into world of dumpster diving reveals troubling facts about America’s food waste

12

42

Opinion Our city’s recycling director busts a big recycling myth—and issues us a challenge

Oil Boom Recycling the barrels of waste oil used by restaurants across the city is big business

14 Made in Philly Chester county may become an international hub for biogas research and design

19 Shop Local Look beyond carrots and cucumbers this spring with new options in buying clubs and CSAs

Ladders and other scrap at Lombardo Iron and Metal scrapyard

“Once Donald Trump gets in there, he’s gonna start a war, and scrap metal [prices] will go way up.”

— Chris Little, Philadelphia metal scrapper

ON THE COV ER

30 Fighting Over Scraps Nosediving global prices for scrap metal and other materials have made for a bruising hustle for the city’s scrappers. China’s slowdown may mean a fatal blow for many

54

58

Homestead Acts

Events What to see and where to go

We recycle. Reducing and reusing would have more impact

Dump your toxic cleaning products and use these four easy-to-make cleaners instead

28

57

64

45

The Big Picture

Market Watch

Dispatch

Healthy Homes

26 The Right Question

Historian and author Susan Strasser talks with Grid about the history of housework and waste in America

Liven up your favorite pizza with the delicate green onions of early spring

COVER PH OTO A ND A B OVE P HOTO BY M A R K LI KOS KY

SPECIA L SECTI ON

An artist sets out to use recycled materials for her sculptures, and discovers the people of Philadelphia instead

A clean home gives you peace of mind. But it’s good for your body, too

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EDITOR’S NOTES

by

HEATHER SHAYNE BLAKESLEE

THROWING IT ALL AWAY The inconvenient truth about convenience

A

merican women do more than 10 hours of housework per week than their male partners—more than a full workday. Marketers, smartly, continue to target women with messages about convenience and saving time. My sister, a chemical engineer and mother of three, is fully aware of this dynamic. She once showed me a bottle of Go-Gurt that she “ate” in her car on her way to work after she got the kids to school. “Do you see this?” she said, exasperated, holding up her plastic-bottle breakfast and reflecting on her schedule. “They made this for me. I am the target market for this product.”

In the book “Never Done: A History of American Housework,” historian Susan Strasser writes that a century ago, as we moved into the time of mass-marketed products, advertisers sold us convenience “as an end to itself... holding out the premise that the burdens might be lightened with the promise of the latest products.”

Consumerism has become an ethos, an art and a science.

A mid-century check-in point would be a scene in the series “Mad Men,” in which the Draper family is ending a roadside picnic.

Don, ever the suave ad man (and the occasional family man), tosses his beer can into the woods. His wife, Betty, a stay-at-home mom who is always perfectly coiffed and coutured, begins to pack up and dutifully performs a “hand check” on the kids to make sure they are free of dirt before they scramble into the car and back to their suburban home. Then, she grabs the corners of the picnic blanket, and we watch (some of us in horror) as she shakes off paper napkins and other refuse, flinging it away into the sunny day.

We see litter; Betty and her contemporaries, with a little help from Don’s slogans and jingles, see liberation. Cleanliness, convenience, housework and waste are a closely interwoven set of ideas, and the gendered component to them still looms large.

The inconsistent acts of making sure that

the kids aren’t too dirty to get into the car and then throwing their garbage out into the world at large is jarring. But it still perfectly captures—even 40 years later—our modern mindset. We keep our own lives clean and convenient while not troubling to think of the planet or the people who bear the consequences.

The fact that we all equate the idea of “single-serve” and “disposable” with “easy” and “clean” is the great success of ad men like Don Draper; it is also the great lie of the 20th century.

For women in particular, our lives—by many measures—are better than they used to be. We have moved away from hand-making nearly everything that keeps our life going in the realms of food, clothing and shelter, and, despite the uneven distribution, have been spared from endless hours of housework. There is no sense romanticising a time one hundred years ago when the weekly washing took an entire red-knuckled, backbreaking day.

But the ease of canned soup for lunch while the washing machine whirs has come at a price to our environment and values.

We have piled our landfills to the brim with shoddy construction materials, packaging from food and “durable goods” ordered online that were not meant to last, only to separate us from our latest paycheck.

As we move into this next era we need to come to terms with the fact that it is not enough to recycle our bottles at the end of the day; we need to stop consuming at our current rate. We must unlearn convenience as a virtue and rediscover what really matters to us. We have more opportunity than ever to live better lives—we need to take care not to throw it all away.

editor-in-chief Alex Mulcahy managing editor Heather Shayne Blakeslee heather@gridphilly.com 215.625.9850 ext. 107 designer Kathleen White kathleen@gridphilly.com 215.625.9850 ext. 112 copy editor Walter Foley writers Marilyn Anthony Matt Bevilacqua Phil Bresee Peggy Paul Casella Christina P. Day Anna Herman Justin Klugh Emily Kovach Thomas Parry Jerry Silberman illustrators

Corey Brickley James Heimer Chelsea Manheim Mike L. Perry Laura Weiszer photgrapher Mark Likosky

___________ Sales & Marketing Manager Claire Margheim claire@gridphilly.com 215.625.9850 ext. 103 ad sales Wesley Kays-Henry wesley@gridphilly.com 215.625.9850 ext. 100 distribution Megan Matuzak megan@gridphilly.com 215.625.9850 ext. 106 published by Red Flag Media 1032 Arch Street, 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19107 215.625.9850 G R I D P H I L LY . C O M

heather shayne blakeslee Managing Editor

heather@gridphilly.com

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TO-DO LIST 1.

clean up planter beds, pots and gardens Remove weeds and fallen leaves, and get started on composting the remnants. (The best time to spread compost on your garden is in the fall.)

4.

2.

store your winter gear

3.

Get hold of a storage bin to put away the bulkiest of your winter clothes, and give away anything that you won’t wear again.

It’s easy to mix up salt or sugar scrubs at home. Give yourself a little pampering and get your skin ready for the more revealing spring weather.

6.

get in the zone

tune up your bike

The USDA has an online hardiness zone map to help determine what you can plant early in the season. Type in your zip code and find out which Philadelphia zone you’re in—we span over two. Depending on where you live, you can start seeds for putting cool weather crops such as broccoli, carrots and onions into the ground in April.

5.

get your pets back on preventatives

Most vets recommend that flea and tick preventatives be used all year. If you stopped during the winter, protect your pets now.

7.

make your own disinfectant It’s time for spring cleaning (see our guide on Page 45), but not for bringing toxic cleaners into your home. It’s easy to whip up a batch with ingredients from the grocery store.

See recipes on Page 55.

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give your skin a treat

The dirt and salt that has built up on your bike can interfere with proper gear shifting and braking, and your tire tread might be too tired to hold out for much longer. Visit your neighborhood bike shop so they can give your bike a safety check and make sure you’re ready for an accident-free spring.

8.

check for winter-induced damage around your home Winter storms can wreak havoc on simple home systems.

Check for damaged gutters, downspouts and steps that may have finally cracked.

9.

skip the cut flowers If you’re prepping the house for the spring holidays, get daffodil and hyacinth blooms that you can plant to rebloom next year.

10.

choose your farm Hooking up with a community supported agriculture program to deliver food or flowers every week is a great way to keep the kitchen stocked while supporting the growers directly. Check out our CSA guide on Page 19 to learn about new programs.

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NEWS vention in July 2016.

“This is an exciting and well deserved honor for the people of Philadelphia,” said Mayor Jim Kenney in a press release.

“Our city is unique, fun and appealing to a broad range of tourists and visitors, while at the same time providing a homegrown sense of culture.”

SOUTHWARK AND HUNGRY PIGEON BRING LOCAL FLAVORS TO SOUTH PHILLY

REPORT SHOWS OIL TRAINS ARE AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ISSUE

HEALTHY ROWHOUSE PROJECT APPOINTS NEW LEADER

Marginalized communities bear a disproportionate risk in the operations of oil train rails in Philadelphia, according to the report “Environmental Justice and Oil Trains in Pennsylvania.” Released in February by ForestEthics, ACTION United and PennEnvironment, the report states that people of color and historically poor communities in Philadelphia are more likely to live in the oil train “blast zone”—the dangerous one-mile evacuation zone in the case of an oil train derailment and fire—than their white counterparts. Fifty-eight percent of the people living inside the city’s blast zone are people of color; 32 percent of those living outside of the blast zone are people of color.

“These oil trains go through our neighborhoods, many to the Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery… but we can’t move away because we don’t necessarily have the resources to do so,” said Southwest Philly resident and ACTION United member Teresa Hill in a press release.

The report found that 50 percent of people living in communities statistically vulnerable to environmental racism are within the dangerous blast zone, yet the blast zone is only 12 percent of the land area—showing that the most vulnerable populations are disproportionately clustered in the blast zones.

This month, Jill Roberts takes on the role of executive director of the Healthy Rowhouse Project, a nonprofit startup created to keep poor Philadelphians from becoming homeless or displaced.

Roberts served for 11 years as a community development project manager at Project Home, where she led homeowner education classes and managed the purchasing process of vacant and blighted buildings.

“Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods.

By making the houses in our neighborhoods stronger and the residents in those houses stronger and healthier, we strengthen our city,” Roberts said in a press release.

The Healthy Rowhouse Project creates financial instruments and construction assistance to help homeowners with low incomes—and landlords who rent to them— repair their buildings.

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LONELY PLANET NAMES PHILLY THE NO. 1 SPOT TO TRAVEL TO IN U.S. Philadelphia ranked No. 1 on the 2016 Lonely Planet list of “10 Best Places to Visit in the United States.” The travel book publishing company recognized Philly for its craft beer and dining scene, and for hosting global events such as 2015’s papal visit and the upcoming Democratic National Con-

Two “responsibly sourced” Fourth Street restaurants opened doors last month: Southwark (under new management) and comfort food newcomer Hungry Pigeon.

Southwark had a quiet reopening last month, showing off a few minor interior renovations including an updated paint and color scheme under new owners Marina De Oliveira and chef Chris D’Ambro, who purchased Southwark in 2015. A frequently changing menu will highlight seasonal flavors from local farms and producers, and the tap will include mostly Pennsylvania brews.“The plan is just to keep it local,” said De Oliveira.

Hungry Pigeon, which also opened in January, takes a “simple and straight forward approach” to comfort food, says Scott Schroeder, who runs it with longtime friend and collaborator Pat O’Malley.

STORMWATER PLAN REPORTS POSITIVE RESULTS FOR ITS FIRST FIVE YEARS Sustainable Business Network released an assessment of the local economic impact of the first five years of “Green City, Clean Waters,” the city’s stormwater management plan. Managed by the Philadelphia Water Department, GCCW addresses Clean Water Act regulations with decentralized, neighborhood scale, natural systems, also known as green stormwater infrastructure (GSI).

“Conservatively, over the life of GCCW, public and private investments in GSI are projected to produce a $3.1 billion impact in the Philadelphia economy, supporting roughly 1,000 jobs per year and generating $2 million per year in local tax revenues,” said Lee Huang, senior vice president and principal of Econsult Solutions, which authored the report.

SNAP KITCHEN OPENS IN CENTER CITY, PLANS SEVEN LOCATIONS TOTAL Snap Kitchen—an Austin, Texas-based, health-conscious grab-and-go eatery—has opened two of seven locations slotted for the area. The shops at 1901 Callowhill St. and 243 Market St. are the first East Coast locations for the chain, which also has branches in the Chicago area.

The chain sources as much food locally as possible depending on seasonal availability, said Marketing Manager Beth Minkus, and has teamed up with Philabundance to donate any food that won’t be sold.

“This is something we do at all of our locations,” said Minkus, “and Philabundance was able to accommodate for all of our volume and pick up from all our locations.”

MORRIS ARBORETUM TO BE ADORNED IN YARN THIS SPRING Fiber artist Melissa Maddonni Haims was selected to decorate Morris Arboretum’s iconic trees, sculptures and bridges starting March 20 for an art exhibit titled “Wrapped Up,” which will last through fall—or until the many feet of yarn succumb to the elements.

Haims, who studied marine affairs and painting at the University of Rhode Island, creates yarn graffiti, soft sculpture, and large-scale installations with crocheted materials, utilizing mostly recycled, reclaimed and rescued textiles.

SCHOLARSHIPS AVAILABLE FOR ENERGYPATH 2016 The Sustainable Energy Fund (SEF) will offer 150 scholarships totaling $150,000 to cover the cost of students and educators planning to attend Energypath 2016, to be held at Pennsylvania State University from July 25 to July 29.

“We want to make sure that we provide people access to the kind information that could lead to the next big idea or development in sustainable energy,” said John Costlow, president and CEO of SEF, in a press release.

Applications are available through June 30 at energypath.org.

SEPTA’s Airport Line gets you to and from Philadelphia International Airport with comfort and convenience. Airport Line service runs every 30 minutes, stops at every terminal and bags ride free. For just $8 SEPTA’s Airport Line is the best deal in town and the best way to start your trip.

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GU E ST EDITOR IAL

A PLAGUE OF PLASTIC BAGS More Americans recycle than vote. But we have to do better by phil bresee

T

hroughout much of 2015, negative stories and shortsighted opinion pieces on recycling dotted national and local media.

The stories, including a particularly exasperating editorial by John Tierney in The New York Times, mostly stemmed from reports on the historic low-market values for recyclables, and called into question recycling’s overall viability.

The most egregious claim is that recycling doesn’t pay. Tierney writes, “Despite decades of exhortations and mandates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill.”

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As the City of Philadelphia’s recycling director, I can tell you that’s simply not true. I see the numbers every day, and investing in recycling is still the right choice.

Even with historic low markets for materials, the city’s recycling program should save us $3.5 million this year.

Prices are clearly not in our control.

Philadelphians should know that while recycling helps conserve natural resources and save energy in manufacturing, it’s also a business enterprise that operates within global markets. Once collected, processed, sorted, etc. at materials recovery facilities (or MRFs, pronounced “merfs”), recyclables become raw materials that are bought

and sold all across the world, just like other commodities.

Starting about three years ago, prices paid for recyclables began tumbling due to a perfect storm of macroeconomic forces, including shrinking GDP growth in China, a strong dollar, and low crude oil prices, just to name a few. The low prices have not just hurt businesses throughout the recycling supply chain, but have also put the squeeze on municipal recycling programs all across the U.S. in the form of lost revenues and high processing costs.

We do, however, have control over how we recycle as a city. More Philadelphians need to understand the role they play in how financially successful—or not—the city’s recycling program is. Given the current state of the markets, keeping nonrecyclable materials out of the blue bins is critical. By “recycling right” the city could save even more money, leaving available funds that directly support other city services.

The two biggest problem materials that cause havoc and lost revenues for Philadelphia’s recycling program? Plastic bags and polystyrene foam (e.g., Styrofoam).

Neither belongs in blue bins.

They’re not recyclable in our curbside program, or in just about anyone else’s. Unfortunately, they’re still omnipresent and are emblazoned with the recycling Möbius symbol, so even some of the most aware recyclers place them in their blue bins with good intentions. The bags shred while traveling through a MRF and wrap around its many moving parts, which causes costly shutdowns and delays.

Recyclers should take these items back to retailers to recycle, throw them out, or— better yet—use reusable shopping bags.

Products such as foam cups, plates and clamshell takeout containers have little market value—and are often contaminated with food waste—but are commonly tossed into recycling bins.

Does all of this mean your recyclables just get trashed if you accidentally toss plastic bags or foam plastic into your blue bin? Not necessarily. However, if the same mistakes are made by all 1,200 homes on a recycling route, a truckload of recyclables could indeed be rejected at the MRF. The city, and our recyclers, need to continue to educate ourselves and evolve.

This year, we’ll be rolling out programs to

IL LUSTRATIO N BY L AURA WEI SZER

target residents in apartments and condos, and expanding our public space recycling program.

Recycling is arguably our country’s greatest environmental success story. Consider that two-thirds of Americans are able to participate in curbside recycling, and nine out of 10 Americans have access to programs overall.

More people recycle than vote, making it a remarkable citizen-engagement achievement. Many believe that recycling can be a gateway to other environmentally conscious behaviors, such as conserving energy at home and work, buying greener products or taking public transit.

It can also remind us to create less waste in the first place, which far and away will always have the greatest environmental benefit. During the past seven years In Philadelphia, we’ve seen a 120 percent increase in tons of curbside recycling. Just as importantly, we’ve seen a 19 percent drop in household garbage disposal, and a seven percent decrease in garbage generation over that time period.

We’re in the closing stages of updating our solid waste master plan, and our goals going forward will focus more on waste reduction.

That could include organics—such as yard wastes and food wastes—which make up the largest component of our garbage.

And we’re in the beginning stages of an organics recycling feasibility study that we hope will help us identify some ways to move forward in this new frontier.

Paying attention to all these opportunities, metrics and financials is essential to running an efficient, sustainable recycling program for Philadelphia. But it’s also misguided to only consider the bottom line. Recycling is an environmental win at a time when the country sorely needs it.

We need to remember that the environmental benefits of recycling are paramount.

Philadelphians have embraced recycling and recognize that it is crucial to ensuring clean, safe and green streets. It’s also a way for all of us to be a part of building a more sustainable Philadelphia. Let’s recycle right.

Phil Bresee is the recycling director for the City of Philadelphia.

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MA D E IN PH ILLY

BACKYARD BIOGAS Chester County becomes U.S. headquarters for global initiative by marilyn anthony

T

hirteen-year-old Clayton Young, a home-schooled Berks County teen, is working to design a solution that would enable small-scale biodigesters to provide year-round cooking gas in Syrian refugee camps. But when he first brought the lofty idea to his mother, Jennifer, she was adamantly opposed. “We’re not doing a project on poop,” she told him.

Biodigesters combine raw or cooked food waste, animal or human fecal matter and water in an anaerobic (oxygenless) environment to produce three essential byproducts: liquid fertilizer, methane-based cooking gas and rich soil. Learning more about the process was a perfect opportunity for Clayton to complete an assigned science project to solve a real world problem.

He’s since won his mother over.

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The pair are now working with the global Solar CITIES program, based in Chester County, which trains trainers to introduce this simple biogas technology into resource-poor communities and other places lacking sufficient public health infrastructure—including refugee camps.

Thomas Culhane, a research scientist in urban planning, environmental analysis and policy, is a co-founder of the organization. He believes biodigester systems, whose simple technology requires little more than plastic cubes and tubes, can turn dangerous waste into an asset. He says a biodigester converts waste into soil in three to six days—instead of three to six months of composting. The clean gas that is produced requires no additional refining to be usable, and it also creates

nutrient-dense fertilizer in just 24 hours.

Using up the food waste helps reduce the greenhouse gases that would be produced if it rotted in a landfill. The process extracts the last bit of photosynthetic energy from the food waste and converts it to cooking fuel. A next generation design uses mirrors to direct solar energy to the units to keep them warm in winter.

As Solar CITIES vice president and co-founder Janice Kelsey puts it, “We’re able to deal with food and manure at its source.” Biodigester technology on an industrial scale is already in use in countries such as Germany and Sweden. Culhane and Kelsey’s efforts center on the construction of “appliance-sized” digesters for home use.

Kelsey uses a portion of her suburban Chester County backyard as a demonstration area for what she affectionately refers to as her “pet dragon,” since it “breathes fire.” Inside a plastic-wrapped greenhouse are two 1,000-gallon intermediate bulk-shipping containers. Plastic piping directs some gas from the containers to capacious storage bags in the greenhouse and some to a countertop stove in Kelsey’s kitchen. Her “baby dragon” produces about four hours of cooking gas daily. Kathy Puffer, a Solar CITIES board member with a home digester in the Hudson Valley, refers to the liquid fertilizer byproduct as “Compeaujolais,” and applies it to her gardens, lawn and indoor vegetable growing system.

In December 2014, Solar CITIES member and neighbor Jody Spangler installed “Gassy Girl,” the largest residential biogas system in the U.S. on her Windy Hill Farms in East Nantmeal Township. With Kelsey, Spangler tirelessly promotes biodigesters to school and community groups.

This spring Solar CITIES will collaborate with Villanova University on a multidisciplinary project to build and analyze smallscale biodigesters.

Culhane says the enthusiastic response his ideas received from Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite communities, educators, off-grid innovators and activists for social justice led him to select Chester County as the Solar CITIES headquarters.

This enthusiasm is evident even from the once reluctant Jennifer Young as she reflects on her son Clayton’s project.

“The most important thing he is learning is how something we can do in our backyard can help other people.”

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Connect to Your Food.

Connect to the Co-op.

When you shop at Weavers Way, more of your money stays local, through our partnerships and our very own farms. For 40 years, we’ve been owned by our members, the people who shop here every day.

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Buying Clubs by emily kovach

New spring options for stocking the fridge CSA stands for “Community Supported Agriculture.” It’s a little like a layaway program for your pantry combined with crowdsourced funding for farmers. The term typically refers to a group of people sometimes, but not always, living in the same community, who pay a farmer or cooperative in advance to periodically receive boxes of fresh produce throughout the harvest season. This model provides farmers with the capital they need to make purchases through the winter and growing season, until the bounty (and cash flow) of spring, summer and autumn arrives.

Produce CSAs have been a decades-long tradition in and around Philadelphia.

For more information and extensive CSA listings, please visit farmtocity.org or localharvest.org.

But CSAs—and other kinds of buying clubs—are not limited to food. You can also consider getting flowers, medicine or other products. Here are some of Grid’s new spring picks.

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Beyond the Brown Box There’s a whole new crop of CSA-based buying clubs out there, offering products beyond fruit and vegetables If you’re a seasoned CSA buyer, you probably already have a favorite farm that does heirloom tomatoes just right, or you know a farmer who will surprise you with a crazy new item you’ve never seen. This season, try a new kind of CSA. Here are some options that caught our eye.

m e at c s a

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Highland Orchards

Yellow Springs Farm

By partnering with other farms and 4-H clubs, this mostly produce-growing farm in Wilmington, Delaware, is able to offer meat CSA pickups on the second Saturday of every month.

There are two versions: chicken-only (one whole and two cutup chickens), and trio (10 to 12 pounds of three kinds of meat of mixed cuts of the farmer’s choice, such as beef, chicken and lamb). Both types of shares include frozen and fresh meat. $38 per month for chicken, $85 per month for the trio

Never be without delicious cheese: Members of this CSA receive shares twice each month, from May through November. A regular share is 12 ounces of cheese split among varieties; a plus share is four cheeses totaling a pound. Both options combine fresh and aged goat cheese. All of the cheeses are handmade at Yellow Springs Farms in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania. Pickup locations include Weavers Way Co-op in Mount Airy and Forest & Main Brewing Company in Ambler. $325 to $405

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spring plants csa

community supported medicine shares

Love ’n Fresh Flowers

Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative

This micro-farm in Roxborough offers a one-time pickup in April of more than 30 flowering plants (all organically grown from seed), which will continue to grow in an at-home cutting garden. This mix of perennials and biennials (25 percent) and annuals (75 percent) will provide enough flowers to make bouquets all spring, if properly cared for, of course. Each diverse mix of plants is good for sun/part-sun gardens with average soil. $68.50

Once per month for six months, three to five locally made natural health products arrive to members at the LFFC pickup location of their choosing. They have many sites in and around Philadelphia. CSM shares may include items such as digestive tonics, skin salves, bath salts, tea blends and dried herbs. Each shipment includes an informative newsletter, explaining the herbal products and their uses. The CSM shares run from May to October. $210

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Foraging hens at one of the farms that supplies Persnickety Protein

The Road to Better Food A mom, a daughter and a pickup truck deliver the goods to Germantown

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ne Saturday per month, retired mother Nancy Price and her adult daughter Candice Price drive their pickup truck from Germantown to Lancaster and back again. On the way there the truck is empty, but on the return trip, it’s loaded with meats, dairy and produce from small family farms. The haul isn’t just for them, but for up to a dozen families who place orders through their delivery program, Persnickety Protein.

The Prices have been running this operation since early 2010, when Candice read “Eating Animals” (an animal rights exposé by author Jonathan Safran Foer) and became appalled by the conditions in which most farmed animals live and die.

“It was a really eye-opening, heartbreaking experience for her,” her mother re-

members. The two made a commitment to only buy humanely raised meat, and they began researching and visiting farms in Lancaster County. Friends and acquaintances took an interest, and soon they were making weekly treks up with coolers.

They’ve made the trip regularly ever since, with a rotating list of buyers.

Their program is easy to navigate, and a low-commitment for customers. Every month, about 10 days before delivery day, they send an email out with a spreadsheet of all the products offered. Members place their orders from an impressive number of items: proteins, of course (all kinds of meat and dairy), as well as pantry staples and seasonal produce. Once the Prices make their run, buyers come to their Germantown home to pick up and pay. There is no

membership fee, the food costs and delivery charges are reasonable, and conscientious eaters can rest assured that all the farms have been vetted by the Prices, who take animal welfare extremely seriously.

“We are not only supporting family farmers that are quickly becoming the poorest people on this earth,” Nancy says, “but we are supporting the humane treatment of all of the animals. When you go to these farms, the animals are running around playing with each other in the grassy fields, just being free.”

Member growth has been slow, as they have very little capital and don’t spend money for marketing or advertising. But their labor of love will continue, as long as the pickup still runs and orders keep coming in.

Find out more at persnicketyprotein.com.

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Peas from a specially curated CSA from the chefs of High Street on Market and Plowshare Farms

Kitchen Confidential A restaurant-based CSA gives adventurous home chefs inspiration and recipes

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s there such a thing as Chef Supported Agriculture? A new program at High Street on Market started with a couple of farmers and chefs flipping through a seed catalog. Jack Goldenberg of Urban Roots Farm in Philadelphia and Teddy Moynihan of Plowshare Farms of Upper Bucks County sat down with chefs Eli Kulp of Fork and John Patterson of High Street— neighboring restaurants in Old City that are part of the same restaurant group—and began to plan. The chefs chose specialty and heirloom items the farms would grow specifically for their kitchens: heirloom Italian red corn called Floriani, nero tondo black Spanish radishes, Good Mother Stallard shelling beans, and other such delicacies that they hadn’t seen in Philadelphia.

This partnership spawned a second idea: a weekly Saturday farmers market held in front of their restaurants, where the farmers could come with product, and other local artisans would be invited to set up stands. “We’re on Market Street where all

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the markets were in Revolutionary times— why not embrace that?” says Patterson.

They founded the market in spring 2015 and launched a CSA at the same time.

The CSA shares added a twist to the usual brown-box-of-produce model: They paired standard local crops like tomatoes and lettuce with the more boutique items grown by Plowshare and Urban Roots for the chefs. Each box was curated to strike a balance between the familiar and the unexpected. “We didn’t want people to feel like, ‘I’ve never seen any of this, I can’t make a meal of this!’” Patterson says. “But a few specialty items create a moment of surprise, create conversation, and that creates a community.”

Every week at the market, the farmers and chefs would talk with customers, introducing them to new produce varieties and answering questions. If shoppers were unsure what to do with, say, baby red cipollini onions or Grenada peppers, they could chat with chefs who had been working

with those very same items in the restaurant kitchens.

“We go nuts with these ingredients!” Patterson says. “It’s the perfect opportunity to talk to someone who’s using it that day.”

For 2016, CSA sign-ups are now open, and the Saturday farmers market will begin around Easter. CSA pickups will be on Tuesday evenings, so that members have plenty to cook with throughout the week.

When the weekend rolls around, they can visit the market to re-up on their favorites from the share and give the farmer feedback.

This year, the produce in the CSAs will be exclusively grown at Plowshare Farms.

“The farmer is literally right there, talking about his passion,” Patterson says. “You can see the entire path of the product.”

Register at plowsharefarms.com or by calling Teddy Moynihan, of Plowshare Farms, at 203979-8546. A full share is $910 ($35/week for 26 weeks) running from May 31 to November 22. A half share is $455 and runs for the first 13 weeks.

Bring our Farm Share program to your workplace this summer for convenient deliveries of farm-fresh, local food.

Contact Sarah to learn more: sarah@thecommonmarket.org or (215) 275-3435 ext. 19

www.cmfarmshare.org

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Two Gander Farm

Certified Organic Produce Grown in Downingtown, PA

Now accepting 2016 CSA Members!

Pick-up locations in Bryn Mawr, S. Philly (Pennsport), and Downingtown Sign up online!

www.twoganderfarm.com

Weekly M arket

open Saturdays from 9am-3pm

GROW YOUR OWN, AT HOME.

caterer \ bakery \ wholesale 215 964 3232

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the RIGH T QUE STION

LET’S TRASH THE IDEA OF GARBAGE Recycling is good, but it should be our last resort by jerry silberman

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uestion: How much of my household waste can I recycle, and does it decrease energy and materials use?

The Right Question: Why do I have waste, anyway?

If you are my age or older, you probably remember when beer and soda came in bottles that you had to bring back for the deposit. Milk bottles went back to the milkman, and you might have earned some pocket change by finding discarded bottles and returning them for a few cents each. In the early ’60s, big soda manufacturers realized that the cost of the bottle, and cleaning it, cost more than the soda inside it, and that profits would jump if the bottle was discarded instead of reused. Manufacturers realized that they could promote this change by advertising for its modernity and convenience of throwing an empty container away. Don’t keep track of the bottles, or worry about lugging them back to the store—just toss it!

Disposables caught on swiftly and com-

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pletely, but there was collateral damage.

Solid waste volumes spiked, costing cities money. Roadsides became de facto trash receptacles. Conservationists decried the waste of resources. The solution was recycling, which the soda industry embraced, especially since it cost them nothing, and sometimes made money for them. For other industries, recycling was always part of the business. Steel, aluminum and other metals—relatively unaffected by repeated use and amenable to reshaping without losing their properties—have always been recycled in very high percentages. In part, this is because recycling metals saves enormous amounts of energy as compared with producing them from ore. Eighty to 90 percent of steel is recycled. Paper and glass have a variety of uses, but as you get into plastic, true recycling—which involves reusing the material in a similar way to its original use or through many incarnations—gets very dicey. Most plastics have one reincarnation before they are unusable.

Every product that we use has an energy cost. Many studies have been done on the “life cycle energy costs” of different products. How much energy does it take to make a throwaway, recyclable plastic bottle for Coke (or your favorite bottled water), deliver it to the point of sale, and then reprocess it into filler for road asphalt or industrial carpet? How does that compare with a glass bottle that we washed and refilled 100 times before it became unusable, before it was melted down to cast a new bottle?

How does either compare with a drink of tap water from the sink in a glass that’s been on your shelf as long as you can remember, factoring in the cost of purifying the water and later running it through a sewage treatment plant? (Speaking of recycling, much of Philadelphia’s drinking water has been recycled up to seven times before it gets to us. Check out the displays at Fairmount Water Works!)

The slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!” entered the environmental lexicon decades IL LUSTRATIO N BY CHE LS EA MA NHEI M

ago, but it has largely been ignored. We have continued to increase consumption, and minimize reuse, while focusing on recycling. Reducing consumption clearly reduces energy use, by whatever amount would be necessary to produce (and dispose of) whatever was not used. It’s always the best choice.

Reusing generally has a linear relationship to reduction in energy consumption, since it may reduce the need for production. Reuse, which can be anything from a returnable bottle to taking your own containers to fill at the bulk bins at a grocery store, is resource and energy efficient.

The energy saving connection with recycling, however, is much more tentative.

For those materials where recycling is clearly less energy intensive than obtaining fresh supplies (steel and aluminum, for example) the industry doesn’t need public encouragement.

Little research is available on the energy cost of recycling plastic from, say, soda bottles into synthetic carpet fibers; my hunch is that it is an energy expensive process.

Recycling where there is not a clear energetic and economic incentive to do so only occurs with substantial subsidies, which include the public expense involved in collecting and in some cases sorting recyclables, and the volunteer labor of individuals who take the time to collect and sort materials in many recycling operations that depend on volunteer labor.

Recycling should be our choice of last resort, (or second to last resort, if the other choice is a landfill.) Yet there have even been programs that pay people based on the volume of material they recycle, such as the Philadelphia Streets Department’s program with Recyclebank—thus stimulating the use of disposable packaging.

Natural systems have no waste, only cycles of use as matter is continually repurposed with the help of energy arriving from the sun—energy that eventually dissipates back into space. Modern humanity has developed a concept of waste that threatens our ability to live on the planet, and that is why, among other changes, we must boycott all beverages and food products that come in single use containers.

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We are currently accepting applications.

For more information, please contact us at 215.951.2943 or by email at GradAdm@philau.edu.

Jerry Silberman is a cranky environmentalist and union negotiator who likes to ask the right question and is no stranger to compromise.

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the BIG PICTUR E

TIME TO WASTE Our housework has decreased. But our trash is piling up interview by heather shayne blakeslee

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odern products—from store-bought soap to paper plates—are a reflection of the shift from a time when handwork ruled to our age of mass manufacturing.

That change in the kind of work we do in our daily lives has also ushered in a time when cleanliness and convenience are the bright face of our culture, behind which we are hiding mountains of waste. Historian Susan Strasser, author of the book “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash” spoke with Grid about the shift in what we value.

You could say that the idea of waste is subjective: Where one person sees garbage, another sees a raw material.

SS: I think about it not so much as subjective but as culturally determined, and historically determined. … In the 19th century, people wasted astonishingly little. There was an understanding of what it took to make things. Most people, most of what they used, most of what they ate, most of what they sat on, most of what they slept on, most of what they wore, was handmade. A lot of it was handmade by themselves, or people they knew or people that they had a business relationship with.

There was an understanding of the labor that was embodied in material goods.

Modern consumers have so little connection to the products they use and consume.

We upgrade cell phones, for instance, way before we actually need them, with little thought to the materials extraction or the waste that’s generated. It’s almost the equivalent of kids not knowing that beef comes from cows.

SS: I think it’s very similar, actually. Before the end of the 19th century, people wasted virtually nothing. Clothes, for example.

The richest, richest, richest people—the women in an Edith Wharton novel—had their clothes made by Parisian couturiers, and they sent their clothes back to Paris to be remade, to be redone, to get a new collar, to get new buttons, to be brought up to fashion. But they [didn’t] give away their clothes and then buy something new.

You found that there was a big gender component to waste.

SS: I’m particularly interested in those gendered issues of work. It was certainly the case that while women were still at home, working at home—married women for the most part were not out in the workforce— this kind of reuse was part of the work that they did, and part of the way their work saved money for the household.

How did our relationship to waste change as our population shifted from rural areas to densely packed cities?

SS: It’s not just a question of rural to urban. I think it’s a question of people doing handwork to not doing handwork. …

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IL LUSTRATIO N BY KATHL E EN WHI TE

An example I really love is, I was once at a friend’s house, and she had a big pile of stuff she was giving away, and as people do sometimes I thought I’d go through it.

And there was a sweater that she really loved, and I was surprised to see it there.

And I commented, “Why are throwing this away?” and she said, “Well, there’s a hole in it.” And because I know how to knit, I said, “Well, I’ll fix it for you.” People who know how to make things often know how to repair things. …Most Americans don’t any longer have those skills. They don’t know what to do. I mean, it’s coming back in a way—the whole Etsy thing, the whole hipster thing. But it’s coming back as a niche thing. This isn’t the way the whole culture rolls. The culture rolls at H&M. I was interested to see that some of the first companies to mass market household products, like soap, include really big companies like Procter & Gamble that are still around today. What role do those companies, and marketing, play on selling us goods and products that we used to make ourselves?

SS: It plays a huge role. [But] I don’t want to turn marketers into Svengalis who can manipulate us completely. …There’s something about Homo sapiens that makes us attracted to novelty. To new things. It’s probably one of the good things about Homo sapiens. It’s one of the things that makes humans human and makes us try new things. It makes us explore. It makes us invent. [It’s not that] these companies sold us a bill of goods. They sold us stuff we thought was attractive, particularly in that it would save time and save labor and make life easier… you couldn’t run a household without one person pretty much working full time to keep it up, to keep it clean, to keep it repaired and to keep it going. …

When Procter & Gamble started selling soap… that’s vastly convenient. That’s cool.

And if it floats, well, even cooler!

It also played into the idea that there was a virtuous cycle around keeping things clean and it being convenient, and that played into creating some of the consumer culture that we have today.

SS: Truly. Absolutely. Convenience is a really fascinating concept that is about… al-

most pretending that we don’t have bodies.

That things can happen without expending any kind of effort whatsoever. It’s very attractive. You have a big party, and—even if you cook all the food yourself—do you want to wash all those dishes? Or, maybe, you use paper plates. It’s a feature of products that were promoted as something worthwhile, as something worth paying for… it saves time, it saves effort, and it promised freedom from work.

It saved on all of those things, but it certainly didn’t save on natural resources, nor does it save on the places that we choose to throw these items away. Even for products

extraction of raw materials. Pope Francis, among many other people, has derided our throwaway culture and talked about how it’s also created a class of throwaway human beings.

SS: That class of human beings has been there for a long time. And the use of that language has been in use for a long time. I think we see more public discussion of it, yes, and at the same time, the consumer culture churns out that much more stuff and that much more propaganda in the other direction.

I’m struck by how there is a lot of public discussion of all this stuff. Awareness of environmental issues overall is greater. But

“People don’t know how to live differently.

Living differently is a huge challenge. And I think it’s a challenge especially because we are still—all the time—offered this new and intriguing and wonderful stuff coming faster and faster in those cardboard boxes.” that we do need, how has packing changed over the course of the last century?

SS: First of all, not only is there stuff that didn’t used to have packing, but packing is part of the marketing niche: It’s not just something to enclose the product. It’s part of the product. So it may not seem like a big deal that every box of cereal, that a half or a third of it is for air, but then when you put all those boxes in bigger cardboard boxes, that’s a lot more cardboard that gets used, and then you put those boxes in trucks, and that’s a lot more gasoline that gets used, and a lot more pollution that gets put out by the trucks. You get these things that on the consumer level, may not even amount to that much, but when they start adding up, it’s huge.

There is a moral dimension to waste, just one of which is the deplorable conditions for workers and slaves at the point of the

T HIS EXC ER PT ED INT ERVIE W H AS BE E N E D I TE D FO R CLA R I TY

I also think that people don’t know how to live differently. Living differently is a huge challenge. And I think it’s a challenge especially because we are still—all the time—offered this new and intriguing and wonderful stuff coming faster and faster in those cardboard boxes. ... I order stuff online. I’m talking to you on an iPhone 5s, and the time will come, even if it still works, that I’ll get a new one—I’ll betcha.

I think the notion that any of us is above all this is one of those things that we have to really watch out for. Culture is very powerful in terms of shaping our desires and shaping our behavior. To live in other ways requires not only a lot of inconvenience, but also a lot of concentration—a lot of work.

Susan Strasser is a historian and the author of several books, including “Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash” and “Never Done: A History of American Housework.”

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Our city’s scrappers could help us fight toxic mines and global CO2 rise … if they can make it through the winter

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the waste issue

A scrapper offers his haul at Lombardo Iron and Metal scrapyard in West Philadelphia

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t’s below freezing and the wind blasts across a lot in Northeast Philadelphia, but Chris Little doesn’t shiver.

He’s big. Defensive-tackle big. And fast.

In a moment he’s around the back of his battle-worn Ford pickup, sorting through a pile of metal set against the wall of the garage. Every weekday he sets out to buy scrap from the city’s auto shops. Brake shoes, bumpers, alternators, anything busted beyond use. Today, he’s begun in the neighborhood of Holmesburg and plans to work his way south, ending at a metal yard in Kensington.

Across the city and outlying areas, scrappers like Little head out early, often before dawn, pushing carts or driving trucks. Rattling through the streets, they collect our discarded metal. By sunset, they’ll sell their gleanings to a metal yard.

The payoff goes beyond the cash earned by the individual scrapper. Scrap metal recycling is a salve to the wounds inflicted by our industrial age.

Every bit of copper a scrapper pulls from an old TV left on the sidewalk is one less bit of copper pulled from the earth. Scrap metal recycling staves off mines and their enormous costs in pollution, energy, and in many cases, human misery. Right now,

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however, the mines are winning.

Across the globe, mines proliferate.

They put out “virgin” metals, costly in CO2 and pollution yet cheap in dollars— so cheap that a Philadelphia scrapper can barely hang on.

The hustle and the bubble From the shop door where Little has arrived for his first stop of the day, a mechanic wearing navy blue coveralls steps out.

“This the man, right here,” he says of Little. “He’s been coming around here a long time.”

They agree on a price and Little peels a few fresh 20s from a roll. The mechanic is about to duck into the shop to make change, but Little tells him to keep it. To stay alive as a scrapper, Little needs to keep his clientele happy. He needs the shops to set aside metal with him in mind. These days, he needs every edge.

The haul in Holmesburg is good. Between this first garage and the next, Little and his cousin Mark collect a dozen rusted brake rotors, Frisbee-sized steel discs that Mark, Little’s sole crew for the day, tosses into a 50-gallon drum bolted to the cargo bed of the pickup. Better still, the first ga-

rage had two catalytic converters. The converters, which look like large canteens with a mouth at each end, keep down the toxic pollutants in an automobile’s exhaust. The “catalysts” in this conversion are the precious metals of palladium, rhodium and— best of all—platinum.

Little pays the garage $25 for each converter. The scrapyard will pay $50 or more.

Little leaves Holmesburg and heads south for Tacony. His pickup floats down Frankford Avenue, through the morning glare coming off of the shop windows. It bangs on the seams of the road. Oil grime lines the cargo bed. The tailgate, salvaged from another truck, is gold-colored and bashed in.

“This truck was nice when I got it,” Little says with a smile.

At a garage between I-95 and the rail tracks, Little and Mark get out to inspect a heap of metal pressing down a patch of long grass by a chain-link fence. Little offers the mechanic $90. A motor, a car door and a dozen rotors are in the haul. Mark bends the better part of a rusted-out exhaust system against the asphalt lot and folds it into the cargo bed. The day has shown strong start.

One morning in 1991, when Little was

a high school kid in Logan, North Philadelphia, his grandfather took him out scrapping. Little was hooked. For years afterward he rode shotgun with uncles and other scrappers, learning the trade.

“I had one other job in my life, in a nursing home,” he says, “but as soon as I got a truck, I started scrapping full time.”

Little’s trade is knowledge.

It’s a mental map of auto shops that stretches into New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. It’s an ability to improvise a day’s route. You have to stay away from the neighborhoods that are beat, find the areas no one has picked over and bend the route according to traffic. You have to slip the truck through crowded lots. You have to know the mechanic in charge, get his attention and make a deal without making it a chore. You have to keep them happy.

The trade is knowing what you’re looking at. Little is prepared to drop a grand in cash per day. It’s a gamble, and to make the gamble pay he has to know how much brass lurks inside of an engine’s housing, or that GM catalytic converters are up over Chrysler’s.

Little has to know the yards, their prices, and whether it’s worth the time and gas to cross the city to another that pays more for copper.

There’s no room for error: The margins are thin, and a bad purchase can erase the money he’s made for the day.

“It’s tight out here,” Little says. “I’ve never seen prices this low.”

Out of Tacony and into Bridesburg, Little hits a slump. At two shops in a row, no one answers. At the next, a mechanic with his hands full of keys and a 24-ounce Wawa coffee tells Little he’s got nothing. At the following shop, the garage door flies up and a wild-eyed mechanic shouts, “Naw, man, I'm scrapping my own!”

We pull into a gas station and Little drops $60 on fuel. As the digital numbers tally, Little shows his first signs of doubt.

“Man, I hope it’s a good day,” he says. “I hate coming home and telling my wife I didn’t make nothing.”

In under 20 minutes, Little weaves through Frankford, backing down alleys and squeezing through tight streets. Two rusted wheel rims join the cargo bed. As we ease out of the neighborhood, Little slows the truck. He points at a garage door.

“Right there,” he says “that was my shop.”

When scrap metal prices peaked in 2012,

Little bought a detailing shop.

“See, the sign is still up.”

C and N detailing. C is for Chris and N is for his wife. She ran the shop. “I was out here doing this. I love this.”

After the shop, he bought two water ice trucks and an auto garage. That summer, Little would ride with a four-man crew. In 2012, one man’s scrap operation had created the seed money for three businesses and almost a dozen jobs.

“For six or seven months, it was wonderful. Best summer I ever had.” Those were the flush times, “When the gettin’ was good,” as Little says.

When the gettin’ was good, China wanted metal. For a decade in which its GDP grew 10 percent each year, China wanted metal for new machinery, for consumer goods sold in the U.S. and across the world, for trains, rails and bridges, and for skyscrapers, hundreds of them shooting up

in cities from Shanghai to Shenzhen. At its peak of consumption—a bubble from 2011 to 2014—China bought almost half of the steel on the world’s market, according to the World Steel Association.

“They wanted it, and they wanted it at almost any cost,” says Barbara Reck, a metals research scientist at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. “In those 10 years [of China’s boom], the prices for raw materials skyrocketed.”

The world’s second-largest economy has since slowed. “China doesn’t want the metal like they used to,” says Chris Little. “If [prices] go any lower,” he says, “I might have to do something else.” He’s already sold the detailing shop, the water ice trucks and the auto garage. He got rid of the BMW he drove when scrap was king. He’s moved out of his house and into a one-bedroom apartment.

“Man,” he says, “I’m selling my rings.”

Up ahead the sun shines off of the El

“Man, I hope it’s a good day. I hate coming home and telling my wife I didn’t make nothing.”

— Chris Little, scrapper

Bike wheels among the other metal at the Lombardo Iron and Metal scrapyard

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A car is among the metal refuse piled at the Lombardo Iron and Metal scrapyard

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train. We pass beneath its shadow on Kensington Avenue. A pothole rustles the scrap in the cargo bed. Back in the sun, heading for Broad Street, Little reconsiders. Tax refund season is coming. Refunds bring cars into the shops, and bumpers, rotors and catalytic converters will appear on the asphalt. What’s more, he has his eye on the presidential election. “Once Donald Trump gets in there,” Little says, “he’s gonna start a war, and scrap metal will go way up.”

The slowdown in China has had a major impact on Little’s life. But at the core of the price drop lies a dirtier, more intractable problem: mines.

The mines In the years of the boom, mining companies made huge capital investments, opening mines to meet the demand. Mining, however, is a slow industry.

“The time between the idea of increasing capacity and actually getting going is a few years,” Reck says. “Some of these mines are just coming online now. Essentially, our capacity is tailored to demand by China five to 10 years ago.”

In a scramble to recoup the investment, mining companies have flooded the market with “virgin” metal, driving prices to historic lows.

Outliers aside, cheap, virgin metal will continue to shape the market, in part because many of the new mines opened in countries where labor and regulatory costs are low. Think Guinea, South Africa, Ukraine, India and China itself. Furthermore, just as a mine is hard to open, it’s tough to close.

“Once you’ve started your new mine,” Reck says, “then you need to run it for one to three decades to get your money back.”

That virgin metal may be cheap in dollars, but it’s costly in CO2 and pollution. In some places, mine workers bear an even greater cost in injury and loss of freedom.

In every metal studied, recycling presents a huge savings in energy, so says a massive 2013 report released by the United Nations Environment Programme.

The UNEP report details the obvious; collecting and melting down metal waste is leagues more efficient than opening the earth and processing rocky ore.

With an open pit mine, huge machinery and energy-dense explosives cut and blast

the earth’s surface for trucks to haul away.

Underground shaft mines, which appear surgical in comparison, require even greater energy. Consider drilling, blasting and clearing a mile-long corridor beneath the earth to convey tons of ore back to the light of day.

Whether by pit or shaft, once the rocky chunks of ore are out, they’re trucked to a grinder that can beat boulders into a grain of “liberation size” particles. To liberate pure metal from the grain, mines apply either heat or chemicals. To melt the metal from the ore requires huge amounts of fossil fuels.

To “leach” the metal out, mines may douse the ore in cyanide or sulfuric acid. Whether heated or leached, ore results in leftovers, an often toxic mix called “tailings.”

But that’s not all. There remains the cost of damage to the landscape, the destruction of ecosystems, and the occasionally radioactive and often poisonous metal dust that may have churned into the local soil and contaminated the water. Mining is an ordeal.

Then there’s the human toll.

The abuse of mine workers across the world is a long-standing target of the U.N. International Labour Organization. The ILO has detailed the lives of the more than one million children across the world who spend long hours crawling into pits and tunnels to dig and blast, to hammer in the dark, to set explosives. They handle sulfur, cyanide and mercury as they mine for tin in Indonesia, copper in Mongolia, zinc in Zambia or tungsten in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where mining

profits fuel the warring factions of a civil war. Some of these workers are born into slavery, others are forced into these inhuman conditions later in life. Still others are conned into working and will never be able to leave. From the mouth of the mine, the injustice spreads as young women and girls are pressed into a sex trade that flourishes in and around the camps.

To be sure, global recycling has witnessed abuses. Electronics recycling in India and other countries often poisons workers, many of whom are children, but unlike the ore that’s found in remote areas, away from the presence of law, schools and social services, the source of this scrap lies in our homes, stores and offices. These materials can be recycled here, and American workers who transform it back into a raw material have a far better shot at fairness and safety.

For all of its benefits, though, scrapping is not carbon neutral. Waste metal moves by way of trucks. Yards run excavators and cranes for sorting. Consumer goods such as refrigerators get broken down with power tools. The stripped remains run through shredders, chambers of grinding shafts, blades and hammers that spit out tatters of metal. Electrical currents sort out the shreds. From there, the material is smelted; some items require more work before being smelted, others, such as I-beams, go directly in.

As complex as the task may be, it hardly compares to a mine. UNEP’s report found that recycled aluminum presents a 90 to 97 percent energy savings over its mined

“Some of these mines are just coming online now... our capacity is tailored to demand

by China five to 10 years ago.”

— Barbara Reck, metals research scientist, Yale University

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counterpart. Steel, on the low end of the spectrum, presents a savings of 60 percent.

European Metal Recycling, a corporation with 150 plants across the world, estimates that every year its operations save the atmosphere from 15 million tons of CO2.

Whether the flood of virgin materials will drive down recycling rates worldwide remains to be seen. On the ground in Philadelphia, however, the decline of scrap is felt in the metal yard.

The yard

Joe Lombardo Jr., a fourth-generation recycler, stands in his scrapyard

“Metal I bought in the morning was devalued 25 percent by the end of the day. That’s how fast it was coming down.”

— Joseph Lombardo Jr., Lombardo Iron and Metal

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As Joseph Lombardo Jr. walks his metal yard at 49th Street and Lancaster Avenue, the piles of iron reach over two stories, the cinder block stalls brim with a kaleidoscope of crushed aluminum cans, and bright tangles of stripped copper wire overfill their barrels. But to Lombardo’s eye, the material is low, and he knows why.

He points to a scrapper unloading a white bed frame onto the scale. “See that? That’s light iron. He’ll get a penny a pound,” Lombardo says. Last winter’s price drop has slashed the yard’s intake. “Where a pickup might have gotten $150 a truckload, maybe he’s getting 16, 17 dollars,” Lombardo says.

“That killed off 75 percent of the business.”

Metal prices sloped downward throughout the second half of 2014. Then they dropped off a cliff. No one could see the bottom.

“A broker, whose single job is buying and selling scrap, couldn’t give you a price,” Lombardo says. “That’s how fast it was coming down.”

Another illustration: “The metal I bought in the morning was devalued 25 percent by the end of the day. That’s how fast it was coming down.”

The greatest shock for Lombardo came in January 2015. A mill Lombardo had negotiated with three days before sent out a group email to void all sales contracts.

Out on Lombardo’s yard, the ragged pyramids of a once valuable commodity were now near-worthless heaps. He could still truck it to the mill, but a container’s worth of steel might not clear the cost of the driver, gas, tolls, and wear and tear.

“I lost well over a hundred grand,” Lombardo figures, “and that’s chump change compared to a lot of other guys.”

In the past year, not much has changed.

Except the way Lombardo has come to look at his yard.

Joe Lombardo Jr. talks with one of his employees over a truck at his scrapyard

The problem is not too little metal, too few grills, radiators or I-beams. The problem is not enough of everything else.

To survive, Lombardo believes his yard must unwind its heavy dependence on metal.

A yard that can recycle an array of materials can weather the collapse of a single commodity. That’s Lombardo’s thinking, and it’s the strategy behind Revolution Recovery, a Northeast Philadelphia yard.

When a demo crew drops a container off at the Revolution Recovery lot in Tacony, 80 percent of the debris get recycled: Drywall gets pulverized, the lumber gets chipped, the rubble is crushed, and even ceiling tiles and carpet are repurposed.

The yard transforms building waste into more than 40 commodities. As with metal, some of those commodities have seen price drops, but as Revolution Recovery co-owner Avi Golen confirmed via phone, “The diversity helps.”

Lombardo is more emphatic: “You’ve got to diversify. It’s the future.” His inspiration for a diversified yard, however, came from the past. Specifically, his grandfather. “He

recycled everything,” Lombardo says.

James F. Lombardo came to Philadelphia from Italy and got a job working at the Navy Yard as a crane operator. From his perch in the crane, he saw men collecting rags, cardboard and bits of metal, Joe says. James opened his first yard at Second Street and Moyamensing Avenue. From the time Joe was a child he remembers the cranes swinging their “clam buckets,” metal piled up high, the noise, the commotion and the buzz of deals being made.

Joe grew up, as he says, “hanging off the back of a garbage truck.”

In 2011, he bought his own metal yard.

The deal was good, but without any cash to spare, Lombardo still needed a truck. A yard that can’t haul can’t sell to a mill, so his wife sent him out with her credit cards.

Both cards at their limit bought a 26-foot roll off truck and a couple of containers.

“I’m telling you, it had a million mechanical problems,” Lombardo says. “I spent all day and all night wrenching on this truck to get it up on the road.”

It was a rocky start, but help arrived in the form of favors from friends Joe’s grand-

father had made in the industry. “People came out of the woodwork to help,” he says.

“Guys kept telling me, ‘I’m doing this for your grandfather. He was a hell of a man,’” Lombardo says. “I did a lot of visiting at the cemetery to thank him, believe me.”

Running a metal yard through the present collapse has been a struggle, but Lombardo insists: “I wouldn’t change a minute of it.”

His dedication, born from a family connection and years spent in the game, jibes with that of Chris Little.

“I love scrapping,” Little said. “It’s been in my family for years. All my uncles, my cousins, all my family scraps. But me, I’ve committed to it.”

As Little and Lombardo see it, they have to endure. Little will endure the days when he comes home with nothing. He’ll grit his teeth when his fingers are mashed by metal in the cold. Lombardo will walk his yard.

He’ll check that his scales are true and his contracts sound. He’ll make sure the metal is clean.

As Little says, “It’s got to get better out here.”

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SECOND HARVEST Where others see waste, local gleaning programs see food for those in need by marilyn anthony

A Drexel student in professor Eva Thury’s “Gleaning, Food Security and Agriculture” course, gleaning eggplants

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onika Crosby, a “true blue farmer’s daughter,” does not grow vegetables. Employing what she calls “picking with a cause,” Crosby runs Philabundance’s gleaning program, coordinating volunteer vegetable harvests at three commercial farms in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Since 2014, Philabundance has redirected 760,000 pounds of produce to low-income families.

Dating back to ancient times, wealthy landowners permitted the poor to retrieve any post-harvest edibles left in the fields.

Today’s gleaners are more likely to be volunteers assisting nonprofits or school and church groups. These organizations partner with growers who allow volunteers to harvest excess food that would otherwise have rotted in fields. In Philadelphia, gleaning is being reimagined as a way to capture farm waste, chicken bones and even urban tree fruit.

There’s a staggering amount of waste to reclaim or redirect. Annually, Americans throw out 30 to 40 percent of all food produced. According to a 2012 Natural Resources Defense Council report that put the number at 40 percent, that’s more than 20 pounds of food per person each month. It’s mostly vegetables and fruits— the same kind of food that is unaffordable for the one in six Americans whom policy makers label “food insecure.” In layman’s terms, it means that many of our neighbors don’t know where their next meal may come from.

According to Executive Director Glenn Bergman, Philabundance runs the largest gleaning program in the Greater Philadelphia region, but it’s a misconception to think this food is free.

“You can purchase food more cheaply on the market than by gleaning,” he says.

“The issue is, there’s food to be gotten… (and) we have a system for getting food to the people that need it.”

Still under development is another system to redirect food. Rooster Soup Company, a restaurant venture by Federal Donuts

“Thinking in terms of waste and not letting waste dominate us is a much more powerful aspect of gleaning.”

— Eva Thury, professor, Drexel University

and Broad Street Ministry, plans to glean chicken bones and backs generated by Federal Donuts to make soups, salads and other menu items. One hundred percent of the profits will fight hunger through the Broad Street Ministry Hospitality Collaborative.

Gleaners for the Philadelphia Orchard Project (POP), launched by Program Director Robyn Mello in 2014, harvest fruits from city street trees. The yields aren’t high enough to be donated to a food program, so volunteers keep as much as they want, learn about ways to use it, and keep the streets free of rotting fruit. Molly Haendler’s Spruce Hill Preserves receives

some of POP’s juneberry and crabapple gleanings to convert into jelly, which is then sold for POP fundraising.

As valuable as these efforts are, local gleaning programs provide only a minuscule amount of the food needed by the poor.

But advocates such as Drexel University professor Eva Thury see additional benefits to gleaning.

Inspired by Agnès Varda’s documentary, “The Gleaners and I,” Thury led a 2014–15 course titled “Gleaning, Food Security and Agriculture.” The course united Drexel students and neighbors to learn about the food system and included gleaning with Phila-

bundance. Drexel students may have kept a gleaned eggplant or two, but neighborhood participants showed up with large containers, eager to enjoy the fresh vegetables.

Standing in the hot sun harvesting together helped Thury’s students to see food access as a human problem—not as a statistic.

“Thinking in terms of waste and not letting waste dominate us is a much more powerful aspect of gleaning—it teaches us something about how to approach the world,” says Thury. “That’s the underlying spirit I get from gleaning—the community working together to spread what we have much further.”

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the waste issue

LEFTOVERS A day in the life of a dumpster diver exposes America’s food waste problem by justin klugh

O

n a cold night in Philadelphia, Jane grabs her box cutter and flashlight, a fistful of plastic bags and a container of baby wipes. “I take a step ladder for if I fall and can’t get out once I get in,” she says. “I usually don’t ever go by myself—that’s really important.”

After that, it’s just a matter of waiting for the stores to close. Then it’s time to go shopping.

Jane (not her real name) is a young dumpster diving transplant who has lived in Philadelphia for less than a year. She

ILLUSTRAT IO N BY KAT H L E E N W H I TE

appears to be in her 20s, but wouldn’t say more about where she lives or how she gets by, other than that she retrieves about half of her weekly foodstuffs from dumpsters.

She’s frustrated by the volume of food waste that plagues the United States. A September 2015 USDA report put it at 133 billion pounds per year—or 31 percent of the overall consumer food supply.

“We’re used to food being this picture-perfect thing. In other countries it’s definitely not like that,” she explains.

Dumpster diving is legal in the United

States except where prohibited by local regulation. If there is nothing to deter a diver—a lock, a sign, etc.—then dive in.

Jane shows concern for those who dumpster dive not as a choice, but out of necessity.

“I come from a middle class background—I didn’t grow up in poverty,” she says. “If [other divers] are needing it more than I am, I don’t want to get into their territory. If you’re poor and you need to survive, you do what it takes. It’s not something that’s exciting or fun.”

In Jane’s hometown, she was getting all of her food from dumpsters from two regular hunting grounds. At the moment, she is using her experience to scan Philadelphia for top spots.

“If you go to the supermarket, you might find any kind of stuff—produce, bread, doughnuts. It also depends on what is getting thrown out that day. The majority of what I keep is produce,” she says, though there is no guaranteed bounty on any given night.

As a former grocery store employee, she has seen businesses refuse to let employees take home expiring groceries, while also being scared of donating edible food for fear of being made liable for it.

“Say we get… five new gallons of milk and there’s one gallon left on the shelf,” she explains. “We’re gonna throw out that one gallon. It results in a lot of waste.”

Locked dumpsters and bleach-covered pizzas are some of the countermeasures she’s seen taken to repel divers from a food source. While she looks for anything useful, those in the most dire situations are just looking for produce, crackers and dry goods—things they can eat without preparation.

“Ninety percent of the time, people don’t want to leave a mess,” Jane explains. “They don’t want anyone to know that they did it and they don’t want to ruin their chances of coming back. But it’s great if workers are aware they’re going to be throwing out food and leave it where it can be accessed.”

She encourages businesses to donate to grassroots organizations, nonprofits, and food pantries—France just became the first country to declare it illegal for supermarkets to throw out edible food; donations are now required. More than anything, Jane pleads, “Look at that food. You’re throwing it out, and someone could be eating it.”

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how it works:

Plants produce vegetable oil used in restaurants

Waste vegetable oil is collected and purified

Cars release CO2, which is absorbed by plants

Biodiesel is sold to consumers

Chemical reactions separate biodiesel from glycerol

Biodiesel is polished by proprietary processes

OIL CHANGE

Neighborhood pubs like Memphis Taproom are recycling more than beer bottles

F

by matt bevilacqua

or many people, excess cooking oil is something to pour down the drain after preparing a meal.

But at Leigh Maida’s restaurants, all that greasy liquid has another destination: gas tanks, where it will power cars rather than block sewer pipes.

“You have to do something with the used oil,” says Maida, one of the owners behind a quintet of well-regarded Philadelphia eateries. “That it’s possible to give it to anyone who will do something with it seems [like] a lucky break to me.”

The chefs at each of her restaurants— Memphis Taproom, Strangelove’s, Local 44, Clarkville and Coeur—gather their used cooking oil in 55-gallon drums, which they place outside a few times a week. Then trucks bearing the name Waste Oil Recyclers pick it up, after which it will, eventually, become fuel.

“Our cooking oil gets processed and then basically sold to a biodiesel refinery,” explains Brendan Steer, director of sales and co-owner at Waste Oil Recyclers.

The Modena, Pennsylvania-based com-

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pany started in 2006 with “a credit card and a van,” Steer says. Today, its fleet of 12 trucks operates from Atlantic City to Harrisburg and from Baltimore to Scranton. (The company also seeks to expand to Southern Delaware and east to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.) Waste Oil Recyclers customers include restaurants, universities, hospitals and most of the stadiums in the South Philadelphia Sports Complex.

“Really, anyone who fries food,” says Brenda McNeil, director of marketing.

The use of biofuel goes back to ancient times, and vegetable oil has taken turns powering streetlamps in the 1700s and diesel engines in the 1920s, according to the 2013 book “Biofuel Crops: Production, Physiology and Genetics.” Petroleum became king in the mid-20th century, but the volatility of the global crude oil market has led countries to turn back to biofuel over the last dozen years.

Nationally, the practice has grown in an explosive way. According to a January report from the market research firm IBISWorld, cooking oil recycling is a $2 billion

a year industry with almost 400 businesses employing more than 4,000 people in the U.S. The market grew by 5.8 percent annually between 2010 and 2015 and is projected to continue growing through the end of the decade—thanks in no small part to the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard program, which requires a certain share of transportation fuel sold in the country to be renewable.

A handful of massive companies, such as Darling International and Baker Commodities, dominate the industry. But Steer says that Waste Oil Recyclers cornered the Southeastern Pennsylvania market precisely because it maintained a local scope.

“We were a smaller, more nimble company that focused on service and hammered home our promise of the oil being recycled into domestically produced renewable fuels,” he says.

For Maida, who became a customer in 2008, getting in on the trend seemed like a no-brainer. “We almost never have to think about the oil being taken away,” she says.

“It’s a pretty easy way to be green.”

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h e a lt h y h o m e s

A HEALTHY HOME STARTS WITH GETTING RID OF DIRT, POLLUTANTS AND MOLD by anna herman illustrations by mike l. perry

T

he typical shoe carries more bacteria than a toilet seat. If avoiding tracking unhealthy germs and pollutants into your home isn’t incentive enough to free your feet when you walk in the door, just think about how much less cleaning you’ll have to do on a weekly basis.

A clean home, according to one study by Indiana University, was one of the biggest indicators of how active and healthy a person is. Regular cleaning can also extend the life of your fixtures and furnishings, and can save you money with the investment of just a little elbow grease. And remember, energetic cleaning burns calories!

Most of us no longer rely on smoky wood fires to heat our homes, or sooty candles to light the dark night, but modernity has given us plenty of other pollutants to worry about. You may hate scrubbing the tub, but at least one study has shown that they carry more staphylococcus bacteria, a cause of serious skin conditions, than garbage cans.

Health-damaging critters are all over our homes, and our greatest defense is to kick them out.

It’s time to make a plan of attack for spring cleaning.

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h e a lt h y h o m e s

THE BEDROOM

Y

ou spend a full one-third of your life in bed. Much of that time is spent drooling, sweating, sloughing skin and hair and otherwise offering up food to miscellaneous molds, bacteria and bugs. There are tens of thousands of dust mites in the average bed, which, if you are prone to allergies, should be addressed often. Everyone should wash pillows, comforters, blankets and bed trimmings at least annually. Yes, pillows can, and should, go in the washing machine and dryer. Mattresses are now generally constructed such that they don’t need flipping. If your mattress has padding on one side, that side stays up. Most experts agree that mattresses should be rotated, end-to-end, once per season—especially if bed mates are uneven in weight, or if you sleep alone, so the mattress wears evenly over its lifetime. While you are taking the trouble to rotate your mattress, take a bit of extra time to wipe down and vacuum bed frames, headboards and under the bed.

Consider enclosing your mattress and pillowcase with washable covers. This will protect you from allergens and can be removed if stained to protect the mattress.

Start this season with some bedbug prevention methods in place—mattress covers and bedbug interceptors are inexpensive ways to reduce the risk of sleeping with this increasingly common pest.

Bedroom carpets and drapes may not get the full brunt of winter salt and snow or spring mud, but are nonetheless a reservoir of dust and dirt. Modern vacuums are generally sufficient to remove most particulates, but it is quite satisfying to shake and/or beat a carpet outside. Hung over a clothesline or porch rail, even a freshly vacuumed carpet will emit clouds of dust and dirt when whacked with a broom. Picking up the carpets also provides a great opportunity to sweep and mop the floor beneath.

Bedroom shades and drapery should be removed and cleaned—soap and water, a run through the washing machine, or a good shake outside, depending on the material. Fabric curtains and drapes may need professional attention.

Improve your view by washing your

windows and screens. Cleaning outside windows on upper floors is a job for professionals, but it is worth doing every year or two. You can take on the inside of bedroom windows with simple homemade vinegar-based glass cleaner.

All old houses were once painted with lead-based paints. Most homes have this old paint safely encapsulated by later layerings of new paint. The one spot in many homes that is still a source of lead paint dust is inside window frames, where there is friction from the opening and closing of windows. Especially if you have young children at home, wash inside all window frames and sills that you open and close regularly with cleanser formulated to hold or neutralize lead. Keep the possibility of lead dust in mind when contracting for painters and other spring home repairs.

Clean all light fixtures inside and out.

Wipe down the blades of the ceiling fan.

While you are looking up, take a dust mop with damp microfiber and get the cobwebs in corners and above window frames.

You will have earned a good night’s sleep.

VENTS AND FILTERS Does your refrigerator have a water filter? Your coffee machine? Is there one under your sink? Does your furnace have a filter? Does your air conditioner have replaceable or washable filters?

Set your calendar with periodic reminders of the various filters in your home.

Check all your filters and replace or wash them regularly. Clogged air filters use more energy to circulate air, and both air and water filters may actually add particulates back into the system if they are too full.

Dryer vents fill with lint and should be cleaned annually. Why not now? This is a sure way to easily prevent the surprisingly common—and devastating—dryer vent fires.

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h e a lt h y h o m e s

T H E B AT H R O O M

I

t’s a small room. Take an hour and empty your bathroom and scrub down every surface. Expired medicines should be disposed of in household trash. Put pills and capsules into a sealed bag containing used coffee grounds or cat litter—it makes them less appealing to anyone who might find them—and recycle the bottles. Do not flush medicine down the toilet; pharmaceuticals should stay out of our rivers.

Now get yourself a jar of inexpensive white vinegar and get busy. Add a cup or two to your toilet bowl and let sit for at least 15 minutes before scrubbing to remove mineral deposits and buildup. Use a splash of vinegar on a rag to sanitize and clean the seat and bowl and water tank.

Clean shower heads that have been clogged with mineral deposits with undiluted white vinegar. Place 1/4 to 1/2 cup vinegar in a plastic food storage bag, and 48

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secure the bag to the shower head with a rubber band. Let stand for two hours to overnight, then rinse and buff the fixture to a shiny finish. Remove and replace or wash shower curtains (a spray bottle filled with vinegar and water works well here).

Examine tiles and grout for signs of mold or mildew and tackle this with—yes—more white vinegar and a toothbrush. Rinse well with hot water.

Sink fixtures will shine and sparkle with some rubbing with a damp white vinegar rag. Pour remaining vinegar down the drains of the sink and tub, following in 15 minutes with boiling water to clear all loosened gunk.

Wet a few balled sheets of newspaper and use them to wipe down the mirror and windows. Then open a window for a few minutes to air out the vinegar smell, which lingers so briefly.

Mattresses ✦ Bedding ✦ Accessories

Sleep healthy with a

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h e a lt h y h o m e s

T H E K I TC H E N

S

inks and faucets take daily abuse and deserve some TLC. If you have a garbage disposal, give the ice cleaning trick a try. Turn on cold water, and, in the garbage disposal, add two to three trays of ice cubes, which will freeze and solidify gunk, allowing the blades to chop and wash away the remains. Add a half lemon or two once the ice cubes are ground, and your garbage disposal will be clean and smell fresh.

Mineral deposits will likely build up in the faucet aerator and spray attachments.

Aerators can usually be removed and soaked for 15 minutes in white vinegar and then scrubbed if needed with a toothbrush, 50

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rather than being replaced. Spray attachment heads can be placed in a bowl of vinegar and then used with very hot water to flush out bacterial buildup and grime.

The condensing coils in your fridge need regular cleaning to perform efficiently. Unplug your fridge, and unhook the water line to the ice maker, if there is one. Slide the fridge out from the wall if the coils are in the rear and brush or vacuum accumulated dust. Newer models often have coils tucked in underneath, so consult your owner’s guide or website for coil access info for your specific model.

While you are in the kitchen, wipe down inside your oven with baking soda and wa-

ter. Empty out the food pantry and get rid of—donate or compost—food you will never actually eat. Toss spices that are more than a year old.

Kitchen trash and recycling bins are best cleaned outside on a sunny day. Use mild dish detergent and hot water for sticky residue and/or white vinegar for disinfection and odor removal.

Once you get started, you will find more nooks and crannies to wipe down and tidy up. Give yourself a break. Open one of your clean windows, knowing a few chores are complete, and enjoy the warm breeze with a cold beer. There are more weeks of spring and always more chores.

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HOM E STEAD ACT S

CLEAN SLATE Dump the toxic products for a healthier home by anna herman

E

very product you use in your home affects the quality of the air you breathe, the water quality downstream of your drain, and has had some manufacturing, packaging and distribution impact in communities of humans along the way. Switch some of your day-to-day cleaning supplies to ones made from pantry ingredients, and limit your environmental impact without sacrificing fresh, clean surfaces.

Baking soda is mildly abrasive and has natural deodorizing properties, which makes it a powerful ally and a replacement for harsher scouring powders and chemical deodorizers. Sprinkle baking soda onto a damp sponge to clean sinks or grimy bathtubs. Make a paste of baking soda and water to tackle the tougher crud left behind on the stovetop or inside the oven. If you didn’t grow up with an open

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box of baking soda tucked into the back of the fridge and freezer to absorb odors, make sure your kids do.

Mildly acidic white vinegar will dissolve dirt, soap residue and hard water deposits from smooth surfaces, yet is gentle enough, mixed with water, to clean hardwood flooring. Diluted it is the simplest of all-purpose cleansers. Use it full strength with a balledup newspaper for streak-free windows.

White vinegar is a natural deodorizer that absorbs odors instead of covering them up. The vinegar smell dissipates quickly, and if mixed with an essential oil such as lemon, sweet orange or lavender, it will leave a fresh scent behind.

Lemon is also a potent deodorizer. Cut a lemon into halves and rub the cut surface on wooden cutting boards or counters to both clean and neutralize onion and garlic smells. Rinse with warm water. Lem-

on juice and olive oil is great for all your wood counters and furniture. Throw the half lemon into your garbage disposal to freshen and clean the blades.

If you aren’t going to make your own products, look for the least toxic product that will do the job. Many retailers and coops carry excellent nontoxic cleaning supplies, and the best even have product refill stations to eliminate the need to buy a new plastic bottle.

All of us need some references on how to clean specialty surfaces or materials throughout our homes—especially stains and spills such as wine, blood and melted wax. The Web has many resources—and contradictory advice. A go-to guide at our house is the 1999 book by Cheryl Mendelson, “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.” After all, there is no place like (a clean) home.

HOM E STEAD ACT S

All-Natural Cleaning Recipes Wood Furniture Dusting, Cleaning & Polish

Basic Spray Cleaner

Spray Cleaner for Greasy Surfaces:

yy 2 cups water yy 1 cup olive or jojoba oil

yy 1 cup white vinegar

yy 2 cups water

yy 3 tablespoons lemon juice

yy Optional: up to 25 drops essential oil of

yy 1 cup vinegar or 1/2 cup lemon juice

your choice (e.g., lemon, lavender, basil,

yy 1 teaspoon natural dish soap such as

sweet orange, peppermint, tea tree)

Ecover or Dr. Bronner’s

Mix in a spray bottle. Spritz and wipe as needed.

Mix in a spray bottle. Spray and wipe down with a damp cloth as needed.

Mix in a bowl or jar. Use a lint-free cloth to rub the lemon oil sparingly and evenly on wood surfaces to renew and clean.

Bath & Shower Cleaner yy Baking Soda Sprinkle 1 to 2 teaspoons on a damp sponge and wipe. Rinse with warm water. For old crud and soap scum, mix baking soda with very warm water until it forms a thin paste.

Using a damp sponge, spread the paste over the surfaces. Let sit for 5 to 10 minutes.

Wipe down with water. For moldy surfaces, wipe down the paste with full-strength white vinegar and then warm water.

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PLAN THE

PERFECT WEDDING

A Rustic Wedding in Philadelphia

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MAR KET WATCH

SPRING ALLIUMS Add flavor to your food with spring garlic and green onions by peggy paul casella

T

hese adolescent stalks are the first signs of green at the market—culled from farmers’ fields to make room for bulbs from remaining garlic and onion plants to swell underground.

They are less pungent than their mature counterparts, with zingy, front-of-themouth flavors. And their svelte bulbs and leaves add just the right amount of crunch and Allium flavor to all sorts of spring dishes. In April and May, you might notice that the spring garlic and green onions sold at the farmers market have more pronounced bulbs than the first bunches of the season. These will be slightly more intense in flavor but can be used in the same way as their younger counterparts.

Choose stalks that are firm, straight as arrows and brightly colored. To store, wrap the roots with damp paper towels and place the whole bunch in a plastic bag in your refrigerator’s crisper drawer; they will keep this way for about one week.

Uses: Slice thin and add them raw to salads or as a garnish to other dishes.

Trim off the roots and roast or grill them whole. Braise them with butter and white wine. Bake them into tarts, quiches, frittatas, pancakes, biscuits and scones. Add them to omelets and scrambles, soups, dumplings, fish and crab cakes, stir fries and pizzas.

Mediterranean Spring Pizza Makes one 12-inch pizza

Ingredients yy 4 stalks spring garlic, roots and all but 1

yy 1 tablespoon lemon zest

inch of the darker green parts trimmed off

yy 1 (14- to 16-ounce) ball pizza dough

yy 2 green or spring onions, roots and

yy Extra-virgin olive oil

all but 1 inch of the darker green parts

yy 1 cup crumbled feta cheese

trimmed off

yy 3 tablespoons heavy cream

yy 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes packed in

yy Salt and freshly ground black pepper

oil, chopped

yy 1 tablespoon chopped fresh mint

Directions 1.

Place pizza stone/steel (if using) on an oven rack about 8 inches from the broiler. If you plan to use a baking sheet instead, place a rack in the middle of the oven (you do not need to preheat the baking sheet). Preheat the oven to 500 F.

2.

Slice each spring garlic stalk in half lengthwise and separate the layers into long, thin strands. Slice the spring onions in half lengthwise, then slice the halves so they are approximately the same width as the spring garlic strands. In a small bowl, toss together the sun-dried tomatoes and lemon zest.

3.

Place the dough on a floured work surface. Gently stretch or roll the dough into a 12-inch disc. Using a pizza stone or steel: Dust a pizza peel or the back of a baking sheet generously with flour or cornmeal. Place the dough on the prepared peel. Using a baking sheet: Spray the baking sheet with cooking spray. Place the dough on the prepared baking sheet.

4.

Brush the dough lightly with olive oil. Add half the cheese, followed by the sundried tomatoes and spring garlic and onions. Drizzle with the cream and sprinkle on the rest of the cheese. Season with salt and pepper.

5.

If using a pizza stone or steel, increase the oven heat to broil. Slide the pizza from the peel (or inverted baking sheet) to the hot stone/steel and broil for 5 to 7 minutes until the crust is crispy and blistered on top. If using a baking sheet, do not increase the oven to broil. Transfer the pizza to the oven and bake for about 10 minutes, until the crust is crispy and blistered on top.

6.

Let cool for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with the mint. Slice and serve.

Peggy Paul Casella is a cookbook editor, writer, urban vegetable gardener, produce peddler and author of the blog Thursday Night Pizza.

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EVENT S

3/2/2016 The New Front Yard This class at Mt. Cuba Center will give students the knowledge to move beyond generic foundation plantings of Japanese barberry, burning bush and Bradford pear.

Substitute these invasive plants with native trees, shrubs and perennials that feature multi-seasonal interest, support songbirds and provide wildlife habitat. mtcubacenter.org WHEN: 1 to 3 p.m. COST: $30 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

3/3/2016 Slow Down and Save Water: Rain Barrel Workshop Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed offers this informative workshop on rain barrels, which catch water from your roof to save for later reuse. RSVP to Alex Cooper: cooper@ttfwatershed.org or 215-744-1853. ttfwatershed.org WHEN: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Glenside Free Library, 215 S. Keswick Ave., Glenside, Pa.

Beer Tasting with Woman-Owned Breweries Enjoy a tasting and conversation with some of the most prominent women in the beer scene. Moderated by brewing consultant Suzanne O'Brien, the panel will feature owners of Stoudt Brewing Co., Devil’s Den, Home Sweet Homebrew, and Saint Benjamin Brewing Company. Light snacks will be included to complement the beer selection. newcenturytrust.org WHEN: 6 to 8:30 p.m. COST: $15 WHERE: New Century Trust, 1307 Locust St.

philadelphia f low e r s h ow m a r c h 5 t h r o u g h 13

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Flower Show theme, “Explore America,” will take visitors through acres of displays inspired by iconic parks such as Acadia and Cape Cod, Valley Forge and Shenandoah, Yellow-

3/4/2016

stone and Yosemite. Many of these and other parks and historic sites were created by the nation’s premier floral

Sixth Annual DVGBC Tri-State Sustainability Symposium This event features more than 100 speakers and includes 21 hour-long educational sessions covering green building topics that include energy efficiency, occupant health and wellness, corporate sustainability, resilient communities, green building policies, codes, rating systems and standards, and green schools. dvgbc.org WHEN: 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. COST: $50 for members; $60 for nonmembers; $30 for employees of nonprofit/government/education; $10 for students with ID WHERE: Temple University Howard Gittis Student Center, 1755 N. 13th St.

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and garden designers. Runs March 5 through 13.

WHEN: 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

COST: Adults $27; students $20; children $15 WHERE: Pennsylvania Convention Center, 12th and Arch streets

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3/5/2016

From Tree to Table: Maple Sugaring

Annual Sapsucker Festival Explore the world of maple sugar on the historic grounds with tree tapping demonstrations, sample stations, kids’ games and crafts, and live owl presentations throughout the day. Learn how birds like the yellow-bellied sapsucker rely on Pennsylvania’s forests for food sources.

Visit Tacony Creek Park to “tap” a tree and watch maple syrup being made, learn about the process, then pour it on a waffle for a taste test. For adults and children ages 5 and up. ttfwatershed.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Tacony Creek Park, I Street and Ramona Avenue

johnjames.audubon.org

Beginner’s Beekeeping

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove, 1201 Pawlings Road, Audubon, Pa.

Cranaleith Spiritual Center offers this class for those interested in learning the basics of beekeeping. Topics will include the current state of beekeeping, honey bee biology, colony structure, hive management basics, and bee diseases and treatment. cranaleith.org

A Guide’s View Lecture Series The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides presents its sixth annual lecture series on the city. Experts at this event will speak on subjects including architecture, early U.S. government and Native American history. Continues through March 13. phillyguides.org WHEN: 9 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. COST: $225 WHERE: Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides, 702 N. Third St., #802

Yarn Along at Morris Arboretum Crocheters and knitters are invited to join in and whip up an original piece of needlework artistry to be incorporated into the upcoming yarnbombing installation, “Wrapped Up.” Artist Melissa Haims will be on hand to facilitate the session. morrisarboretum.org WHEN: 1 to 4 p.m. COST: Free with admission WHERE: Morris Arboretum, 100 E. Northwestern Ave.

Repair Fair, Philly Fixers Guild Stop by with your damaged/broken/malfunctioning possessions and learn to fix them. You’ll sit down with skilled fixers and get guidance on mending, troubleshooting and repairing your item yourself. Bring anything: clothing, appliances, furniture, computers, etc. phillyfixersguild.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Philadelphia Sculpture Gym, 1834 Frankford Ave.

Introduction to Botanical Art Learn to draw plants using pen and pencil in this introductory class at Mt. Cuba Center, the first in a series of three. Carefully observe the subject and understand form and structure. Practice sighting skills to place the subject in a way that is both pleasing and exciting. mtcubacenter.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. COST: $180 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

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WHEN: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. COST: $75 WHERE: Cranaleith Spiritual Center, 13475 Proctor Road

Organic Gardening Ron Kushner, master gardener and experienced organic vegetable grower, will teach you how to apply organic methods to your home garden. Learn the basics of soil amending, controlling insects and disease, and increasing your harvest. primexgardencenter.com WHEN: 10 to 11 a.m. COST: $10 WHERE: Primex Garden Center, 435 W. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa.

Companion Planting Primex Garden Center will guide you through companion plant selection that will help you naturally deter harmful insects, increase fertility and attract beneficial insects to your garden. Learn how plant diversity contributes to a healthy environment. primexgardencenter.com WHEN: Noon to 1 p.m. COST: $10 WHERE: Primex Garden Center, 435 W. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa.

Exploring 'Cold Mountain': Behind the Scenes of William Bartram's 'Travels' The hero of Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” relies on a tattered copy of William Bartram’s “Travels” during his arduous trek through war-torn Appalachia. Dig into a fresh perspective on the adventure by exploring the real stories behind “Travels.”

Bartram’s influential and idiosyncratic travel memoir was a bestseller in the 18th century, not only for its vivid descriptions of Cherokee country but also for its more colorful claims (fire-breathing alligators, anyone?). Refreshments provided. bartramsgarden.org WHEN: 2:30 to 4 p.m. COST: Free for members; $15 for nonmembers WHERE: Bartram's Garden, 5400 Lindbergh Blvd.

Paleopalooza Every year, the Academy of Natural Sciences celebrates all things prehistoric during Paleopalooza, a two-day festival of fossils.

They offer new and exciting activities along with their ongoing attractions and exhibits. ansp.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. COST: $14.95 to $18.95 WHERE: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.

3/6/2016 Sensory-Friendly Sunday: Terrific Trains Families, adults and groups with members on the autism spectrum, as well as other differing needs, are welcome to enjoy the Franklin Institute in their own way and at their own pace, accompanied by a trainthemed activity for the morning. fi.edu

Seed Starting Demo at Greensgrow Farms

WHEN: 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. COST: Adults $12.50; children $9.50 WHERE: The Franklin Institute, 222 N. 20th St.

Staff from Greensgrow Farms will demonstrate how to start a tray of seeds and discuss what to choose for your location, planning and planting times, soil selection and temperature, and watering for success.

Participants will be instructed on how to identify leaf sets and true leaves, when to transplant and how to harden off starts. The session will touch on nutrients, feeding, compost and vermiculture. Everyone will get a handout of Greensgrow’s planting calendar with recommended seed varieties for the region. greensgrow.org

Kids Cooking: Veggie Triple Play

WHEN: Noon to 1 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Greensgrow Farms, 2501 E. Cumberland St.

Carrots take the starring role in soup, salad and cupcakes during this class for kids ages 8 to 14. Come learn how this humble root vegetable works in both sweet and savory dishes. hungryeducation.com WHEN: 3 to 4:30 p.m. COST: $32.50 WHERE: Mishkan Shalom, 4101 Freeland Ave.

EVENT S

3/8/2016 Attracting Bluebirds Betsy Nutt, Penn State master gardener and member of the Bluebird Society of Pennsylvania speaker’s bureau, will give a talk on the history, biology, habitat and protection of the bluebird. Hear a discussion about nesting boxes and learn to build them with take-home woodworking plans. Light refreshments provided. Registration required. wvwa.org WHEN: 7 to 8:30 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association, 12 Morris Road, Ambler, Pa.

Sustainability Film Series: ‘Surviving Progress’ Come when the doors open to visit the Sustainability Expo, and stay afterward for a panel discussion on this persuasive, engaging feature that connects the most recent financial collapse with growing social inequity, technology and sustainability. amblertheater.org/pennypack

Raised Garden Beds

Philly Co-op Happy Hour

Join the second in a series of four homeowners’ classes presented by Rutgers Master Gardeners of Camden County. Learn how to construct and successfully garden in a raised bed. Mark Wellner, master gardener from the class of 2010, will be the speaker.

Pre-registration is suggested.

Cooperators from all over the region gather for a fun, casual happy hour at W/N W/N Coffee Bar, a worker-owned co-op. If you're curious about co-ops, this event can be an introduction to members, staff and general enthusiasts. philadelphia.coop/events

camden.njaes.rutgers.edu/garden WHEN: 7 to 8 p.m. COST: $10 per household WHERE: Camden County Parks Environmental Center, 1301 Park Blvd., Cherry Hill, N.J.

3/10/2016 Land Ethics Symposium This daylong event for landscape professionals at Delaware Valley University focuses on creating low-maintenance, economical and ecologically balanced landscapes that use native plants and restoration techniques. Continuing education credits are available. bhwp.org

WHEN: 6 to 9:30 p.m. COST: $10 WHERE: Ambler Theater, 108 E. Butler Ave., Ambler, Pa.

WHEN: 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. COST: $99 to $179 WHERE: Life Sciences Building, Delaware Valley University, 700 E. Butler Ave., Doylestown, Pa.

3/9/2016

Local Solutions to Global Challenges

Enhancing Life in the Soil Study the basics of soil science, the value of organic matter—and its role in soil structure—and the importance of soil organisms. Learn how to make and use compost, and how sustainable gardening practices contribute to creating high-quality garden soil. This is the first of four weekly sessions. mtcubacenter.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. COST: $240 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

The agreement made at the U.N. climate conference is a big step to curb climate change, but there is much to be done to translate it into concrete action. Sustainable Cherry Hill explores this global challenge with local climate activists. sustainablecherryhill.org WHEN: 6:45 to 9 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Cherry Hill Public Library, 1100 Kings Highway North, Cherry Hill, N.J.

WHEN: 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: W/N W/N Coffee Bar, 931 Spring Garden St.

3/12/2016 Ricotta Lunch Class In this hands-on class, you’ll watch sideby-side demonstrations on making ricotta using different coagulants. Then, using the cheese made in class, you’ll create a savory lasagna lunch with a sweet ricotta dessert. shopcherrygrovefarm.com WHEN: 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. COST: $70 WHERE: Cherry Grove Farm, 3200 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrence Township, N.J.

Backyard Chickens Learn to raise a backyard flock. Find out how to choose the right chicks, set up a coop and keep your hens happy and healthy year-round. Primex Garden Center will be selling chicks this spring, so this is the perfect starter course for your new flock. primexgardencenter.com WHEN: 10 to 11 a.m. COST: $10 WHERE: Primex Garden Center, 435 W. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa.

Services and Support for Kids Children’s Community School is offering a public workshop for families to learn more about how to access services and support for kids throughout the city. childrenscommunityschool.org WHEN: 3:30 to 4:30 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Children’s Community School, 1212 S. 47th St.

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EVENT S Indoor Seed Starting and Spring Turf Renovation Learn how to start your garden from seed this year. Gloria Foran, Primex Garden Center’s own propagation expert, will discuss seed selection, planning and timing, along with steps for growing healthy vegetable and flower seedlings. primexgardencenter.com WHEN: 1 to 2 p.m. COST: $10 WHERE: Primex Garden Center, 435 W. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa.

3/13/2016 Gardening with Deer Mt. Cuba Center staff will guide you in exploring the variety and efficacy of strategies to prevent deer from destroying your garden. Take home ideas and a plant list so that you can enjoy a lush, balanced, deer-resistant landscape. mtcubacenter.org WHEN: 1 to 3 p.m. COST: $30 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

Our Table, Our Planet: Making Connections Between Food and the Environment How does growing food organically versus conventionally affect the taste? Explore Riverbend Environmental Education Center’s aquaponics greenhouse, conduct your own taste test, and learn about the connection between a healthy ecosystem and healthy food. riverbendeec.org WHEN: 2 to 4 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Riverbend Environmental Education Center, 1950 Spring Mill Road, Gladwyne, Pa.

3/18/2016 Think Local, Give Local The Garces Foundation presents a smorgasbord of tastings from the area’s brightest chefs, along with a food-themed silent auction, to benefit Philadelphia’s immigrant communities. garcesfoundation.org

Best Native Plants for Pollinators

Stock up on gardening supplies with 20 percent savings on most purchases. Sale continues March 20 until 5 p.m.

A recent trial conducted by Penn State Extension rated 84 species of native perennials—and some of their cultivars—to determine which ones are more attractive to pollinators. Discover the winners at Mt. Cuba Center, and learn how to combine them with other plants to create attractive gardens for our insect friends. mtcubacenter.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to noon COST: $30 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

3/19/2016 Living Local Expo: Being Green Pays Off Organized by a volunteer committee from the Mercer County Sustainability Coalition, the Living Local Expo brings a variety of resources each year to educate and inspire residents to live a healthy and sustainable life. livinglocalexpo.net WHEN: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrenceville, N.J.

Fair Food celebrates the region’s exceptional farmers, chefs, artisans, breweries, cideries, distillers and winemakers. brewersplate.com

Children’s Community School invites families to speak with representatives from a variety of preschools and other childhood programs. Activities for children will be available. childrenscommunityschool.org

GMO Free PA and GMO Free NJ explore how the looming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade treaty could affect the food that ends up on your dinner table. Special guest Adam Weissman, an organizer with Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, will answer questions. gmofreenj.com WHEN: 6:30 to 8:15 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Collingswood Public Library, 771 Haddon Ave., Collingswood, N.J.

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WHEN: 1 to 2:30 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Studio 34, 4522 Baltimore Ave.

Night Hike and Campfire

What Are We Trading Away?

M A RC H 201 6

WHEN: Noon to 2 p.m. COST: $70 WHERE: Cherry Grove Farm, 3200 Lawrenceville Road, Lawrence Township, N.J.

Beginning of Spring Sale at Primex Garden Center

West Philly Childhood Info Day

3/17/2016

Learn the basics of using rennet to turn milk into cheese in a mozzarella-making demonstration at Cherry Grove Farm. Then, stretch fresh curd into your own fresh mozzarella. shopcherrygrovefarm.com

WHEN: 7:30 to 10:30 p.m. COST: $150 for general admission; $250 for VIP WHERE: Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 1200 Market St.

The Brewer’s Plate

WHEN: 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. COST: $74 to $99 WHERE: Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, 300 S. Broad St.

Mozzarella from Scratch

Join Riverbend Environmental Education Center for a family friendly exploration of the night. Learn about local nocturnal animals such as bats, moths and flying squirrels as you hike the trails. Afterward, warm up by the campfire and roast marshmallows. riverbendeec.org WHEN: 6 to 8 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Riverbend Environmental Education Center, 1950 Spring Mill Road Gladwyne, Pa.

primexgardencenter.com WHEN: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. COST: Pay as you go WHERE: Primex Garden Center, 435 W. Glenside Ave., Glenside, Pa.

Knowing Native Plants: Signs of Spring Meet the early flowering plants of spring and learn how they have adapted to this potentially harsh time of year in the Northeast. Discover early blooming species such as snow trillium, skunk cabbage and the genus Hepatica. You’ll learn how to identify spring-blooming species from small shoots.

The indoor presentation is followed by an outdoor walk, and attendees should dress for the weather. bhwp.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. COST: $15 for members; $20 for nonmembers WHERE: Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, 1635 River Road, New Hope, Pa.

Kitchen Science: Heat Transfer Which foods should be baked, grilled, fried or boiled? This event concerns heat transfer, and how different cooking methods affect the taste and texture of food. fi.edu WHEN: 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. COST: Free with admission WHERE: The Franklin Institute, 222 N. 20th St.

Introduction to Preserving with Natural Sweeteners Join local cookbook author Marisa McClellan for an introductory workshop on preserving with honey, maple, fruit juice concentrates and more at Greensgrow Community Kitchen. This workshop is for anyone looking to reduce their refined sugar intake. McClellan will show you how to swap these sweeteners into your favorite recipes, and participants will help prep and preserve a batch of pear jam sweetened with honey. McClellan will also demonstrate how to make a small batch of fruit juice sweetened blueberry jam. Everyone will get a jar of jam to take home. greensgrow.org WHEN: Noon to 2 p.m. COST: $35 WHERE: Greensgrow Community Kitchen at St. Michael's Lutheran Church, 2139 E. Cumberland St

EVENT S

3/20/2016

4/6/2016

4/16/2016

Kids Cooking: Soup’s On!

Native Plants of Spring

Run for Clean Air

Hungry Education teaches kids ages 5 to 11 how to make a delicious winter dish. Attendees will make fluffy dumplings and veggie soup from scratch and use the leftover dough to make a surprise dessert. Pre-registration is required. hungryeducation.com

Learn to identify 60 beautiful and functional native spring flowering trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials. Through lectures and outdoor labs, examine the identifying characteristics of each plant, its preferred site conditions and its environmental value.

This is a six-session, weekly indoor/outdoor course. mtcubacenter.org

Celebrate Earth Day with the Clean Air Council’s charity run for environmental health. Register for a 10k run, 5k run, 3k walk or kids’ fun run. runforcleanair.com

WHEN: 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. COST: $180 WHERE: Mt. Cuba Center, 3120 Barley Mill Road, Hockessin, Del.

4/19/2016

4/9/2016

Jon McGoran’s ‘Dust Up’ Launch Party

WHEN: 3 to 4:30 p.m. COST: $32.50 WHERE: Mishkan Shalom, 4101 Freeland Ave.

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3/21/2016

Founders Day at the Academy of Natural Sciences Celebrate the founding of the academy and view all of its signature exhibits, including dinosaur displays, live butterflies, dioramas and the renovated children’s discovery center. ansp.org WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. COST: Pay as you wish WHERE: Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.

Annual Philly Spring Cleanup Dedicate a few hours to clearing debris and garbage in your neighborhood, or submit an application by April 1 to register and organize a cleanup project in your area. philadelphiastreets.com WHEN: 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Various locations

WHEN: 7:30 a.m. COST: $10 to $40 WHERE: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.

Enjoy craft beer from Saint Benjamin Brewing Company, snacks from Weavers Way Co-op, and live music from Rich Ciocco and Matt Davis during the release party for Jon McGoran’s new ecological thriller, “Dust Up.” A portion of proceeds from books sold at this event will support sustainable agriculture and education in Haiti, where much of the book takes place. Registration is requested. dust-up-launch.eventbrite.com WHEN: 6 to 8 p.m. COST: Free WHERE: Free Library of Philadelphia, Parkway Central Branch, 1901 Vine St.

3/26/2016

4/10/2016

Kombucha Fermentation Workshop with Phickle

Philly Farm and Food Fest

4/22/2016

One of the area’s biggest food festivals returns to celebrate local farmers, artisans and experts in the agricultural and processing fields. phillyfarmfest.org

Philadelphia Science Festival

Amanda Feifer, fermenting enthusiast behind phickle.com, comes to the Greensgrow Community Kitchen to talk cultures and tea in this workshop on the ubiquitous—and sometimes magical—kombucha. The session will include bottling tips and information on bacterial benefits, and will end with a tasting of the finished ferments. Registration required. greensgrow.org WHEN: Noon to 2 p.m. COST: $35 WHERE: Greensgrow Community Kitchen at St. Michael's Lutheran Church, 2139 E. Cumberland St.

3/31/2016 Excellence in Green Stormwater Infrastructure Awards This is a chance to recognize and celebrate Philadelphians pioneering sustainability in research and practice. Winners receive opportunities to present their project as a case study to an international audience.

WHEN: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. COST: $15 to $45 WHERE: Pennsylvania Convention Center, 1101 Arch St.

4/13/2016

A community-wide celebration of science featuring lectures, debates, hands-on activities, special exhibitions and a variety of educational experiences for all ages. Runs through April 30. philasciencefestival.org WHEN: April 22 through April 30 COST: Various WHERE: The Franklin Institute, 222 N. 20 St.

Beneficial Insects for Your Garden Bernadette Eichinger from Rutgers Master Gardeners of Camden County will speak on the differences between useful and harmful bugs found in home gardens. Pre-registration is suggested. camden.njaes.rutgers.edu/garden WHEN: 7 to 8 p.m. COST: $10 per household WHERE: Camden County Parks Environmental Center, 1301 Park Blvd., Cherry Hill, N.J.

sbnphiladelphia.org WHEN: 6 to 9 p.m. COST: $75 WHERE: WHYY Media Commons, Independence Mall West, 160 N. Sixth St.

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DIS PATCH

LOST AND FOUND In the city’s trash, an artist finds a connection to the people of Philadelphia by christina p. day

T

he day we came across a fake breast in a pink box, we thought it was funny at first—until further digging revealed the owner had endured breast cancer. A refrigerator arrived with a rock-hard frozen turkey still intact in its yellow netting. The day I found a complete dental cast of a middle-aged woman’s mouth, I stopped in my tracks.

Every time I pulled material from the heaps of waste dropped off at Revolution Recovery, a construction and demolition recycling center in the Tacony neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, it felt like I was reading a short story.

The amazing garble was shoved into one space to be heard together, as if I had simultaneously turned on the 18 radios I collected during my three-month artistic residency with RAIR, a nonprofit that works with artists to bring attention to the never ending stream of waste that our culture produces. Each day at Revolution Recovery, they sort through 250 tons of debris, and I was allowed to source materials from what was deposited.

My current body of art has me finding duplicates at different times and places—a

process that can often take years—and conjoining them into sculptural forms. But the relentless pace of the material arriving each day allowed me to find duplicates within a few days as I sorted through wallpaper fragments, ladies’ pumps, architectural elements. My definition of a match shifted from seeking identical duplicates to finding a likeness: a decorative motif from separate drop-offs, a reoccurring color, or—in one important case—finding, through a series of photographs, the same person at different stages in their life.

Conclusions came fast as the pile was refreshed by another truck and driven further in with heavy machinery: Someone just died, and there is no family to collect this, or someone just lost everything. In another pile, an eviction: a drawer full of condoms, sunglasses, Polaroid photographs of toddlers dressed in matching basketball jerseys.

Banknotes, junk mail, furniture, clothing, all of it. Or, This is no emergency. This is simply a strike from a theater show.

I found colorful pencils with the nickname DEE stamped on them and a bunch of family pictures, one that showed her washing dishes. How did I know it was

her? I found the pair of high-waisted denim Sasson jeans she is wearing in the photograph. Nadine, DEE for short, what happened to you?

The pile of waste, beyond being a literal mess of material, is a psychological tangle of situations, all tossed into a growing heap, mid-sentence. In these interactions with other people’s private things, my sensitivities heightened to the histories others share of our city. My time at RAIR was a sharp reminder that our things will outlast us. In response, I needed to work with these things to imbue them with the value only intense workmanship can provide. I felt honored to rescue these objects and stories from getting lost any further. It was a way to acknowledge the people who let them go, to say, I remember you, because I met you here, today, in this pile.

Christina P. Day is a visual artist who lives and works in Philadelphia. An opening reception for the work created during her RAIR residency will be held April 1 from 6 to 9 p.m., and run through April 29 at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym. More of her work can be found at chrissyday.com.

Each month, Dispatch features personal reflections on adventures in sustainability. Have a story you’d like to share? Email getinvolved@gridphilly.com

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The roots of resilience A passionate arborist shows us that protecting our trees means protecting our future.

Bob Wells Master of Environmental Studies ’13, University of Pennsylvania To learn more about how Bob’s vision is changing our campus and the community, visit www.upenn.edu/grid

When Bob Wells (Master of Environmental Studies ’13) talks about the White Oak, it’s like listening to an artist talk about his muse, “It’s the most beautiful tree there is on the eastern seaboard.” As the Arboriculture Director at Morris Arboretum, Bob admits, “People get very emotionally involved with their trees.”

It’s no wonder, either. Trees provide us with much more than shade. As Bob explains, “Having trees in urban environments is crucial for good mental health, and we have that at Penn like no other campus, and we can quantify and demonstrate it. Having a program like MES gives that strong credibility.”

Staff from Penn’s MES program are here to answer your questions face-to-face on the second Wednesday of each month.

Trees are also key players in building a more resilient ecosystem. As MES celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, the University is investing in its 7,000 trees’ health like never before. Bob and his expert team are working with Penn to ensure the protection of trees on campus as the university continues to grow because, in Bob’s words, “Trees are living, breathing biological entities that need love and care just like everything else.”

www.upenn.edu/grid

Walk right in.

www.upenn.edu/grid

www.facebook.com/UPennEES

@PENN_EES