Grid Magazine January 2024 [#176]

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Grieving children get in touch with their feelings

A rapidlygrowing tech company tackles electronic waste

The Plastic Bag Ban: a progress report

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JANUARY 2024 / ISSUE 176 / GRIDPHILLY.COM

T O W A R D A S U S TA I N A B L E P H I L A D E L P H I A

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the

WA ST E issue

A slow, degenerative disease is creeping closer to Philadelphia’s deer population.

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EDI TOR ’S NOTES

by bernard brown

Laws Are Nice, But Enforcement Is Necessary publisher Alex Mulcahy managing editor Bernard Brown associate editor & distribution Timothy Mulcahy tim@gridphilly.com deputy editor Katherine Rapin art director Michael Wohlberg writers Marilyn Anthony Kyle Bagenstose Bernard Brown Constance Garcia-Barrio Dawn Kane Heidi Krull Alex Mulcahy Jordan Teicher photographers Chris Baker Evens Matthew Bender Jordan Teicher 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

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etting a magazine to print on time is a nailbiter in a lot of ways, with every delay you can imagine threatening chaos. One speed bump we often run into is waiting for government sources to respond to our questions. A writer will have the article ready to go except for a pending request for comment sent to a department media representative a while ago.

This month, for an article about the problem of tire dumping, Jordan Teicher had asked the City’s Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) about how they are enforcing a law that requires repair shops to properly dispose of the used tires they take from cars. L&I got back to him with a vague answer. He asked the department to clarify, and that’s where they stalled.

We edited the article with a placeholder for the eventual answer, which arrived a week before print: L&I had no idea if they had ever actually checked to make sure tire shops were following the law.

I have no desire to beat up on L&I. Anyone reading the news in Philadelphia knows that the agency is grossly understaffed, with inspectors carrying impossibly large caseloads while fending off political interference from City Council members. And the inspectors take their jobs seriously, given that a problem they miss can lead to buildings collapsing and people dying. If you were as overworked as an L&I inspector, you too might prioritize responding to construction complaints that could save lives over reviewing the tire hauling records at repair shops.

Similar problems have dogged enforcement of Philadelphia’s tree canopy protections, as Grid reported in 2022. Bad actors like the Union League can cut down acres of trees without permission or an approved plan to replace them, knowing that L&I lacks the capacity to do anything about it. Even

well-crafted rules will fail if everyone knows there is no downside to ignoring them.

The Philly Tree Plan, released in February 2023, actually contains a solution, creating a city forester position to lend desperately needed expertise to tree canopy oversight.

Perhaps we need a similar solution for tires and related dumping problems. Of course, it is also critically necessary to fully staff L&I. Enforcement comes up as a key point in Dawn Kane’s article about Philadelphia’s plastic bag ban, too. Last week, I ran around the corner from Grid’s office to buy a small Hanukkah gift at Reading Terminal Market.

After I paid, the vendor handed me my purchase inside a thin plastic bag — it was then up to me to report the shop to the City. The ban has been a success in many ways, but there are still plenty of vendors out there ignoring it. Kane’s piece tackles the tough question of how we provide businesses with incentives, including the negative incentive of a fine, in just the right way that we shift them to paper or reusable bags without driving them out of business or kicking up opposition to the ban overall.

L&I has a role in enforcing the plastic bag ban, along with four other offices. So do I. I felt a little weird dropping a dime on the vendor who handed me the plastic bag at checkout, but after writing my editor’s notes about enforcement, I felt like I had to. So I pulled up Philly311, which so often feels like a joke the City plays on residents who care, and I submitted the complaint. I wonder if anyone will follow up.

b e r na r d b r ow n , Managing Editor

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healing city

S’vante Sammons, here with his mother Tasha, found support from the Uplift Center for Grieving Children after his father’s sudden death.

Grieving While Growing East Falls center gives children a space to process loss collectively by constance garcia-barrio

T

asha sammons and her son, S’vante, were expecting a cheerful dinner at their home in Olney on Father’s Day weekend five years ago.

“S’vante was happy, waiting for his dad,” Sammons says. “But my husband, Ted, who’d had diabetes since age 9, never made it home. He had a heart attack and died [on the way].”

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With that death, S’vante (pronounced sa-vaunt), a second grader at the time, joined the one in 12 U.S. children who confront the death of a parent or sibling by age 18, according to statistics from the Colorado-based JAG Institute.

“S’vante and Teddy had been so close,” Sammons says. “I knew we needed help.

Our church did not offer grief groups then,

although they have one for adults now.”

Sammons scoured the internet and found the Uplift Center for Grieving Children.

Headquartered in East Falls, Uplift provides free peer support groups for children from kindergarten to 12th grade in Greater Philadelphia who have experienced the death of an important person in their lives, says executive director Keri Salerno. Begun in 1995 as part of the bereavement program at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children, Uplift became an independent nonprofit in 2000. Government aid, corporate sponsorship, grants as well as public and private donations fund the organization.

Uplift serves some 5,000 clients annually, including many children from families P HOTO G RAP HY BY M ATTHE W BENDER

of color living at or below the poverty line, Salerno says. The organization also offers guidance for caregivers and professionals who work with grieving youth.

Uplift provides a unique refuge for bereaved youngsters since many Americans avoid talking about death, says Crystal Wortham, Uplift’s director of clinical and education services. Grief groups usually begin with conversation circles where children introduce themselves, say who has died and explain their relationship to that person. This opening leads into discussions about feelings.

Uplift runs six-week programs in schools, community groups and online.

S’vante, for example, attended sessions at the Lenfest Center, a privately owned and operated community center in Hunting Park. The majority of in-person sessions currently take place at schools. During the 2022-23 program year, the organization presented in-school grief support programs at 99 schools, Salerno says. “There’s always a waiting list,” she says. Virtual and hybrid grief groups are also offered.

Clinicians group children by age and developmental level because those factors shape how they respond to death. Preschoolers usually see death as reversible, in part because in cartoons people die, then come back to life, according to American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Children from ages 5 to 9 start thinking more like adults about death, but doubt they or the people they love will die.

“Once, a girl in the 3rd or 4th grade didn’t want to be in a [conversation] circle,” Wortham says. “She said later that she didn’t want to join in because it would make the death real. Participants may choose to [opt out] when they feel uncomfortable.”

Stigma may further limit young people’s comfort in seeking support. “If the death was highlighted in the media, as sometimes happens with a suicide or overdose, stigma leaves children with few safe places to talk,” Wortham says.

Uplift’s clinicians use icebreakers to start discussions. They may show a relevant clip from “Sesame Street,” read a story about death, or do artwork, Wortham says of the sessions, which generally last 50 to 60 minutes. Facilitators sometimes have children toss a thumb ball whose surface has more than a dozen prompts like, “A topic you want to learn about,” or “a place you feel relaxed.”

We may ask them, ‘Do you express your grief in front of the child?’ They may say, ‘I’m crying in the bathroom or in the car.’

They’re trying to protect the child from their pain. But seeing caregivers’ sadness may give a child permission to grieve.”

— crystal wortham, Uplift Center for Grieving Children Children respond according to where their thumb lands when they catch the ball.

“Sometimes I ask a child to describe their feelings as if they were weather conditions,” Wortham says. “They might say, ‘It’s been stormy, but it’s starting to clear.’”

The icebreakers may have helped S’vante to become more vocal about his feelings, Sammons says. It’s also beneficial for him to be with other children who’ve lost a loved one because they can relate to him, she believes.

During the sessions, young people learn inconspicuous coping strategies like deep breathing, counting, squeezing a stress ball, palming a smooth stone and keeping a diary. When the program ends, participants may take follow-up sessions or choose to return later, Wortham says.

Uplift tailors some support to the needs of specific groups. For example, in-school legacy groups include young people who’ve all lost the same classmate or friend. “The situation has nuances that everyone in the group shares,” Wortham says.

For LGBTQIA+ youth, separate meetings provide safety and confidentiality, Salerno says. Many young people may not have discussed their sexual identity at school, nor had the opportunity to share feelings about their identity with the person they’re grieving.

Special sessions for caregivers are important, too. “We may ask them, ‘Do you express your grief in front of the child?’”

Wortham says. “They may say, ‘I’m crying in the bathroom or in the car.’ They’re trying to protect the child from their pain. But seeing caregivers’ sadness may give a child permission to grieve.”

These sessions help caregivers anticipate a child’s responses to death. Young children may ask repeatedly if the dead person is coming back, Wortham says. Some children may be up constantly at night and sleepy

during the day. Clinicians guide caregivers to find support at the child’s school, and of course through Uplift’s groups.

“We explain to caregivers that things may not improve immediately after children start attending a grief group,” Wortham says. “Feelings like anger may surface then.

The child may start slamming doors. We also tell caregivers that they may seek family counseling in addition to grief support.

We don’t limit clients to our services.”

Uplift’s bilingual/bicultural therapists enable the organization to offer sessions in Spanish. “Once, a woman who spoke little English attended a session,” Wortham says. “I encouraged her to speak Spanish, her first language. All the emotion came through, but I realized that we needed bilingual staff.”

Uplift often finds that families are grappling with challenges beyond grief.

“They may be having an issue with housing or financial matters,” Wortham says.

“We share resources like job fairs, food pantries and mentoring programs. We also list resources on our website.”

In addition, Uplift increases its resources by networking with organizations like nearby Camp Erin-Philadelphia. Part of the Penn Medicine Hospice, it offers a free weekend bereavement camp.

Sammons and S’vante, now in 6th grade, have continued with Uplift, a choice that has paid off, she says. “S’vante’s counselor says that he’s emotionally aware and can identify his feelings even when he can’t control them.

He’s more able to deal with another boy who sometimes taunts S’vante about his father’s death. I tell everyone about Uplift.” ◆ For more details or to make a donation, visit upliftphilly.org. For free confidential help from master’s-level clinicians, call the HopeLine at 1-833-PHL-HOPE (833-745-4673).

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urban naturalist

Wasting Away A deer plague is heading toward Philadelphia.

Business and politics are getting in the way of stopping it

L

by bernard brown

ike a human starting to experience Alzheimer’s disease, a deer in the early stages of chronic wasting dis�ease doesn’t look all that sick. You’d have to spend some time with it to notice anything amiss. But in both illnesses, once it starts, there is no stopping the degeneration of the brain tissue and further outward decline.

Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, got its name from its end stage, when the afflicted cervid (any member of the deer family, including elk, moose and caribou) drools uncontrollably, stares off into space, and, no surprise, wastes away.

The deer sheds infectious prions through its feces and bodily fluids during the couple of years it can take to reach that state. After it dies, its carcass remains a source of these prions, which can linger in the environment for years.

CWD was first discovered in captive mule deer (Western relatives of Pennsylvania’s white-tailed deer) at a Colorado research facility in 1967 and soon after in elk, also held in research facilities. In 1981 a wild elk with CWD was found in Colorado, and since then the disease has picked up speed, like a boulder careening downhill and crashing across the landscape. It now infects cervids in 29

A SPONGY DISEASE Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is caused by a mutant prion. Prions are proteins found inside animal cells. All proteins are chains of amino acids, and they fold in specific ways that help determine their function. The faulty prions that cause CWD cause other prions inside brain cells to misfold. This ultimately kills the cells and leaves holes in the brain tissue, hence the “sponge” in the official name for illnesses like CWD: transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE). The same is true for kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, aka mad cow disease) in cattle, and scrapie in sheep and goats.

states and two Canadian provinces. In Pennsylvania, infected deer have been found in 21 counties. As it rolls east, the disease could end deer hunting as we know it.

A deer in the final stages of chronic wasting disease (CWD) will drool, stumble and lose their fear of humans.

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PA GA M E C O M M I S S I O N

Caption tk

Hunters can deposit deer heads for CWD testing in special dumpsters. The disease is not known to be zoonotic — for now.

he’d keep hunting if rates got really high. “If I get three or four in a row [testing positive for CWD] and I’m in it to fill the freezer … that would get old.”

“I am a meat hunter,” says Jim Moore, who has been hunting in Chester County for almost 70 years. “I would still go hunting if the meat was okay to eat. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.”

Non-hunters might not care if hunters give up on killing deer, but a sharp decline in hunting — already fading in popularity — could undermine important streams of conservation funding that come from hunting license fees and from taxes on hunting equipment. “CWD has the potential to have major impacts on deer populations across the U.S.,” says Field. “It could have major impacts on our ability to keep hunting and conservation funding across the U.S. … Anything that would reduce hunter participation would reduce funding for conservation.”

It’s really sad. They’re very skinny, they’re stumbling, drooling, losing their fear of humans. It’s definitely a hard thing to see.”

A LT H O M / I S TO C K P H OTO

— andrea korman, Pennsylvania Game Commission

The End of an Era? “If your animal tests positive for CWD, do not eat meat from that animal,” states the Centers for Disease Control. Though so far no human illness has been connected to eating venison from CWD-positive deer, other prion diseases as well as lab experiments investigating CWD transmission offer reasons to both hope and worry. Humans have been infected by eating cattle with mad cow disease. However, apparently no one has caught scrapie from eating mutton or goat, though the disease has been around for hundreds of years.

Macaques that researchers exposed to the CWD prions from infected deer (either orally or by injecting it directly into

the macaques’ brains), did not get infected.

Squirrel monkeys whose brains were injected by the same researchers did get sick, which demonstrated that it is technically possible for CWD prions to cause illness in primates. That said, the squirrel monkeys also got sick from scrapie prions delivered in the same way. And of course humans eat venison; they don’t inject it into their brains.

“I’d hate to go to the store and buy beef,” says Brad Gates, a Philadelphia hunter and wildlife expert who serves on the Friends of the Wissahickon Deer Committee. If CWD reached where he hunts in the Philadelphia area, “I would keep hunting,” he says, “but every deer I kill for food or to give away I would have tested.” He says he’s not sure if

CWD Spreads in PA As CWD outbreaks flared up in Western Maryland, West Virginia and New York, it seemed like Pennsylvania had been spared, but in 2012 the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (PDA) found an infected deer in a captive deer facility in Adams County, about 100 miles west of Philadelphia.

Around the same time, the Pennsylvania Game Commission found CWD in two wild deer in Bedford and Blair Counties, about 175 miles west of Philadelphia.

Deer are often seen as a symbol of the wild, but they are also livestock. There are 753 captive deer facilities in Pennsylvania according to the PDA, second in number only to Texas. A few of these are petting zoos or hobby farms. Others produce products such as doe urine that some hunters use to lure in wild bucks. Some facilities are known as “high fence” operations or as hunting ranches. There, in a controversial practice frowned upon by many traditional hunters, clients can pay to shoot captive-raised bucks that are bigger and have larger antlers (many freakishly so) than what they can usually find in the wild. Other facilities selectively breed deer and sell them to the high fence operations.

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The Game Commission established Deer Management Areas (DMAs), zones around the CWD cases with more-intense monitoring and restrictions limiting the movement of deer or their parts out of the zones. The PDA oversaw the quarantine and “depopulation” (killing) of the Adams County facility’s deer herd. One of those culled deer tested positive as well, bringing the total for the facility to two.

It is unclear how Pennsylvania’s initial outbreaks got started. The shipping of deer that is inherent to the captive deer industry could have delivered the infected deer to the facility. “CWD is highly transmissible but it doesn’t move that fast across the landscape until you take an animal and put it in a trailer.

That’s how you get to new states and counties,” says Aaron Field, director of private lands conservation for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a national hunting-focused nonprofit.

In Blair and Bedford Counties, the disease could have spread north from outbreaks in nearby Maryland and West Virginia, but it also could have been transported by people bringing dead deer back from hunting trips and, after butchering the carcasses, tossing the scraps in the woods.

“I should say hunters need to be part of the solution, too,” Field says. “We can’t be moving infectious tissue around.”

Fighting the Spread CWD outbreaks can get out of control quickly. “The 1-4% [rate of infection in wild deer] range is considered manageable, but when you start to hit that 5% level, you start to see the cat get out of the bag,” says Torin Miller, senior director of policy for the National Deer Association, which advocates for wild deer, their conservation and deer hunting. “So there are implications to not doing enough, and we see that where it has gotten out of control.”

The Adams County outbreak was apparently nipped in the bud. After five years of testing turned up no new cases in the DMA, 8 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

the Game Commission considered it extinguished.

The Bedford and Blair county outbreak, however, has only grown. That DMA now covers all or part of 19 counties in West Central Pennsylvania, and the Game Commission considers CWD to be established — no chance of wiping it out — in all or part of five of those counties.

“In Bedford County where we have the highest prevalence, near 30%, people are starting to see it,” says Andrea Korman, who oversees CWD for the Game Commission. “It’s really sad. They’re very skinny, they’re stumbling, drooling, losing their fear of humans. It’s definitely a hard thing to see.” Based on anecdotal observations, Korman says that when CWD initially pops up in a new area, local hunters tend to heed the alarms, for example by submitting samples (deer heads deposited in special dumpsters) for testing. After a little while

the issue fades to the background, only to be taken seriously when obviously sick deer are impossible to ignore.

Infected deer have been discovered at captive facilities in four other areas of Pennsylvania, including in Jefferson County, where wild white-tailed deer were later found to be infected, raising concerns that the disease had passed across the captive facilities’ fence lines. This outbreak is at the edge of the current range of Pennsylvania’s elk. Elk are native to Pennsylvania but were wiped out by hunters by 1867. The Game Commission reintroduced elk to north-central Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. Chronic wasting disease could mean the end of Pennsylvania’s elk, which number just 1,400.

Research indicates wild predators could help slow the spread of CWD by weeding out infected deer that are starting to miss a beat — it’s the weaker, slower individuals that tend to be killed by wolves and moun-

P H OTO C O U R T E S Y P E N N V E T W I L D L I F E F U T U R E S P R O G R A M

Dr. Michelle Gibison and the Wildlife Futures Team at the University of Pennsylvania test 10,000 to 12,000 deer samples for CWD per year. Deer will appear generally healthy until the final stage of the illness.

CWD is highly transmissible but it doesn’t move that fast across the landscape until you take an animal and put it in a trailer.”

A R LU T Z 7 3 / I S TO C K P H OTO

— aaron field, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership tain lions. Even the fastest deer can’t outrun a bullet, yet a study testing mountain lion scat (poop) in Colorado found that they kill CWD-positive deer at a higher rate than human hunters, and computer modeling has indicated that wolves might do something similar. But there are no plans to reintroduce extirpated wolves or mountain lions in Pennsylvania.

So we humans are left with cruder tools.

“You can’t get deer to socially distance, so the fewer deer there are, the less interactions they have, and the less chance to transmit disease to each other,” says Korman. There are basically two ways that state agencies can end up with fewer deer: give recreational hunters permission to kill more deer, particularly does, or have professionals do it (“targeted removal”).

The hunting-targeted removal combination apparently worked to stamp out New

York’s brief CWD outbreak. In 2005, after finding cases in two captive deer facilities in Oneida County (near Syracuse) New York responded within weeks, engaging both recreational hunters and professionals to kill more than 300 wild deer around the facilities. Two of those wild deer tested positive, but no cases have been reported in the state in the years since.

In 2012 the Game Commission did not respond with similar alacrity, as described in the state’s official CWD Response Plan’s account of the first wild outbreak. You can read the frustration between the bureaucratese lines: “[I]n addition to instituting the same DMA-wide restrictions and enhanced surveillance that had been applied to DMA 1 [in Adams County], recommendations were made to reduce deer abundance in the area … Unfortunately, these measures … were not implemented.”

Political and Social Barriers Field, of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, says state wildlife agencies should act according to science. “They can’t be hamstrung by politics,” he says.

“If you take a trained wildlife management professional and give them science to act on, they will come up with good policy.”

Although CWD is increasingly widespread, deer in the final stage of the illness are rare. A deer with its version of dementia is more likely to get killed by a predator (human or wild) or by a car, usually before it is obviously sick. A more visible illness might cause more alarm, but the public has to trust scientists that CWD is a problem.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the backlash to public health measures have only made it more difficult for Game Commission scientists to convince hunters to go along with new rules and recommendations.

It doesn’t help that hunters often oppose measures to reduce deer abundance, since that makes it harder for them to kill deer.

“Management strategies that tend to reduce deer densities tend to get pushback,” Field says.

And of course the captive deer facility JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP H ILLY.COM 9

urban naturalist

owners tend to oppose measures that impact their businesses. Miller and Field point to the best management practices developed by the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies as the gold standard playbook for managing CWD. The first recommended practice is to “Prohibit all human-assisted live cervid movements.” In other words, don’t transport any live deer. That measure would severely limit the captive industry, though, and Pennsylvania has not adopted it.

Instead, all captive deer facilities in Pennsylvania must enroll in either a state or federal CWD program that sets rules for record keeping, testing of dead deer and fencing requirements. Both programs have their shortcomings. Neither requires more than a single fence to keep the captive and outside wild deer apart, even though contact through fences has been identified by researchers studying CWD transmission as a potential way for the disease to spread into or out of facilities. And while the federal herd certification program requires testing for all animals that die for whatever reason, the state’s program only requires that 50% be tested, meaning CWD-positive deer could be escaping notice.

“All of the barriers are political and social,” Korman, of the Game Commission, says. “Everything with CWD becomes controversial.” She points to a recent attempt to ban the use of urine from captive deer, since urine from infected deer contains prions.

Game Commission scientists backed the ban, but the captive deer industry rallied to oppose it. Ultimately the commission, made up of political appointees, voted against the urine ban. “I didn’t know my career would entail so much deer pee,” Korman says.

Pennsylvania’s response to CWD is further complicated by splitting deer oversight between the PDA (captive deer) and the Game Commission (wild deer). “In states like Pennsylvania, where deer are managed by different agencies, we see a disconnect between the two,” Miller says. For a possible solution he points to Minnesota, which in 2021 shifted captive deer oversight from its agriculture department to its department of natural resources.

Next Stop, Philadelphia?

It’s a dirty job, but every year the Game Commission pulls more than 3,500 dead 10 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

deer off the sides of roads to test them for CWD. On September 13, 2023, the Game Commission announced that two such deer collected in Dauphin County (near Harrisburg) had tested positive, the first free-ranging deer east of the Susquehanna River detected with the illness. Now, no major barrier stands between the deer of the Philadelphia region and the incurable, highly-transmissible disease.

The University of Pennsylvania’s veterinary school in Kennett Square, Chester County, is helping to monitor the spread of CWD by testing samples taken from roadkilled deer as well as hunted deer. “We test 10,000 to 12,000 samples per year,” says Dr. Michelle Gibison, who directs CWD research with PennVet’s Wildlife Futures program. Their lab is also working to develop faster and more sensitive tests.

Dogs might also play a part. The keennosed canines can differentiate between

droppings of healthy deer and infected deer. At some point, specially trained dogs might roam the woods, fields and yards of Pennsylvania, sniffing out new outbreaks.

Although CWD’s impact on wild deer and on hunting draws the most attention, the potential for prion diseases to jump species makes it a public health concern for non-hunters as well. The next species it jumps to could develop into a version that is more infectious in humans. “Right now it doesn’t appear to be zoonotic to humans,” Gibison says, “but BSE [mad cow disease] was something humans eventually got, so it might not go directly from deer to humans.”

It is impossible to say for sure when Philadelphians will see sick deer stagger out of Fairmount Park, but when the disease reaches the area, with its extremely dense deer populations, it will be even harder to control than in rural areas. “It’s definitely

You can’t get deer to socially distance.”

— andrea korman, Pennsylvania Game Commission going to be a problem. The more deer you have, the more likely they are to transmit it to each other,” Korman says.

The landscape of parks wrapped around neighborhoods, along with suburban deer populations living in backyards and narrow strips of greenery, limit the effectiveness of hunting and targeted removal.

Experts Grid interviewed couldn’t think of any other similar urban areas with CWD outbreaks so far, but they pointed to the experience of captive facilities with their artificially-dense herds as offering a possible view of the future. For example, in one Iowa hunting ranch stricken with CWD, 280 out

of 356 deer tested positive in 2014.

Here in Philadelphia where we have to fence deer out of our parks to regenerate forest canopy and in suburbs where the animals devour almost everything gardeners plant in the ground, it might be hard to imagine that 120 years ago, Pennsylvania had virtually no white-tailed deer. A combination of deforestation and unlimited hunting had nearly wiped out what is now the state’s official animal. Regrowth of forest, restocking by Game Commission, and enforcement of hunting regulations led to the recovery of white-tailed deer, one of the state’s greatest conservation feats.

For now, Pennsylvania still has plenty of white-tailed deer (1.5 million), though CWD has begun to cause populations of mule deer to decline out West, where it has been established for a longer time. The same could happen here with their white-tailed relatives once the infection rates increase.

Although hunters are the people who come into contact with deer most often, everyone can get involved with slowing CWD’s spread across the commonwealth. “As the Game Commission, we tend to focus on hunters and what hunters can do,” Korman says, “but there are things the general public can do.” Anyone who sees an apparently sick deer should call the Game Commission (1-833-PGC-WILD). The same goes for reporting road-killed deer, which the Commission can have tested to monitor for new CWD outbreaks. Though it can be tempting, “don’t feed the deer,” Korman says. “That passes along all kinds of illnesses.” ◆

PennVet is training dogs to sniff out new CWD cases in the field.

P HOTOS COU RT ESY P ENNV ET W I LD LI FE FU TU R ES PRO G RA M

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water

Brakes On The Levee After decades of major flooding in Eastwick, a potential solution is on the table. With dozens of stakeholders in Philadelphia and Delaware County, it won’t be a quick and easy fix by kyle bagenstose

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t was september 1999 and Denise Statham didn’t know danger was lapping at her doorstep.

Her employer had closed their office earlier that day and Statham was finishing some work on her laptop when the power went out. She decided to nap for a while and see if it came back on. At about 7 p.m., she awoke to the sound of water sloshing around the finished lower level of her three-story rowhome.

“I looked down the steps and my washer and dryer were floating,” Statham says.

Hurricane Floyd was lashing Philadelphia, ultimately dropping nearly seven inches of rain in a single day, a record at that time. Statham was in her home on Venus Place in Eastwick, a low-lying Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood now well known for its propensity to flood. But at that point, Statham had lived in the home less than a decade and wasn’t prepared for what would come next.

Thinking a pipe had burst, she waded through the water to her garage where a valve for her water main was located. But seeing that her car was also submerged, she realized the flooding was coming from outside. She used her cell phone to call her sister.

“My sister said, ‘What are you doing there?! We’re watching your house on TV,’” Statham says. “That’s when I went to the front door and realized the magnitude of what was happening.”

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Denise Statham endured significant flooding to her Eastwick home during Hurricane Floyd in 1999; she slept through the evacuation, but emerged unscathed.

She was the only person remaining on her flooded street. Her neighbors had left or been evacuated by National Guard boats while she was sleeping.

Statham emerged from the event physically unscathed, but it was one of just several times she and her neighbors have experienced severe flooding in the decades since. All the while, anger about a lack of solutions for chronic flooding in Eastwick has simmered, boiling over on occasion.

This summer came a fresh wave when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a draft study promoting a potential

1,400-foot-long levee to shield Eastwick from floodwaters from the adjacent Cobbs Creek, just above its confluence with Darby Creek. At first glance, it looked like a major milestone. At a community meeting in Eastwick in October, officials from the Army Corps and Philadelphia’s Office of Sustainability promised the levee was a good faith, nearly shovel-ready proposal after decades of start-and-stop efforts that ultimately went nowhere.

“We can’t fix the flooding, but we can attempt to substantially reduce it,” says Steve Roberts, executive assistant at the Army P HOTO G RAP H BY CHRIS BAKER EVENS

We live here by choice …

We live here for reasons, principles and values.

There are people on every block that are settled and have been here … where are we going?”

— denise statham, Eastwick resident

Corps. “We hear the frustration about the time that has elapsed. We are further along than we have ever been before.”

But from the earliest moments of the meeting and through the weeks and months that followed, it became clear the levee proposal would be no panacea. Residents, community organizations and government officials have expressed a range of opinions on the proposal with some in favor, some opposed and many still silent as they consider its merits.

Conversations about the levee quickly expand to other potential solutions. Some

prefer that efforts focus on buying out and relocating residents from their homes, making flood insurance more affordable, or turning to nature-based solutions to soak up floodwaters.

Perhaps most ominously, it isn’t clear who will ultimately make a decision. There are dozens of entities who potentially could play a role, with the Office of Sustainability functioning as something like an air traffic controller. Decision making could range as high-level as incoming Mayor Cherelle Parker, down to street-level community organizations in Eastwick.

“We’re coordinating closely with partners, including City Council and community members, to inform decision making for the new administration,” the Office of Sustainability wrote in a statement to Grid, adding that a Flood Resilience Strategy set to kick off in 2024 will explore “how to shift as much of that decision making as possible to community-based organizations and residents.”

But where things stand with those community organizations is also presently an enigma. Influential groups like the Eastwick Friends & Neighbors Coalition and Delaware Riverkeeper Network have largely been mum on the levee proposal. The Army Corps has pushed back its deadline for public comment on the levee proposal twice by community request, from November 2023 to the end of January as of press time.

Brenda Whitfield, an outspoken officer of the community organization Eastwick United CDC, said, as of mid-December, the situation remained “very complicated and complex.” Just a few weeks earlier, residents of neighboring communities in Delaware County — where Army Corps models show flooding could worsen if the levee is built — expressed deep concerns at their own public meeting about the proposal.

In a text message to Grid, Whitfield said that left the Army Corps with “their work cut out for them” in making sure Delaware County communities “are not getting extra floodwaters.” But at the same time, Whitfield lamented that Eastwick residents had not had a seat at the table in prior decades, JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 13

water

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Eastwick floods from multiple directions, from the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, as well as Cobbs and Darby creeks.

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Coastal Storm Surge when Delaware County communities made decisions regarding upstream infrastructure and land use she believed impacted conditions in her Eastwick community.

Whitfield says she believes there have been at least “14 different levees, stormwater drains, dikes and private levees,” built in the county.

“So we will see how this plays out,” Whitfield said.

Jaclyn Rhoads, board president of the nonprofit Darby Creek Valley Association (DCVA), believes there’s a path forward.

Her organization spans the entire watershed, with constituents in both Delaware and Philadelphia counties. Rhoads told Grid there is an effort underway by the DCVA, Friends of Eastwick, Riverkeepers and Friends of Heinz Refuge to craft a shared vision that includes a number of potential solutions. They were also in conversation with others, such as Eastwick United, Rhoads said.

If such groups could present a united 14 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 2024

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front to powerbrokers, Rhoads believes it could create the impetus and pressure for the City to finally deliver a solution in Eastwick that’s not only actionable, but inclusive and holistic. “[The City] needs to become a little bit more outspoken on what the community wants and what their vision is,” Rhoads says. “Time is up.”

Weighing the options On paper, the Army Corps’ levee proposal has a lot going for it.

In materials passed out during an October 4 community meeting in Eastwick, a map of the area shows hundreds of green dots in Eastwick marking properties where the Corps believes a levee would reduce flood risk during severe storms. With levee construction costs estimated at $13 million and annual maintenance projected at $67,000, the cost-benefit looks very good, considering the Corps estimates a levee will

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reduce flood damages by $128 million over 50 years. The Corps proposal also says the federal government will pay for two-thirds of the construction costs.

Plus, a levee can give a real sense of physical security. At about 15-feet in height at its highest point, the levee would provide a tangible barrier higher than the flood levels reached during Hurricanes Floyd, Irene and Isaias, according to the Corps. For all these reasons, the Corps said, the levee was the preferred option over others it studied, such as relocating residents or fortifying homes.

But along the periphery, the faults of the levee proposal can be seen. The same Army Corps maps showing floodwater improvement in Eastwick show scores of properties facing extra flooding further upstream along the Cobbs and Darby creeks, including in Philadelphia’s Elmwood neighborhood and Delaware County’s Darby Borough, Colwyn Borough and Darby Township.

M A P B A S E D O N U S AC E E A S T W I C K F LO O D R I S K M A N AG E M E N T S T U D Y

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While the Army Corps says such “induced flooding” will likely be minimized by extra capacity at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge downstream, Lamar Gore, refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says it isn’t clear to him that Heinz is currently capable of handling extra water.

At the October meeting, Gore instead floated his own proposal to convert over a hundred acres of undeveloped land north of the refuge, currently owned by the City of Philadelphia, into tidal marshland. Then, excess floodwaters from the confluence of the Darby and Cobbs creeks could be channeled through a culvert under 84th Street to the new wetlands, creating a “nature-based solution” to absorb the water from Eastwick without pushing as much into adjoining communities.

But such an arrangement would likely require Philadelphia to transfer the land to the federal government and the popularity of that proposal remains unclear within the confines of City Hall.

“I’ve talked to the City about this, the Corps, and some in the community have come to meetings where we discussed this, too,” Gore said in October. “Some modified version of a levee combined with a nature based-solution could work.”

As the October meeting wore on, further diversity of opinions emerged.

Statham, who told Grid she largely favors the levee proposal, also pondered whether the City could do more to upgrade and maintain sewer capacity in her neighborhood. Another resident wondered if an early warning system for impending floodwaters would be a good use of resources. Many talked about a long history of neglect and racial justice issues in the neighborhood, dating back to its very construction atop marshland. With skepticism that a true fix is coming, some, like 50-year resident Victor DiSalvatore, are eyeing a move.

“Of all these plans you guys have, is there a plan for relocation, a buyout of these houses, if this thing don’t work?” DiSalvatore asked.

“Yeah, buy us out,” a woman called out.

Such a proposal could have legs. In 2021, a team of residents and local researchers concluded a “land swap” could be one of

[The City] needs to become a little bit more outspoken on what the community wants and what their vision is. Time is up.”

— jaclyn rhoads, Darby Creek Valley Association

the top options for Eastwick, moving about 250 residents from their current flood prone homes and constructing new residences on the same undeveloped parcel that Gore is eyeing for the potential nature-based solution. In recent news stories, local leaders admitted that some residents remain committed to the idea.

Then there’s the impacted Delaware County communities: how much say do they deserve? The Office of Sustainability currently says that any levee construction would have to be part of a larger plan to address induced flooding.

“When talking about this decision, it is important to note that the Army Corps plan is still incomplete because it does not account for induced flooding, or the floodwaters that could be routed elsewhere because of the levee,” the office told Grid in a statement. “Until induced flooding is incorporated into the plan, this decision will not come before the new administration.”

Exactly how much political power Delaware County and its communities hold remains to be seen, although WHYY reported in November that a portion of the proposed levee stretches into Darby Township and would thus require an easement.

What happens next?

The Office of Sustainability says it is holding a variety of monthly and quarterly meetings to try and work toward consensus on a solution. The efforts will increase next year, after the City launches a $500,000 initiative to “develop a community-driven Flood Resilience Strategy for the Eastwick neighborhood,” according to a public request for proposals that went out shortly after the October meeting.

“This will be a dedicated planning process to weigh the many different flood resilience

options on the table and develop an implementation roadmap to bring those flood resilience measures into fruition,” the RFP stated.

Statham has assisted with the efforts. Her long history in the neighborhood reveals the complexity of the issue. She knows the housing stock of the neighborhood, dating to development by the Korman Company in the 1950s, is problematic. She too believes upriver communities like those in Delaware County have carelessly contributed to downstream flooding problems in the past.

And yet, she recoils at being referred to as a “marginalized” community and detests the idea of relocation. She’d rather see the money used to study such concepts go toward “low-hanging” fruit like storm drain cleaning and better warning systems. For her, mitigating the damages to the community as much as possible, as soon as possible, is the salve to long-running injustices.

“We live here by choice … we live here for reasons, principles and values,” Statham says. “There are people on every block that are settled and have been here … where are we going?”

For Rhoads, the latest flurry of activity in Eastwick holds new promise. In 2019, Delaware County Council turned Democratic for the first time since the Civil War and she says the new leadership is more cognizant of watershed management. Multiple other key players are at the table. A solution feels attainable if common ground can be found and political leaders can lead.

“It’s been a historical problem and now we’re getting to the point where people are now finally having conversations and understanding we need to rely on each other for the solutions,” Rhoads says. “This presents an opportunity to forget the past, move on, have these conversations and figure out a way to look at the future.” ◆ JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 5

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the issue sponsored content

Business Scents

A homemade gift project blossoms into a candle venture

I

t all began as one of Marques Davis’ self-described “quirky ideas.” In 2018, he decided that for the holidays he would make his loved ones a handmade gift: soap.

But soapmaking, with its weeks-long production period, did not agree with Davis’ disposition, he says. “I like immediate gratification.”

After what he calls his “soap fail,” he turned to a plan B: candlemaking. His ill-fated soapmaking escapade had led him to Quakertown retailer Candles & Supplies, where he was enraptured by the sensory stimulation.

“I would literally spend hours there, just going up and down the scent wall, trying to find unique scents or holding two scents, maybe three sometimes, to my nose to see, ‘Okay, could I blend these together to make something interesting and unique?’ And I just kind of fell in love with the whole process of it.”

Davis also appreciated the immediacy of candlemaking and was delighted to present the candles as gifts. When the holidays were 16 16 GRID GR ID P PH H IL IL LY.CO LY.CO M M JA JA NUA NUA RY RY 2024 20 24

over, he thought that would be the end of it and he would be on to the next quirky project.

The gift recipients thought otherwise.

They loved the candles and wanted more, and they “kind of nudged me into turning it into a business.” In 2019, Davis, who still works full time as a director of marketing planning and performance for Ikea, founded Mount Airy Candle Co., a company specializing in hand poured candles.

At the behest of a co-worker at his day job, Davis approached Weavers Way Co-op in Mount Airy. They were the first retailer he asked about carrying his products, and he credits them with helping him take his business to the next level. “Weavers Way gave me the opportunity to truly start to become a baby entrepreneur. They said yes when they could have said no,” Davis says.

Now his candles are available online, at retail locations throughout Greater Philadelphia, and at his new studio in Germantown.

The company began in Davis’ kitchen, and almost immediately outgrew that space

and moved to his basement. Eventually he realized that “when you’re stepping over boxes of wax and the dog is in between your legs and, you know, every table surface is covered with candles for orders” that it was time to make the move to the studio.

While he sells candles at the new location, he doesn’t keep regular hours there (he works 9-to5 for Ikea) — and he views it more as an artist’s studio that he uses for special events.

The new space has allowed him to expand into making perfumes and body care items, something he could have never imagined doing in his cluttered basement.

Davis’ favorite part is still the process that initially captured him: perfecting scents he finds evocative. “We know scent can awaken desire and stir long-lost memories,” Davis says. His ‘Crème de Vanille’ reminds him of his favorite hamburger and milkshake shop growing up in Norristown. And one of his fall favorites, ‘Figs & Pink Pepper,’ is an homage to the Fig Newton. The scent of pear is often a prominent ingredient in his creations. “I’ll take a poached pear for dessert, put pears in my salad,” he says. “Give me a pear martini, I’m happy.”

Though his candles are primarily his own creations, there is one exception: the ‘Cashmere & Amber’ scent. Davis’ mother had suggested the combination, and he was very skeptical. “I told her, it won’t work. Those two things don’t go together.”

But after a couple months, he relented and blended the scents, and it’s now one of his bestselling candles. “My penance is that anytime anyone buys the candle, I tell them the story,” he says.

And Davis hopes to continue telling that story for a long time. “I’m thankful for every order that comes in. Every time I see one come through my phone, I express a bit of gratitude. And that may seem like, ‘Oh, he’s just saying it,’ but it’s really true.” ◆

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The Weavers Way Vendor Diversity Initiative provides assistance, support and shelf space for makers and artisans who are people of color.

Hey, it’s not your fault.

Do your overflowing trash can and recycling bin make you feel like a failure as you drag them to the curb on trash day? ¶ You’re supposed to reduce, reuse, recycle, but everything you buy comes encased in plastic. If you buy it online, that plastic comes packed in paper and yet more plastic inside a cardboard box.

Did you treat your family to pizza on Friday? Those grease-stained boxes are in the trash can, straining to unfold themselves inside a plastic bag. Did your kid convince you to grab some juice boxes as you approached the checkout at the grocery store?

In the moment it seemed like a reasonable compromise to avoid an argument, though you knew it would be better to get a big bottle of juice and use cups (or just have everyone drink water). ¶ You didn’t design the systems of overproduction and excess that yield mountains of trash.

You can do your small part to fight it, but so can our public officials through measures like plastic bag bans. ¶ You do have allies. Most businesses we rely on give us a shamefully narrow range of circular options, but thankfully some of them are forging a new path, whether that’s with refillable personal care products or reusable containers to hold our food. ¶ Keep reducing, reusing and recycling as much as you can.

We hope this issue sparks a little bit of hope that a world in which doing so easily is possible.

And remember: you’re part of the solution, but it’s not all on you. ¶ Want to read more about how we ended up with our trashy solid waste problem? At Grid we are fans of “Gone Tomorrow: the Hidden Life of Garbage” by Heather Rogers. Published in 2006, it will take you through the rise of the consumer economy, as companies marketed more stuff we never needed to buy and industries responded to the resulting surge in waste by shifting the burden of responsibility to local governments and consumers.

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Greet, Refill, Repeat NoLibs shop guides customers both new and experienced in zero-waste choices

story by marilyn anthony • photography by matthew bender

S

oft-spoken ray daly, the founding owner of Ray’s Reusables, is on a zero-waste mission. But her approach is more supportive sherpa than zealous missionary. While noting on her website that only 9% of the 8.3 billion pounds of plastic produced before 2019 have been recycled — leaving billions in landfills or the oceans — Daly’s response is not to panic but to provide alternatives.

The thoughtfully curated household, personal care and gift selections she offers make it easy for consumers to support local makers, buy eco-friendly items and reduce packaging waste by refilling reusable containers with bulk products.

Daly’s customers seem to get her supportive vibe. Recently, one gift-seeking customer burst into the shop with an urgent request: “Can you guide me to buy some candles?”

It wasn’t a question of locating the candles (the store is fewer than 900 square feet), but of being coached on the subtle differences among them: made from beeswax or soy, from a local company or a specific mission-driven producer. Candles in hand, the customer asked for advice on some additional gifts. Daly directed her to one of the products made in-house: shower steamers.

The combination of essential oils and salts are the shower equivalent of a bath bomb.

Exit one happy customer.

Interactions like these are one way Daly measures success. Sales numbers matter, along with tracking refill ounces, how much plastic is diverted and how much glass is kept out of landfills. But it’s her customers’ happiness, “when they tell me, ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’” that tops her list of success metrics and makes the difficult days easier to bear.

Daly’s own journey toward a sustainable lifestyle began decades ago when, as a middle schooler, she learned about fac18 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

tory farming. She became a vegetarian in response, choosing the diet she still prefers today. Another major influence came during her ten years working for Whole Foods Market, where she became interested in reduced packaging, recycling and compost-

ing. A year spent in China teaching English left her impressed by the legions of older workers maintaining litter-free streets, but shocked by the excessive amount of packaging. She began making the connection between packaging and litter in the U.S. Eventually, her combined interests led her to formulate a simple statement as the foundation of her business: “Here at Ray’s Reusables we are on a mission to help people reduce the amount of waste in their lives.”

Initially, Daly launched her business as a pop-up “refillery,” driving a van laden with vats of popular items such as spray cleaner, shampoo, conditioner and dishwasher pods to craft fairs as well as the Clark Park and East Falls farmers markets. She credits her “diehard” early customers whose “fervent support” showed that demand for refillables

was real. When the pandemic hit, one month after she’d given notice at Whole Foods and all the craft events she’d signed up for were canceled, she pivoted to sewing masks.

Post-pandemic, Daly resumed traveling to farmers markets and spent months searching for a storefront that would enable her to reach another market. When she saw the 2nd Street building in Northern Liberties, she knew she’d found a home for her business.

As you step into the hygge space, its clean lines and heady fragrances are simultaneously soothing and invigorating. Open shelves and a handsome bulk dispensing island invite browsing. Among the carefully researched inventory, Ray’s Reusables offers personal care items such as tallow soap, mineral sunscreen, bamboo tooth-

brushes, vegan dental floss (commercial dental floss is commonly coated with beeswax or petroleum-based wax), safety razors and shaving brushes. Household items are equally varied. Reusable paperless towels, cast iron pan conditioner, pencil sharpeners, bamboo cutlery and greeting cards are all on offer. More than 30 items can be purchased as refills, including deodorant, hair gel, witch hazel, insect repellent and Epsom salts. Daly shares that the “Big Three” — the most popular refill items — are ones people use most frequently in their homes: laundry detergent, liquid dish soap and hand soap.

Her first year running the retail location with four part-time employees has had its challenges, including the extensive research required to overcome regulatory hurdles gov-

Everybody has to enter [zero waste] from where it makes sense for them. I ask people, ‘What are you trying to replace? What’s most important to you?’”

RAY DALY, Ray’s Reusables Ray Daly helps customers get the product without the throwaway packaging.

erning container reuse. Daly, 32, claims she “operates on intuition,” while she admits to being “bad at a lot of stuff and very willing to seek out advice.” She has worked with coaches from SCORE, a national non-profit providing free mentorship to small businesses, and completed the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program at the Community College of Philadelphia.

She is also deeply committed to learning from her customers. The dialogue starts by meeting the customer where they are; Daly knows how hard it is to make behavior changing choices. “Everybody has to enter [zero waste] from where it makes sense for them. I ask people, ‘What are you trying to replace? What’s most important to you?’”

She likes to start people with easy swaps, like using Swedish dish cloths instead of paper towels.

“Sustainable looks very different to different people,” she says. “There’s no one right way to be sustainable.” She laughs when recounting how often customers look embarrassed as they enter carrying a throwaway coffee cup. “No need to apologize,” she says, “We’re not here to judge. We are all imperfectly sustainable.”

A Maryland native, Daly is grateful her husband’s career brought them to Philly, which she views as “a really great green city with lots of support and energy” for businesses that are trying to provide alternatives to wasteful consumption. She would love to see the city offer incentives to encourage more businesses to move toward zero-waste practices.

Meanwhile, Daly keeps her focus on her customers. These friendly interactions help offset the loneliness she can sometimes experience as a solo owner. Daly wants everyone to know what keeps her going as she works to build a sustainable business: “We never take it for granted that you’ll come into the shop and support us … We’re always here to talk you through those moments [of hard decisions], making the transition to less waste … I’m just like you. I’m figuring it out as I go.

We’re here to help people do their best because that’s all we’re doing.” ◆ Ray’s Reusables is open Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday ftrom 10 to 6 p.m.; and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is located at 935 North 2nd Street in Northern Liberties.

JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 1 9

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CTRL-ALT-RECYCLE West Grove tech business innovates electronic recycling — and builds its own microgrid

story by alex mulcahy • photography by chris baker evens

T

he amount of electronic waste the U.S. produces — 6.9 million tons annually — is an overwhelming problem, but for Steve Figgatt, founder of the e-waste recycling business Sycamore International, it’s also a nearly limitless opportunity.

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Thirteen years ago Figgatt, 36, started the West Grove-based business — which now employs 73 people and processes 40,000 devices per month in 60,000 square feet of warehouse space — after graduating from Ithaca College in 2008.

At Ithaca, Figgatt majored in environ-

mental studies, focusing on wind and solar development. When he launched his business, he turned his attention to keeping computers functional and out of the landfill.

“When you start a new enterprise, you think, ‘Hey, what sucks about this thing?’”

Figgatt says. “And if you have a solution, you solve it. And then rinse, repeat and scale.”

It took Figgatt a few iterations of his business before he found his niche. For several years, the company repaired broken computers for local school districts, but he eventually concluded he was bound to be outcompeted.

Meanwhile, he had been working with the Chester County Intermediate Unit, which serves as a liaison between public, private

Why not mine or source your raw materials from assets that are already in the material stream, rather than doing mountaintop removal to mine iron ore ... ” STEVE FIGGATT, founder of Sycamore International

Steve Figgatt is the founder and CEO of Sycamore International, which processes 40,000 electronic devices per month for refurbishing and recycling.

and charter schools and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, where he was working on school computer upgrades. Figgatt was tasked with getting rid of their old electronics, and was appalled at the companies he had to deal with. “It was just a terrible customer experience,” says Figgatt. “They were destroying assets … and I figured we could extract more value out of these assets.”

Electronics recycling is a gold mine — as well as a mine for silver, nickel, platinum, iron and palladium, to name just a few of the rare earth metals in the average laptop — but a complicated one to monetize. The careless destruction of the computers led Figgatt to begin investigating the supply

chains to try to make it work. It also aligned with his guiding business philosophy, which predates but embodies the circular economy movement.

Figgatt says, “Why not mine or source your raw materials from assets that are already in the material stream, rather than doing mountaintop removal to mine iron ore, for example, which is an incredibly costly process, energy-wise, materials-wise, labor-wise. Why not just use it out of an existing waste stream?”

Figgatt estimates that, after the computers are pried apart and their parts are sorted, Sycamore sends materials to between 72 and 74 downstream recyclers, and he vets each one of them to ensure the materials are handled properly.

“There’s a lot of bad actors that have been in this industry,” Figgatt says, some of which export waste to developing countries.

There, he explains, “people just pour gasoline on TVs … and just light it on fire because it’s an easier way to burn off the plastic so they can collect the metal.” The results are poisoned air and hazardous waste sites.

Recycling is not the only end game for computers. In fact, it’s the second and less desirable outcome. The first and more profitable option is refurbishing. According to Figgatt, selling refurbished computers accounts for 82% of the company’s revenue.

He says that Sycamore’s sales are currently split 50-50 between domestic and international markets.

Figgatt says, “We’re actually working on

[an order] this morning where we’re shipping a bunch of tested refurbished televisions that we pulled out of the school system regionally and it’s being distributed to a customer in Casablanca.”

Sycamore has contracts with school districts and colleges and universities — as well as some medical institutions — in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and other Mid-Atlantic states to purchase computers they are replacing. Sycamore sends a truck to pick up the unwanted computers, and brings them back to their 16-acre campus.

Then, the sorting begins.

If the laptop is suitable for resale, it must be cleaned both physically and digitally. The physical part is pretty straightforward. Employees use razor blades and rubbing alcohol to remove stickers previous owners had used to decorate them.

The digital scrubbing is a more time and energy intensive process, requiring up to a day to complete. To adhere to information technology asset disposition standards, this process must not be interrupted, and if it is, the process must start over.

This vulnerability to a power outage, along with his goal of creating a zero-waste, net-zero company, prompted Figgatt to have a microgrid built for this campus. That means if the power goes down for everyone else, Sycamore remains powered.

As impressive as the recycling and refurbishing business is, how Sycamore powers its operation has at least as much, if not more, potential as a business. The energy is JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 21

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Books & Stuff

When you think about it through an ecological lens, everything in the natural world is reused in some way or other … It just makes sense.”

STEVE FIGGATT, founder of Sycamore International derived entirely from rooftop solar panels, and it is stored in an iron flow battery, the first of its kind on the East Coast.

The battery most familiar to us is the lithium-ion used in cell phones, electric cars and countless other rechargeable household electronics. A major advantage of lithium batteries is that they are energy dense and, therefore, compact. The disadvantage is that lithium degrades over time.

Iron flow batteries have the opposite traits. Iron flow batteries are huge; the one Sycamore uses, which is manufactured by Portland, OR-based ESS, Inc., is housed in a 40 foot-long shipping container and weighs 40 tons.

However, it does not degrade with time, and Sycamore’s system is guaranteed for 25 years, though it should continue to run beyond that. “You’d have to have two and a half lithium batteries for every one of these,” says Figgatt.

The materials for the technology, salt water and iron, are also plentiful. It’s a closed loop system, so the same water continues to course through the tubes indefinitely.

Should the unit ever be decommissioned, 22 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

it’s a simple matter to neutralize the water, so there’s little environmental risk.

Sycamore is working on the installation of a second battery to increase their capacity.

It’s easy to see why Figgatt is so bullish in business: there is such a tremendous amount of waste, or, as he sees it, undervalued assets.

He’s excited to begin processing solar panels, another hard-to-recycle item that is just beginning to become a major waste issue.

He sees the solutions that his company is creating to these vexing problems of waste and energy as appealing to both sides of the political aisle. Democrats already embrace recycling and green energy, while Republicans see an opportunity to reclaim rare earth metals — the mining of which is, by some estimates, 90% controlled by the Chinese government.

As Figgatt sees it, the underlying philosophy of the business transcends all political labels and divisions. He says, “When you think about it through an ecological lens, everything in the natural world is reused in some way or other, carbon cycles originally, and everything else. It just makes sense.” ◆

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Tableware Today

Reusable dishware company helps corporations and cafeterias cut waste story by heidi krull • photography by chris baker evens

Re:Dish founder Caroline Vanderlip is working to reduce plastic food container waste. Opposite page: Yoanette Davila sterilizes dishware at the company’s Philadelphia facility, where containers can be washed and reused more than 1,000 times.

F

our years ago, Re:Dish CEO and founder, Caroline Vanderlip, set out with the goal of reducing the amount of plastic waste in the United States.

The U.S. alone has produced 8.3 metric tons of plastics since 2018 and production is expected to triple by 2050, a report compiled by nonprofit ocean conservation organization Oceana shows. Most of it ends up in landfills, or worse yet, in our soils, groundwater or animals’ stomachs. Seeing the dire need for a sustainable alternative for plastic dining ware, Vanderlip and the new Re:Dish team began working to decrease single-use plastic consumption in New York state. Now the sustainable dishware company is expanding to the Philadelphia region.

24 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

“When I started researching, I discovered the concept of the circular economy,” Vanderlip says. “I found that there was a tremendous business opportunity, as well as an opportunity to really impact climate change.”

Instead of creating a product that could be used once and thrown away, Re:Dish formulated a variety of containers and cups with lids made of FDA-approved food-grade polypropylene that can be reused more than 1,000 times. Re:Dish offers each of their clients a custom plan, but the basic process is the same: each single-use ware is replaced by Re:Dish sustainable ware, employees and staff return the dishes to the designated Re:Dish Drop-off bins after use and the Re:Dish team collects and washes them in their facility.

The company uses an industrial dish washing machine that washes Re:Dish products at a minimum of 170 degrees Fahrenheit, incorporates both washing and drying to ensure that each dish is up to safety standards and uses eco-friendly chemicals deemed safe for human and environmental health. On top of that, the machine itself was made to be sustainable.

“We have worked with our manufacturer to ensure that the actual dish washing machine conserves water and energy,” says Vanderlip. “Essentially, the machine uses water four times before it disposes of it. The dirtiest water is at the front end and the cleanest water is used to rinse at the back end.”

Re:Dish is still building their clien-

You teach somebody at eight years old what reusability is, and they learn it for life. They don’t form the bad habits of using single-use products.”

CAROLINE VANDERLIP, Re:Dish CEO

tele, which includes schools, event venues and municipalities. According to Vanderlip, the team is mainly working with Fortune 500 companies that are looking to decrease their waste production in the workplace.

For example, Barclays Corporate and Investment Bank in Wilmington, DE, started working with Re:Dish in 2022.

According to Frances Cabrera, vice president of citizenship at Barclays in New York City, the bank decided to get involved with Re:Dish not only to pursue their own sus-

tainability goals, but also to support a growing company.

Like many of Re:Dish’s clients, Barclays has their own goals to reach lower carbon emissions. Casey Cullen-Woods, vice president of global sustainable design and operations, says that a transition toward a low-carbon economy is a challenge businesses are facing right now.

While Barclays has only been working with Re:Dish for a year, Cullen-Woods says that they have already noticed significant strides toward sustainability in all of their offices with Re:Dish products, having already saved 150,000 single-use plastics from landfills. Re:Dish is in all of Barclays’ East Coast campuses in Delaware, New Jersey and New York.

According to Vanderlip, Re:Dish’s environmental impact can be measured in a variety of ways, including company surveys.

“We did a survey about a year ago with a client, and we discovered that one-third of the respondents had taken the idea of circularity in other aspects of their lives because of the incorporation of Re:Dish in their corporate environments,” Vanderlip says.

Customers can also track impact by calculating statistics on their website. For example, if 1,000 employees use one Re:Dish container a day for just one year, 19,906 disposables will be saved from landfills, 2,297 cars will be kept off the roads and 40,410 gallons of water will be saved. This means that every Re:Dish client is reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by 77%, and re-

ducing their water waste by 67%.

Re:Dish aims to improve on their own current diversion rate of 76%. They’ve sent 2,400 pounds of organic materials from used Re:Dish containers to compost facilities, and partnered with the NYC company aNYbag to transform their plastic waste into reusable bags.

While Re:Dish has made strides toward complete sustainability, Vanderlip believes there is still work to be done. Re:Dish products are shipped to the facilities in plastic containers, which is preventing them from achieving closer to a 100% waste diversion rate. Additionally, although Re:Dish does use recycled water to wash used dishes, there is still new water being used at the beginning of the process. These two hindrances make the zero waste goal more difficult to achieve.

Re:Dish is also working to expand their presence in schools. Vanderlip states that they are currently servicing five K-12 schools in New York, and hope to soon reach public schools in the Philadelphia area and beyond. “The problem is that the materials they use are inexpensive, but bad for the environment,” she says. “It’s hard to bridge the gap between what they’re currently using and the cost of sustainability.”

Vanderlip says that teaching sustainability to children is now more vital than ever. “You teach somebody at eight years old what reusability is, and they learn it for life. They don’t form the bad habits of using single-use products.” ◆ JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 25

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Tired of Tires

In 2018, the City passed an ordinance designed to stem the tide of illegal tire dumping. Five years on, the problem has only gotten worse story and phtotos by jordan teicher

“M

y life,” says Julie Slavet, “is all about tires.”

Slavet is exaggerating — but only slightly. As the executive director of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, part of her job is to help improve Tacony Creek Park, a 300-acre preserve in Northeast Philadelphia. And for the last couple years, that’s meant dealing with illegally dumped tires.

The last time they appeared, she says, was early this fall. There were around 500 of them, scattered underneath the Whitaker Avenue bridge, a popular spot for illegal dumping. “People dump in places where they’re not going to get noticed, and there aren’t a lot of eyes on the bridges at night,” she says. “Trucks pull up, back up, and they just dump the tires over the bridge.”

Tire dumping isn’t just a problem in Tacony Creek Park — it’s all over the city. In December 2021, dumpers unloaded nearly 4,000 tires — about 80,000 pounds worth — at a business in Frankford. And in October 2023, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reported pulling more than 3,000 tires out of the Schuylkill River during the second phase of a dredge project. In 2022, according to the Mayor’s Office, the City cleaned up 2,672 tons of dumped tires.

The tire dumping problem is just one facet of a larger illegal dumping issue that has long plagued the city. But tires present a special danger. Tires collect water, which makes them an ideal breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes. They’re also highly flammable. In 1996, a fire famously erupted at a lot under I-95 where a pile of at least 10,000 tires was being illegally stored.

In 2021, a huge pile of tires at a junkyard in Southwest Philly went up in flames, sending 26 GRID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 2024

smoke into the air that was visible for miles.

The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership organizes weekly cleanups in the park, Slavet says. But tires, unlike smaller, lighter forms of trash that regularly turn up in the park, can’t be simply picked up and bagged by volunteers. “Getting rid of tires is not pleasant at all. It’s really hard work,” she says. So, as she’s done many times before, Slavet called Parks & Recreation, which took about a month to finish the job.

Slavet was glad to see the tires go and grateful for the City’s help in removing them.

But she knows it’s only a temporary solution.

In a couple weeks or months, she figures, they’ll be back to remove tires again. why is tire dumping so persistent in Philadelphia? Nic Esposito, the former director of the City’s now-defunct Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, understands the issue better than most. In 2018, he spent months studying the problem. It starts, he says, with tire dealers.

Tire dealers, he says, have to get rid of old tires. And the easiest, cheapest way to do that is to hire a small hauler — essentially, someone with a truck — to come by and take them away. Currently, according to a list provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, there are just two certified waste tire processing facilities nearby where haulers can bring those tires; one is Delaware Valley Recycling in Southwest Philly. When reached by phone, however, an employee, who would not give his name, said the company used to send tires to a landfill, but they stopped taking in tires about two years ago.

The other facility is Emmanuel Tire of Pennsylvania, which is located in Consho-

hocken. For many small haulers looking to make a quick buck, it’s more time and cost efficient to skip the trip outside the city and simply dump tires in places like Tacony Creek Park. “The tire dealers have no idea where the haulers are taking the tires. They don’t really care,” Esposito says. “A lot of times it’s willful ignorance.”

Esposito realized back in 2018 that City officials also had no idea where tire dealers were sending their old tires. So he developed legislation to help them find out — and to shut down dealers who weren’t practicing proper waste disposal. That November, City Council passed Bill No. 180648, an ordinance

From left: Dallas Herbert Sr., Ron Whitehorne and Patricia Eakin of the 215 People’s Alliance have to deal with regular dumping, including lots of tires, near Tacony Creek Park.

It’s embarrassing. People do come to visit, and it doesn’t look good for the whole neighborhood.”

DALLAS HERBERT SR., Lawncrest resident that requires tire dealers to get a license in order to operate. To qualify for the license, tire dealers have to contract with a waste hauler registered with the state. They also have to keep a manifest documenting every old tire they receive and every tire that goes out for disposal. As part of the program, the City’s

Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I) is empowered to inspect tire dealerships at random, review their manifests to ensure tires aren’t mysteriously disappearing, and, if necessary, revoke or suspend the license of non-compliant dealers.

The tire dealer license program has been

active since August 2021. But the rollout is still incomplete. In the past two years, L&I says it has inspected 74 tire dealers and issued 57 licenses. But there are still tire dealers that haven’t yet applied, and L&I would not share a timeline for when the remaining dealers would become licensed.

It’s also unclear if L&I is enforcing some of the measures designed to deter dumping.

L&I didn’t say how often it has randomly inspected tire dealer manifests, or if it has done any such inspections at all. And the department would not say how many non-compliant tire dealers, if any, have had their licenses suspended or revoked.

JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 27

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“It’s almost like it’s voluntary if you actually want to follow the rules,” says Esposito.

“If you don’t, there’s no repercussions for it.”

The inconsistency of the rollout is likely due to a deficit of resources at L&I, a historically underfunded department. But the City is paying far more to clean up tires than it would to hire a few more inspectors at L&I. In 2022, the City paid $253,888 in disposal fees — more than double what it paid in 2016 — for the tires it collected. The total cost of getting tires off the streets — including things like labor and fuel — is far higher than that. According to a 2013 study from the nonprofit Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful, the average municipal costs for cleaning illegal dumping is $619 per ton. By that metric, the City is likely spending more than $1.5 million annually to clean up tires. (The City does not track the total cost of tire disposal.)

“They have a really powerful tool in their toolbox. Why aren’t they using it to the full ability?” says Esposito of the tire license program. “They’re investing in the reaction and the response rather than the proactive, preventative measures.” the deluge of dumped tires has only intensified in recent years. In 2016, according to the Mayor’s Office, the City removed 1,372 tons of tires — about half the tonnage hauled away by the City in 2022. Complaints from residents about the problem remain a steady drumbeat. According to the Mayor’s Office, Philly311 received 2,098 service requests regarding illegally dumped tires in 2022 — more than five calls per day. That’s fewer than the recent peak of 2,889 calls in 2019, but still far more than in 2017 when the City received 1,736 calls on the matter.

According to the Mayor’s Office, the most service requests related to illegally dumped tires are coming from some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The top three zip codes —19140, 19134 and 19124 — are all areas where the median household income is less than $30,000. “The dumping map and the redlining map interface with each other very, very closely,” says Shari Hersh, a longtime member of Trash Academy, a group working to end littering and dumping in the city. “This is happening over and over again in communities that have had generations of environmental injustice and environmental burdens.”

28 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

The city has many threatening signs with ordinances that are rarely enforced.

It’s almost like it’s voluntary if you actually want to follow the rules. If you don’t, there’s no repercussions for it.”

NIC ESPOSITO, former director of the City’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet One of the zip codes where residents are calling frequently about tire dumping is 19120, which covers most of Tacony Creek Park. It’s also where Dallas Herbert Sr. has lived for more than 20 years.

Since he retired, he’s been spending more of his time working with members of 215 People’s Alliance to keep his community clean — specifically, a stretch of Newtown Avenue known locally as Snake Road because of how it curves. “Snake Road is a legacy dumping spot. This has been a problem for generations,” Herbert says. “If you don’t clean up the tires right away, they’ll just add more. Before you know it, you’ve got a safety issue.”

After years of advocacy, the Department of Streets installed three security cameras

on the road. But Herbert says they haven’t stopped the illegal dumping. The City, meanwhile, has begun paying a contractor to clean up the street once a month. Still, Herbert says he calls 311 about twice a month to report tires. And most days, he finds driving on the road is like navigating an obstacle course.

With a new mayoral administration incoming, there’s a chance for renewed focus on addressing the root causes of this longstanding problem, Herbert says. For him, stopping the flow of tires isn’t just a matter of public safety; it’s also a matter of civic pride.

“It’s embarrassing. People do come to visit, and it doesn’t look good for the whole neighborhood,” he says. “It’s been such a long time that this has been happening. The community is just fed up with it.” ◆

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JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HI LLY.COM 29

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Paper is a step forward, but it would be even better if customers brought reusable bags.

One Bag at a Time

Philly’s plastic bag ban has not been perfect, but it has significantly changed business and consumer behavior story by dawn kane • photography by matthew bender

S

amuel velasquez operates La Marqueza Philly, a colorful Mexican food truck near the Community College of Philadelphia. Before the City’s plastic bag ban, his customers received their orders in disposable plastic bags. These days, unless those customers offer up their own reusable bags, their orders come in paper bags.

As a step towards mitigating the use of plastics — which cause myriad environmental and health impacts — City Council passed legislation prohibiting retail businesses from giving out plastic bags in De30 GR ID P H I L LY.CO M JA NUA RY 20 24

cember 2019. Full enforcement was delayed

by COVID-19 and began in April 2022.

Two years after the ban’s implementation, the Mayor’s Office released an independent study in April 2023: “Evaluating the Ban: Philadelphia’s Plastic Bag Ban and Changes in Bag Usage in the City,” which shows some progress. According to the report, the percentage of shoppers that used at least one plastic bag while grocery shopping has dropped from 64% before the ban to 4%. The researchers estimate that during that period, the law prevented the distribution of more than 200 million single-use plastic bags.

But there are still plenty of challenges.

For one, the City relies on citizens to report businesses that violate the ban through Philly311. In a call to the 311 call center, an agent explained that when they receive a complaint, an inspector will go to the site within 20 days, and if the vendor is found to be out of compliance, inspectors will issue a violation, which comes with a $150 fine.

But many customers don’t report the businesses they patronize — in some cases because they think certain businesses, like food trucks, are exempt. A PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center report published in November 2023 found that 84% of food trucks surveyed in Philly are violating the ban.

Velasquez used to be among them. At the time, the seeming lack of enforcement of the ban and the lower cost of disposable plastic bags had lured him to go back to using them, he says. But recently, the fear of the steep fine drove him to reverse course again. “Most of us,” he said as he pointed

up the street at the line of food carts, “were using paper bags at first.” But after a while the vendors went back to plastic.

“Please write,” Velasquez says, “that customers should bring their own bags.”

Miguel Nolasco, co-owner of Burrito Feliz Philly with his wife, Leticia Jolapa, says that he buys paper bags for his food truck business. “We changed to paper bags one year ago,” Nolasco says, “[but] the plastic bag is more economical.”

On restaurantsupply.com, the cost of paper bags is about double that of plastic bags. “It eats into profits,” Nolasco says. He adds that food vendors can still buy cheaper plastic bags at places like Restaurant Depot, a membership-based supply company with a location in Allegheny West, and he argues, given the ban, he doesn’t think these stores should be allowed to sell them.

Many environmental advocates think of the bag ban as a starting point and say that the City needs to find workable alternatives to the convenience of disposable plastics so that they don’t pass from consumers hands and trash cans into streets and waterways and further impact the health of residents.

And although the Mayor’s Office points to the success of the program, many believe that the addition of a bag fee would make it more effective — benefiting the environment and helping to keep food costs down.

A work in progress The bag ban bill failed three times before the (now defunct) Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet worked with Mural Arts Philadelphia to promote the #BYOBagPHL campaign that addressed it as a litter issue.

“People might not care about environmental issues that seem far away,” says Nic Esposito, former director of the cabinet, who helped write the law. “But people do care a lot when their sewer is overflowing and flooding their front sidewalk because there’s all these plastic bags stuck on the grate.”

Philadelphia benefited from its late start in banning the bags, says Maurice M. Sampson II, Eastern Pennsylvania director for Clean Water Action. It gave the City the advantage of writing the law after seeing how bans had worked in other places. He cited the example of Chicago, which implemented a partial plastic bag ban in 2015. “They

really, the business owners — after it was all said and done — said they wished the fee was in there because it gives them a little cover to charge for the bags.”

Sampson contends that those opposed to the bag fees don’t understand that it’s the poor communities who are most impacted if the bag ban doesn’t have a fee. “There’s a whole group of supermarkets whose target audience are households with less than $35,000 income,” he says. “They have always charged for their bags … and they do that in order to reduce the costs of the food.”

Also, without the fee, the large chain stores can absorb the cost of giving away bags

Please write that customers should bring their own bags.”

SAMUEL VELASQUEZ, La Marqueza Philly food truck basically just substituted the thicker bags and called them reusable,” Sampson says.

“In fact, they were not being reused.”

Esposito credits Sampson for crafting the language to include a prohibition of any type of blown-film extrusion bags. “We completely banned the bags by putting into our legislation the definition of how plastic bags are made,” Sampson explains.

Originally, the proposed law included a 15-cent fee for the plastic bags, but it was removed. “There were certain politicians that thought they were protecting their constituents, especially small business owners, by taking that fee out,” Esposito says. “But

across the country, but local stores must raise prices, he adds.

According to PlasticBagLaws.org, when Chicago implemented a 7-cent tax, the number of plastic and paper bags used at grocery stores dropped 42% in the first month. The fee creates a behavioral change that will prevent people from asking for unnecessary bags, Sampson explains, adding that even though paper bags are less harmful than disposable plastic bags, they still have a negative impact on the environment. “We don’t want you to use 365 bags a year,” he says. “We want you to use one bag 365 days of the year.”

JAN UARY 20 24 G R I DP HILLY.COM 31

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On April 28, 2022, Councilmember Mark Squilla introduced Bill No. 22036401 to amend the ban and reintroduce the 15-cent bag fee on all provided bags. “It’s still an uphill battle,” says Sean McMonagle, Councilmember Squilla’s legislative aide. “This is not about the fee. This, in our opinion, is a way to change people’s mindset about single-use plastics.”

McMonagle adds that while they would like their work to lead to citizens rethinking their use of items like plastic straws and Styrofoam, that’s a tougher sell. “Plastic bags were a logical place to start because the bags foul city water and recycling processing plants.”

Plastic bags, plastic film and other contaminants continue to be a major challenge for the recycling industry because they impede the sorting process, says John Hambrose, public relations officer for WM, formerly Waste Management. “You can never do enough education to get people to develop good recycling habits — and to hang onto them.”

A City Council vote is imminently expected on the proposed bag-fee amendment, but final passage will require a mayoral signature. Without the fee to recoup the bag costs, compliance will remain an issue. “In Philadelphia [businesses] test these things,”

Miguel Nolasco of Burrito Feliz Philly is in compliance with the plastic bag ban, but the higher cost eats into his profits.

Sampson says. “The business community will test to see if this is going to be enforced, and if it’s not, they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing.”

According to Shemeka Moore, communications director of the Department of Licenses and Inspections, since the bag ban went into effect on April 1, 2022, 106 violation notices have been issued to businesses. “Currently writing Site Violations Notices are our only course of action for non-compliance,” she wrote in an email response in November 2023.

She added that from April 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022, the department received a total of 210 plastic bag complaints. In 2023, it received 106 complaints through November.

This is not about the fee. This, in our opinion, is a way to change people’s mindset about single-use plastics.”

SEAN MCMONAGLE, legislative assistant, Councilmember Mark Squilla’s office 32 GRID P H IL LY.CO M JA NUA RY 2024

Despite the slow progress, the ban has already made major impacts. In the study released by the Mayor’s Office, researchers also found that there’s been an increase in the number of shoppers using paper bags, reusable bags or choosing not to use a bag at all.

And the proportion of consumers using a reusable bag almost doubled from 22% to 42%.

On a weekday afternoon at the Whole Foods in Center City, customers at checkout lines were busy loading groceries — mostly into paper bags. For customers who bring their own reusable bags, the store gives a 5-cent refund on their purchases. A woman in the produce section carried a reusable bag, and when asked what prompted her decision, she explained that it was her daughter’s. “She’s been using it for a long time for environmental reasons,” she said.

“People forget how bad it was before the ban,” says Esposito, who thinks of the law as a work in progress that the City must continue to refine. “It’s low hanging fruit because you don’t need plastic bags.” ◆

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“The world of sustainability is so vast. If you really want to have influence, it’s so important that you understand all of its interconnections,” says Dr. Swati Hegde, a sustainability research specialist and instructor in Penn’s Master of Environmental Studies (MES) degree. At Penn, Dr. Hegde teaches sustainability courses designed to give students a taste of the considerations, connections, and controversies they may expect to encounter in a sustainability career— whether they focus on science and technology, law and policy, economics, or any other application. “My theme is that anyone who wants to make a meaningful contribution to the field of sustainability needs to see the big picture,” she says.

“Then we unlayer that big picture into its smaller components.”

Dr. Hegde teaches from experience: at her current role at the World Resource Institute, she explores ways to reduce agricultural methane emissions by creating enabling environments for science and technology approaches. She previously worked at The Water Center at Penn, and applied her PhD research toward diverting food waste in upstate New York. “If you are in the field of sustainability, it’s very important that you understand all of these subjects,” she says. “If you are a budding sustainability professional, it is important to have an open mind, understand all dimensions of sustainable development, but still find a niche area where you can make a difference.”

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