Limiting Intake at Big Run Landfill, Boyd Co KY

Ashland Daily Independent article

Contributor: Citizen Randy Roberson

 

CATLETTSBURG The Boyd County Fiscal Court took two major steps Tuesday toward limiting trash intake at Big Run Landfill.

First, members unanimously approved hiring Paul Nesbitt of Lexington-based Nesbitt Engineering as a consultant throughout Big Run Landfill’s permit renewal phase in January.
Nesbitt has worked with the court in the past regarding the county’s solid waste management plan. He said attempting to lower the total capacity of a landfill is groundbreaking for local government in Kentucky. Second, members unanimously approved a resolution accepting Nesbitt’s recommendation to lower the landfill’s total capacity by about 60 percent — in other words, cutting out about 18 million tons of trash from its currently permitted intake.
If the court is successful, it will be the first government body in Kentucky to reduce the total capacity of a landfill through this process, and the only way to do it is through an amendment to its solid waste management plan.

Nesbitt provided the court with data he obtained through state government agencies, noting it was not a “complete” set of data.

He said at one time, the landfill was accepting about 2,000 tons of garbage per day based on an average calculated for a six-day work week.
After a “boom” in 2013 and another in 2014, the landfill now accepts about 5,500 tons of trash per day. This figure, he said, was based on the last two quarterly reports from the landfill for 2014.
As of 2008, the landfill is permitted a total site area of 576 acres, with the ability to store trash in 255 acres.

Nesbitt said his justification to the state for implementing his suggested capacity reduction would be based off the 2008 slide, the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection-issued agreed order and other problems that appear to correlate with increased intake at the site.
“You can see that there’s a correlation when you look at the tonnage and the violation history that the increased flow into the landfill created some issues for the landfill,” Nesbitt told the court. “Because it is present in terms of violations, the slide and everything else.”
He added the landfill appeared to be able to operate successfully when it accepted about 2,000 tons per day. He recommended the company be required to return to this rate for the next 20 years, which would amount to a total capacity of 12.48 cubic yards.

Trash trains bring East Coast odors

Nesbitt also clarified the amendment is not based on a certain time frame and does not address daily flow. The time frame mentioned was more of a projection based on average intake data.
Boyd County resident Steve Cole asked Nesbitt if he would consider a rate that would effectively reduce the amount of garbage brought in from out-of state sources.
Cole said since the state would ensure the needs of Boyd County and other Kentucky-based customers would be met, lowering the overall capacity even further could cut off intake from some out-of-state sources since those needs are secondary.

Nesbitt, however, said he could not justify writing a suggestion that reflected Cole’s recommendation.

Boyd County Judge-Executive Steve Towler said the amendment could take up to five months to enact and it would have to be presented to the state for approval before becoming law.
EnviroSolutions Inc., the parent company for Big Run Landfill, had its CEO and President Dean Kattler and Regional Vice President Scott Cunningham present at the meeting.
ESI’s public relations representative Phil Osborne said Kattler could not comment on the suggested capacity reduction at this time.
Kattler did, however, release this statement: “We wish more than four of the 35-plus people that attended the fiscal court meeting would have attended yesterday’s two open houses where we could have listened, then answered their questions and concerns.
“We hope to see them at our July 15 open house, where we will be set up and waiting to share information.”

"We will be at your Open House on the 15th !!
This is another How great the Landfill is story by the Daily Independent this RAG is not worth reading it is not telling the full story about the pollution and and cancer causing coal ash, or fracking water waste that this company is destroying our environment with. And Kattler trying to say we are not interested enough to attend his Dog and Pony Show and saying they provide 14% of the county budget.


We got along without your filth money before the Dump Take Your Garbage Back to New Jersey. Good Job Ashland Daily  Independent Lick your Masters boots or kiss their a**'s"

 Randy Roberson

Citizen-Boyd Co Ky

Diary of a Dying Country By William Rivers Pitt,

William Rivers Pitt | Diary of a Dying Country

Thursday, 06 February 2014 09:04 By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed 
 

Pumps in the Midway Sunset, an oil field operational for over a century, near Fellows, California. (Photo: Jim Wilson / The New York Times) 
As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the 
fabric of life - a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously
 tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. 
These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no "high-minded orientation," no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.
- Rachel Carson, "Silent Spring"

It has been snowing all day here, the biggest storm of the season to date. There is at least a foot piled atop the stacked cordwood outside my office window, the trees are frosted, and everything is white and silent save for the hiss of flakes coming to rest. I am not one of those people who detests winter; in fact, I adore it, because it is beautiful. What I see out my window in the fading light of this late afternoon reminds me, again, how truly gorgeous this country is.
And then I remember that it is being wrecked, poisoned, denuded and ruined for money, and I want to go outside and sit in the snow and listen to it as it buries me until I am gone from this country that would do such harm to itself, brazenly and without restraint, for profit.
On Tuesday afternoon, Duke Energy in North Carolina released a press statement announcing that somewhere between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash, which created some 27 million gallons of water polluted with heavy metals and other poisons, had been accidentally dumped into the Dan River, near the towns of Danville and Eden. Eden, because God, or Fate, and definitely the coal industry have a vicious sense of humor. Duke Energy waited 24 hours to report the spill. They may not have said anything at all, but a security guard noticed an unusually low water level in what is called an "ash pond," which is where this crud is stored. That low water level means most of the poison had escaped into the river by the time it was discovered.
The Dan River is a source of drinking water for the region, as the Elk River was in West Virginia when the coal industry dumped poison there a few weeks ago. According to EcoWatch, "The spill is the equivalent of 413 to 677 rail cars of wet coal ash poured into a public drinking water source. If a freight train full of this toxic waste had derailed, there would have been immediate notification and quick news coverage in order to inform and protect the public." It appears at this point to be the third largest coal ash spill in American history.
This is what coal ash looks like. By Tuesday afternoon, the Dan River had turned completely grey.
The worst drought in living memory is currently afflicting the State of California and other parts of the West, severe water restrictions have been put in place, and every available weather model predicts the situation will "persist or intensify" through April and beyond. California Republicans have chosen to use the parched landscape as a way to attack Democrats, claiming that policies including environmental protection are to blame for the drought...because humans can't cause climate change, but Democrats can cause droughts, or something.
As it turns out, however, there may be another explanation for why California and much of the West is drying up:

America's oil and gas rush is depleting water supplies in the driest and most drought-prone areas of the country, from Texas to California, new research has found. Of the nearly 40,000 oil and gas wells drilled since 2011, three-quarters were located in areas where water is scarce, and 55% were in areas experiencing drought, the report by the Ceres investor network found. Fracking those wells used 97 billion gallons of water, raising new concerns about unforeseen costs of America's energy rush.
It can take millions of gallons of fresh water to frack a single well, and much of the drilling is tightly concentrated in areas where water is in chronically short supply, or where there have been multi-year droughts. In California, where a drought emergency was declared last month, 96% of new oil and gas wells were located in areas where there was already fierce competition for water. The pattern holds for other regions caught up in the oil and gas rush. Most of the wells in New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming were also located in areas of high water stress, the report said.

It's not just the West that is being affected by the practice of fracking. A report by the Environment America Research & Policy Center titled "Shalefield Stories" has collected the personal testimonies of dozens of people from all across the country who are suffering from the aftereffects of natural gas extraction, processing and waste disposal.
"Across the country," reads the report, "fracking is contaminating drinking water, making nearby families sick with air pollution, and turning forest acres into industrial zones. We believe it is vital for the public to hear directly from people living on the frontlines of fracking, and so Environment America Research & Policy Center is supporting the Shalefield Stories project-a booklet designed and published by local activists where people impacted by fracking tell their stories, in their own words."
Read it. It is the diary of a dying country.
The Keystone XL Pipeline is under construction, but not yet complete, and is still awaiting approval from the Obama administration. A few days ago, the State Department released a report on Keystone XL claiming that there are no serious environmental concerns regarding the pipeline, despite the fact that it will be carrying tar sands oil - the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet - through America's breadbasket and very close to the most important water aquifer in the nation.
Beyond the very basic, thousand-times proven fact that the Keystone XL pipeline will leak, because all pipelines leak when they are not exploding in huge fireballs that lay waste to the countryside and light up the sky for miles, is the fact that the extraction process for tar sands oil - before it ever sees the inside of any pipeline - is actually more pollutive by two to three orders of magnitude than previously understood.
The President of the United States did not deign to give a single damn about these or any other inconvenient facts about Keystone and tar sands oil when he stood up before the American people during his State of the Union address last week and talked about "energy independence" in terms so rosy that they would make an oil baron blush.
He didn't talk to you about any of this...but maybe you might want to talk to him. The 30-day period for public comment on the Keystone XL pipeline project has officially begun, and if you have a mind to, you can speak your mind on the matter here. Click the blue "Comment Now" button in the upper right corner and speak your piece.
I would not in any way presume to tell you what to say or how to say it, and I offer no guarantees that commenting on that site will be anything other than a waste of time; the damned pipeline is half-built already, the State Department has blithely brushed off a mountain of extremely unsettling environmental concerns, so I am pretty much convinced that the president is going to approve this thing even if God appears before him in the Oval Office and denounces the project with brimstone and fire. The president doesn't work for God, and he sure as hell doesn't work for us. He works for the energy industry that is turning this indescribably beautiful country - this indescribably beautiful world - into a parched, poisoned wasteland.
Speak your mind anyway, if you feel like it. Unlike the energy policies that are filling the rivers and the air with poison, drying up the water out West while making the tap water back East flammable, speaking your mind does no harm. Who knows? They may even listen. Stranger things have happened, and you still have time, because the seas have not risen to reclaim us.

Yet.

 William Rivers Pitt is Truthout's senior editor and lead columnist. He is also a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of three books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know," "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence" and "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation." He lives and works in New Hampshire.

Calory Count and Minimum Wage: The real cost of being poor

Nutrition and Productivity

Bhijit Banerjee

Department of Economics, M.I.T.

1       A simple theory of nutrition and productivity

The capacity curve (fig1)

•        The capacity curve: It relates income and work capacity (productivity)

          Higher income → better nutrition.

          Better nutrition: first used by the body for the basic metabolism. Then only it translates in higher capacity.

          As a result, the work capacity is convex, and it intersects the 45 degree line from below.

The Piece-wage schedule (fig2)

•        The piece wage schedule

—     The amount of income you get for each task you perform

3

—: v1 >v ∗ >v

—There is a wage v ∗ at which the body ”breaks even” → it creates a discontinuity in the labor supply.

Discontinuous labor supply (fig3)

•        The individual labor supply jumps

•        We can now draw the aggregate labor supply.

Equilibrium (fig3)

•        Introduce a labor demand curve.

•        What happens if the labor supply cross the labor demand in the gap?

•        There is involuntary unemployment Definition= A person is involuntarily unemployed if he cannot find employment in a market which does employ a person very similar to him and if the latter person, by virtue of his employment in this market is distinctly better off than him.

•        The vicious circle is complete: low wage leads to reduced work capacity, which closes access to employment.

1.1 The effect of non-labor income (fig4)

•        In what direction do assets move the capacity curve?

•        Who is more likely to be employed: the rich or the poor?

•        Who earns a larger wage income if both are employed?

The vicious circle of inequality: the functioning of the labor market magnifies assets inequality.

1.2 The effect of redistributing wealth

•        Imagine individuals are ranked by land holding (fig 5)

•        m have no land.

Who will work (fig6)

Definition: Minimum wage such that an individual can or want to work.

•        Capacity curve and labor supply.

•        what is the minimum wage at which someone can work?

•        Labor supply for capacity to work: the minimum wage necessary decreases with wealth

•       

•        Willingness to work and labor supply

•        The willingness to work is smaller for richer people

•        Labor supply for willingness to work: the minimum wage necessary increases with wealth.

Labor Supply (fig7)

•        Combine the two: labor supply.

•        How does redistributing land frm the rich to the poor affect labor supply

•        what happens to wages, production.

1.3 Dynamics

•        Assume now that work capacity today is a function of last period’s nutrition:

work capacity t = f(nt−1),f0 > 0

•        To simplify the analysis, let us assume away all the labor market issues—everyone works on his own and gets an income equal to his work capacity. Furthermore nutrition is an increasing function of income.

•        Therefore

nt      = g (workcapacityt)= g(f(nt−1)).

Implications

•        Poverty trap (fig10).

•      Reinforces the lack of a equity-efficiency trade-off

•        What if poor people could enter into long term employment contracts?

•      What would be the effect of providing free meals?

•      What would be the effect of providing access to credit?

•      What would be the effect of an employment guarantee scheme?

•        How much does an improvement in a household’s income increase investments in human capital?

1.4 Looking at the evidence

•        Observe that the model, in order to generate a poverty trap, requires that over a range, the f(g(•)) curve intersects the 45 degree line from below.

•        A poverty trap will emerge if f0g> 1. Let’s denote income by y and do some algebra:

0

0       0

gf0 gf

0

f0 g = gf0 ∗ = g ∗ y ∗ (1)

gf gy

0

The expressions ff 0 g and gy are called“elasticities”.

g

•        On the 45 degree line, f = y. Expression 1 tells us that there can be a nutrition-based poverty trap only if the product of the elasticity’s of the income-nutrition and nutrition-productivity relationships is greater than 1. It gives us a clear empirical fact to look for.

1.5    A Methodological aside: investigating the relationship between two variables

•        Say we are interested in the relationship between

log (income) and log (calories).

•        We start with a data set (say, data from India), which will look like two columns (two variables), with one observation of income and one observation of log(calories) for a sample of individuals (for example: 200 individuals).

•        The first thing we could do: plot the data. We put log(income) on the x axis and log(calories) on the y axis.

•        Suppose we want to summarize the shape of this graph:

•        The most flexible way is the “non-parametric regression”: we try to trace the function g(.)which best captures the variation in the data. We want to find g such that

ln(calories)=ˆg(ln(income)) +ˆ²

Where E(ˆ²)=0. ˆ² is called the residual of our regression. gˆ(ln(income)) is the predicted value of ln(calories)

•        We are not going to go into the details of how we find this function ˆg(.). There are several methods, of which the “kernel” regression is the most commonly used.

•        The most economical form is to run a linear regression: we restrict the function ˆg(.)to be a linear function of log (expenditure per capita). That is, we try to find the line that represent the best the cloud of points.

•        Note that these are all just ways to describe the data.

•        It is not because we have decided to run this particular regression that we have uncovered the true causal relationship between income and nutrition.

•        For example, what would I find if I were to run a regression of the number of sick people on the number of doctor in an area? How should I interpret it?

•        Often, we assume that the data has been generated byamodel of the form:

ln(calories)= βˆ+ˆα ln(income)) +ˆ²,

where E(ˆ²)=0.

ln(calories)= β + α ln(income)+ ²,

where ² is some error term, with E(²| ln(income)) = 0 and then, the linear regression will uncover our best estimates of α and β (notice that the hats are gone above the parameters).

•        In this case we assume that log(expenditures per capita) causes log(calories per capita). In this course, we will see many instances (for example today!) where this is not the right model to assume, and how to deal with that.

1.6    The relationship between income and nutrition: The “conventional wisdom” and its problems

•        “Conventional wisdom”: more income leads to more income spent on food and to better nutrition. In the data: strong correlation between income and food expenditures.

•      Note: if you regress food expenditures on total expenditures, the coefficient is less than one. What does the relationship between the share of expenditure spent on food and total expenditure?

•        This is called Engel’s law: As household income increases, the share spent on food decreases.

Problems with figuring out how much income affects nutrition

1. Reverse causality

2. Common causes

3. Measurement problem (1): Food expenditures are not correctly measured.

•        Meals taken outside th household and given to people.

•        Who tends to eat out?

•        Who tends to feed people?

•        In what direction does that bias the relationship between income and actual nutrition if you do not observe meals taken out and given to people but only total expenditure on food?

•       

4. Measurement problem (2)

•        Food waste

•        Who tends to waste more?

•        In what direction does that bias the relationship between income and actual nutrition if you do not observe waste but only total expenditures on food?

•       

5. Measurement problem (3):

•        Even if expenditures were correctly measured, they do not give a correct representation of quality. As people get richer, they buy better tasting food.

•        How does it bias α?

1.7    Income and nutrients in Maharastra, India

Based on Deaton and Subramanian (JPE, 1996)

D-S deal with some measurement issues

•        Meals taken in and given out. The data set includes the number of meals taken out, meals given to people, meals taken at home: they correct for this.

•        Quality: They start with 149 food items that the households have consumed in the past 30 days. Items are very precise (ex: several categories of rice are included). They use a conversion table to calculate how many calories are provided by each item.

•        Cannot fix Waste and Endogeneity

D-S take a Non-parametric approach In addition, their work not only examines the average relationship, but also the entire shape of the relationship between income and nutrition: Do we observe the non-linearity which forms the basis of the Dasgupta-Ray model we studied in lecture 2?

To do so, they run non-parametric regressions:

ln(calories)= g(ln(expenditure)) + ²

They try to estimate the shape of the function g(.).

D-S Results:

•        The relationship between expenditure and calories

•        Figure2: More expenditures → better nutrition.

•        Figure 3: Elasticity: derivative of the curve in figure 2. It is declining with expenditures (the curve is concave), but not very fast.

         

•        The relationship between quality and expenditures

•        An indicator of quality: price paid per calorie.

•        Figure 4: Log of price per calorie increases with expenditures.

•        Figure 5: Elasticity is fairly constant with expenditures.

1.8 Conclusion

•        There is a fairly strong relationship.

•        However there is also a lot of substitution towards quality even at low incomes.

•        Not surprsing given that they calculate that 2000 calories cost about 4% of the average daily wage.

•        The elasticity is nowhere close to 1....

2       The relationship between nutrition and productivity

Is there evidence that this relationship is very steep?

•        There is experimental evidence that better-fed workers are more productive at physical tasks. Example: 302 anemic rubber tree tapper in Indonesia. Half were allocated to a treatment group who was given iron supplement, half were allocated to a placebo. After 60 days, the treatment group had lower anemia, higher capacity, and higher productivity than the placebo group.

•        In the early 1990s, the Indonesian government experimented with an increase in health care prices: they increased the prices in a set of (randomly chosen) pilot locations. The consequences were: people were less likely to participate in the labor market in the pilot areas. Those who participated earned less.

•        However the elasticity of the productivity-nutrition relationship is below one... The product will not be above one: a study of the relationship between farm productivity and calorie consumption in Burkina Faso (Strauss 1986) finds an elasticity of 0.34, 0.49 for the poorest.

3       Conclusion: Should we abandon DasGupta and Ray?

•        This exercise has shown us that this very clever and appealing model is not a literal description of the reality: the relationship between calories and nutrition is not steep enough to generate a poverty trap by itself: the product of the two elasticities is around 0.09, which is far from one!!

•        However, the model forces us to think about how the nexus between human capital and income can lead to a vicious circle: this circle may be found in contexts other than the health and productivity nexus.

•