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| May 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
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| May 1996 | by Jym Dyer |
Phil Matier blows it.
In East Oakland there's a patch of land that used to be a battery factory, was later converted into a park, and is now a designated EPA Superfund site. Before opening up Verdese Carter park in 1978, the city of Oakland trucked out and replaced 18 inches of topsoil that had been contaminated by the battery factory. Unfortunately, they didn't dig deep enough or look far enough afield: toxins are still seeping out, and high levels of lead have been found in the yards of 130 residences nearby.
News about the park trickles in now and then. This past January, a few newspapers reported that the Federal budget battle had put a stop to the EPA's cleanup efforts at and around the park, and that Allied Signal (which owns the assets of the defunct battery factory) has offered to step in and clean things up at 30 of the residences.
It was very refreshing, then, to see a detailed article on the park by Tyche Hendricks in the March 8 issue of the East Bay Express. Not only did this article summarize the history of the problems at the park, it paid due attention to the impact the toxins had on nearby residents.
Too frequently, the coverage of the impact of toxic waste sites is very abtract. Measurements and statistics feature more prominently than a human face. The Express story is a prime example of the value of alternative newsweeklies.
We're in a bit of a conundrum here at The Funny Papers world headquarters. One problem with matters ecological is that anyone reporting on them can reduce a complex issue into simplistic nonsense by failing to mention a crucial fact or two. This happens quite frequently, and this column will occasionally round up some of these omissions under the title Unmentionables.
Alas, the term's a bit outdated, and perhaps even quaintly nostalgic by now. With newsmakers like Clarence Thomas and John Wayne Bobbitt running around, unmentionables get mentioned all the time. Thus my quandry: KRON-TV had a chance to present some informative comments in the debate about the recycling of plastics. Guess what they chose to focus on instead?
Here's what happened: the City of Berkeley's curbside recycling program does not pick up plastics, a policy that's been challenged by Berkeley City Councilmember Polly Armstrong. In last month's column I took a look at the Oakland Tribune's coverage of the issue and found that coverage to be pretty light on facts that might help their readers understand the issue, and pretty heavy on the usual batch of sound bites (many of them supplied by Armstrong) about those wacky Berkeley people with their wacky ideals.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Phil Matier picked up the trail from there and came sniffing around the Ecology Center for some more information. That in itself is reasonable: in addition to providing Berkeley's curbside recycling service, the Ecology Center has a variety of research and information projects going, including one devoted to this very issue. And so, Mark Gorrell of the Ecology Center volunteered some time and described the various facets of the issue in detail.
None of this showed up in March 4's "Matier & Ross Report" column. Introducing Gorrell as an "anti-plastics crusader and Berkeley Ecology Center board member," the article boiled everything he had to say down to a single unexplained comment, unmoored from any context: "If we allowed them into the recycling program, people will think it's environmentally OK to buy them. It's not."
One has to wonder why Matier bothered to do any research at all, since his article was little more than a rewrite of the Trib pieces (even using the same juxtapositioning of unrelated events to brew up some pseudo-irony). There's the requisite Armstrong soundbite, comparing Berkeleyites to ostriches. About the only thing Matier managed to add to the debate was an odd implication that somebody at the Ecology Center has some power over what Berkeley's citizens are "allowed" to recycle.
Matier decided to milk the story some more for the teevee version of the "Matier & Ross Report," so he gave Gorrell a call. Gorrell expressed his disappointment with the coverage so far, and Matier made assurances that the show would delve deeper into issues that didn't fit into the column.
And so, Gorrell found himself under the teevee lights, talking for almost half an hour about the ins and outs of recycling plastics: technical problems with making use of recycled plastic, sham recycling schemes, toxic byproducts of plastic production, and the migration of chemicals from plastic containers into the food stored inside them.
After he'd had his say, they did another take, and after they did another take, they asked him about the migration of chemicals. He cracked a bad joke about shrinking penises.
And when the "Matier & Ross Report" aired, shrinking penises turned out to be the only "issue" handled at any length.
Nonetheless, this story does have unmentionables.
You wouldn't be able to tell it from either version of the "Matier & Ross Report," but Gorrell made it very clear that he was only speaking for himself, and not representing the Ecology Center's position on the issue. Indeed, the Ecology Center has no official position on the matter. (Plenty of well-informed opinions, but no official position.)
It should also have been made clear that the Ecology Center's recycling program does not determine the city of Berkeley's recycling policies. Quite the opposite: the program is contracted to pick up what the city decides to have put out on the curb, including plastics. In case the city does make such a decision, the Ecology Center has been diligently seeking out a plastic recycling company that might actually do something worthwhile with the material rather than, say, dumping it somewhere in Asia.
As pointed out in last week's column, the question of where curbside-collected plastic actually ends up was not even asked, and it still remains to be asked. It's a classic unmentionable: with that vital element omitted, Berkeley's policy can be and has been portrayed as a quixotic attempt to do nothing but browbeat citizens into avoiding plastics, and ironically forcing them to dump them in the landfill (which, the unspoken argument goes, must surely be much worse than what would happen if they went into a "recycling" bin).
There is an argument, and a very strong one, for doing whatever we can to discouraging the production of plastics in the first place: toxic waste is produced, and chances are that some of it will end up in somebody's yard, their water, or their lungs. As with Carter Verdese Park, the daily papers aren't rushing to show us the human side of this. Such coverage might take valuable column-inches away from an Armstrong quote about how people in Berkeley aren't facing reality.
My last two columns mentioned electric vehicles (EVs), but didn't explore one of the biggest problems with EVs: the fact that they use a lot of batteries, usually lead-acid batteries. The situation at Verdese Carter park ought to be kept in mind when considering EVs as a transportation alternative.
I fear that my parenthetical comment (about the "juxtapositioning of unrelated events to brew up some pseudo-irony") might be a bit obscure. Basically, the Matier article, like the two Trib articles before it, put things this way: (1) a survey showed public support for plastics recycling, but (2) the city ignored this and decided to spend money on yard wastes instead, and then (3) decided to spend even more money on recycling education "including, presumably, the dangers of plastics."
In fact, there have been a number of recycling-related projects in the works, including a yard waste collection project, and an educational project. These have been going on for years. The East Bay Express did a story about Armstrong's plastics crusade almost a year earlier, in their April 7, 1995 issue, mentioning some of these projects, and yet this time around, everyone's portraying it as a slap in the face followed by another slap in the face.
One has to wonder why all these articles are structured the same misleading way. Are our journalists irresponsibly lazy, and just copying each other's work? Or are our journalists lazily irresponsible, just parroting whatever politicians want them to?
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