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Rethinking Waste

SGIQuarterlyJanuary 2013

Number 71A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education

S o k a G a k k a i I n t e r n a t i o n a l

TRACKING DOWN TRASH Elizabeth Royte

PLASTIC WORLD Susan Freinkel

LEARNING FROM NATURE Janine Benyus

FEATURE1 Rethinking Waste

2 Tracking Down Trash Interview with Elizabeth Royte

4 Converting Waste to WealthBy Mohammad J. Taherzadeh and Olle Engström

6 The Fruits of Cooperation in YogyakartaBy Siti Syamsiah and Mohammad J. Taherzadeh

7 Moving Beyond Waste PickingBy Parag Gupta and Tiffany Talsma

8 Plastic WorldInterview with Susan Freinkel

10 Learning from NatureFrom an interview with Janine Benyus

13 Transforming Trash

14 Making Sense of Ancient GarbageBy Rana Özbal

15 The Earth’s Legal TeamInterview with Polly Higgins

16 The Afterlife of E-WasteInterview with Dan McKinney

PEOPLE18 My Small Step

By Shin Won-suk, Korea

19 Food for the HungryBy Huntley Nicholas, Japan

GLOBAL CITIZENS20 Jun Ui—Pioneer in Pollution Research

By Daisaku Ikeda

PROPOSAL22 For a Sustainable Global Society:

Learning for Empowerment and LeadershipBy Daisaku Ikeda

AROUND THE WORLD23 SGI activity news from around

the world

ON VOCATION 26 An Eye for Fashion

BUDDHISM IN DAILY LIFE28 Desire, Impermanence and the Self

ContentsEditorial Team:

Anthony GeorgeElizabeth Ingrams Joan Anderson Julie Kazumi KakiuchiKeiko KakuraiMarisa StensonMotoki KawamoritaRichard WalkerYoshiko MatsumotoYoshinori Miyagawa

Published by Soka Gakkai International

Art Direction & Design by Modis Design Printed by Japan Print Co., Ltd.

© 2013 Soka Gakkai International All rights reserved. Printed in Japan.

Printed on FSC certified paper, supporting responsible forest management.

ISSN 1341-6510

1410 16

The SGI Quarterly aims to highlight initiatives and perspectives on peace, education and culture and to provide

information about the Soka Gakkai International’s activities around the world. The views expressed in the SGI Quarterly

are not necessarily those of the SGI. The editorial team (see above) welcomes ideas and comments from readers.

For permission to reprint material from this magazine, please contact [email protected].

Soka Gakkai International Quarterly Magazine

SGIQuarterly

A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education

January 2013

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At the end of the 19th century, the stench that arose from the streets of New York City was so bad that sailors six miles out at sea could smell it. Waste was simply

thrown into the streets, joining the manure of the horses that provided the city’s transport. Much of the garbage disposal was left to pigs that wandered freely through the city, depositing their own waste among the rotting remains of food, ash and human garbage. Other cities around the world often fared no better.

Today, while all major cities have some form of organized waste management, the waste we are generating is a lot more complex, more toxic and less biodegradable than anything known to our forebears or more traditional cultures.

Each day we throw away an enormous amount of stuff, encouraged by a modern consumer economy that urges us to continually buy more and replace products with newer and better versions. And all those purchases come wrapped in layers of needless packaging. Modern-day residents of

New York throw away 12,000 tons of trash daily—a weight equivalent to 62 Boeing 747 jumbo jets. While efficiencies of waste management take it out of sight and out of mind, much of it will still exist hundreds of years from now.

Growing mountains of trash and vast areas of landfill throughout the world are only part of the problem. The bigger issue is the careless attitude that produces them and the shortsightedness that allows us to squander precious resources, turning them into poisons which damage the air, soil and sea.

Fortunately, solutions do exist and are being explored and developed, including innovative approaches that mimic the “no waste” principle of the natural world. Some of these are explored in this issue of the SGI Quarterly. Ultimately, a sustainable future rests on each of us wasting less, questioning more and developing a personal sense of responsibility for the things we consume, realizing that our everyday decisions have far-reaching impacts. ❖

Rethinking WasteA plastic refuse recycling center in Herat, Afghanistan

SGI Quarterly 1January 2013

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SGI Quarterly: What got you started investigating garbage?Elizabeth Royte: The genesis for Garbage Land was simple curiosity: I put trash and recyclables on the street, and by 10:00 the next morning they were gone. I knew these materials went somewhere, and I suspected they were having an impact on other living things. I decided to follow that trail.

SGIQ: Where did it lead? ER: I learned that New York City’s trash—some 12,000 tons of it a day—goes to scores of landfills in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, upstate New York, Ohio, Virginia and sometimes South Carolina—over 1,000 km away! A portion of city waste also goes to incinerators in Newark and on Long Island. My recyclable plastic went to a plant on Long Island that makes plastic lumber; my metal was headed to China by ship; my paper went to Staten Island for processing, and then off to Valparaiso, Indiana, to be made into cardboard boxes; my glass was crushed and used by nearby landfills as “cover,” required by law to keep down dust, rats, odors and gulls.

SGIQ: How much waste does the average person produce, and how has this changed in the past 100 years or so?ER: Individuals in the US now produce about 2 kg of waste a day, and about 30 percent of this is recycled and composted. In the 1960s, it was

1.2 kg per person a day. One hundred years ago, it’s unlikely anyone was weighing what he or she threw out their windows or tossed off piers into waterways, unless they were paying, by the pound, to have it hauled away. (We were recycling then, too: rags for paper; fats, oils and grease for fertilizers and fuels; metals for smelting.)

More interesting is the change in the composition of our waste. A hundred years ago, it was mostly ash from heating and cooking, and inedible food. Products were made of natural materials that were reused or recycled. Now, most household waste is products and their packaging: a full 30 percent of the municipal waste stream is single-use paper and plastic packaging. We also have more textiles in our landfills and, of course, electronic waste.

SGIQ: What do landfills actually look like? ER: The basic model, in simplest terms, goes like this: Dig a hole in the earth; line it with clay, sand or gravel and then a plastic liner. Dump in a day’s waste, crush and compress it with heavy machines, cover it with a layer of dirt or foam or crushed-up glass. Repeat daily until the landfill achieves its “regulatory height.” Then cap the landfill with more plastic, a couple feet of soil, and seed with grass to curtail erosion.

Landfills are impressive places: big, smelly, loud, busy. One is struck by the level of

Tracking Down TrashAn interview with Elizabeth Royte

Elizabeth Royte is an American

science and nature writer and author

of the book Garbage Land: On The Secret Trail Of Trash (Little, Brown,

2005), named New York Times

Notable Book of the Year in 2005.

A recycling center in Beijing, China

Tracking Down TrashAn interview with Elizabeth Royte

SGI Quarterly2 January 2013

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organization it takes to manage the steady flow of trucks and the volume of material. Modern landfills tend to be large, covering hundreds of acres.

SGIQ: What is the problem with burying our garbage in landfills?ER: There are two main problems. When we bury organic material, it generates methane, a serious greenhouse gas. Landfills are the third largest anthropogenic source of methane in this country. Some landfills collect this gas and use it to generate electricity, but experts believe these systems capture, at best, 50 percent of a landfill’s lifetime emissions.

The other problem with landfills is leachate: as liquid trickles through garbage, it picks up traces of solvents, acids, heavy metals, pesticides, motor oil and flame retardants. Leachate collection systems aren’t perfect, and leaking landfills have been known to contaminate nearby waterways and soil. The Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that any landfill liner will eventually leak. The truth is, landfills become more dangerous over time, not less.

SGIQ: How long does it take garbage in landfills to disappear?ER: It depends on the type of garbage and the environmental conditions of the dump: wet or dry, hot or cold. People who advocate against single-use plastics claim that a plastic bottle, made for a few minutes’ use, will last 1,000 years. Anthropologists have dug around in landfills in dry climates and found 40-year-old newspapers that are readable and carrots that look edible. Digs in wetter landfills reveal stinky mush. The science of decomposition is complicated and fascinating.

SGIQ: What are the pros and cons of incineration? ER: Incinerators take up less space than landfills, and they significantly reduce the volume of waste. But they don’t make waste disappear: one still has to landfill the end product—ash that can be toxic.

Modern incinerators are much cleaner-burning than older models, but they still release small but dangerous levels of lead, mercury and dioxins. But the biggest problem with incinerators is that they destroy resources that could be reused,

repaired or recycled—they need a steady stream of material to operate effectively. They’re also very expensive to build and operate, and they generate more carbon dioxide per MWh than any fossil fuel-based power source, including coal-burning plants.

SGIQ: To what extent is recycling a solution?ER: Remember: the three Rs are a hierarchy, and recycling comes after we’ve reduced our consumption and reused (or refurbished or repurposed) materials. Recycling reduces the extraction and transformation of virgin materials. Making new goods from old goods reduces air and water pollution, cuts energy use and

ER: After learning about the enormity of the waste Americans produce, I was shocked to learn that all this garbage coming from our households—more than a ton of it per household per year—represents just 2 percent of the nation’s entire waste stream. Far more waste is generated upstream, in extracting raw materials and manufacturing and transporting the goods we use and daily dispose of.

It’s both strange and not at all surprising that we’re disconnected from what happens to our waste: we’re incredibly lucky that we don’t have to think about where things go. But even if you don’t live near a landfill or incinerator, garbage is a problem for all of us. Methane

saves room in landfills. So it is important. But recycling depends on strong markets, and many products can’t be easily (or endlessly) recycled. I also think that recycling can provide a false sense that everything’s okay, consumption-wise—“No problem buying another bottle of water—I’m recycling this one!”

Recycling is an end-of-pipe solution, something individuals do (and municipalities currently pay for). But it’s also important to work collectively to get governments to adopt policies that address fundamental problems of consumption and waste.

SGIQ: What were some of the big surprises in your investigations?

is wafting from landfills and warming everyone’s atmosphere. Mercury from incinerators is settling in waterways and working its way into fish we eat. Processing of electronic waste in the developing world sends contaminants into the jet stream that crosses oceans and continents. And so on.

One of the best parts of researching my book was spending time with the men who collected my waste (women do it too, but not on my route). They were thoughtful about their work—what it means, why they do it—and funny. They work so hard, lifting 10 tons a day in searing heat, drenching rain, bone-rattling cold. Their job is dangerous, and sanitation workers are seriously underappreciated. Without them, we’d be drowning in our own detritus.

A methane collection well at a landfill in Pompano Beach, Florida


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SGIQ: Your book focuses on garbage management in New York. What are some of the promising solutions that you’ve seen elsewhere?ER: San Francisco has shown serious commitment to diverting waste from landfills—the city collects food scraps for composting, in addition to recycling the usual papers and containers, plus things like mattresses, lightbulbs, hazardous household goods. Many cities have a “pay as you throw” system, charging more for residents to send waste to the dump and less for recycling. Compost collection is up,

your energy, your water and your food come from; understand how resources are extracted, how they’re transformed into consumer goods, and what their energy, carbon and water footprints look like. And then learn about where these materials go when you set them on the curb or flush them down the toilet, and understand what impact they have on the environment and public health.

We can make personal changes based on what we learn, and we can work for larger change within our families and communities, our places of work or school,

nationwide, as are drop-off sites for food scraps. There are more programs for textile and electronics recycling. Municipalities are adopting frameworks that require manufacturers or brand owners to devise and finance systems for handling their products at the end of their life.

SGIQ: What do you see as possible solutions to the problems of waste?ER: Education is key. Knowing more about where our “stuff” (from food and clothing to telephones and toothbrushes) comes from can drive us to act more responsibly. We need to become ecological citizens in the fullest sense: understand where you live, what grows here and what doesn’t; learn where

higher levels of government. Agitate for composting programs, take-back programs for electronics, laws that ban the use of toxic materials that can end up in our air, water and soil, mandates for recycled content in consumer goods, and increased producer responsibility.

We’re finally starting to look seriously at food waste in this country. Researchers say we throw out 40 percent of our edible food. That’s bad for landfills and for the atmosphere: it’s also a mindless squandering of the labor, water and energy it took to produce and transport that food. We need to start thinking the same way about the consumer goods we heedlessly buy, so briefly use, and then toss into the trash. ❖

By Mohammad J. Taherzadeh and Olle Engström

Mohammad J. Taherzadeh is professor of

Biotechnology at the University of Borås in Sweden.

He is also director of resource recovery, involving 50

researchers working on ways of converting waste to

energy and value-added products.

Olle Engström is a councilor in the city of Borås,

Sweden, and the chairman of the board of the local

transportation company. He is the project coordinator

for Waste Recovery—International Partnership in Borås,

which he and Professor Taherzadeh jointly founded.

Sorting plastic bottles on a conveyor belt at the San Francisco Recycling Center


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Improved welfare and economic growth is generally accompanied by more waste. The global production of household waste is more than

2 billion tons per year, in addition to the waste from companies, agriculture, forestry and other sectors. The general practice of waste management around the world consists of open dumps and landfills. A quick look at European countries points to just a few that have succeeded in finding other solutions. Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands landfill less than 1 percent of their municipal waste, while in the UK the figure is 47 percent and in Romania and Bulgaria it is 99 percent. The situation in developing countries is worse. It is not uncommon for waste to be left on the streets or for hazardous waste to be dumped together with other waste, while environmentally harmful landfill gas is allowed to escape into the atmosphere.

The Swedish city of Borås, with a population of around 100,000, has been a pioneer in developing an economical system for converting waste into value-added products since 1986. Today, household waste is separated into 30 categories, which are either recycled or converted into biofuel, electricity or heat.

In Borås, “waste” is “wealth” rather than a problem.

The Zero Waste System in BoråsBorås’s waste management system

started with a pilot plan for 3,000 households, and was then implemented in the entire city over a 10-year period. During this time, laws and regulations, economic plans, technology, and environmental and social plans regarding waste management and resource recovery were developed in parallel. Currently, approximately 27 percent of waste is recycled via several private companies, 30 percent is converted to biogas followed by composting of the undigested residuals, and 43 percent is combusted to produce

electricity and heat.One key factor is the cooperation of

the citizens in waste sorting. Children are taught the system at school and learn about waste management at the city science center, which hosts regular school field trips. There are also social and sports activities for adults connected to this subject.

The municipality provides households with a booklet on how to handle 130 waste materials. There are recycling containers within walking distance of most residences. For the rest, the municipality provides households with black bags for organic waste and white bags for all other waste. The black bags, together with waste from restaurants, slaughterhouses, etc., go to a digester to produce 3,000,000 m3 of biogas per year, which is then upgraded to fuel for 59 buses, 12 garbage trucks and CNG (compressed natural gas) light vehicles. The white bags and some other industrial waste end up in two 20 MW combustion plants that produce 960 MWh of heat and electricity per day.

International PartnershipAt the beginning of 2006, collaboration

between a researcher (Mohammad Taherzadeh) and a local politician in

Borås (Olle Engström) resulted in the founding of an organization named Waste Recovery—International Partnership (WR). WR connects clusters of universities, municipalities, companies and NGOs in different parts of the world to WR in Borås and to each other. WR in Borås includes the University of Borås, the city of Borås, the municipal company Borås Energy and Environment AB, SP Technical Research Institute of Sweden and about 20 other companies and organizations with interest in or technology for waste management and resource recovery. The cluster in Borås connects with the cluster in each partner country in order to share knowledge and technology for education, research collaboration, system

analysis, technical solutions and project management and administration regarding waste management and resource recovery. WR now has relationships with cities in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America and Europe.

The collaboration usually begins with a visit and discussion initiated by either counterpart. The universities have crucial roles in these aspects, since most of the contacts have been initiated between the University of Borås and a university in the counterpart city. The collaboration is then developed to involve the local and central governments, embassies, municipalities, companies, NGOs and also organizations and cooperatives.

A full WR collaboration between Borås and a partner city includes extensive interaction at multiple levels. Decision-makers (mayors, company managers, etc.) are assisted to create a vision for a waste management system. This includes them visiting Borås. Contact is established between politicians in the two cities, or even at national level, for possible improvement of the laws and political instruments. Municipality staff and other technical people in the public and private spheres are given training and education, while the University of Borås offers

Converting Waste to Wealth

Waste-sorting bins in the UK


FEATURE

The Fruits of Cooperation in YogyakartaBy Siti Syamsiah and Mohammad J. Taherzadeh

Waste is commonly regarded simply as a useless byproduct. But as the global population increases, we need to utilize resources ever more efficiently while finding alternative means for fulfilling people’s demand. In the Gemah Ripah fruit market in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, a demo plant that converts fruit waste into energy is helping educate people toward a new paradigm that waste can be a valuable resource.

and filtered. The liquid is fed into a bioreactor for producing biogas used for generating electricity, while the solids are composted to produce fertilizer. With the daily input of 4 tons of waste, the plant can potentially generate approximately 500 kWh of electricity per day. This demo plant tackles two issues simultaneously—the environmental problem of the accumulation of solid waste and the provision of energy. Since the plant came into operation in 2011, the 14 waste trucks per week to the landfill have been reduced to just one truck.

The initiative is a partnership among Gadjah Mada University, Sleman Regency local government, Gemah Ripah Cooperation (a private company) and the market community, together with a constellation of partners in the Borås Waste Recovery—International Partnership in Sweden. The project has facilitated community education, raised awareness in waste sorting and utilization and strengthened partnerships among the university, government and private actors. A number of theses and student projects have been carried out based on the project, and the capacity and awareness of government officials and policymakers, especially in waste management, has been improved. The relationship between the university and local government, which is a crucial component in sustainable

a full MSc or PhD in Resource Recovery for students from the counterpart university. There is also further educational or research collaboration between the universities.

Public awareness-raising occurs through the media and religious and educational institutions. Waste pickers and companies and organizations involved in waste management are drawn in under

development, is being developed. The most challenging aspect of

initiating and operating this project has been to bring all partners into the same vision with a shared commitment to realize that vision. Many other institutions have been inspired by this project and are trying to adopt the idea in their own localities. Other initiatives that have resulted from the demo plant partnerships include management of waste at Gadjah Mada University by adopting the Swedish system of waste management and a clustering system for waste management in Sleman Regency.

Through all this cooperation, waste is gradually coming to be seen as an important resource for a better life—environmentally, economically and socially.

an environmental review and master plan with established goals and milestones for improved waste management. Finally, demonstration-scale projects in areas such as recycling, biogas and combustion are set up with the help of the companies in the two countries.

A major point in this collaboration is to find economical solutions to waste recovery that are most likely not the same

as the system in Borås, since the cultures and infrastructure, the composition of waste and the market for the potential products are different in different countries and even different cities. WR acts as a noncommercial organization with the goal of improving the environment. However, the process also leads to various commercial and cultural contacts and collaborations between Sweden and counterpart countries. ❖

The Gemah Ripah fruit wholesale market produces 4–10 tons of rotten fruit daily that, before the construction of the plant, had to be transported to a waste dumping area about 40 km away. This was costly, with negative impacts on the environment.

In the plant, rotten fruits are crushed

“Household waste is separated into 30 categories, which are either recycled or converted into biofuel, electricity or heat.”

Siti Syamsiah is an associate professor in the Chemical

Engineering Department of Gadjah Mada University,

Indonesia. She is coordinator of the Waste Refinery

Center at Gadjah Mada University, which focuses on

research, education and community empowerment in

waste utilization.

Constructing the bioreactor at Gemah Ripah fruit market


FEATUREFEATURE

Since she was barely five years old, Archana has been working at the Gazipur landfill, a mountain of garbage high enough to afford

views over a vast swathe of Delhi. She works here with her two brothers because there is not enough money with which her parents can feed the family otherwise. They wait eagerly for garbage trucks to dump over 200 tons of waste each day at the top of the trash mountain, scrounging through it for pieces of salvageable garbage that can be resold to scrap aggregators. Between the three of them, they scrape together an average of US$1.50 a day from the sale of plastic bottles, rags, cardboard, glass and metal shards.

The work is dangerous, she explains, and she suffers from “loose motions” almost every day. She claims it’s from breathing in the blanket of smoke from the constantly smoldering fires. More likely, it is from the exposure to the bacteria and parasites caked in her fingernails from digging through rotting organic waste. She is proud and a bit roughened, and smiles boastfully when she points out scars on her hand and arms from digging through the garbage.

As she sets a newly discovered baseball

cap jauntily on her head, I think of how the 13-year-old Archana can neither read nor write. She and her brothers have little chance of graduating on to another source of livelihood if something does not change.

The Waste Ventures model was developed to provide a solution to the problems faced by Archana and the 50 million people like her worldwide who depend on waste picking. It gives waste picker families the means to work in a safe environment and put their children into school.

It does this by creating integrated waste management companies that employ waste pickers like Archana’s parents. Their income is tripled by extracting greater value from the waste, reducing the portion dumped to under 20 percent, and taking away their dependence on working in the dangerous conditions of a landfill. Instead, they are equipped with uniforms and protective gear for collecting waste and segregating at source. This is important because it keeps the dry waste separate from the wet waste, increasing the portion that can be recovered and processed into products of value such as much-needed compost and recyclable pellets that are an alternative to virgin raw materials. This way, more than 80 percent

of the material discarded by households can be reused, preventing emissions of carcinogenic dioxins and climate-warming greenhouse gases.

However, one waste picker company, or even 10, is not enough. India alone has over 6,000 towns and cities where municipalities struggle to provide adequate services, and over half a million families pick up the slack by recycling what can be salvaged. Rather than try to transform the waste management system in all of these cities, Waste Ventures makes its model available for adoption by other organizations and entrepreneurs. Lessons learned are disseminated to accelerate a total-sector shift.

A long-term solution must also be financially viable. Waste Ventures spent two years honing a model for profitability that can be implemented fully with locally available resources and reach operational breakeven within nine months. Even small grassroots entrepreneurs are thus able to find adequate financing and access the technical know-how for collecting and processing the waste.

Waste Ventures is a young company with a small team not yet in a position to establish our model in Delhi—a city of over 16 million people. But if we are joined by others who see the urgency of fixing waste management systems in emerging market cities, together we can soon give Archana the opportunity that our model affords. ❖

Find out more at www.wasteventures.org.

Archana (right) wearing a baseball cap pulled from the dump

Parag Gupta, a social

entrepreneur and adviser to

Fortune 500 CEOs, public

officials and nonprofits,

created both Waste

Ventures Charities and

Waste Capital Partners in

2010 to incubate waste

picker cooperatives and

provide them with access

to finance.

Tiffany Talsma is

executive vice president of

Waste Ventures Charities.

She holds a BBA from the

Michigan Ross School and

has experience in M&A and

strategy consulting in the

US and Germany.

Moving Beyond Waste Picking By Parag Gupta and Tiffany Talsma


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SGI Quarterly: What surprised you about plastic when you began studying it?Susan Freinkel: One thing that really struck me was the pervasiveness. I describe in the beginning of the book doing this thought experiment where I tried to go a day without touching anything plastic and quickly realized that that was really impossible.

Another surprise was seeing how quickly plastic products that are so common today had come into being—within my lifetime. I had forgotten that there was life before the plastic bag, which wasn’t introduced until the late 70s, or a plastic soda bottle, which didn’t show up until the early 70s.

The other thing that was surprising to me was discovering that plastics originally came from the waste byproducts of oil and gas refining. It was an industry that had its roots in a need to do something with industrial byproducts.

SGIQ: What were the first kinds of plastic products to come on the market?SF: Let me start by saying that we talk about plastic as one thing whereas there are hundreds of different plastics in use, and they all have their own history.

Celluloid, one of the very first commercially successful plastics, was invented in the mid-19th century. It was created and often used to replace natural materials like ivory or tortoiseshell that were becoming scarce. Typically, it went into basic kinds of consumer goods that had been made of those substances, such as combs and brushes and buttons.

As a result, celluloid helped democratize consumer goods. Everyday folks could now have a very beautiful comb that looked like it was tortoiseshell and was much less expensive.

But you didn’t have plastics really permeating people’s experience in the way that they do now until the mid-20th century. What allowed the industry to take off was World War II. The military in the US and Europe commissioned plastics

manufacturers to replace strategic metals and materials with plastic goods, and so, come the end of the war, you have this huge production capacity that’s been built up. That’s when you really started to get a lot of products coming into everyday life, in durable goods, like cars, furniture and appliances, and in things like textiles and toys.

Then in the late 50s and early 60s, the next great wave of production happens, as the industry starts looking for new markets to develop and moves into disposables like picnic cups and plastic forks and straws.

The polyethylene industry, for instance, was looking for ways to replace different paper products—paper dry cleaning bags, the newspapers people used to line their trashcans and, ultimately, the paper shopping bag. Which is how we got the plastic shopping bag in the late 1970s—which is now probably the most ubiquitous consumer item on the planet—the symbol of plastic’s pervasiveness.

SGIQ: What kind of effect did the introduction of so many new kinds of products have on consumerism?SF: I can really only speak to the American experience, although I think it’s being played out in other countries. People have become more and more consumer-oriented over the last 50 or 60 years. Plastic isn’t responsible for that, but plastic facilitated it by being the material of more affordable consumer goods.

Where you saw a real shift in consumption patterns was with the introduction of disposable goods, which plastics had a huge part in creating. Half of all plastics go into single-use goods; a third of all plastics go into packaging.

That throwaway mindset is a large reason why we have so many problems related to plastic pollution. People aren’t finding plastic steering wheels on their beaches, they’re finding plastic cups and straws and throwaway lighters.

SGIQ: Plastic pollution in the ocean has become a cause of particular concern.

In the 1930s, plastics were mostly unknown. Today, they are in almost every product we lay our hands on. The convenience, versatility and astonishing durability of this wondrous material have revolutionized our world, but are also behind the dire problems of plastic pollution. The SGI Quarterly spoke with Susan Freinkel, an award-winning science writer and author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

Plastic World An interview with Susan Freinkel



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SGIQ: What kinds of new developments are we seeing in more environmentally friendly plastics?SF: There is a push to get away from using fossil fuels and instead use plants to make plastics. Right now, those bioplastics are only about 1 percent of all plastic production.

You can use a plant base to make a lot of different kinds of plastics, but just because it’s bio-based doesn’t mean it’s green. For a truly green bioplastic there has to be a commitment not to use toxic or hazardous chemicals in the making of the plastic and to engineering the molecules so that the plastic can biodegrade or so it can be part of

the recycling stream. Some of the bio-based plastics are neither recyclable nor are they easily compostable.

Right now, I am not aware of any commercial-scale plastic that, for instance, will just melt away if it gets into the ocean. The real answer to plastic pollution in the ocean is for it not to get into the ocean in the first place. And the answer to that is to dramatically reduce our use of single-use stuff.

SGIQ: How effective is recycling as a solution?SF: It depends on where you are. In the US, less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. Where you see plastic recycling working well is where countries have laws that require producers to be responsible for the plastic packaging and goods they put in the

market; where they basically are required to pay for schemes that recover those plastics. In European countries where they have various kinds of take-back programs, you’ve got recycling rates of 60–80 percent. Those countries are realizing these are valuable materials and they shouldn’t just be thrown away or left to scatter in the environment.

SGIQ: How has writing the book affected you?SF: It really did change my relationship to plastic. I can’t say that I am not wasteful, but I am very diligent about plastic recycling, and I will take apart packages to

harvest the plastic pieces. I don’t use plastic bags, I don’t buy bottled water, and I think more carefully about the purchases I make. I am also more careful about potential chemical exposure from plastic.

But what doing the book made me realize is that this web of plastic stuff that we live in, we don’t even see it most of the time because it’s everywhere. And once you open your eyes and you start to see it, it makes you think more consciously and more mindfully about how you are going to approach and use these materials—thinking about it when you are just automatically given a straw with your drink, even though you’re not going to use it, or not using a plastic bag while buying produce. If we all did that more, it won’t solve all the problems that plastics pose, but it’s a way to start engaging with those problems. ❖

SF: People are horrified by the discovery of what’s called the Pacific Garbage Patch and the discovery that human reach extends so far from the places we actually live. The Pacific Garbage Patch—though it is not really a floating patch of garbage—is only one of five areas around the world where the currents cause debris—now mostly plastic—to collect. But researchers also have found plastic debris on remote beaches literally all over the world.

SGIQ: If plastic bags epitomize the problem of the throwaway mindset, can you give a sense of the scale of global plastic bag consumption?SF: The numbers I’ve seen are 500 billion to a trillion plastic bags consumed every year. According to the Sierra Club, 60,000 plastic bags are consumed in the US every five seconds, and 240,000 plastic bags are consumed worldwide every 10 seconds. The numbers become ridiculous.

Ireland famously instituted a “plastax,” a fee on plastic bags. Reportedly, bag use dropped by something like 90 percent in the first several weeks.

In Washington DC, they put a fee of 5¢ on bags and also saw a dramatic decrease. What I like about the Washington DC program is that the revenues were tied to cleaning up a very litter-choked river that ran through the city.

San Francisco placed an outright ban on plastic bags. Initially, everybody just started using paper bags. This is still a tremendous waste of resources and emblematic of that wasteful mindset that underlies the convenience of disposability. Now the city has implemented a fee of 10¢ on paper bags. I like this, as it forces people to think about single-use bags of any material. For something as trivial as carrying your groceries home, you don’t need a single-use bag of any sort. An arrangement of beach

plastic collected from Kehoe Beach, California, by artists Richard and Judith Lang

“Half of all plastics go into single-use goods; a third of all plastics go into packaging.”

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The Earth started as a pretty inhospitable ball of rock and sea and gases, and what life has done over long periods of time—3.8 billion years—is make it a lush

and livable place. Life creates conditions conducive to life. With biomimicry, we look at the “instruction manual” for being a good Earthling. The best way to do that is to look at ecosystems that have assembled over long periods of time. And what you see is that there is no concept of waste in the natural world. What you have is opportunities and limits. You have abundant energy pouring down all day long in the form of sunlight, and you have the materials of earth, water and atmosphere. Life has learned to take those materials and make things, and to make

the most of things without squandering them.The way we think about waste and about

recycling is not really the way it works in the natural world. In our manmade systems, we think of recycling as taking something like a soda bottle and breaking it down into its parts and starting again. But if you think about a log that falls in a forest, what happens is that the materials in the log get up-cycled into the body of a fungus, that fungus gets eaten by a mouse, and then the mouse is eaten by a hawk. Those materials get up-cycled from the body of one to the next. And even what we would call waste—the feces and the dead bodies of those organisms—the materials in these are up-cycled again and again into new bodies, new forms.

Learning from Nature From an interview with Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus, an American biologist and innovation consultant, is cofounder of Biomimicry 3.8, a bio-inspired innovation consultancy, and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She describes biomimicry, a term she has coined, as “learning from and then emulating natural forms, processes and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs.” The SGI Quarterly asked Janine what biomimicry can teach us about the problem of waste.


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Organisms don’t see these nutrients as waste; they see them as raw materials for the next thing.

But in order to up-cycle continuously, life builds with a very small subset of the periodic table. It only uses about 26 of the safest elements, relying mainly on six essentials (carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur) to make most biomolecules on Earth.

We, on the other hand, have about 350 commercial plastics, and every single one is different. Plastics are polymers, long chains of molecules. There are only about five commonly used polymers in the natural world, and they make just about everything. Those simple materials can be easily up-cycled into new bodies because all biotic creatures have the need for this small subset of materials. So when we start making 350 polymers, we are synthesizing all these materials and chemicals that no living thing can use in its body—that’s how we ended up with this problem of waste. If we had thought through the design process early on, all this plastic sitting around wouldn’t be waste.

Reimagining ManufacturingIf we were to reimagine the way

we make things, the way of thinking biomimetically is to ask, “Can we use local materials and manufacture things in safe ways, and then at the end of the life of those products can we recapture them and make them into new things?”

It begins with looking around for opportunities, and what we all have a lot of right now is waste and excess CO2. As biologists, we realize CO2 is not a bad thing. Anything green is made of CO2. So you begin to think of CO2 as a building block, then you look at how a leaf works. A leaf takes CO2, combines it with hydrogen protons from water and with sunlight, and makes sugars and starches—polymers. There is a company called Novomer that learned from a leaf how to do that and is now making biodegradable plastics out of CO2.

One of the biggest emitters of CO2 in terms of a single product is concrete. There’s a company in California called Calera that’s taking CO2 and spraying seawater through

it and precipitating out the materials that make concrete. So instead of emitting a ton of CO2 for every ton of concrete, it sequesters half a ton or more of CO2.

It’s also important to ask how we can design things so that at the end of their life they are raw materials instead of waste. If there’s a byproduct, what’s that byproduct good for?

When you look at the water exiting a forest, most of the useful nutrients have already been captured. The forest is reusing all those materials over and over again, because a forest can’t go anywhere. The organisms are there, and what they have available to them in the soil and the air and the sunlight, that’s their limit. They’re not importing barges full of materials. Life has learned to work with these local materials over and over again.

While we think we’re the most advanced species on Earth, we’re actually really young. Homo sapiens sapiens are 200,000 years old, and life’s been on Earth for 3.8 billion years. We’re toddlers. Toddlers with matches! When you learn from blue-green algae, you are learning from something that’s almost 4 billion

years old. It has evolved in context to live in a system with other beings; its “waste” is exactly what other organisms need to live.

As we grow up, the criterion by which natural selection will judge us, by which we will either be allowed to continue on this planet or not, is this: Are we or are we not a generous species.

Nature as MeasureOne of the things we’ve done with

biomimicry is to work with city planners in different parts of the world and say, “What would this place be if the city weren’t there? What is the ecological land-type, and what are the ecosystem services it provides?” We find a reference point, the ecosystem that is the healthiest of that type, so we know a healthy system absorbs this much water in a monsoon and stores this much water. Then we give those numbers to the city managers and we say, “This is what you have to meet.” Say you had a metric that said you had to build so many inches of soil a year, then it would be crazy for you to dump rotten vegetables from the back of a supermarket into a landfill. You would plow them back into the soil.

“If we had thought through the design process early on, all this plastic sitting around wouldn’t be waste.”

Scientists at Princeton University achieved a 47-percent increase in electricity generation from flexible plastic solar cells by texturing the surface to mimic the wrinkles of a typical leaf


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Or if a system would normally sequester so many thousands of tons of CO2 every year if it was still a forest, then you say, “Well, we have to do that now as a city, so we probably should use that cement that sequesters CO2.” New York City’s new Bank of America building, for example, releases air three times cleaner than when it comes in. If every building did that, then the “waste product” would be cleaner air, as part of a contribution to the city’s attempt to meet that metric.

So I think biomimicry also has a role in creating performance standards that we adhere to.

Then we need to go upstream in the design process and decide never to design anything so that it or its byproducts are anything but valuable to something else in the natural world. Because organisms don’t create anything that is not of value. We happen to think of feces as waste products. But believe me, that’s gold to organisms!

Actually, we’ve been on that path for a while. For about 20 years now there’s been a very well understood concept called “Design for Disassembly,” and it has been driven by the extended product responsibility legislation that started in Germany and went through the European Union. What this means is that if you sell a car or a dishwasher, you are responsible for it. At the end of its life it doesn’t

go to the landfill, it comes back to you. So the onus is on you as a manufacturer to build it in a way that’s modular, so that when it comes back, you can take parts off and use them somewhere else.

Another financial arrangement that moves us toward that is the idea of leasing rather than buying things. For instance, Xerox leases you copying services, but they own the machines. This eliminates “planned obsolescence”—companies don’t plan for their own machines to break down, especially if they have to repair them. So if you want to reduce waste, you either have to make things as durable as possible or make them as reusable or re-manufacturable as possible—you can take a few parts out and put a few parts in and resell it—or make it easy to break down and actually turn into something new.

I think that the enabling technology of all this, of local manufacturing, is this idea of printed objects—although it sounds like sci-fi right now. You have a 3D printer that can make objects. It’s called additive manufacturing or 3D printing, and is becoming very affordable now. Eventually, you’ll go to an auto parts store and there won’t be a warehouse full of auto parts, there will be five printers and some powdered metals.

What we’re doing in biomimicry is starting to get ahead of that revolution and recommend that what we put into those inkjets is a simple set of materials assembled with safe chemistry. And, once we make a product, we’ve got to be able to unzip the polymers by dissolving the product in an enzyme bath, for instance. Then we can return the materials to your 3D printer and make them into something new.

This is one of those things that’s always been on our radar, because printing things to shape is the way nature actually does it. Think about a leaf: if we made leaves, we’d take a piece of green construction paper and cut them out, and have a whole lot of left-overs. Life makes the leaf to shape. No waste. That in itself is such a deep principle that we get from the natural world, that life builds to shape, from the bottom up.

A lot of our waste is because in our manufacturing process of heating and beating and treating—heating, and then high pressures and then chemicals—we carve bulk materials down so that by the end of the process the product is only 4 percent of the bulk materials that came in the door of a manufacturing plant; 96 percent is waste.

So you can’t really get away from this question. You can do all kinds of clever things and take beer cans and make a house out of them, but that’s never going to get you to where we want to be. It’s really a deeper rethink of how we make things. ❖

To learn more about biomimicry or take a course on it, visit biomimicry.net. Also visit asknature.org, a database of life’s best ideas organized by function.

“When you learn from blue-green algae, you are learning from something that’s almost 4 billion years old.”



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Transforming Trash

Biogas-Powered Prisons

A New Life for Shoes

Plastic to Diesel

Food for Waste

In Rwanda, human waste is being converted into biogas to provide 75 percent of the power in the country’s 14 prisons. At one of the prisons, Nsinda, a number of inmates who are trained engineers worked with the Institute of Technology in Kigali to build the biogas plant. Sewage from the prison’s toilets is mixed with cow dung to produce the biogas, which is stored in digesters maintained by the inmates. The gas powers a series of biogas burners in one of the prison’s two kitchens, which previously relied on firewood from Rwanda’s dwindling forests. Cost reductions of up to 85 percent in energy bills have inspired officials in Kenya to introduce biogas plants in prisons in that country as well.

Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program recovers old athletic shoes (of any brand) and recycles them into materials for different kinds of sports surfaces. The shoes’ outer soles are used in track surfaces and interlocking gym flooring tiles. The midsoles are used in outdoor basketball and tennis courts and futsal fields. The fabric uppers are used to create cushioning pads for indoor synthetic courts. The program currently operates in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain and Germany. Since 1990, 28 million pairs of shoes have been collected.

A Philippine company, Poly-Green, is turning plastic waste into gasoline, diesel and kerosene through a process called pyrolysis. Much of the plastic trash comes from landfills and 2 metric tons of it is converted into 1,600 liters of fuel daily. The person behind the project is Filipino inventor Jayme Navarro. Although not the first person to convert plastic into fuel, he has patented a system that is environmentally safe, produces fuel that burns cleaner than regular fuel and costs 10–20 percent less, thanks to the abundance of plastic and low production costs.

A number of Latin American cities have instituted waste for food programs, encouraging local residents to recycle. In Mexico City, 20 million residents produce some 12,600 metric tons of trash every day. To curb this problem, city officials have instituted a program in which residents can exchange recyclable materials—glass, paper, cardboard, aluminum cans and PET plastic bottles—for green points, which they redeem at a local farmers market for food, or seedlings to start their own gardens. The farmers are then paid by the city. The program has been very successful and creates, according to the Mexican environmental agency, “a direct link between sorting and exchanging waste and a sustainable food supply.”

A similar program operates in the Brazilian city of Jundiaí, where food is supplied from a community garden. In the city of Curitiba, also in Brazil, recycled materials can be exchanged for public transport passes. The program uses proceeds from the sale of the recyclable material for social programs for those in need.

Innovative ideas for waste


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FEATURE

The things we throw in the garbage are by nature of little worth; they’re the used, finished and broken remains of our day-to-day consumption. We assume

that refuse carries hardly any value beyond perhaps its recycling worth, yet have you considered that the information conveyed by what we discard can be priceless? For the past four decades, a group of archaeologists from the University of Arizona have been investigating a modern trash dump and have unearthed nuanced subtleties on the modern American way of life. Garbage carries a treasure trove of information about daily practices and local customs. In fact, investigations show that we can find out far more about consumption habits by investigating trash than we can from surveys or interviews. People simply are not truthful about their consumption habits. Alcohol use, for example, tends to be highly understated, while the average consumption of fruit is often inflated. Investigating the garbage dump, the direct evidence can provide a more honest view about the ways in which people live their lives.

This same premise applies to the past and actually forms the basis of archaeological inquiry. Even in historic periods where important information is recorded in writing, archaeology—the simple excavation of day-to-day remains and ancient heaps of trash—can provide a more honest and informative perspective on past ways of life. For prehistoric periods, prior to written records, garbage forms the backbone of our interpretations.

Remnants of discarded materials can bring us to the heart of ancient household practices, while archaeology’s long-term lens allows us to reconstruct changes in the ways in which people’s lives were structured through time.

Excavations I codirect at the prehistoric site of Barcın Höyük, a small Neolithic settlement in northwest Turkey, yielded an area that was used as a trash dump for over a century. The settlement dates to between roughly 6600 and 6000 BCE, when farming and domesticated plants and animals first emerged in the region. The earliest phases were a time of adjustment and settling in, so the meticulous layer-by-layer study of the prehistoric garbage dump provided important insights into the gradual changes in ancient practices and lifestyles. Indeed, as we peeled away the layers, we discovered that pottery fragments, prolific in the later levels, became sparse in the lower strata. In addition, fire-cracked stones appeared in growing numbers as we moved on down into the past.

Our investigations of the site show that this transition marks a major innovation in cooking practices. The invention of the cooking pot, allowing a meal to be cooked on a fire within an enclosed fire-resistant vessel, clearly transformed food preparation practices. The earliest layers of the ancient garbage dump we excavated chronicled a period where, in the absence of pottery, the inhabitants used heated stones for cooking. Although known from other regions of the world, this practice had not yet been recorded for the northwest of Turkey prior to the uncovering of the trash layers in question. The lack of any containers would have meant that food preparation must have been a rather cumbersome task. Maneuvering and attending to the hot stones would have required considerable time and skill. Since food is undeniably a daily necessity, its preparation would have fundamentally structured the lives of the inhabitants.

Archaeology is the science of making sense of ancient garbage because it is through discarded remains, the remnants of ancient practices, that we can identify cultural changes through time. Our layer-by-layer excavation of an unassuming garbage dump is just one example of how trash can carry significant clues about the lives of ancient peoples. The study of discarded materials allows us to gain insights into the ways in which the inhabitants’ days were organized and how, over time, their daily routines were transformed. ❖

Making Sense of Ancient GarbageBy Rana Özbal

Rana Özbal is an assistant professor

of archaeology specializing in

Anatolian and Near Eastern prehistory

in the Department of Archaeology

and History of Art at Koç University,

located in Istanbul, Turkey.

An archaeological dig in Istanbul, Turkey


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SGI Quarterly: Why have legal frameworks not been put in place to protect environments, people and other living beings from the devastating effects of waste and pollution?Polly Higgins: The existing legal frameworks are not fit for purpose. We can see this all too obviously. You just have to look at the Amazon forest and other examples of huge environmental devastation and degradation, such as the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada, which is 45,000 km2 of land with ancient arboreal peatlands and wetlands that are being destroyed for oil.

One of the biggest problems we have with existing legal frameworks is that they prioritize the polluter, not the people and the planet.

Two hundred years ago, we didn’t understand the mass damage and destruction we were causing through business and industrial activity. We created laws without looking to the consequences. So it’s a learning process, it is not a blame game. Big business is caught in a system that prioritizes profit first. The law encourages maximizing profits without looking to the consequences.

This is about recognizing that it is time to

upgrade our legal systems and bring them in line with a wider consciousness and wisdom, where we now understand that if we destroy our planet, we destroy our ability to live in peace and enjoyment. It is about realigning our laws at the international level, understanding we are all interconnected and interdependent and that all life is sacred.

When you embed those values at the very top in international law, it has a very dramatic, automatic impact on laws right across the world. That is what the law of ecocide would do: create a realignment of our priorities toward people and planet first. It is a fundamental shift of what we say we value. What is it we need to do today so that people live safely in peace and enjoyment tomorrow?

This is something that Buddhist and indigenous communities recognize, that the Earth herself has the right to life. And when we abuse that right, our own ability to live in peace and enjoyment is compromised enormously.

In 1948, we recognized the law of genocide, when civilization got to a point when we said we can’t do this anymore, we have to outlaw mass destruction of humanity. It took World War II

The Earth’s Legal TeamAn interview with Polly Higgins

Polly Higgins is the author of

Eradicating Ecocide and The Earth is our Business. Having worked as a

barrister in the UK for many years,

she has devoted herself to finding

ways to strengthen legal protection

for the environment and to have

ecocide added as the fifth serious

crime of concern identified in the

Rome Statute which established the

International Criminal Court.

Protesting the tar sands pipelines outside the provincial legislature in Victoria, B.C., Canada, October 2012


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for that to really crystallize in our minds. Genocide still sometimes occurs, but it has become unacceptable. It has become something over which we can seek justice. We recognized that it was morally wrong, and we made it a legal wrong.

That is also what we did with slavery. The moral imperative trumped the economic imperative. There were fears that the economies would collapse, but they didn’t. We went on and found new solutions.

And I say that civilization has reached a point now that we have to do the same with the mass destruction of the Earth.

PH: I am a great believer in permaculture principles. One of these principles is that the problem can become the solution. You just need to give the right framework of understanding. The law of ecocide will prioritize innovation in a very different direction. Instead of continued profiteering from fossil-based systems, for instance, companies will have the ability, financial support and government policy to enable and empower them to become the green solution. It will trigger a green economy. Legislation works well because it sets the framework of where business can and cannot go. It sends out a powerful message to shareholders and to investors as to what they will or will not be able to do and therefore where they are going to go next. That is very powerful. It mobilizes society, it mobilizes governments, and it mobilizes investments into innovation in a completely different direction.

SGIQ: Are there signs of a shift, even if ecocide is not yet enshrined as the fifth crime against peace?PH: I have just come back from Kazakhstan, which is one of 10 countries that have crimes of ecocide on their general penal code. Kazakhstan put that in place when they banned nuclear testing and the use of nuclear weapons. They know what it is like to suffer a huge ecocide. Nuclear testing goes back to 1949, and third-generation children are still

being born malformed or dead. It’s tragic. They have to train doctors to deal with melanoma, with cancers, with huge malformations. So this is a country that has drawn a line in the sand and said, “We will criminalize mass damage and destruction.”

It is not just use of nuclear weapons or testing, it is also about nuclear waste. That is very important here because that is something that we are storing up for future generations. We have to take responsibility. ❖

SGI Quarterly: How aware of the problems of e-waste were you before you started working on the film?Dan McKinney: I already assumed it was a bad idea to simply throw away old electronics. The batteries are toxic, not to mention the components. I knew that, so I assumed if I took my old computer to a recycling center, they would responsibly dispose of it. But that wasn’t what we found.

SGIQ: What were your first impressions of the Agbogbloshie slum and the “e-waste recycling” you saw there?DM: Children as young as 9 or 10 were breaking apart heavy computer monitors with their bare hands. They’d take a large rock and use it to smash the screen so that they could strip out the copper wires inside. Then they would throw the wires on a bonfire at the edge of the scrapyard to burn away the plastic. The fires fed off the plastic releasing this awful acrid smoke. The younger kids working there complained of sore throats and headaches, probably a result of working near the

It is morally wrong, and we need to recognize it as the missing fifth crime against peace, along with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression. If we fail to add ecocide into the equation, we are still only

dealing with mainly human-to-human engagement, and that is not enough. We have to look to the health and well-being of all beings. There is a direct link between our well-being and how we value the very Earth we walk on.

At the moment it is not legally wrong to cause mass damage and destruction to the Earth, and that’s a huge problem.

SGIQ: Do you simply want to punish or penalize industry, or do you want to find win-win solutions?

“The law of ecocide would create a realignment of our priorities toward people and planet first.”

An interview with Dan McKinney

Dan McKinney is a cinematographer and producer teaching at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. A project on which he worked with his students investigated how electronic equipment from recycling centers in developed countries ends up in hazardous scrapyards in the developing world. The resulting documentary film Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground won an Emmy Award in 2010. Dan talks here about the issues uncovered in the film and

his experience of filming in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. Dan is a member of SGI-Canada.

Spraying of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, 1969. Since then several UN treaties have introduced provisions to limit the environmental impact of war.


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fires. Tests of soil in the area have found dangerously high levels of cadmium, chromium, lead . . .

One image that still sticks with me is seeing these same kids walk through heaps of old monitor casings and glass with their bare feet. Some had flip-flops, but not all.

Just to see so much computer junk in one place is overwhelming. Agbogbloshie used to be a wetland. I talked to locals there who told me that 10 years earlier they’d come there to have a picnic or play soccer. They still play soccer, but now the field is surrounded by 10-meter-high piles of broken computer monitors and keyboards.

SGIQ: Where does the e-waste come from—how and why does it end up in places like Agbogbloshie?DM: The computers are sent to developing-world countries as “donations,” but close to half of them don’t work before they even arrive, so they end up in scrapyards like Agbogbloshie.

E-waste is full of toxic metals and other chemicals, so to recycle it

responsibly is expensive. International law doesn’t allow dumping it in other countries, but sending old computers halfway around the world as a “donation” is allowed. That’s the loophole that allows for the flow of e-waste to less developed countries. It’s less expensive to ship it off than deal with the more restrictive environmental regulations at home.

SGIQ: Is there data on how much e-waste is being shipped for this kind of illicit recycling?DM: The UN released a report putting the number at 20–50 million tons of e-waste per year being shipped abroad. It’s hard to estimate because it’s difficult to calculate what percent of the computers “donated” are still working.

One interesting sidebar to this story is the security risk. People who ship their old computer overseas are usually sending a hard drive with it that’s full of old data. Even if they’ve erased the disk, it’s not complicated to recover all the old files, including personal information like

SGIQ: What motivates you now, both as a filmmaker and as a teacher?DM: As a documentary filmmaker, you have the opportunity to take viewers somewhere they wouldn’t ever go and meet people they wouldn’t meet. It’s a powerful way to show the human side of a story. Once we’ve met someone, even if it’s only on-screen, there’s a connection; our appreciation for their life and our own expands. Based on that understanding, hopefully, we can make better decisions.

My Buddhist practice has helped me stay open to the moment, and that’s a huge part of making documentaries. You have a plan of what you’d like to shoot and the story you want to tell, but you also have to be flexible and able to pivot. What you expected and what actually happens in the field are often radically different. ❖

Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground can be viewed at: www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ghana804/.

bank records, social security numbers or other sensitive information.

During an interview we asked a computer security expert at the FBI about the best way to secure your old data. He pulled out a hammer and explained that the best way to protect information was to physically remove the drive from your old computer and break it.

SGIQ: Are there solutions to the problem?DM: The Basel Action Network has established an e-Stewards program that is now certifying recycling centers that handle e-waste. The city of San José, California—in the heart of Silicon Valley—adopted the program in 2011, the first major US city to do so.

SGIQ: How did working on this film impact your life—have you changed your attitudes to waste?DM: What we do has consequences down-stream. I’m trying to be a better recycler and not buy more electronics unless I have to.

The Afterlife of E-Waste


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I have been practicing Nichiren Buddhism since 1973, and by engaging in SGI activities I have learned the importance of living a

contributive life—to be concerned not only for myself but for others and for society as a whole. Taking to heart SGI President Ikeda’s constant encouragement to become an asset to our local community and society, I began to think deeply about what I could do to contribute.

It occurred to me that there was no need to start with something big, but there must be something I can do using my skills and background as a landscape gardener. There is a river, the Taehwa, that runs through the city of Ulsan, where I live, which is heavily polluted. I decided to somehow help restore this river.

Throughout history, the Taehwa River has been considered a lifeline for the city’s residents. However, Ulsan is one of the most industrialized cities of South Korea, and because of heavy pollution from industrial waste, the Taehwa came to be known as “the river of death.”

I realized that in order to nurture a healthy environment, we must be prepared to actively protect it. Thinking of myself as “the protector of the Taehwa River,”

I began making time to care for the environment around the river, doing things such as developing bamboo fields, removing waste and pruning branches of trees along the river, inviting local residents and fellow SGI-Korea members to join in.

In 2008, I began serving as chair of a local ecological restoration group with over 700 registered volunteers. Once a week, I engage in volunteer work such as picking up trash from the river, cleaning up hiking trails and recycling waste

materials. I also take part in educational activities to raise awareness about environmental protection in the local community such as giving lectures at universities.

Seven years have passed since I began to take action and, as a result of our efforts, the beauty of the Taehwa River has been restored. Fish are once again swimming in its waters, and herons now also make the river their home.

I hope to continue encouraging my

fellow SGI-Korea members and local residents to become involved in these activities.

The challenge of reviving the environment requires a lot of time and effort. We don’t always see immediate results, and at times, I do get frustrated and weary. However, what has kept me going in my efforts to help restore the environment are the simple words of appreciation we get from local residents. Moreover, as I chant every night upon returning home from a day of volunteer work, I feel a deep sense of fulfillment, which in turn becomes a source of energy to continue my efforts. As Nichiren Daishonin states in his writings, “If one lights a fire for others, one will brighten one’s own way.”

In Buddhism, we uphold the principle of “oneness of self and environment,” meaning that life and its environment are inseparable. It is deeply rewarding to know that the small step of deciding to do something positive, and my efforts to convey to others the spirit of coexisting with nature, have led to a revival of the environment and the lives of those around me. While it’s easy to be overwhelmed by problems in our communities, each of us can do something to make a difference. ❖

My Small Step By Shin Won-suk, Korea

“I realized that in order to nurture a healthy environment, we must be prepared to actively protect it.”


PEOPLE SGI members’ experiences in faith

In March 1985, three months into my now almost 28-year-long practice of Nichiren Buddhism, I found myself leaving the comfort and security

of my home in Boston, Massachusetts, to travel to famine-stricken and war-torn Ethiopia. I was the soundman of a two-man film crew that was to document the delivery of several tons of wheat flour and thousands of blankets which had been donated by the oldest continually-operated organization of Black churches in the US. Here I was, a freshly minted Black Buddhist going to Africa with a representative team of Black Baptists.

The human suffering that we witnessed firsthand had a profound and long-lasting effect on me. Visiting the relief camps, I saw people who were so weak they were unable to brush the flies from their faces. The scenes we filmed forever filled my mind with searing memories of how hunger can make living pure misery.

The Ethiopian famine resulted from a years-long drought, successive crop failures, and a protracted civil war in the northern region. This calamity struck a chord in the hearts of millions of people around the world. The famine made it apparent to me that a significant portion of Earth’s population lacks fundamental food security.

When I returned to the US, I changed careers. My experiences in Ethiopia made me reflect deeply on my life path, and I decided that, whatever I did, I would never make money off the suffering of others. It was a choice that was years in the making. So began my human revolution in earnest.

In the spring of 2003, after having lived in Tokyo for almost nine years, I learned that a former coworker together with other like-minded people had recently started the country’s first food bank, Food Bank Japan

(FBJ). The organization was founded with the express purpose of rescuing some of the 5 to 9 million tons of safe food that are thrown away every year in Japan.

When I became involved with FBJ, Tokyo had a large number of homeless people living in parks, alongside waterways, under highways and bridges, and even inside the world’s busiest

(2HJ). Later, in 2010, a new organization, Second Harvest Asia (2HA), was created to promote food banking in East Asia. I am one of its founding trustees.

Both 2HJ and 2HA contributed greatly to the relief efforts in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami disaster that struck northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011. By the end of the year, 2HJ had delivered over

1,000 tons of aid and had sent 6,639 care packages to the stricken areas.

People, companies and organizations around the world sent heartfelt financial donations and goods. Moreover, many actually came to Japan for the express purpose of volunteering in the activities of 2HJ and other organizations.

A few fellow SGI members came down and pitched in with the loading of trucks and sorting donations, working late into the night, giving a part of their lives so others could live.

Practice for oneself and others is a key aspect of our lives as Buddhists. My work with 2HJ and 2HA is anchored in my passion to make this world a better place for us all to live in while rescuing some of the enormous amounts of safe food that are wasted each day. ❖

transportation hub, Shinjuku Station. One thing these men and women all had in common, besides their homelessness, was a lack of food security.

I first began volunteering with FBJ on Saturday afternoons to help sort and distribute food donated by a large membership warehouse club. Since I worked from home and could set my own schedule, that once-a-week involvement grew into a five- to six-days-a-week commitment where I was on call to help unload trucks of donated food and stack products, make deliveries to recipient groups and help start the soup kitchen that now serves over 600 meals each Saturday afternoon in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

In 2006, I was elected to the board of trustees of the food bank, which by then was renamed Second Harvest Japan

Food for the Hungry By Huntley Nicholas, Japan

“My work with 2HJ and 2HA is anchored in my passion to make this world a better place.”

Huntley (left), 2HJ founder Charles McJilton, Mary McJilton and Yusuke Wada


PEOPLE

The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, was the first

international summit on the environment. The renowned Japanese antipollution campaigner Jun Ui (1932–2006) dearly wanted to send a delegation of victims of Minamata disease from Japan to speak about the horrors of environmental pollution. Members of the Soka Gakkai young women’s division shared his wish and helped make it a reality.

Mr. Ui was a pioneering researcher in the field of pollution and the environment, and a passionate grassroots activist. In 1970, the negotiations to compensate Minamata disease victims were being conducted in a way that was disadvantageous to

victims, while polluters sidestepped full responsibility for their actions. Mr. Ui boldly protested against this by organizing a sit-in with fellow supporters at the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Tokyo. He was arrested and spent four days in jail. News of the arrest of a research associate at the University of Tokyo caused quite a stir. At that time, he also received numerous threatening anonymous letters and phone calls.

Mr. Ui and I first met in Shizuoka Prefecture on August 19, 1972, when he was 40 years old, four years my junior.

He firmly believed that true wisdom and knowledge are found “on the ground” where things are happening and “among the people” at the grassroots. This was a credo nurtured through his long years

of fighting for environmental causes. He was a harsh critic of elitist, ivory-tower scholarship.

After graduating from the Department of Applied Chemistry in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo (in 1956), Mr. Ui first worked for a private corporation. In 1959, he returned to research work by entering a graduate program at the University of Tokyo. It was there that he first learned of Minamata disease. Saving up money, he traveled to the afflicted region and listened to its victims. He soon realized that there was a large gap between the testimony of the local residents and the studies that were being reported.

Minamata disease was originally rumored to be a genetic or endemic disease, but in fact it was caused by industrial waste that a chemical factory was dumping into Minamata Bay. This epitomizes Japan’s common failing of forgetting about people’s happiness and the sanctity of life, a tendency nowhere more evident than in the country’s headlong rush to gain military might during the war and then economic might after the war.

Mr. Ui began to publish his findings in a labor union’s weekly newsletter. As a scientist, he strove to report the truth faithfully and impartially.

“Once I started to work on behalf of the victims, the wisdom to find a way to help them just welled forth from within me,” he said to me. “Scholarship is dead if it becomes divorced from people’s lives.” I agreed with this conclusion wholeheartedly.

As he fought all out against industrial pollution, Mr. Ui became painfully aware that science in Japan had become no more than a tool for personal advancement and ambition. He vowed to restore science and learning to their true purpose of benefiting the people.

In October 1970, he began a series of public lectures on “the principles of pollution.” The ideas that he had developed through his hands-on research struck home with his listeners, and attendance grew with each subsequent series of lectures.

There was also another purpose behind Mr. Ui’s lectures—that of fostering young academics who would make their

Jun Ui—Pioneer in Pollution ResearchBy Daisaku Ikeda

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Sufferers from Minamata disease on their way to Stockholm, 1972. Minamata disease was caused by mercury poisoning resulting from industrial pollution. It is estimated that nearly 1,800 people have died as a result of related conditions


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An essay by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda from a series based on his meetings with inspiring individuals from around the world

own investigations and take responsibility to think for themselves rather than relying on others.

Mr. Ui kindly invited me to be a guest speaker at one of his lectures.

He expressed high hopes for Soka University, which had opened the year before our meeting. Clearly understanding its mission, he commented that the university seemed to be firmly rooted in the people. I said: “A university cannot be

the city, risking their lives to study. There were no graduation certificates for these unheralded students. Mr. Ui felt that this spirit is what real education is about.

Held in a traditional Japanese tatami-mat room, our talks proceeded in a frank and informal manner from start to finish, with us sometimes sitting cross-legged or lying back casually stretched out on the floor. We covered a wide range of topics, including our views on social organizations

and movements, perspectives on life, the Vietnam War and memories of our youth.

As I was speaking to someone of the same generation, I said: “I see nothing admirable about people who put on airs and don’t want to get their hands dirty with real work. To me, truly admirable are those who work hard for the people, no matter what the personal cost. At a certain point in every field of endeavor, one will encounter a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. The only way to get past that is by challenging oneself through one’s own efforts. People who strive all out are the ones who win in the end.”

Mr. Ui agreed with me, saying that it is at times when we find ourselves in a bind, a predicament from which there seems to be no escape, that we can achieve something really meaningful.

Mr. Ui was married with three children. His wife, Noriko, of whom he spoke with great affection, was a renowned calligrapher. I still remember the words of Mr. Ui that she inscribed in her fine hand: “If you make a choice that you truly feel to

be good—even if only once in your life—society is bound to change for the better.”

On November 11, 2006, at the age of 74, Mr. Ui passed away. “Society is a school built by the people,” he once observed. They are words I will never forget.

This dedicated campaigner played a critical role in opening an age of the environment, connecting learning to people and science to the happiness and welfare of humanity. His legacy and achievements will live on forever. ❖

Excerpted from an essay in the February 26, 2009, edition of the Seikyo Shimbun.

alienated from the people. It was out of my wish to help build an age of victory for the people and foster individuals who can make a contribution to the 21st century that I founded Soka University.”

Mr. Ui then recounted the following to me about the University of Warsaw in Poland. The university was shut down by the Nazis during World War II. During the Nazi occupation, any opposition was punishable by death. Warsaw was under constant fire from guns and bombs. Yet students still had a passionate desire to learn, so they secretly went to their professors’ homes, located throughout

“As he fought all out against industrial pollution, Mr. Ui became painfully aware that science in Japan had become no more than a tool for personal advancement and ambition. He vowed to restore science and learning to their true purpose of benefiting the people.”

Mr. Ui, pictured left in 2004, lecturing at the University of Tokyo in 1974


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Addressing the significance of the [Rio+20] Conference, Helen Clark, Administrator of the United Nations Development

Programme (UNDP), made the following powerful statement:

Sustainability is not exclusively or even primarily an environmental issue . . . It is fundamentally about how we choose to live our lives, with an awareness that everything we do has consequences for the 7 billion of us here today, as well as for the billions more who will follow, for centuries to come.

Today, there are widespread calls for a paradigm shift from the pursuit of material wealth to sustainability. To achieve this, we must of course review and revise current

economic and environmental policies; but this will not be enough. Rather, we must interrogate the very nature of human civilization, from the ways in which our societies are organized to the manner in which we conduct our daily lives.

This is not to deny the reality that many societies will continue to prioritize economic growth. But I believe it is necessary for all societies to reexamine the underlying objectives and rationales for growth and be clearly aware of other priorities. I hope that the Rio+20 Conference will spur deep and earnest consideration of such questions.

The devastating earthquake that struck Japan in March last year brought these issues into stark relief . . .

The loss of human life, the wounding of dignity, the destruction of the familiar

nature and ecology of the community—such are the cruel outcomes wrought not only by natural disaster but by armed conflict and environmental degradation. In the case, for example, of climate change, no place can be fully free from risk over the long term; the impacts will be felt by all present inhabitants of Earth and, further, by future generations.

In this sense, shifting the orientation of human civilization toward sustainability requires that the issues involved be considered on an authentically human scale, within the context and experiences of daily life. This is where we must sense the full weight of life’s inalienable dignity, and reflect on what is truly important to us and what we must come together to protect.

This is why it is unacceptable to consider the pursuit of sustainability as simply a matter of adjusting policies in order to find a better balance between economic and ecological imperatives. Rather, sustainability must be understood as a challenge and undertaking requiring the commitment of all individuals. At its heart, sustainability is the work of constructing a society that accords highest priority to the dignity of life—the dignity of all members of present and future generations and the biosphere that sustains us . . .

To many people, sustainability evokes images of various constraints being imposed upon individuals and societies. But such a narrow approach will not give rise to the kind of transformative ripple effects that are required.

Although physical resources are finite, human potential is infinite, as is our capacity to create value. The real significance of sustainability is, in my view, as a dynamic concept in which there is a striving or competition to generate positive value and share it with the world and with the future. ❖

To read the full text of the proposal, visit www.sgi.org/sgi-president/proposals/environment-2012.html.

The following is excerpted from a proposal written by SGI President Daisaku Ikeda on the occasion of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012.

For a Sustainable Global Society: Learning for Empowerment and LeadershipBy Daisaku Ikeda


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PROPOSAL

The film A Path to Dignity: The Power of

Human Rights Education, which uses case

studies from India, Australia and Turkey

to illustrate how human rights education

can transform the lives of individuals and

communities, was launched at the United

Nations Office at Geneva, Switzerland, on

September 19.

The SGI, Human Rights Education

Associates (HREA) and the Office of the

United Nations High Commissioner for

Human Rights (OHCHR) have jointly

produced this 28-minute film to raise

awareness about the importance of human

rights education.

Held as a side event of the 21st

session of the UN Human Rights Council,

the launch was chaired by Frank Elbers,

Executive Director of

HREA. Speakers included

filmmaker Ellen Bruno, who

directed the film, and Craig

Mokhiber, Chief of the

Development and Economic

and Social Issues Branch

of OHCHR. Mr. Mokhiber

commented: “This film

helps our communities to

be better places to live.

Human rights education is

not a soft tool, but a very

strong tool. Human rights

education can empower

individuals. It is a path to

dignity.” H. E. Christian

Guillermet-Fernández,

Ambassador of Costa Rica to the UN Office

at Geneva, also spoke, stating that although

the path to dignity and the realization of

human rights is long, this film will give

many people hope along the way.

Suzanne Pritchard of SGI-Europe

applauded this collaborative effort and

introduced excerpts from SGI President

Daisaku Ikeda’s message on the occasion

of the launch: “We believe that the true

value of human rights education lies in its

empowerment of the individual through

transformation from within and the

corresponding awakening of a sense of

responsibility to spread the ripples of change

far and wide. The purpose of human rights

education is truly fulfilled when those who

suffered from injustice are able to become

sources of hope for those who are suffering

around them.”

The film presents three inspiring stories

illustrating the impact of human rights

education on schoolchildren in India, on

police officers in Australia, and on female

victims of domestic violence in Turkey. As

Evrim Gul from Turkey comments in the

film following her own exposure to human

rights education, “Women everywhere,

anywhere in the world, would change with

this training.”

Anna Rottenecker, representative

of the Association for the Prevention of

Torture, commented at the launch: “I

was impressed by the wide selection of

case stories chosen: children, police and

women. I appreciate this film because of

the very easy and understandable way

that it portrays the power of human rights

education through these stories. I believe it

is a very usable tool for both professionals

and nonprofessionals.”

The film also introduces key United

Nations instruments and frameworks such

as the World Programme for Human Rights

Education (2005–ongoing) in advancing

implementation of human rights education.

A Path to Dignity includes statements

by Navi Pillay, United Nations High

Commissioner for Human Rights, and Laura

Chinchilla, President of Costa Rica, a country

which has played a key role in promoting

human rights education in the United

Nations context.

A Path to Dignity is available in Arabic,

Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian and

Spanish. For further information, see: www.

path-to-dignity.org.

Human Rights Education Video Launched

At the launch in Geneva

Ghana Dance Ensemble Tours Japan

The Ghana Dance Ensemble performed at the Nitori

Culture Hall in Sapporo, Japan, on August 20, at the

invitation of the Min-On Concert Association. The ensemble

was established by the first president of Ghana, Dr. Kwame

Nkrumah, in 1962.

This performance, the first in a 19-city tour of Japan,

launched the seventh installment of Min-On’s “Musical

Voyage across Africa” and also marked the 55th anniversary

of Ghana’s independence. Previous installments of

this series, which was launched in 1999, have featured

performers from Ethiopia, Zambia, Morocco, Senegal,

Madagascar and Cameroon. Min-On was founded by SGI

President Ikeda in 1963 to promote international cultural

exchange and peace through music.


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SGI-Korea Sponsors PEN International Congress

Mr. Soyinka viewing the SGI-Korea exhibition

New Antinuclear Exhibition Launched at 20th IPPNW World Congress

SGI-Korea was one of four official

sponsors of the 78th PEN International

Congress in Gyeongju, Korea, held from

September 9–15. The theme of the Congress,

“Literature, Media and Human Rights,”

focused on the impact of media on literature

and its role in defending the right to freedom

of expression, including digital freedom.

Around 1,000 writers from 114 countries

and territories and over 80 PEN Centers

participated in the various sessions and side

events, which included literary forums, book

signings, readings and exhibitions.

Keynote speakers at the event included

Wole Soyinka, recipient of the 1986 Nobel

Prize for Literature (Nigeria); Jean-Marie

Gustave Le Clézio, recipient of the 2008

Nobel Prize for Literature (France); Orhan

Pamuk, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize for

Literature (Turkey); and Lee O-young, adviser

to the major Korean newspaper JoongAng IIbo

and honorary professor of the Ewha Academy

for Advanced Studies (Korea).

SGI-Korea showed an exhibition at the

Congress from September 10–14, introducing

SGI President Ikeda’s philosophy and

writings, as well as SGI-Korea’s contributions

to peace, culture and education.

A new antinuclear exhibition “Everything

You Treasure—For a World Free From Nuclear

Weapons,” which examines nuclear weapons

issues from a variety of perspectives, was

launched at the 20th World Congress of

International Physicians for the Prevention of

Nuclear War (IPPNW) in Hiroshima from August

24–25. The exhibition has been jointly created

by the SGI and the International Campaign to

Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a civil society

campaign launched in 2007 by IPPNW.

This new exhibition, which also

commemorates the 55th anniversary of second

Soka Gakkai president Josei Toda’s Declaration

Calling for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons,

consists of a total of 40 panels that cover

nuclear weapons issues from 12 perspectives:

humanitarian, environmental, medical, economic,

human rights, energy, scientific, political,

spiritual, gender, generational and security.

At the opening ceremony, Dr. Robert

Mtonga, Co-President of IPPNW, commented on

the new exhibition: “This is a space that brings all

of us together as human beings communicating

with human beings . . . In our lifetime, we will

stand as one, as we are at this exhibition, and

walk a world without nuclear weapons.”

SGI President Daisaku Ikeda sent a message

on the occasion of the launch, in which he stated,

“A key objective of this new exhibition is to

examine the problem of nuclear weapons from

a range of perspectives in order to help people

recognize the fact that nuclear weapons pose a

direct and dire threat to all that they personally

value and treasure.” He also expressed his hope

that the commitments made by each individual

will form the axis of a new turning point for

humankind as we choose hope over despair and

courage over fear.


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Turin Spirituality Event

Seafarers’ Photography Exhibition

Hiroshima Peace Day participants at Taplow Court

SGI-UK Hosts Hiroshima Peace Day EventsSGI-UK hosted three official Hiroshima

Peace Day events in Birmingham, London

and at SGI-UK’s Taplow Court center in

Maidenhead from September 8–15, to mark

the anniversaries of the dropping of atomic

bombs on Japan in 1945 and of second Soka

Gakkai president Josei Toda’s call to abolish

nuclear weapons in 1957.

Over 400 people attended the events,

which included a special visit from Soka

Gakkai members from Hiroshima. Among the

guests was Emiko Yamanaka, a 78-year-old

hibakusha (A-bomb survivor), who was just

1.4 km from ground zero when the bomb

was dropped on August 6, 1945. Now living

happily in Hiroshima as a grandmother of

seven, she shared her struggle to overcome

the greatest of adversities.

Masaru Tanaka, whose father survived

the bombing of Hiroshima, described how his

family history led him to establish his ART

Peace project and to collaborate with US

artist Betsie Miller-Kusz, whose father was

a scientist on the team that developed the

atomic bomb.

Toshiko and Masanori Shinagawa, both

Soka Gakkai Peace Committee members

from Hiroshima, also spoke about their

experiences. Mrs. Shinagawa, whose

grandmother died in the atomic bombing,

shared her search for her mission as a citizen

of Hiroshima. Shoko Ishida, director of a radio

program in Hiroshima, described her efforts

to broadcast hibakusha experiences.

SGI-UK Youth Peace Committee Leader

Manuel Fernandez gave a keynote lecture on

Josei Toda’s call to abolish nuclear weapons,

and one Youth Peace Committee member

spoke about how she held a 100-day dialogue

campaign on nuclear abolition following her

participation in the 2010 SGI-UK student

division nuclear abolition survey.

Leading up to the Hiroshima Peace

Day event in Birmingham on September

8, members in the area studied and held

discussion meetings on the topic of nuclear

abolition. On the day of the event, Dr. Jason

Hart, a lecturer at Bath Spa University, gave

a talk in which he declared: “It is not enough

to ban nuclear weapons: we have to change

the darkness in human life that has given rise

to such weaponry and has led, in the case of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to their use.”

“Beyond the Horizon,” an exhibition

of photographs taken by members of the

Hato-kai, a group of SGI members involved

in maritime occupations, was shown

at Yamashita Park in Yokohama, Japan,

from October 5–14. On display were 80

photographs capturing the ocean’s wild

beauty, bustling port scenes and village life.

The Hato-kai started as a group of 37

members in August 1971 as a means of

providing a network of support in faith. In the

80s, Hato-kai members created an exhibition

of photography that sought to illustrate the

most positive aspects of their work. The first

“Beyond the Horizon” exhibition was held

in Yokohama in July 1987. Since then, it has

been shown more than 1,000 times in 14

countries throughout the world.

SGI-Italy representatives addressed

an audience of over 250 in Turin’s Teatro

Cavallerizza Reale, as part of the International

Annual Conference on Spirituality, titled

“Wisdom of the Smile,” on September 29.

The event brought together representatives

of a wide range of different faiths and cultures

for exchange and discussion over five days

from September 26-30.

Speakers at the September 29 panel

titled “The Triumph of Humanity in the

Buddha’s Smile” included several SGI

representatives who discussed themes such

as the collective responsibility of dealing

with global issues, humanity’s inherent

ability to overcome suffering and how to

draw forth human potential. The conclusion

was that a world based on the dignity of life

would indeed be “a world where everyone

can smile.”


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What does your work entail, and why did you choose fashion as a field?Noorin: I run my own ethical and sustainable fashion label—designing, pattern cutting and selling my own designs. I also work with students to raise awareness of responsible and sustainable design approaches. I knew from a young age that I wanted to do something creative. I’ve always been fascinated by the connection we can make with items of clothing and how important they can become to us because of the confidence they give us or the memories they evoke. Sakina: Fashion is a barometer of society. It shows the culture and behavior of a civilization, and it epitomizes a particular period. I chose fashion for these reasons, and also because of the notions of self-esteem—taking care of one’s life and oneself—that it involves. Fashion also communicates our identity, our strengths and our fragility.

How did you get the idea of using fabrics from sustainable sources and recycled fabrics?Noorin: I started practicing Buddhism while working for conventional fashion brands. I started to question the way in which garments are produced. Many companies do not seem to realize that people on the other side of the world who stitch our garments are human beings just like us and deserve to be paid a fair wage for their skills and their hard work. Conventional cotton farming harms the environment and farmers. Many other common fabrics will never biodegrade. As my awareness of cause and effect took hold, I wanted to prove that there is another way to make fashion.Sakina: I’ve always learned to make do with what I have. My collections are made with recycled fabrics we keep in stock as basic materials, such as good crêpe or Duchess satin bought from the haute couture houses. It’s a case of arranging everything around a politics of “eco-conception.” There is enough for everyone on this planet.

My aim is to create beautiful collections and to thereby “explain” to the consumer how to buy in a way that is both sexy and responsible.

How does your approach differ from that of a typical fashion designer?Sakina: I am the director of a social enterprise that is also a business: My work must serve human beings. Through the words of SGI President Ikeda, I have come to understand the values of “gain and good.” Placing human beings, productivity and creativity at the center is the most effective way.

I take a real interest in the women who are working with me, where they are living, if they need help with

Secondly, I look at where to get my clothing manufactured. I will only work with ethically-run factories, and take time to visit them. Lastly, I do not follow trends. At most, I aim for a gentle nod to trends and a timeless feel so my designs can be worn season after season.

What are you hoping to contribute to society through your work?Noorin: I aim to offer an alternative to the throwaway culture of mainstream fashion. I want to inspire people to give their clothing more thought by showing them it can be sustainable, ethically made and beautiful. We must also remember the human connection within all the products we create and consume—from the farmer who grew the cotton, to the person who stitched the garment—this is a valuable contribution and should be treated with respect.

Working with students is also important to ensure the next generation of designers is informed and able to design responsibly and create value in the fashion industry.

literacy, for instance, and a social integration counselor comes to the workshop from time to time. The women are then happier to come to work, and they become more productive. Noorin: There are many differences, but I aim to make them almost invisible in the final product. The first difference is the fabrics I use and the way in which I select them. I only work with organic or sustainable fabrics that have minimal impact on the environment. But I also feel the “limitation” of the fabrics I use actually pushes the creativity in a different way. Plus it is worth it when people comment on the quality and feel of the fabrics.

Noorin Khamisani was born in London, UK, and is a sustainable fabric consultant at a design company in London, as well as an associate lecturer at London College of Fashion. She is also the creative director of her own label.

Sakina M’Sa is a fashion designer who was born in the Comoros. Her studio is in Barbès, an area in Paris, France, that is home to many immigrants. She employs local women in her studio. In 2010, she was awarded the Social Entrepreneur Award from the PPR Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights.

An Eye for Fashion

In 2007, Sakina worked with 13 disadvantaged women from around Paris on a project to create clothes inspired by the lives of 19th-century women. The results were displayed at the Musée du Petit Palais.


ON VOCATION A series in which SGI members discuss their approach to their profession

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business. I also feel the Buddhist teaching of our interconnectedness with our environment is in rhythm with the sustainable approach I adopt in my work.Sakina: My Buddhist practice inspires everything I do. Putting human values at the center of my business, thinking of new approaches to my work, sharing with those furthest from employment and from society . . . I’m also inspired by Nichiren Daishonin’s encouragement that, when obstacles arise, “the wise will rejoice while the foolish will retreat.”

Sakina: I always want to create collections that contribute to people’s happiness. I would like the public and buyers from manufacturers’ brands and department stores to choose my collections for their style and modernity, the quality of the materials and the finishing. I also feel it is very important to achieve real success in terms of financial results, as this helps convince other people of the importance of social integration and the value of employing the most vulnerable people. I try to ensure that beauty is linked to happiness and the creation of value.

Can you describe a recent project or collection?Sakina: A project that means a lot to me involves a fashion show held at a women’s prison. The inmates have their own television program within the prison, and I had the opportunity to be one of their guests. When we were talking after the show, they told me that their dream was to hold a fashion show. This dream first came true in June 2011. The inmates modeled the clothes, showing a collection in front of 120 detainees. There were great moments of joy, enthusiasm and, above all, self-worth. I will return soon for a second show, together with beauty and hairdressing workshops. I am happy and grateful to be able to do this!Noorin: I have recently produced an autumn/winter collection using a variety of luxurious and long-lasting sustainable fabrics—merino wool, hemp silk and regenerated carbon-neutral wool. It is a range of essential items for

the modern woman.My aim is that my dresses can be worn

to work and then, with a new pair of shoes or statement necklace, take you straight out for the evening.

How does your Buddhist practice influence your approach to work?Noorin: My practice has given me courage: to believe in my dream and then take the action to follow it and start my own ethical fashion label. I use my practice on a daily basis to deal with the inevitable challenges of running my own

In your view, how does fashion create value?Noorin: Ethical and sustainable fashion creates value as it takes into account the whole life cycle of the garments. It’s something we must consider from start to finish: fiber to fabric, design to manufacture, aftercare, and that the finished item be recyclable or biodegradable. Working with farmers and factory workers in a fair and respectful way can create immense value on a practical level, where previously farmers may have been paid poorly or a seamstress was paid less than the living wage. Once we reconnect with the items in our wardrobes and where they came from, we start to appreciate the value in them.Sakina: Value can be created in any field of work. Let’s allow ourselves to be inspired by the infinite potential of our heart. It is truly the heart that is most important. ❖

“We must remember the human connection within all the products we create and consume . . .”

Recent designs by Sakina (left) and Noorin (right)


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Various forms of desire—most essentially, the desire to live—are both natural and necessary to us as human beings. However, Shakyamuni Buddha perceived that being ruled by desires

causes us to suffer. His key insight was to find within himself the means by which to know genuine satisfaction while escaping the domination of desires. In order for all people to do the same, he taught that we first need to understand two fundamental truths about life. The first is the impermanent nature of all things: everything in life is constantly changing and will eventually cease to exist. Secondly he understood that nothing has a fixed identity or essence—each individual existence is dependent on and interwoven with all others. Suffering, the Buddha taught, derives essentially from our attachment to and reliance upon things and circumstances that are by nature ever-changing and impermanent.

As human beings we often live under the sway of these twin delusions: we want things to remain fixed and unchanged and we think we are able to control things that are outside of our control—other people, relationships, our children—as though they were extensions of ourselves. But to live in this way is to misunderstand the true nature of our own lives.

After all, even our bodies and minds—what seems most essentially “us”—change in ways that we ultimately cannot direct. In the process of aging, our health does not remain constant, nor does our vitality, nor our looks or abilities. Furthermore, when we die, we will inevitably be separated from our loved ones and possessions; all that is not truly “us” is stripped away.

The Buddha taught that understanding the interdependent and transient nature of things is a way for us to overcome our mistaken views of the self that are at the root of desire and suffering.

If all these things are impermanent and subject to change, there is a deeper unchanging reality of life—the dharma or Law of life. Enlightenment in Buddhism consists of striving to align our lives with this Law.

What this means in practice is a life based on respect for the inherent dignity of our lives and the lives of others. It is to embrace and be enriched by difference, rather than to reject and deny it by imposing our values and standards upon others; to be open to change, rather than seek to control life and mold others according to our wishes and expectations. It is a life oriented above all toward the establishment of a rich inner state of life and the sharing of this deepest joy with others. The Buddha urged us to awaken to the fact that this state exists in our own lives, and taught that we can choose to manifest it in our day-to-day reality.

By “seeking the Law,” we overcome our tendency to be swayed by deluded impulses and forge a life of “absolute happiness”— described by Josei Toda, second president of the Soka Gakkai, as a state of life in which one’s sense of self and joy in being remains untouched by external circumstances.

Nichiren, the 13th-century monk upon whose teachings the philosophy of the SGI is based, recognized the value of wealth, physical health, intellect and skills. He wrote, however, that of all the treasures we possess, the most fundamental one is the profound dignity and depth of character we develop by basing our life on the dharma. These “treasures of the heart,” as he called them, are the most valuable treasure we can accumulate and are what endure through the cycles of birth and death.

As SGI President Ikeda has said, “A true sense of fulfillment or satisfaction can’t be found in chasing after money or possessions. The highest state of being is the enriched spiritual condition of desiring little and feeling satisfied, free from the control of desires. In other words, true happiness resides in accumulating treasures of the heart.” ❖

Desire, Impermanence and the Self

“Of all the treasures that we possess, the most fundamental one is the profound dignity and depth of character we develop by basing our life on the dharma.”


BUDDHISM in DAILY LIFE

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A Path to Dignity:NEW EDUCATIONAL DVD

The Power of Human Rights EducationA Path to Dignity is a 28-minute film jointly produced by the Soka Gakkai International (SGI), Human

Rights Education Associates (HREA) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for

Human Rights (OHCHR) to raise awareness about the positive role that human rights education can

play in making human rights a reality.

It contains case studies showing the impact of human rights education on schoolchildren in India, police

officers in Australia and female victims of domestic violence in Turkey.

The simple yet powerful stories of people’s lives are one of the best tools we have in our human rights work. These stories are powerful because they touch our hearts, connect us as humans, and move us to action.

—Ellen Bruno, Film Director

I feel strong. If I could help other women, then I would be even happier. That’s what I want: to be an example.

—Evrim Gul

A Path to Dignity is available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.

For further information, visit: www.path-to-dignity.orgThe film can also be viewed on the SGI website (www.sgi.org)

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Rethinking WasteCover Photo: Rainbow Flotsam and Jetsam© Liz Jones linoforest.blogspot.com

SGIQuarterly

A Buddhist Forum for Peace, Culture and Education

The Soka Gakkai International (SGI) is a

worldwide association of 90 constituent

organizations with membership in 192

countries and territories. In the service of

its members and of society at large, the

SGI centers its activities on developing

positive human potentialities for hope,

courage and altruistic action.

Rooted in the life-affirming philosophy of

Nichiren Buddhism, members of the SGI

share a commitment to the promotion of

peace, culture and education. The scope

and nature of the activities conducted in

each country vary in accordance with the

culture and characteristics of that society.

They all grow, however, from a shared

understanding of the inseparable linkages

that exist between individual happiness

and the peace and development of

all humanity.

As a nongovernmental organization (NGO)

with formal ties to the United Nations, the

SGI is active in the fields of humanitarian

relief and public education, with a focus

on peace, sustainable development and

human rights.

SOKA GAKKAI INTERNATIONAL15-3 Samoncho, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 160-0017, Japan

Telephone: +81-3-5360-9830 Facsimile: +81-3-5360-9885

E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.sgi.orgSGI Quarterly Website: www.sgiquarterly.org

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