1. March-April 2011
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Monday, February 28, 2011
By Sarah Bixby
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“You should be out of that area of the city by afternoon,” the
hotel concierge said. “A demonstration is planned.” When I
asked the topic of the demonstration, he only shook his head.
My trip to Hamburg to attend the International Solid Waste
Association (ISWA) Congress as one of SWANA’s
representatives seemed to be starting with some excitement.
Around 11 a.m., I caught a sightseeing bus (narration in
German) to the area near the Rathaus, Hamburg’s city hall and
a major shopping area, and set to wandering, easily losing
myself in the crowds and the shops. Everybody paused as a
line of police vehicles flew past, sirens screaming, and I briefly
recalled the concierge’s warning. As I walked closer back to the
city center, more and more police vehicles—cars, vans, and
personnel carriers—were positioned around the area and
officers in riot gear lingered on the sidewalks and in the parks.
Clearly they were expecting something to happen.
About that time, I realized I had lost my pass to get back on the sightseeing bus that would have carried me away
from the riot and safely back to my hotel. Three options occurred to me—buy another ticket, hire a taxi, or start
walking. Not anxious to spend the money or to try to cross the language divide, and with no threat in site, I decided
to walk.
Moving farther away from the city center, I saw more police, and finally, in the distance, heard the sound of an angry
crowd. Ignoring good advice and a clear reminder of the level of police concern offered by the urban tank parked
across the street, I turned around and headed, as directly as I could calculate, toward the demonstration.
But as I walked, the quieter voice of common sense in my head kept pointing out the foolishness of my actions: in a
foreign country; can’t speak the language; ignoring the police presence; the only other person I knew in the city
sensibly absent. After several blocks, I stopped and retraced my steps, finishing the walk to the hotel, which was
about 1.5 miles away. Soon, a beehive hum of voices and the drawn-out sound of sirens grew loud enough to hear
easily through the open 4th floor window.
The next day’s discussion with a city official confirmed there had been about 5,000 people demonstrating, with
nearly 2,000 police on hand to keep the situation from escalating out of control. Over coffee, I wondered to myself
whether the police presence in Hamburg made a difference to the demonstration. I’m pretty sure I would have
disregarded the concierge’s warning without the reinforcement of police on every street corner. But beyond the
reaction of one tourist, would the demonstration itself have been larger or destructive if the police weren’t there or
had been there in smaller numbers? How do you measure the difference in the size of a riot? What if the
demonstration had never begun? Would bystanders credit its absence to a well-planned preventive action by the
police, or would we scoff at them for jumping at shadows?
And then I started asking those same questions about greenhouse gases and the efforts of the global solid waste
management industry to slow or prevent their release.
Frankly, it wasn’t a long stretch from one topic to the other. Speakers at the ISWA Congress addressed the themes
of urban development and sustainability through a broad array of topics ranging from greenhouse gas mitigation to
the final destination of PVC gases released by discarded old shoes in Germany and the implementation of a variety
of recovery and research projects worldwide. The results of the mid-term elections and their likely effect on US
policies related to solid waste and greenhouse gas management drew a lot of attention.
I brought mostly questions home from the ISWA Congress, and maybe that is a good place to start. Is climate
change real and affected by human activity? So far, we don’t seem able to agree even on that. Will we wait for some
crisis level of greenhouse gas concentration to agree it might happen? Are the actions of solid waste industry
participants in the rest of the world and the concerns of scientists and regulators providing a warning equivalent to
the concierge, the police presence, and the sound of the crowd?
Will the efforts of the global solid waste management industry make a difference? What if the rest of the world tries
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2. to make a change—the equivalent of walking away from the demonstration—but the United States doesn’t and
instead continues business as usual? I could be a spectator with some hope of not getting drawn into a street
demonstration, but is it really possible to be a spectator to global climate change?
If greenhouse gas emissions and their effects never hit a crisis level meaningful to those of us in the United States,
does that mean the rest of the world jumped at shadows or that their efforts prevented something worse? Did the
police presence in the Hamburg city center prevent a larger or more destructive riot? Was the potential to avoid a
bigger demonstration worth the cost of 2,000 police on the streets? Is it possible to use a similar process to calculate
the value of avoided greenhouse gas emissions?
It was easy to sit in my hotel room listening to the sounds of a demonstration through an open window. Somehow, I
don’t think the answer to the questions I brought home will be as easy to find.
Author's Bio: Sarah Bixby is the Director of the South Central Iowa Solid Waste Agency at Tracy, IA, Sarah Bixby is
also the 2011 president of the Solid Waste Association of North America and a member of MSW Management’s
Editorial Advisory Board.
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