Solve one problem and create two more happens all too often throughout life, whether it's government, business or personal matters.
When it comes to protecting the environment, however, it seems so much more straightforward.
Except it rarely is.
The federal government thought it was doing the right thing in 2010 when it banned oil-based highway paint. As the story by Rob Shaw of the Vancouver Sun explains, the provinces were forced to use more environmentally-sensitive paints but in B.C., those paints don't last even a whole year, regardless of whether the roads are in the cold north, hot Okanagan or wet coast.
The provincial transportation ministry has been running several experiments across B.C., one of them near Prince George, trying different paints and different applications in hopes of finding something that works better but minister Todd Stone is trying to manage expectations, saying that there is nothing available that is as durable and long-lasting for road use as oil-based paint.
The problem with oil paints is that when they break down and come off roads, they don't disappear. They work their way into waterways, soil and the food supply of area ecosystems, causing serious pollution damage.
Yet the ban comes with its own costs. On the safety side, disappearing lines make driving more dangerous, particularly at night.
On the environmental side, the change has brought its own problems. More paint is needed to be made and then it needs to be applied more often. More trucks need to be on the road more often applying this paint. The fuel consumption and the resulting increase in greenhouse-gas emission may more than offset the immediate benefit of removing oil-based paints from highways. In other words, the environmental gains from removing a toxic pollutant are lost through increased energy use to make more paint and more regularly apply it.
This kind of life-cycle analysis (which UNBC chemistry professor Todd Whitcombe has written about in his weekly science column in The Citizen) casts these kinds of decisions in a much broader context. As one of Whitcombe's recent columns pointed out, from an energy consumption standpoint, a Styrofoam cup is much better to use than a paper cup or even a ceramic coffee mug over its average lifespan. A paper cup will break down in the environment faster but only if the time measurement is in centuries. Same goes for plastic shopping bags. It takes less energy to produce 150 plastic bags than just one recyclable cotton bag.
Closer to home, the folks reading The Citizen electronically, either the digital edition or the online edition, can hardly claim superiority over the readers getting their local news through the print edition. While printing information on dead trees and transporting that paper sounds horribly wasteful, those trees are a renewable resource and the newsprint and the soy-based inks means the newspaper can not only be recycled, it can be composted.
Meanwhile, the production of a computer or a smartphone requires parts from around the world, made from ingredients that have to be mined. And the computers and the phones require complex recycling at distant depots, requiring even more energy consumption. No mention yet of the power used to operate that computer or keep that phone charged, as well as the electricity needed to operate those servers that host our website and keep the Internet running. And so it goes.
Smart homes and buildings save on light and heat bills but the technology used to maintain their operation comes with significant environmental effects. Today's automobiles are lighter and far more fuel-efficient than their predecessors but they also contain far more high-tech components that burn significant amounts of energy in both their production and their operation. Energy-efficient bulbs have mercury in them.
With any effort to reduce environmental damage from human activity, it's important to ask whether the visible, surrounding ecosystem will benefit while causing the same or even more harm to the less visible global ecoystem.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
