Cover photo of "The heart smart oil free cookbook"

“The heart smart oil free cookbook” co-authored by Mayura Mohta and George Jacobs was recently launched  in Singapore.

The cookbook features delicious plant based recipes from skilled chefs and global nutrition experts. It is inspired by Dr Caldwell Esselstyn Jr’s ground breaking study on the link between the elimination of added oil from one’s daily diet and the prevention and reversal of coronary heart diseases. Dr Esselstyn is the doctor credited with former US President Bill Clinton’s recovery from a failed bypass, through his plant based diet regime.

Mayura Mohta is a Singapore based nutrition consultant, health writer and founder of Healthfriend. Healthfriend is a social enterprise that promotes health and fitness, and contributes to community welfare by distributing all its profits to charities in Singapore and India, that support underprivileged children. George Jacobs, co-author of the book, is President of Vegetarian Society Singapore since 2003.

Mayura Mohta discusses with Bhavani Prakash of Eco WALK the Talk the idea behind “The heart smart oil free cookbook“. The book is supported by Singapore Heart Foundation.

EWTT: What is the philosophy behind the book and what inspired you to write it?

Mayura Mohta at the launch of her The heart smart oil free cookbook

Mayura Mohta: Quoting this from my introduction: “The concept behind the book is based on the contention that the food we eat can protect us from many of the lifestyle diseases that we, in increasing numbers, suffer from. These food-linked diseases include diabetes, obesity and heart disease. This book focuses on coronary artery disease, the world’s No. 1 killer disease.

The idea of writing this book was triggered with Dr Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr’s visit to Singapore in March 2011. A pioneer in developing a non-invasive treatment for coronary heart disease, Dr Esselstyn’s book, “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease” records the evidence of his plant-based diet in reversing heart disease. Dr Esselstyn is possibly most famous for his treatment of President Bill Clinton (along with Dr Dean Ornish). After his failed bypass Bill Clinton began Dr Esselstyn’s plant-based diet program. As reported, “Over the next few months, Clinton lost 24 pounds, returning to his high school weight, feels great, and his heart disease is in reversal.”

We had the good fortune of interviewing Dr Esselstyn and spending  considerable time with him and his wife Anne Esselstyn. This dynamic septuagenarian couple visited Singapore in 2011 for a series of talks to doctors and other health professionals and to the general public, not to mention dinner with then Minister of Health and now Minister for National Development Khaw Boon Wan and the team of cardiologists who were treating him. After heart surgery, Mr Khaw had followed the Esselstyns’ diet guidelines.

This book is about vegetarian food, but as the title suggests, it goes beyond vegetarianism. It is about oil free vegetarianism. As far as we are aware, this is the first oil free cookbook written in Singapore.”

EWTT:Isn’t oil or a bit of unsaturated fat supposed to be healthy for growing children and good for the brain?

Most people get sufficient omega 6 (excess is harmful) and less omega-3. The latter fatty acids are more important for healthy development of the brain. These omega -3 oils can obtained from plant sources such as chia seeds, flax seeds and hemp seeds.

The point to note is that unlike saturated fats, unsaturated fats are unstable and are damaged when exposed to heat. Given the modern diet and cooking techniques using unsaturated oils, most of us consume unsaturated oils that are damaged or rancid and harmful to health. The best sources of unsaturated fats (omega-3&6) are raw seeds and nuts. These are best consumed in moderation. Children have a high metabolic rate and active lives and can metabolize fats more easily than adults and do not
require such an extreme diet.

Dr.Esselstyn’s Q&A 

Why does the diet eliminate oil entirely?
NO OIL! Not even olive oil, which goes against a lot of other advice out thereabout so-called good fats. The reality is that oils are extremely low in terms of nutritive value. They contain no fiber, no minerals and are 100% fat calories. And above all they contain saturated fat which immediately injures the endothelial lining of the arteries when eaten. It doesn’t matter whether it’s olive oil, corn oil, or any other kind of oil. You should not consume any oil if you have heart disease.

Fish Oil – Should I take fish oil?


Fish oil is not essential. Fish get their omega 3 from plants. It is
difficult to be deficient in Omega 3 if eating 1-2 tablespoons of flax seed meal and green leafy vegetables at several meals. There is also research that suggests that those on plant based nutrition become highly efficient in their own manufacture of omega 3. Patients on fish oil are also at increased risk for bleeding.

Flax Seed Oil/Flax Seed Meal –What about flax seed oil?


Flax seed meal is well tolerated and supplies a bonus of omega 3 using 1 or 2 tablespoons on cereal daily. Avoid flax seed oil.

Olive oil, canola oil, coconut oil, Sunflower oil, soybean oil, peanut oil, any oil – 
Which oil is best?


Avoid oils. They injure the endothelium, the innermost lining of the artery, and that injury is the gateway to vascular disease.

EWTT: Is the book targeted only at heart patients? How can it be used by everyone
else?

EWTT: What are some of the recipes you have included in this book and how did you source them?

Mayura Mohta: We wrote to various restaurants, chefs, nutritionists, dietitians and other is to contribute a recipe as per Dr. Esselstyn’s guidelines (free form oil, dairy, nuts, seeds, avocado, coconut and any animal products). The response was overwhelming. We included only those which were favorable (ingredients available locally), easy to make and tasty.

 EWTT: What happens to the proceeds from the sale of the book?

Mayura Mohta: The royalties are to be equally split between the Vegetarian Society Of Singapore (to support their efforts) and the children’s charities that HealthFriend supports.

EWTT: Where can readers buy the book?

Mayura Mohta: The Heart Smart Oil Free Cookbook is available at most bookstores in Singapore like Kinokuniya, Popular, Select and in Malaysia. Readers can also order from amazon.com.

About the interviewer:

Bhavani Prakash is the Founder of Eco WALK the Talk .com.  She is a sustainability speaker, trainer and writer can be contacted at bhavani[at]ecowalkthetalk.com. Follow Eco WALK the Talk on Facebook, Twitter, Linked IN and YouTube

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT:  Go Veg with a delicious Arabic meal

EWTT: Winged Bean: The single species supermarket

Here is video about science behind Dr. Esselstyns strict dietary guidelines.

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Fukuoka starts this little gem of a book with a seemingly harsh remark by saying: “Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort.” But after flying through the book, I tend to agree with him. He advocates a “do-nothing” type of farming which is not to say his style was idle or easy. But rather, it calls for doing less with the end result that nothing is out of sync with nature.

Generally Fukuoka was also a bit harsh in his evaluation of the medical and educational systems, and especially of scientists. He was a scientist himself before he devoted his life to natural farming and he draws an analogy between the role of the scientist in society to the role of discrimination in our minds which leads to narrow-mindedness. He discusses how technology based on science only serves to take us away from nature.

But Fukuoka advocates a gentle calm way of life and farming practice with four underlying principles, namely: no cultivation, no chemical fertilizer of prepared compost, no weeding by tillage or herbicides, and no dependence on chemicals. He points out that fertility increases when nature is left to itself and that this is beyond the reach of our imagination. He shares his simple techniques that allowed him to produce the same or greater quantities of crops as his neighbours who used the modern industrial methods, one of which was the use of strewing straw on his fields.

Fukuoka not only focuses on farming methods, but covers a wide range of related issues including diet, nutrition, the culture of food, confusion about food, the agri-food business and agricultural policy.  He calls for sweeping changes to the economic and social structures of our societies, which if there is, will be because of a change in consciousness in people.

Drawing from philosophy and religion, he has many sayings that reflect this and I give a few here:

“If you try to do something, your efforts will never achieve the desired result. (There is no other way than through the destruction of the ego, casting aside the thought that humans exist apart from heaven and earth.)

Trying to capture the unknowable in theories and formalized doctrines is like trying to catch the wind in a butterfly net.

An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.

There are countless variations. (Nature is always changing and is never the same.)

In general, commercial agriculture is an unstable proposition.

Food is life, and life must not step away from nature.

Human beings can destroy natural forms, but they cannot create them.

What’s wrong with a growth rate of 0%?

Living is no more than the result of being born.

Just to live here and now – this is the true basis of human life.

To believe that by research and invention humanity can create something better than nature is an illusion.

Farming used to be sacred work.

The marriage is not bestowed, not received; the perfect pair comes into existence of itself.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

No matter how hard people try, they cannot improve upon naturally grown fruits and vegetables.

If we do have a food crisis it will not be caused by the insufficiency of nature’s productive power, but by the extravagance of human desire.

In all contentions there is neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad.

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. (Let food be your medicine.)

Within one thing lie all things, but if all things are brought together not one thing can arise. (Western science is unable to grasp this precept of eastern philosophy.  A person can analyze and investigate a butterfly as far as he likes, but he cannot make a butterfly. In an apple there are all kinds of nutrients, fibre, juice, calories, and other things.  If we were to try to make an apple by putting all the known components together, we would not be able to make an apple.)

Masanobu Fukuoka trained as a microbiologist and worked as a soil scientist specializing in plant pathology. After suffering an illness at 25, he had an enlightenment experience and decided to put his thoughts into practice. He returned to his family’s farm on the island of Shikoku in Southern Japan to practice natural farming. He died at the age of 95 in 2008.

The book is available on Amazon and in pdf form here. More information can also be found on the One Straw Revolution website.

About the reviewer

JENNIE WILSON has been involved in the banking and legal industries. However, since June 2010, she has caught up her  long-term interests of health and environmental matters and manages a blog called B’org Food Chain, “Big organisation of Food and the Chain of inequities” with the view to writing a book on similar issues.

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Allowing a beautiful large mammal that has evolved over millions of years to disappear forever,  is a monumental failure of human civilisation. Yet the extinction of the baiji dolphin of the Yangtze river is no longer on people’s radar screens. Why do we need to keep the story alive? How do we ensure the same fate doesn’t befall the other river dolphins of the Amazon, the Ganges and the Indus? What failures of conservation can we simply not allow to happen?

Though it has been a couple of years since the baiji dolphin of the Yangtze river in China has been declared “most likely” extinct – it was in 2007 when the announcement was made – why is it important for us not to let this unfortunate and unforgivable event fade out of human memory and consciousness?

Samuel Turvey , the conservation biologist who currently works for the Zoological Society of London, was deeply involved in the final stages of the project to save the baiji dolphin. His book, “Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin” takes a poignant and angry look at the series of lost chances that led a beautiful cetacean, one that has evolved over 20 million years to vanish forever from the face of this world in the blink of a planetary eye.

What is the baiji?

The baiji (Lipotes vexillifer) is a native of the longest river in Asia, the Yangtze which stretches over 6,300km from the Tibetan plateau to the East China Sea. The river boasts of rich biological diversity and endemic species such as the baiji. The baiji is one of 4 river dolphin species of the world, the others being the Amazon dolphin, the Ganges and Indus dolphin, and the La Plata dolphin (which live off the coasts of Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in South America)

The baiji as a river dolphin is different in structure and appearance, to marine dolphins which look more streamlined. River dolphins have long thin beaks (about 30 cms and 4 times longer than marine dolphins), hump like dorsal fins and flexible necks. Their vision is poorly developed due to the muddy waters, which is compensated for by a heightened sonar sense – hence they move around and catch fish by echolocation. They often swim on their sides and feel the river bottom with flippers.

Why did the baiji disappear?

The oft assumed reason for the disappearance of the baiji is the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydro-electric power station in the world displacing over a million people along its 600 km long reservoir.

2000 years of relentless hunting had reduced the species to a rather precarious position in the 21st century. Though considered sacred in folklore, the baiji in reality was accorded no such status – being overfished for fat to produce oil for lamps, meat and traditional remedies for ailments.

Massive overpopulation along the Yangtze meant that everything was being removed from the river like a sieve. As early as the 1920s, Clifford Pope observed of Dongting (along the Yangtze)

“there are thousands of fishermen actually straining creatures of all sizes from the rapidly vanishing lake, and it seemed that the dolphin must soon fall victim to one of their innumerable methods of separating the water from everything in it but the mud.”

Pg 30 Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin

Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” in the 1950s transformed China’s agrarian economy into an industrial juggernaut overnight with devastating consequences for the natural environment – which according to Mao had to be “tamed into submission” by the plunder of forests for charcoal, and the construction of “large’ hydroelectrical projects to conquer rivers.

The massive scale of the Three Gorges project, the industrial activity and accompanying pollution of the Yangtze proved to be the last straw. Many riverine creatures on the Yangtze were killed during construction. It also prevented fish from moving into spawning gounds.

In 1988 there were about 200 baiji, a guesstimate at best given the various inconsistencies and challenges in the methods used to survey baijis over the 60s and 70s. The Three Gorges Dam increased the the quantum of ship traffic manifold. When Douglas Adams who wrote “Last Chance to See” lowered the microphone into the Yangtze he observed:

“ The sound we heard wasn’t exactly what I expected. Water is a very good medium for the propogation of sound and I had expected to hear clearly the heavy, pounding reverberations of each of the boats that had gone thundering by us as we stood on the deck. But water transmits sound even better than that, and what we were hearing was everything that was happening in the Yangtze for many, many miles around, jumbled cacophony together. Instead of hearing the roar of each individual ship’s propeller, what we heard was a sustained shrieking blast of pure white noise, in which nothing could be distinguished at all.”

Pg 34 Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin

For a near blind creature such as the baiji that relies heavily on the sense of sound for prey and survival, this pure white noise would be deadly indeed.  Coming up to the surface, the baiji would often get disembowelled on propellers of boats. A third of the baiji found dead in the 1980s may have been killed this way.

Conservation efforts for the Baiji?

Recovery chances for endangered species though faint are by no means impossible. Stellar examples that go down in conservation history are the recovery through intense efforts – of the Mauritius Kestrel, the Chatham Island black robin, the kakapo – the world’s largest parrot in New Zealand.

When it came to the baiji, the level of determination required to save a highly endangered species was found to be really wanting. The Chinese government was in favour of ex-situ or off site conservation (by capturing the baiji and letting them breed in a reserve), while most Western conservationists felt the long term chances of survival would be better only if the natural habitat of the baiji, namely the condition of the Yangtze river was improved – something that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

Turvey dwells upon the lip service and “slow pace of decision making” by both the Chinese Government and western conservationists which only tantamounted to shocking apathy. As Turvey indignantly points out, “ Just because you don’t feel that maintaining a viable population in a large protected oxbow (lake) is the ideal conservation solution, can you really then walk away and condemn the species to extinction, knowing that there’s no other option?

And yet, it would seem that the world did walk away. The reluctance to save the dolphin was evident in the sheer challenge of raising funds for the survey of the Yangtze river (the last one was done in the nineties showing rapid decrease in baiji numbers to about 13 animals), let alone funds for baiji conservation.

If Samuel Turvey and colleague Leigh Barrett hadn’t taken it upon themselves, giving it all their time and effort, literally scraping donors’ doors with begging bowls, even the survey would not have come through. The survey was the last chance for the baiji to study baiji numbers and initiate action to move any spotted dolphins to a reserve – the Tian-e-Zhou lake, the ox-bow lake 21km long.

The irony was that a million or so dollars required for baiji conservation wasn’t huge in the conservation world, considering tons of money were being poured into projects for less endangered species. US $190 million has been spent, for example on the research programme for the Stellar sea lion, which despite a serious decline in numbers off western Alaska, still has healthy populations along Alaska’s southeast coast.

The following video mentions the last surviving baiji dolphin, Qi-Qi (pronounced chee- chee) at Wuhan dolphinarium. Qi-Qi was studied by The Baiji Research Group which was headed by Wang Ding. Qi-Qi died at the age of 24 or 25 years (equivalent to a 70 year man) in 2002 after 22 years in captivity of old age and diabetes and had a funeral broadcast on national television.

Surveying the Yangtze river

When things eventually fell into place, Turvey’s team set off in two boats at the end of October 2006 for a six week journey upstream from Wuhan till Honghu and Yichang and back downstream to cover the range of the baiji.

Baiji Survey Area: Click on map for larger image

The picture that Turvey paints of the Yangtze river is gloomy, to say the least.  The haze of pollution from belching smokestacks and the economic activity supporting the mass of population along the banks – factories, oil refineries and chemical plants, along with the millions of tons raw sewage plants and industrial effluents that found its way into the river had taken a huge toll.  The Yangtze had also become a motorway for thousands of freighters to enable this relentless economic engine to chug along. It was also quite evident that there was no enforcement of illegal fishing practices such as the use of rolling hook lines.

The reader is left to wonder, who’s bearing the real cost of China becoming the world’s factory? And of consumerism within China itself which has been quick to explode in the pursuit of relentless growth?

Declaring extinction

As the lead author of the report following the Yangtze survey, Turvey announced that it was a “shocking tragedy” that not a single baiji was spotted during the dreary 45 day trip.  He describes how he had to juggle over semantics choosing to say the species is now “most likely” to be extinct, over what the Chinese felt was too strong in saying it was “probably” extinct.

But did it mean the baiji was really extinct? As quoted by the BBC “While it is conceivable that a couple of surviving individuals were missed by the survey teams, our inability to detect any baiji despite this intensive search effort indicates that the prospect of finding and translocating them to a [reserve] has all but vanished.”

As it so happened a baiji was spotted in 2007 but the likelihood of successful capture and breeding would really be next to impossible.

Collective memory of species extinction

In 2008, Turvey returned to interview the fishing communities along the Yangtze. To his surprise and consternation, “younger fishermen from the same communities had not only never seen baiji or paddlefish, but had never even heard of them.” His study called, “Rapidly Shifting Baselines in Yangtze Fishing Communities and Local Memory of Extinct Species” in Conservation Biology showed that extinct animals are surprisingly forgotten quickly.

It would seem that this loss of local cultural memory has spilled over to mainstream media as well, where the baiji is hardly ever mentioned anymore. We can’t let this collective memory loss happen, if we have to keep our hopes of saving the thousands of species at the brink of never coming back.

The fate of the river dolphins is symptomatic of the freshwater crisis facing the Asian river systems – which are collapsing due to climate change, population pressures and industrial development. The larger issue of how we protect and restore the river waters of Asia will hold the key to the fate of many endangered species.

If you’re looking for a message of hope in the book – there isn’t one.  ”Someday it will all be over,”  are Turvey’s final words.  And they come as a shock.

Protecting a unique, endangered species is the moral responsibility of the world. If at all there is something that Turvey teaches us, it is this: the effort and energy shown by a few individuals like him can make a difference, if done in good time. It was too late for the baiji, but maybe,  just maybe, there is a tiny window of opportunity for the other river dolphins of the world.

Further links you may be interested in:

EWTT:  So Just What Is Shark Fin Soup?
EWTT:  The Waters of The Third Pole : Water Crisis in Asia

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Janet Unruh

Janet Unruh is a person who believes that everything can be recycled 100% – provided we learn how to design things properly and set up the right systems for materials recovery. With her knowledge and experience in manufacturing, having worked for the last decade in the truck manufacturing industry, she has founded “The Institute for Material Sustainability” in Portland, Oregon, USA where she lives. Through her book Recycle Everything - Why We Must, How We Can and the Institute, she hopes to enable industries to transition to more sustainable methods of using materials for manufacture and recovery through recycling.

BP:  To start from the very title of your book, Recycle Everything: Why We Must, How We Can , why “must” we recycle everything?

Janet: We simply can’t continue to take resources from the Earth, put them through our production-consumption system and dispose of them afterward.  Such a system, by its very nature, is not sustainable.  Someday, we’ll run into resource limitations.  Because of this, efforts at slowing down the throughput of materials and mitigating the effects of disposal don’t address the problem directly and only delay the inevitable, which is scarcity of resources.

What we need is a cyclical system that retains all the materials within itself and reuses them continuously.  Such a system would eliminate the need for both extraction of raw materials and disposal of waste.  That may seem outlandish to some, but I believe that if a thing can be imagined, it can be engineered.  If it weren’t so, we wouldn’t have things like the iPhone or Droid, we wouldn’t send rovers to Mars.

BP:  Can everything really be recycled 100%?

Janet: I believe the answer is yes.  Scientists are creating such things as artificial atoms and programmable matter.  Think about that for a moment.  If we humans are capable of designing atoms, why can’t we have 100% recyclable materials?  We already have certain metals, glass and plastics that could be described as 100% recyclable, but we need to create more options.  We need to ask questions like, how can we design a material that will serve purpose X and be capable of being reprocessed so that it can be used for this same purpose again?  Then we go to work on it.

Alright, so let’s say our goal is to create materials that are 100% recyclable.  I call them ‘perpetually reusable materials’ in the book.  What does that mean?  It means that these materials should be stable, lossless, easily reprocessed and reused, requiring no additives and releasing no byproducts in reprocessing.  That’s a very high standard and may be possible only up to a point.  I know that everything decays.  There’s an interesting word, ‘disgregation’, which refers to the fact that molecules are constantly in motion and become separated from each other.  This applies to all matter.  But even if we are able to invent materials that are 90% recyclable, that eliminates 90% of extraction and waste.  What an enormous benefit that would be!

And let me emphasize this point:  when the material is designed, the method for reprocessing it and returning it to stockpiles must also be designed and the method has to be cost-effective.  Ideally, the cost of reprocessing the material is less than the cost of extracting raw materials.

“Look around you. The microwave oven, the cell phone, the car, clothing, appliances, furniture – imagine that when you’re done with them, you give them to a collector, possibly through curb-side pick-up. Then all these products would go back into the system for 100% reuse in new products. There would be no more used stuff being thrown on top of mountains of junk with toxic chemicals draining into rivers. What are the issues that need to be addressed for 100% reuse to become a reality? Why don’t we fix the production-consumption system so that all the materials that enter into the system stay in the system? We must answer these questions. Only then can we say that our production-consumption system is sustainable.”

(Page 8 of Recycle Everything: Why We Must, How We Can )

BP:  William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book “ Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things ” is a well-known classic on sustainable materials and design. What inspired you to write another book on the same theme?

Janet : The book, Cradle to Cradle, Remaking the Way We Make Things, was a great inspiration to me but I felt that it would be difficult for anyone in industry to know how to apply the ideas in the book.  There was still a large gap to be filled—a whole new system needed to be mapped and explained in detail.  And if you could get ideas like those in Cradle to Cradle accepted by management, you’d have to tell them what to do to implement them, step by step.  So I would say that I adapted many of the Cradle-to-Cradle ideas to the interests of industry and made the ideas operational—capable of being put into operation.

I have quite a bit of experience with manufacturing because I worked as a contractor for 10 years at one of the largest global truck manufacturers with factories in over a dozen countries.  My job enabled me to work with management in all the major departments at corporate headquarters as well as the workers on the assembly lines in the manufacturing plants.  Through this experience, I learned how ideas are accepted and how things get done.  I could see what was needed to bridge that gap and make the ideas practicable in a manufacturing context.

BP:  Is it really possible to map a system by which we can close the materials loop – so that resources are recycled endlessly?

Janet : Yes it is. I call this new kind of system a system for material sustainability.  The first thing we need is a map of this system to show how it would work.  This map has to be adaptable for products made of organic materials, such as wood, natural fiber, food waste, etc., and for inorganic materials such as metals, minerals, plastics, and glass.

In this map, materials never leave the system, but are passed from one role to another and reused in new products countless times into the future.  This graphic is a depiction of an inorganic system.  The organic version of the system routes used materials to compost and then to fields and forests to provide nutrients for new crops.  I explain these systems much more fully in the book and provide examples of several adaptations.

So now that we have a system, we’re beginning to see a little more light on the subject but there’s still a long way to go to make it workable.  For instance, what if a product isn’t designed to be disassembled?  Well, then it is simply impractical to try to disassemble it.  This is an example of how the system has to be optimized.  When the product is designed, it has to be designed for easy assembly and easy disassembly.

BP: Can you give an example where you can apply this to industry?

Janet: Sure.  Let’s say that we’re going to write business requirements for a piece of equipment, yet to be designed, that will disassemble a product.   And let’s say in our example, that Goodlife (fictitious name) corporation wants to make a new washing machine and its disassembly plan is defined.  The disassembly plan will programmed into this specially-designed disassembly equipment.  Now, when the product is recovered from the consumer, it will be routed to this piece of equipment in the disassembly plant.

The business requirements for the disassembly equipment are these:  the equipment should be able read a 3-D bar code, located on the washer, to receive the disassembly instructions.  As a side note, the reason for this is that disassembly equipment should be capable of disassembling multiple products.  The equipment should have the ability to perform actions as specified in the instructions. Now we can give these business requirements and the disassembly instructions to people who design manufacturing equipment and they can design this piece of equipment and write the programming for it.  This is the kind of detailed specification that is needed to make the entire system for material sustainability operational.  If we don’t discuss things on this level of detail, we’re not making sustainability possible.

Stakeholders and the management team must write business requirements such as these for the entire system.  Once the new systems, processes, roles, materials and equipment are set up, they must be optimized for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.  One of my goals is to find people that can design a computer modelling system for this purpose.  The computer system would show real-time operations in an animated simulation that would permit easy adaptability.  I would like to be able to drag and drop lean manufacturing/six sigma features into the operations to optimize them.

Since 1991, Xerox’s efforts in recycling and remanufacturing have enabled them to refurbish more than 2.8 million copiers, printers and multifunction products. Returned products that are suitable for reuse undergo rigorous testing before remanufacturing. Those that cannot be remanufactured are disassembled, and the parts are reused or recycled. A small fraction of the remaining material is discarded. In 2006 alone, Xerox collected 43,000 metric tons of equipment and reused or recycled 96% of it.

(Page 42 of Recycle Everything: Why We Must, How We Can )

BP:  How serious do you see the problem of material shortage for industry?

Janet: Very serious.  And yet, I would characterize it as being locked in a building with a madman rather than standing on train tracks and seeing a train approach from afar.  Material shortage is difficult to quantify simply because there is a chance that somebody somewhere in the world may stumble across a deposit of valuable ore that hadn’t yet been discovered.  The true size of global deposits can’t be ascertained with 100% accuracy.  There are, however, many studies available on the subject of future scarcity, and I refer to some of them in my book.

Our ability to manufacture products is threatened by the increasing scarcity of raw materials. In some cases, raw materials aren’t scarce per se, but they are becoming more expensive to extract because the sources that were easily accessible have already been scraped out or siphoned off and remaining deposits are increasingly difficult to reach. The ore grades of these deposits may also be lower quality, and they will require a greater amount of energy to produce a ton of metal. Access to materials can also be overshadowed by political tensions, regional conflicts, and war.

We only need to turn to the news to learn about shortages. An article in New Scientist* magazine reports that scientists are beginning to realize that certain raw materials will run out, according to a study conducted by researchers at Yale University, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of Augsburg, Germany. Here are a few examples. Indium, which is used in flat-panel TVs and computer screens, could run out in four to 13 years. Silver could become depleted in between four to 29 years. Lead, used in batteries, could become impossible to find in eight to 42 years. Zinc could be exhausted by 2037; hafnium, which is important in computer chips, by 2017, and terbium, which is used to make fluorescent light bulbs, by 2012. Clearly, some of these shortages will have an impact on manufacturing soon.

(Page 2 of Recycle Everything: Why We Must, How We Can )

The price for one of these metals, indium, jumped considerably after the New Scientist article was published in 2007.  Several substitutes were developed and although sources of indium continue to shrink, the price of indium has decreased.  This is a kind of good news/bad news story.  It’s good news for those who can use substitutes—they have bought time to continue production.  But it’s bad news for those who absolutely must have indium.  Why?  Because market prices are not a reliable indicator of the remaining supply of a resource.  In fact, market prices are more responsive to demand.  And meanwhile, extractors are motivated to extract a resource as quickly as possible due to the discount factor**.  And so the producers who are dependent on indium may find themselves confronted with scarcity quite abruptly.

Touch screens and LCDs use Indium

There are those who believe that technology can surmount any challenge of material availability.  There are several issues with this.  The high-grade ores or materials within easy reach are discovered and extracted first, so that over time, the quality and accessibility of new sources diminishes.  At some point, the cost of extraction and processing exceeds profitability.

Technology itself is dependent on materials, so the depletion of one critical material can impact our ability to extract other materials.  Many people are talking about ‘peak oil’, which means that production of petroleum products has already hit an all-time high and is beginning to decline.  And since there’s no substitute for oil, its availability and price will have an enormous negative effect not only on materials extraction but on the entire global economy.

It may be that industry will be goaded into change by the scarcity of one material or another.  Manufacturers can go broke if production has to be shut down for an unknown length of time, competition for materials intensifies and they are priced out of the market, and viable substitutes can’t be found in time.  I think it would be smarter by far to anticipate the inevitable than to bet on business as usual.

BP:  In the systems for material sustainability, consumers no longer own things; they lease them.  And manufacturers now have to own materials.  Please explain why this is necessary.

Janet: Okay, let me start with the manufacturers, or producers.  In order to continue to manufacture products, they must retain control, or ownership of materials.  Without materials, there is no guarantee that the manufacturer can continue to produce.  The systems for material sustainability provide producers with various tracking and recovery methods.  Some have suggested that material cost can be assessed at each point along the way, and that would make it profitable for someone to collect products for resale.  This could work for some things, such as clothes, which are often given away to others.  Also, with a bit of redesign to exclude toxic chemicals, we can make some things to be compostable—such as furniture, which could be made of cotton, hemp, wood and possibly biodegradable plastic.  We have to adapt to a world in which a material like Indium is not reliably available, but perhaps it is the very best material to use in LCD screens.  That makes it critical for producers to get that Indium back.

The change for consumers is that they no longer own, but instead lease things like appliances, electronics, some types of furniture and vehicles.  People like to buy stuff (as Annie Leonard likes to call it), but after a while, stuff breaks down and then they have to dispose of it somehow.  If they go out and buy new stuff, why not turn in the old stuff at the same time?  Or, as I suggested in my book, perhaps we could have curbside pickup for used items, where we have garbage pickup already.  The used items would then go to a central collector and be routed from there to reuse or disassembly.  I can’t say what is going to be the most optimal system for recovery until I get some help from computer modelling experts.  I want to try various scenarios to work out the most efficient and cost-effective system.

Leasing implies that there are payments for all the products people use, and I believe that this should be not much different from the way people now use credit cards to buy things.  The consumer’s ability to pay to lease products drives the whole system.  Without consumers there is no production, so consumers must have jobs and these jobs must pay enough to keep the system going.  The erosion of the consumer base is itself, unsustainable.  That means all employers have to re-think layoffs as a quick fix for quarterly profits because it results in long-term recession.  I admire the German approach to keeping their economy going, and I recommend that your readers read this article in the Wall Street Journal .

And here’s another thought to ponder:  because the lease model eliminates ownership, it also eliminates consumer debt.  How many people are still making payments for things that have broken down, lost their value or were consumed?  In the new system, if consumers want to get rid of something, they can turn it in and cease to make payments.  Again, we can tweak the system over time to achieve the highest benefits for all.  As long as we maintain our sights on the goal of 100% recycling, everything else is up for discussion.

BP: What kind of change within the supply chain/ legislative support/ behaviour change (companies, governments, individuals) would make “recycling of everything” possible?

We have to look for support wherever we can get it!  There’s a growing number of people who understand that our current way of living is unsustainable, and they are in governments, businesses, organizations and society in general.  In many cases, they want to know what they can do and they are ready to do it.  We have to give them the vision.  A vision is something that engages the imagination.  This is a very powerful thing because once you have a large number of people imagining something, it has a very great chance of coming into being.  People begin to come up with the tactical-level ideas on their own.  For government, it’s legislation like the kind we’re seeing in the EU.  For corporations, it’s adopting new systems such as leasing instead of outright sales.  For society, it’s changing the way we think about things like owning ‘stuff’.  There will be those who fight to preserve the ‘status quo’, but in the end, it’s not an ideological battle, it’s a prudent approach to our continuation into the future based on good information.

FOOTNOTES:

* An article that appeared in New Scientist in 2007 titled, “Earth’s natural wealth: an Audit”, summarized a study that gave some fast-approaching dates of depletion for many critical minerals and metals.

**You may also have heard of the ‘discount’ factor in regard to resources.  The way it works is this:  a deposit of copper is worth X amount of money (assume that the value will remain the same in the future).  The owners of the deposit are motivated to extract all of it as quickly as possible, sell it and put the money in the bank.  The bank will pay interest, which means that in a couple of decades, the money will have increased quite a lot.  The difference between the anticipated growth of the fund and the value of the copper is referred to as the ‘discounted’ value of the copper.  This is textbook financial reasoning and for the purposes of investment, it makes conservation of resources unthinkable.

Other issues with material supply include these:
•         Simultaneous development of multiple technologies that require a material, resulting in a sharp increase in demand
•         Geopolitical hostilities which can cut off access to critical materials
•         Dependence on the market for and production of other materials (e.g., gallium is a by-product of bauxite mining)
•         Speculation on prices of materials

Some examples of materials usage and shortages:

Indium

INDIUM
Use: Touch-screen technology, LCD displays, solar technology, semiconductors and medical imaging
Top suppliers: China, Canada, Japan
Projected scarcity: The price of indium has shot up recently. Unless new resources are found and recycling improves, indium could be scarce by 2020.

GALLIUM
Use: LEDs, lasers, solar cells, Blu-ray technology, satellites and radio frequency circuits
Top suppliers: China, Germany, Kazakhstan, Japan, Russia
Projected scarcity: Gallium is a by-product of the production of other, more important metals, and so its supply is entirely dependent on the demand for those other metals.

Child Labour: Coltan Mining in Congo

TANTALUM
Use: High-performance capacitors in cellphones and cars, semiconductors
Top suppliers: Australia, Brazil
Projected scarcity: Tantalum will probably not be scarce until after 2030 . But a U.S. government report notes that suppliers can easily hold capacitor makers hostage to price increases.  A Tantalum ore (Coltan) is found in the conflict regions of the Congo.

Source from Spectrum.IEEE.org (with some edits and additions).

Two good sources of information are these:  “The Global Flows of Metals and Minerals”, available on the U.S. Geological Service website, and “Metal Stocks in Society – Scientific Synthesis”, available on the U.N. Environmental Programme’s website.

Further important links :

Website: The Institute for Material Sustainability
Facebook page: Recycle Everything – Why We Must How We Can
Janet Unruh can be contacted at:  info@recycleeverythingbook.org

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Dr. Masuru Emoto

What then is water telling us? Incredible as it may sound, Dr. Emoto’s research as shown in the New York bestseller “The Hidden Messages in Water” shows us that water stores information, responds to “words,” to sounds, to feelings and even to events. From a quantum physics viewpoint, all of matter, every single atom in our body and in the cosmos, is vibrating at a particular frequency. Water is simply “listening” to that frequency and mirroring it. Water is simply reflecting what we are saying, thinking, writing and feeling.

Some of the most amazing and beautiful crystals appear when words such as “love,” and “thank you,” are shown to water, as written words emit a vibrational frequency as much as spoken words.  Complex and complete crystals emerge from natural spring water, water from shrines and water exposed to classical music.

In contrast, crystals fail to form in tap water which is usually chlorinated, in dammed or polluted water, as well as water that is subjected to heavy metal music.  Distorted crystals emerge when water is exposed to electromagnetic radiation from TVs, computers, mobile phones or before an earthquake or even a man-made catastrophe such as 9/11. If you microwave water, the crystal that emerges is similar to the one formed when water is shown the word “Satan.”

The way water crystals form and change depending on the words shown to it, reflect our very attitude to water itself and the rest of what Nature gives us. We drink it, cook and bathe with it, and use it to dump what comes out of our factories and homes and fields, and yet we spend most of our lives without as much as giving it a second thought. Perhaps it is because we lack gratitude for water that we treat it the way we like, by chlorinating it, damming it, stagnating it and muddying it with toxic effluents. What we get then, is a lifeless, crystal-less medium reflecting the dullness of our minds and souls. Water and Nature itself expresses this in such an eloquent way.

The beauty of water crystals amazingly reflect the fundamental principles of the universe, the healing powers of “love” and “gratitude.” Water blossoms when we spread love. Water rejoices when we say “thank you.” How vitally important it is to say “thank you” to those we meet and greet- our family, our friends, our neighbours, and to say “thank you” to all the wonderful things and events in one’s life, many of which we often take for granted. How important it is to sit at the dinner table with our children or family members to partake of food with a feeling of gratitude for the blessings of the earth and for each other’s company. We are almost nearly water as 70% of our bodies comprises of it.  As we and the food we take in are mostly water, how beautifully we can change the crystals in the water within us and in others.

In another experiment with three bottles of cooked rice, positive words were uttered everyday for a few days to the first, negative ones to the second and the third bottle was left unattended. Which rice do you think rotted first? You could try this simple experiment at home with your children.

Whilst the first got positive energy and the second got negative energy, at least some energy was being given to the latter. The last bottle which was ignored rotted first, because neglect is worse than negative energy. What a powerful lesson this is for those of us with children, for we need to give them our love and attention, as their minds will verily rot if left neglected and ignored.

Perhaps it is really obvious that water, as the most invaluable of Nature’s gifts to the planet should be a medium for what the Universe is telling us. Water is showing us how to live our lives, how to heal ourselves, how to heal the planet and bring peace and harmony in our minds and souls and in our society. In Dr. Emoto’s words,” Our emotions and feelings have an effect on the world moment by moment. Each one has a magical ability to change the world. All you must do is make a simple choice: Are you going to choose a world of love and gratitude, or a tortured world filled with discontent and impoverishment?”

I’m not capable of commenting whether Dr. Emoto’s research has the rigour and objectivity to convince the scientific community, but the results that he shows us are universal principles, in that we can change the world around us by changing our thoughts, words and feelings.  I can’t but agree with his conclusions,” We have an important mission: To make water clean again, and to create a world that is easy and healthy to live in. In order to accomplish our mission, we must make sure our hearts are clear and unpolluted.”

I know that I haven’t been able look at water the same way again… when I sip it from a glass, or let it run between my fingers from a tap, or catch the raindrops, or think of all the springs, rivers, lakes and oceans that sustain life …I can’t but help saying a huge “thank you” in my mind.

An EcoWALK “thank you” for stopping by…..and giving me the opportunity of conveying this beautiful message.

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Indonesia, which has one of the last great rainforests, and about 17,000 islands is one of the key areas where wildlife such as parrots, pangolins, orangutans and tigers are exported or killed. India is another major supplier, with animal parts or bones of elephants, rhinos and tigers being smuggled out. Thailand was once a major supplier, but with dwindling wildlife, it has become a lucrative transit centre, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Laos and Vietnam. Often the illegal animal trade accompanies the narcotics and arms trade, and the trafficking of people.

China, a giant vacuum cleaner?

Amongst Asian countries, China is the largest consumer of ivory, swallowing fifteen tons a year (which is about 1500 dead elephants). China takes in more than half of the 10,000 tons of freshwater turtles traded annually, along with being the biggest market for tiger bone, leopard cat, rhino horn, and sea horse. In fact, one conservationist in Cambodia likened the Chinese market to “a giant vacuum cleaner sucking out all the animals” in his own and neighbouring countries.

There is a tremendous demand for wildlife from cultural reasons. Body parts of wild animals like tiger bones and rhino horns are widely used for Chinese traditional medicine. Shark fin and blood from live snakes are seen as powerful aphrodisiacs.  Ivory and rhino horn are smuggled in large quantities from India and Africa for artefacts and traditional Chinese medicine.

Where else does the wildlife go?

It’s not China alone which sucks in all the wildlife. Bush meat or the commercial killing of wild animals for food is widespread in Africa and in other parts of Asia. Much of the trade in exotic birds, fish and reptiles, from live animal and bird markets in Burma, Thailand and Indonesia end up in Europe and America in the hands of rich pet collectors.

The US is the biggest buyer of exotic pets. Nearly 7 million households own a pet bird, a further 4 million own a pet snake, turtle, or iguana.

Japan is a major purchaser of ivory. Taiwan and Korea also acquire wild animals or products from the region.

The challenge

All the South EastAsian countries(excepting Laos) have signed the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna which produces the Red List of Endangered Species every three to four years), but smuggling is still rampant.

Habitat destruction, due to growing population, deforestation, desertification, urban development, damming for agriculture contributes to reduction of wildlife populations.

The challenge to protect wildlife against illegal trafficking is huge. Developing countries are too poor to keep environment and wildlife on their priority list, their focus being taken away by human issues such as poverty, health, terrorism and education. Funding for wildlife protection is minimal. Poor villagers assist in catching wildlife as a means to supplement their meagre income.

On the contrary, the organised traffickers who kill or capture wildlife with brazen disregard, have well connected, influential and deep pockets, making the task of curbing the trade even more challenging. Even in developed countries, the wildlife trade is hardly a priority for the Police, whose focus is on fighting drugs, theft and anti-social behaviour.

Is there hope?

However blood-curdling the images in Ben Davies’ book are, we have to thank him for bringing them to our attention and raising our awareness of this nefarious global trade. The devastation caused to wildlife species and populations is mind- boggling. Equally mind-boggling is the extreme cruelty to animals which is painful to comprehend. It leads me to wonder, how we as humans have become so numb, so insensitive to the pain and suffering of fellow creatures.

As Jane Goodall says in the introduction of the book, “It is my firm belief that an understanding of animals as individuals can pay an important role in shaping the way people think about wildlife. For it is not only the threat to a species that matters; so too does the suffering of individual animals.”

Raising public awareness, activism and stricter enforcement are the only ways to save whatever is left of the wildlife. If people are poor, they will only continue to try and make money in any way possible, which includes killing wildlife. Community education programmes must enlighten them to value their wildlife, and also provide them with alternative means of earning a livelihood. Consumers from wealthier nations have to end the demand side of the equation. Without demand, there will be no incentive for black market to flourish.

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The Earth has witnessed 5 great extinctions in the last half a billion years. We are now on the brink of the 6th great extinction. We lose a distinct species, of one sort or another, every ten minutes. The normal “background rate of extinction” is roughly 1-2 species per year. That rate is between 100 and 1000 times faster than the background rate of species extinction. This one is unique as the scale of extinction we’re seeing now is mainly due to the activities of a single species, namely us.

Terry Glavin takes us on a personal odyssey as he “journeys among the Lost and Left Behind” worlds. He gives a vivid and poignant account of the scale of loss of species, and the way it affects our lives. On a grander scale, he laments not only the extinction of species, but the dying of languages and cultures, that accompany such losses.

I was pleasantly surprised at the attention he gave to Singapore, as an entire chapter was devoted to this island state and how it represents the paradox of having destroyed most of its rainforests. 95% of Singapore was covered by primary rainforests till the mid 1800s. Now only a fraction of 1%  of that remains, having been replaced by a mass of urban construction.

At the same time, this is the place where through the efforts of the Singapore Zoo, we are seeing a kind of “Noah’s Ark” with a large collection of the “living dead.”  Species like the Bali mynah, pygmy hippo, the proboscis monkey, the orangutans, that are nurtured in enclosed spaces, which otherwise are more or less certain of dying out as a species in their native habitats, as those very same habitats are being decimated rapidly.

I was particularly saddened by his account of the ecological disaster in Russia….a country that I know very little about, let alone seen it. Yet, I could feel the pangs of pain, because when you care about the planet as a whole, political demarcations matter little…Nature, its diversity and its inhabitants belong to all of us.

Glavin takes us to Khabarovsk (I had to look it up in the Atlas, it’s on the Far Eastern side of Russia closer to the border with China) where he recounts the story of how the privatisation of the Soviet Union led to forest licences falling into criminal hands, plundering forests for mineral deposits and leading to the collapse of fisheries. The 200 year old Forest Service was abolished, with the Ministry of Natural resources becoming the main conduit for plundering the Far East’s natural wealth. Since the 1990s, the Amur river in Russia has lost 90% of its salmon species. In other parts of  Russia, more than 90% of the world’s saiga antelope have disappeared from the Russian steppes and the plains of Kazhakstan.

It’s not just the genetic diversity of animal species that we are losing, but plant species too, particularly of food crops. Glavin dwells in the chapter on “An Apple is a Kind of Rose” not on exotic species in exotic lands, but on the humble apples and potatoes and our every day food crops.

According to research on food crop extinctions by Rural Advancement Fund International (RAFI), 86% of the 7098 apple varieties in America have disappeared. Out of 357 onion varieties, only 27 remain. Of 307 sweet-corn varieities, only 12 remain, and so is the fate of cabbages, radishes, lettuces, watermelons and other domesticated crops.

Throughout the 20th century, we are losing a variety of subspecies of domesticated vegetables and fruits to a few industrial hybrid varieties with long shelf lives, that are actively promoted by large companies. About 75 % of all global food production now come from only a dozen crops and only a few species of those crops.

Despite the gloomy discoveries, Glavin finds hope in many places. I was encouraged by his fascinating journey to Costa Rica, one of the few countries in the world which has gone to great lengths to maintain its tropical rainforests and its ecological heritage, symbolised by the amazing humming birds and the resplendent Quetzal.

Glavin found hope in the vaults of the Royal Kew Garden, where seeds of several plant species are caringly preserved for research and for posterity. So too does he find hope in remote North Eastern corner of India, in a village called Khonoma, where the tribal communities don’t resort to the centuries old habit of slash and burn agriculture, but a technique called pollarding, to encourage the tree to produce new growth on a regular basis in order to maintain a supply of new wood for various purposes.

If we are to be a living, breathing world, rich in diversity and abundance of life, then as Glavin puts it, we “have to take the helm” and allow for such diversity to flourish. It will be hard work, he acknowledges, but “you do what can, everything you can”

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Does extinction of species really matter?

I’ve met a few people to whom losing the giant panda in China, or the orangutans in Borneo, or the “unknown and undiscovered” creepy crawlies on the forest floor of a tropical rainforest, or a fish species in the ocean deep, don’t really matter..after all, species extinction is a routine part and parcel of evolution. Agreed, but what is unprecedented in the 3 ½ billion years of so of evolution is the rapidity of the rate of extinction, almost entirely due to human activities, and this rapidity of extinction is bound to have repercussions.

Interdependence of species

Species are interdependent in many ways and don’t live in isolation. An extreme form of vulnerability is a one-to-one dependency, where one species is entirely and exclusively dependent on the other for survival .

Can you recognise this? This is a fruiting fig tree. There are about 800 species of fig trees all over the world, but what is an absolute ecological marvel is that each species of fig tree is pollinated by a unique species of wasp, tiny ones about 2mm only!  If for some reason, the species of wasp, or the fig tree species were to be affected, the other dependant species would also disappear.

Nature abounds in such interdependencies, and if any one species disappears, it causes a chain reaction in which other species of animals, birds, insects and plants are also affected. When such links are cut, eventually ecosystems collapse, and humans who are dependent on them for food, for fibre and products will also be severely affected.

Biodiversity holds immense pharmaceutical interests, and this is one of the main economic reasons why it is so important. Only 1% of the rainforests have been studied. As someone said, losing biodiversity is like burning down an ancient library after reading only 1% of the books.

What is the value of Biodiversity and Nature’s services?

This is a really interesting concept because we know the value of economic goods, or for example, a country’s output of goods and services.  Like many things of genuine value to society, like happiness, a homemaker’s contribution to the family, or for the wonderful services that Nature provides, there is no economic value.

However, Costanza et al in 1997 impute an economic value of all of Nature’s services and it worked out to be US $33 trillion per year, much more than the value of the gross national products of all nations at the time of US $18 trillion. That really tells us something, doesn’t it!
Dr. Gretchen Daily in her famous study lists the following “ecosystem services” which contribute to to human welfare:
• purification of air and water
• mitigation of floods and droughts
• detoxification and decomposition of wastes
• generation and renewal of soil and fertility
• pollination of crops and natural vegetation
• control of the vast majority of potential agricultural pests
• dispersal of seeds and translocation of nutrients
• sources of crop varieties, medicines and industrial enterprise
• protection from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays
• partial stabilization of  climate
• moderation of temperature extremes and the force of wind and waves
• support of diverse human cultures
• provision of aesthetic beauty and intellectual stimulation that lift the human spirit
To this list we could add an important function in an era of global warming, the “storage of carbon” as ecosystems remove carbon from the atmosphere, release oxygen, and store carbon in biomass (such as wood)

Extinction isn’t just a loss for science and scientists; it’s a real loss for all of us. Yet wittingly or unwittingly, we are steadily impoverishing a rich and varied form of life with our economic activities.  What a dull and monotonous world it would be indeed,  if all we had left to show of the planet to our descendants were a few predictable species of plant and animals in monoculture plantations and animal farms, craftily selected by us humans to serve our need and greed…a planet with no surprises, nothing left to discover and marvel.

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