If one were to organize the bulk of this month’s stories in Working Waterfront around a single theme, it would be possible to do so around sustainability: the idea that if we humans are to keep going much longer on this planet, we must go about our business differently; that we can’t go on using energy and other resources that can’t replace themselves in a reasonable length of time.
Fueling boats and cars with biodiesel, or at least a form of fuel that’s not entirely based on fossil plants that lived and died when dinosaurs roamed the earth, is a good example. The better we get at recycling used cooking oil or making use of oils derived from modern-day plants like soybeans, the less we’ll have to rely on the Earth’s declining supplies of crude oil for energy; the more “sustainable” we become.
A second story, related to biodiesel but reaching beyond it, is our report on an upcoming effort to determine the “carbon stamp” of the fishing industry. The idea is to quantify greenhouse gas emissions released during production and transportation of a product. In the case of lobsters, it would include things like fuel for boats and trucks, energy and resources used in the manufacture of equipment like traps and rope, vessel construction and “post-harvest storage and transportation.” Just about anything consumed, in other words, during the process of getting the lobster to the consumer’s plate. Once the size of the industry’s “footprint” is known, it will be up to fishermen, dealers, regulators and of course the rest of us to figure out what to do next. If sustainability is the goal here — and it must be — information like this will have to be taken very seriously.
Several other stories in this issue focus on the use of chemicals and ways to reduce it. Three Portland fish processing plants are using ozonated water to control bacteria and extend the shelf life of their products — the technology is already used in the bottled water industry, and unless problems crop up it’s likely to catch on elsewhere in the fish processing industry, improving food safety while cutting back on waste. Municipal water treatment operations in several island and coastal communities, responding to new federal regulations restricting chlorine use, have turned to a chlorine-ammonia combination called chloramine to treat drinking water. (It’s effective, although some have raised questions about the new treatment, so the jury’s still out on chloramine.)
Finally, we consider sustainability from a couple of other points of view. Some island communities, we report, are way ahead of their mainland counterparts in dealing with trash. Open burning and ocean dumping are out of favor these days, landfills have never been good options on islands with sole source aquifers, and the cost of trucking junk ashore is higher than ever. So recycling’s alive and well in island communities, along with efforts to reduce packaging, impose deposits on big items like appliances and cars, and cut back on waste-generating activities in general.
The sustainability news on one front, sadly, isn’t as good: the New England Fishery Management Council has reacted coolly to proposals for “area management” — an innovative technique being tried on the West Coast — that might help conserve groundfish stocks by empowering local fishermen, much as Maine has empowered its lobster fishermen by permitting management by zone. So far, at the state and federal levels at least, there’s not enough interest. And meanwhile, all the evidence suggests that we haven’t yet learned how to manage our dwindling stocks of groundfish in a sustainable manner. Perhaps someone should be looking around at the efforts underway in other sectors for ideas.