Class action suit against Keurig has implications for other consumer products’ recyclability claims

Katie Pyzyk reports for WasteDive

The company had hoped a California judge would dismiss a complaint claiming its “recyclable” labels are misleading.

A federal judge in California recently ruled that a class action lawsuit against Keurig Green Mountain Inc. — one with interesting implications for recyclability claims about new product streams —can move forward.

The lawsuit was proposed by a California consumer who says the company (now Keurig Dr Pepper) made false claims about its coffee pods’ recyclability, namely that their size, composition, and lack of an end market renders them unrecyclable. The suit points out that while the pods are made of polypropylene — a plastic (#5) accepted for recycling in about 61% of communities nationwide — most domestic MRFs aren’t capable of capturing such small, light materials from the recycling stream.

According to the lawsuit, Keurig adds to the problem by telling consumers they need not remove the pods’ paper filters before recycling. This creates a source of contamination, as it does for numerous other products made from multiple materials that are recyclable only when segregated, including paper envelopes lined with bubble wrap and aluminum cans with plastic shrink wrap sleeves.

Keurig had hoped the lawsuit would be dismissed on the grounds that advertising and labels for the coffee pods encourage consumers to “check locally” about whether the pods are recyclable. It claimed consumers would understand the items aren’t recyclable in all markets, despite being labeled as recyclable. The judge, however, found this defense to be lacking because consumers allege the pods aren’t recyclable through any MRF in the country, so telling them to “check locally” doesn’t make Keurig’s recyclability claims true.

“[C]ommon sense would not so clearly lead a person to believe that a package labeled ‘recyclable’ is not recyclable anywhere,” U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam wrote in the ruling. “[A]lthough Keurig argues that its labeling is sufficient under the Green Guides… the complaint alleges facts that indicate the opposite.”

The Green Guides are the Federal Trade Commission’s advice on the types of marketing claims manufacturers can make about their products’ recyclability. The goal is to prevent manufacturers from making deceptive or overtly false claims. A key part of the Green Guides is a section commonly referred to as the “60% access rule” – companies can make unqualified claims about a product’s recyclability only when a substantial majority (60%) of customers or communities where the item is sold have access to recycling facilities accepting the material. In other words, while a product may technically be recyclable, it won’t necessarily be considered as such in regions without adequate processing or sorting infrastructure.

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Three AGs have a suggestion for PJM

By the Associated Press

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The attorneys general of Maryland, Delaware and the District of Columbia are urging the nation’s biggest electric grid operator to choose a CEO who will help with “efforts to address climate change” and embrace changes needed to make clean energy programs successful.

The letter signed by Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings and District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine was sent last week to a panel searching for a new CEO for PJM Interconnection.

The officials say the new PJM president should have the leadership skills to drive innovations in its markets and operations “to support the necessary shift to clean energy.”

In May, PJM announced the retirement of former CEO Andrew Ott and a search committee to find a new CEO.

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Protest a pipeline in these states and you could face felony charges

Conservative lawmakers have put forward laws criminalizing protests in at least 18 states since 2017 that civil liberties advocates say are unconstitutional

Susie Cagle reports for The Guardian in San Francisco

From the Standing Rock camps in North Dakota to tree-sits in Texas, activists have attempted to stop pipeline construction with massive shows of civil disobedience. Now they could be forced to change those tactics, or face heavy penalties under a wave of new anti-protest laws that civil liberties advocates say violate the first amendment.

Conservative lawmakers have put forward laws criminalizing protests that disrupt the construction and operation of pipelines in at least 18 states since 2017.

  • Seven states have passed laws that ratchet up the penalties for activists protesting or even planning protests of oil and gas pipelines and other “critical infrastructure”
  • At least six more states are considering such laws
  • In each case, misdemeanors are elevated to felonies, and criminal and civil punishments are escalated drastically
  • The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have mounted challenges against such laws in Louisiana and South Dakota.

“This is a trend that shows no sign of slowing, let alone stopping,” said Elly Page, who has been tracking anti-protest legislation for more than two years as a legal adviser for the International Center for Non-Profit Law.Advertisement

The laws purport to only criminalize violence and property damage in service of pipeline safety, but critics say their greater intent appears to be to deter nonviolent civil disobedience by framing it as potentially violent in itself.

The bills have mostly found fertile legislative ground in places where gas and oil companies already wield significant political and economic power and where anti-fossil fuel protests have been especially successful. But watchdogs say there’s every reason to believe more of these types of laws will be passed, and that they will chill activism otherwise protected by the first amendment.

“This is a miscasting of protesters as economic terrorists and saboteurs when in fact they’re going out and having their voices heard about why these pipelines are problematic for their communities and the environment,” said Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Even if folks haven’t been charged, the fact that these laws are on the books can seriously chill people and make them fearful of getting their voices out,” she added.

A wave picking up speed

Oklahoma was the first to pass pipeline-protecting legislation in 2017, with a pair of bills that ostensibly protected critical infrastructure from trespass and damage. By the end of the year, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a non-profit coalition of conservative politicians and industry representatives, had developed model Critical Infrastructure Protectionlegislation based on Oklahoma’s laws. Energy industry groups immediately sent a letter to legislators urging them to adopt the bill in their states.

That effort has proven fruitful.

Louisiana passed a version into law in 2018, and the legislative wave picked up speed in 2019. Laws that would increase criminal and civil penalties for protesting against gas and oil pipelines specifically and “critical infrastructure” more broadly have passed this year in Tennessee, Indiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas, and are currently pending in Idaho, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky. In each case, the laws provide for more extreme criminal charges and civil penalties for trespass and vandalism against pipelines.

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This past winter was the most devastating ever for honeybees

On top of colony collapse, beekeepers are now facing unprecedented losses from extreme weather

Bees on a honeycomb this week in La Bollene-Vesubie, France. (Eric Gallard/Reuters)By Laura ReileyJuly 5

Laura Reily reports for the Washington Post

Commercial honeybee colonies have had a rough run. And it’s not over yet. The annual loss rate for honeybees during the year ending in April rose to 40.7 percent, up slightly over the annual average of 38.7 percent, according to the Bee Informed Partnership, a nonprofit group associated with the University of Maryland.

More troubling was this past winter’s losses of 37.7 percent. Winter bees tend to live longer, clustering in the hive to keep the queen warm. This winter’s losses were 8.9 percentage points higher than the survey average and the highest winter loss since the annual bee survey began 13 years ago.

Karen Rennich, the partnership’s executive director, said the nonprofit has been collecting loss data from beekeepers and conducting a longer survey of management data since 2010. “We’re trying to drill down and see which management practices are correlated with lower mortality,” she said.

Rennich points to the three months of California wildfires, with bees affected by smoke and by the lack of plants on which to forage. She also cited the wet winter in the Midwest and the spring’s slow planting schedule. But drought, fires, hurricanes and the Midwest’s “bomb cyclone” are just the start of bee woes.

The honeybee crisis of the past decade is often blamed on the increased use of fungicides, herbicides such as Monsanto’s Roundup and pesticides called neonicotinoids. In addition to colony collapse disorder, in recent years bees have suffered from viruses carried by varroa mites, as well as problems with queen vigor, weakened immune systems and poor nutrition. Longtime beekeepers such as David Hackenberg say the bee life span has fallen to just 25 to 30 days. It used to be more than twice that.

A bee outside Moscow last month. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

When people think of bees, they think of honey. But since the early 1990s, many beekeepers have made the majority of their money renting out their hives to farmers to pollinate crops such as apples, cranberries, melons and squash. (Row crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans are wind-pollinated or self-pollinating.)

Hackenberg winters his bees in Trilby, Fla., then he starts his year by pollinating California almonds. (It takes nearly 2 million hives to pollinate California’s almond crop alone, with nearly half the country’s hired-gun pollinator bees trucked in from all over.) After that he heads to Georgia to pollinate peaches, then to Pennsylvania, then to Maine for blueberries and New York for clover honey, before finishing up by pollinating pumpkins back in Pennsylvania. He trucks his bees 80,000 to 100,000 miles each year, moving them up to 22 times.

Hackenberg coined the term “colony collapse disorder” in 2006.

“In 2017 we had 1,671 hives and our losses for the year were 1,458 hives. Last year we had 1,832 hives and lost 2,093 hives,” Hackenberg said this week by phone. And while losing more than 100 percent seems like a mathematical impossibility, he explained: “All we’re doing is making replacement bees to make up for our losses. I’ve been talking to the big guys across the country who had 20,000 hives and they didn’t have 1,000 hives to go to [California’s] almonds. It’s not nice to say, but the almond farmers were renting a lot of empty boxes.”

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U.S. Mayors Pressure Congress on Carbon Pricing, Climate Lawsuits and a Green New Deal

The U.S. Conference of Mayors opposed any limits on suing fossil fuel companies over climate change, which would rule out a carbon tax plan supported by industry.

 MARIANNE LAVELLE, reports for inside climate news

Mayors LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Credit: U.S. Conference of Mayors
Mayors LaToya Cantrell of New Orleans and Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles were among the leaders attending the U.S. Conference of Mayors. The group, representing hundreds of U.S. cities, voiced support for several climate change-related resolutions. Credit: U.S. Conference of Mayors

The mayors of hundreds of U.S. cities called on Congress this week to pass legislation to put a price on carbon emissions, citing the financial and social strains their communities are already experiencing because of climate change.

After some contention, they also voiced opposition to any congressional action that would limit cities’ ability to sue fossil fuel companies for damage linked to climate change. That vote marked a stand by the mayors against one of the key policy trade-offs sought by big oil companies that have backed the idea of carbon pricing.

The carbon pricing resolution, introduced by Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski, calls for a price “sufficient enough to reduce carbon emissions in line with ambitions detailed in the Paris Agreement on climate change.”

“We need our elected leaders in Washington to do what many of us as mayors are already doing at home: Move swiftly to adopt policies to mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure the long-term health of our environment,” Biskupski said in a statement.

The two resolutions were among a slew of climate-focused policy positions endorsed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors by voice vote as its annual meeting drew to a close Monday in Honolulu. The mayors also voted in support of a resolution endorsing the idea of a Green New Deal, called for Congress to adopt “a comprehensive national response” to climate change, and voted to oppose President Donald Trump’s plan to freeze vehicle fuel economy standards.

The vote endorsing cities’ right to sue over climate damages came after the two Republican mayors who served as chair and vice chair of the conference’s environment committee, Francis Suarez of Miami and Bryan Barnett of Rochester Hills, Michigan, sought to put off a vote. But the proposed policy statement passed with strong support from mayors of other cities in Florida, where sea level rise is a growing risk, as well as in California, New York and Washington state. Barnett, the incoming president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, stood at the meeting’s final session to offer the resolution for a vote along with the entire package of climate policy position statements.

The resolution supports “cities’ rights and efforts to mitigate climate change damages and protect taxpayers from related adaptation costs.” It opposes any action by Congress or in state legislatures “to limit or eliminate cities’ access to the courts by overriding existing laws or in any way giving fossil fuel companies immunity from lawsuits over climate change-related costs and damages.”

Eight cities, six counties and one state (Rhode Island)—collectively representing approximately 15.4 million people or 4.7 percent of the U.S. population—have filed lawsuits over the past two years seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the costs of climate change, the resolution notes. 

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‘Pretty much scared to death’: After two large quakes, Calif. residents on edge

Firefighters battle an electrical fire in a mobile home park in Ridgecrest, Calif. (AFP/Getty Images)
Firefighters battle an electrical fire in a mobile home park in Ridgecrest. (AFP/Getty Images)

By Washington Posts‘ Kayla Epstein and Ariana Eunjung Cha

Two days of intermittent shaking punctuated by the most significant earthquakes California has seen in years have left residents “scared to death.”

Warnings that Southern California’s July Fourth earthquake could be followed by a more intense seismic event came true Friday night when a 7.1-magnitude earthquake struck at 8:19 p.m. local time about 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

The epicenter was in a remote area about 10 miles northeast of Ridgecrest, Calif., a city of 28,000 that had already declared a state of emergency after a nearby 6.4-magnitude temblor hit on Thursday. Its residents, startled from the first quake, were jolted into a new level of anxiety by Friday’s severe follow-up, and a persistent “swarm” of aftershocks is expected to torment them for days, if not weeks.

“We’re pretty much scared to death,” said Nancy Pace, 66, who runs the Bake My Day pastry business and feared that another large quake could hit at “any second.”

[A 6.4-magnitude earthquake shook California. Now comes the ‘swarm’ of aftershocks.]

Pace and her roommate “were getting slammed back and forth between the walls” during the earthquake Friday night — one of the biggest in California history — and had been so afraid of her home collapsing from a subsequent quake that they slept outside on air mattresses along with their neighbors. But it was far from a restful sleep.

“Every time I tried to doze off we had another earthquake,” she said.

Friday night’s earthquake was 11 times stronger than that original disturbance, and U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Paul Caruso said that the region could expect to feel stronger aftershocks as a result. It was part of a “swarm” of earthquakes that had hit the region, located west of the Mojave Desert. Because it was larger than the 6.4 earthquake that struck Thursday, Friday’s quake would be considered the main shock, Caruso said.

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Related news:

3,000 earthquakes since July 4, more big ones likely coming

Southern California 6.4 earthquake

ALEX WIGGLESWORTH reports for the Los Angeles Times

Shalyn Pineda, regional supervisor of Kern County’s libraries, picks up books at Ridgecrest Library after Thursday’s 6.4 earthquake dislodged bookshelves. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)1 / 20

Southern California could experience another sizable earthquake over the next week, seismologists said Saturday.

The U.S. Geological Survey has calculated a 27% probability the region will be hit by a magnitude 6 or greater quake in the coming days, according to Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson,

“That probability is over the next week, but it is mostly packed into the hours and days after the main shock,” Caltech seismologist Doug Given said.

In other words, the probability that we will experience another earthquake of magnitude 6 or higher is dropping by the minute, he said.

“Every minute that ticks by, it becomes less likely,” he said.

The heightened seismic activity comes in the aftermath of a 7.1 magnitude quake that hit near the town of Ridgecrest, about 125 miles northeast of Los Angeles, on Friday night. That was preceded by a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in the same area the morning of the Fourth of July. Scientists are now calling that a foreshock.

Since the Fourth, Caltech seismologists have detected at least 3,000 smaller earthquakes.

(Chris Keller / Los Angeles Times)

Those include 340 earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 3, 52 with a magnitude greater than 4, and six with a magnitude greater than 5, Hauksson said Saturday.

In total, this earthquake sequence is expected to generate about 34,000 aftershocks with a magnitude 1 or greater over the next six months, he said.

This week’s earthquakes were the strongest to hit the area in 20 years. No deaths or major injuries have been reported, but homes and roadways were damaged, particularly in the Ridgecrest area.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested a presidential emergency declaration for the affected regions.

With the fear of more aftershocks, Jimmy and Jackie Roberts are taking no chances of staying in their home.

The couple was assembling a 20-foot-by-10-foor canopy at their home on Desert Candles Street. They last used the blue canopy at their wedding 10 years ago and plan to put a tent and air conditioner under it.

(Los Angeles Times)

“We’re staying in it for the next three days,” she said. “We have to keep our three dogs and four birds safe.”

She said the couple and many neighbors slept in their cars last night on the street. “We were all out there,” she said. “We were afraid.” Her biggest fear, she said, is another quake will hit and people will run out of water in the 90-degree temperatures. She also expects more neighbors to sleep in tents or cars until dangers clear. “My other neighbor is buying a camper today,” she added.

Ridgecrest Mayor Peggy Breeden said she encourages residents to take safety precautions over the next few days until the seismic activity subsides. She said the town shouldn’t suffer any long-term consequences from the last several days. She doesn’t believe residents will flee to other cities.

“We’re used to this,” she said after a news conference. “We live in the earthquake capital of the world, so I’m told. Our people are strong.”

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