I have been doing a little bit of research on the environmental problems associated with the olive oil extraction process. It turns out that eliminating serious environmental impacts from olive oil processing is a pretty difficult problem because the industry is large overall but subdivided into many small companies, and it creates a LOT of potentially harmful waste. Olive oil process wastes can cause severe damage to the environment due to toxic materials, high loads of organic materials, anti-bacterial properties, and others. These same properties can also result in beneficial uses – but the processing required is relatively expensive. Perhaps the byproducts could be turned into valuable products, but the infrastructure required to do so it expensive. The bottom line is that safe/environmentally appropriate treatment of the waste products can be done, but is expensive – it is much more expensive than alternatives such as “dump it into the creek”. This came to my attention because there is at least one local olive oil producer that elected for the more economical approach of dumping it into the creek (and is now facing fines and clean up costs for making that decision).

I seems to me that the decision about whether or not to process olive oil should have include the costs of properly and safely taking care of the hazardous byproducts to the process air, water, soil, noise, smell, etc. If it costs too much to control the bad aspects of the process, then perhaps the process is not economically viable. I do not know of any “constitutionally given right” to do anything you want because it can make a profit. I agree that people should be able to go into whatever business they want – but in my opinion, that only extends to situations where they don’t cause undo harm or costs to others (including the environment and society).

The olive oil business is a case in point. I think Olive Oil is a good thing. I like it on my salads, it makes nice soap, and probably has a lot of other beneficial uses. It is so good in fact that I am happy to buy it from time-to-time. But if it is too expensive, I probably won’t buy it. For most of my life it was outside of my budget, so I treated it as a “luxury.” TI think that if you can’t produce it at a price that will sell, then perhaps you shouldn’t produce it. Just because there are pressures to keep prices low is not a reason to cut corners and create hazards or damage the environment. Your desire to make money does not equate to your right to cause me harm.

I understand that my approach means some (maybe a lot) of people won’t make money from olive oil if olive oil isn’t produced. It isn’t just the oil processors, there are the farmers that grow the trees, the folks that tend the trees and harvest the fruit, the stores that like to sell the oil, soapmakers, etc. However, if the industry can’t do all of that without causes damage and costs to others, or the environment, then perhaps that industry doesn’t have a viable product. It seems pretty simple to me. Living in Northern California where the ’49s chased after gold with no regard to the damage they were doing, it has always been clear that the limits on what you can do to make money has to be bounded by the value of your product. If gold isn’t worth mining in non-polluting, non-environmentally destructive ways, then it isn’t worth enough to go after. The farmers whose orchards got buried by hydraulic mining tailings shouldn’t have had to pay the cost (in ruined farms) for the profits of the miners. The general public shouldn’t have to pay the cost of cleaning up the resultant destruction and mess.

As a safety engineer, I am very familiar with many instances where large and small companies pumped their highly toxic waste chemicals down wells into the ground water because it was cheap to do so. That reduced the cost of their products and increased their profits. However, many (perhaps most) of them went out of business before the problem was identified, or were fined a fractional amount of how much they saved. Now the public is stuck with many extremely expensive “super fund” site attempting to clean up the residuals of the highly profitable businesses. Much of it will can never be “cleaned up” and will therefore end up in terms of health problems for the public that shares the water polluted by those wells. Even when these companies are caught and fined, the fines are vastly less than the cost for remediation. It would have been far less expensive for the companies and the society if they had spent the money ahead of time to prevent the creation of the problem, but instead they elected to push off the problem (and expense) until sometime into the future — after all, the problem is likely to go away by itself because, who knows maybe I’ll die before the catch up to me.

We need to change our thinking from “how do we reduce the impact of dangerous processes” to “how do we eliminate the creation of dangerous processes.” We need to find workable solutions before we launch into projects rather than trying to find fixes after the damage has been done. To be “worth it” means “worth it” in the BIG picture sense. Plastic packaging and bags are a good case in point. They are creating tremendous environmental problems at all stages of their “life”. Are they worth it? Plastic packaging make billions of dollars a year in profits for some, but at a huge cost to the environment. Does that make any kind of sense? Is it even necessary? These products were essentially non-existent for the first twenty years of my life – I didn’t miss them or need them. None of us thought we were missing something important in our lives. We all know full well that we have very negative, undesirable, obnoxious artifacts in the form of things such as plastic bags and blister packs on products that we can’t get away from because a few people want to keep making billions of dollars. This is totally insane, and similar logic shows up with almost everything we do.

We (individuals) can’t avoid contributing to the problem because we need (or at least want) the products that create the costs and well as environmental and health problems. For example, we want olive oil, but are trapped by the economics of the thing. We want good quality oil at a “low” price. We shop for price, we look at price rather than environmental cost – so pick up the less expensive ones. That means the processors will try to keep the prices low enough to win the most sales, meaning they won’t implement expensive fixes to their environmental problems – if they do, their prices will go up, their sales will go down and they are out of business. We can’t buy the “correct” product because we have no information, and because we also have budgets. There is no “solution” to this in a “free” market. The costs will always be avoided by the consumers and producers, and the costs will always be passed forward to the society (and environment). The “customer” will pay for these costs, but it will be in terms of increased taxes to fix the problems, and a degraded lifestyle somewhere down the road. Unfortunately there is not a clear tie for the individual customer between the cost of their purchase and the eventual fully loaded cost of their decision. The ones that have the savings are seldom the same as those that pay for the external costs.

What is the solution? The first thing that springs to mind is regulation, lots and lots of regulations. Tiny regulations, specific regulations, millions of “can does” and “can’t does”. This approach not only does not work, it cannot work. There are too many things to consider, there are too many powerful lobbyists, things are changing far too fast to ever have nearly enough regulations to cover everything we do. It is practically impossible. What would work? I am not sure, but it seems that the decision of whether or not to produce something, and how to do that, should be tied to “proving” ahead of time that there will be no damages or costs to society or the environment. Should damage occur, then any after-the-facts costs should be paid entirely by those that caused the problems – plus appropriate penalties. Somehow or another we need to shift the responsibility for “doing the right thing” to those that are doing the things. Competition between provides should all have the same constraints – they have to be able to do it properly, not lower their prices by “cheating” or passing the costs on to future generations.