garbage

Is zero waste possible in this consumer culture?

ellen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 06:30:03 -0400

I'm reading Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte.

It's an amazing book although it's now a bit outdated (it was written during the period of time in the early 2000's when the Bloomberg Administration stopped the recycling programs for a while.) I can't put it down. The author (measured/weighed) her kitchen trash and tracked its route "away" from her house. A major theme throughout the book is that there is no "away". Another major theme is how secretive landfill managers are (I haven't finished the book yet, I hope she gets to see a landfill close up).

When we throw things out, there is a huge amount of energy, labor and thought put into how to make these things inert so as to not cause damage as they become a part of our environment. Unfortunately, when it comes to fixing the world, most people just don't want to talk about garbage.

One of my favorite chapters is the one about the solid waste treatment plant and the bio-solids created from New York sludge which is then shipped all over the country. In graduate school I helped a friend photograph the West Side Sewage Treatment Plant just after it opened and Ms. Royte actually managed to capture the smell in written form.

This book is transformative. What I previously just thought of as "crap", I am now clearly thinking of in terms of their component pieces and will do my best to avoid creating more crap to be thrown out. If you liked Cradle to Cradle, read Garbage Land.

This post from Reactions discusses about the false sense of biodegradability you get with compostable garbage bags. I bought these bio bags for our countertop compost pail because it gets slimy, smelly and a bit hard to clean after a few days. However, when I pulled the bag out of the pail to drop it into the compost bin, it almost fell apart. I guess it started to biodegrade before it even left the pail. I'll have to check the compost bin in a few days to see how the plastic is doing.

Garbage Land taught me how truly evil plastic is because it is practically impossible to upcycle it. However, thanks to our friends at Brooklyn Green Team, we now learn about a company called Recycline who makes new products of out old #5 plastics. You will recall how much I couldn't stand having old yogurt containers on the countertop awaiting recycling so we started making our own yogurt. Now I'll just stack them in a box until I have 5 pounds worth.

I'll re-print the requirements for sending the plastic to Recycline because the BGT's blog seems to cut off some of the information.

Many common food containers – yogurt cups, sour cream containers, hummus tubs, ketchup bottles – are #5 plastics.
We accept any CLEAN plastic item with a #5 stamp on the bottom. Please check to make sure that there are no other materials (paper, screws, other number plastics) on the items that you send to us.
Make sure that the #5 plastics are clean – the cleaner the plastic, the cleaner the recycling process.
To help make this program a win for the environment, it is important that you send your plastics back to us via ground shipping (as opposed to air). Reuse a box if you can!
Shipments should weigh at least 5 pounds and no more than 50 pounds. Any package greater than 50 pounds must be pre-approved by Recycline.
Make sure to include your return address on the box and add your name and email address inside the box so we can thank you for your good work.

Send Gimme 5 shipments to:
Preserve Gimme 5
823 NYS Rte 13
Cortland NY 13045

If you have any questions about the Gimme 5 program or need to get a shipment approved, call us at 888-354-7296.

yay garbage.

www.ehapc.com

[brooklyn green] www.ehapc.wordpress.com

Trash Crisis Brings Out the Garbage Police

scleaver — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:33:22 -0400

In the city of Whitehaven in northern England (almost at the Scotland border), Britons are balking at a government crackdown on trash. Earlier this year, for example, local bus driver Gareth Corkhill was fined $215 when he couldn't fully close the lid on his overflowing garbage can. His neighbors rallied behind him, protesting the fine, but they’re not the only city facing increasing scrutiny on trash day.

New garbage rules are spreading across Europe. Britain, especially, is in trash crisis with a poor recycling record, and ever-shrinking landfill space, according to a New York Times article. Now, governments in England and on the continent are enforcing strict rules to get residents to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Two ideas that governments are trying to enforce that you can adopt:

1. Put out garbage every other week: Many countries are collecting trash every other week, instead of every week, forcing people to limit their trash output.

2. Put less in landfills: Landfill space is running out, which is why Britain and Europe have been ordered to reduce landfill waste to 50% of the 1995 levels by 2015, or incur EU fines.

Those policies are being enforced today, but on the horizon are policies that make Britons pay according to the amount of garbage they produce, using a weight sensor inside every garbage bin to calculate each household’s bill. With what they see as the Big Brother of garbage looming, Britons are up in arms. What do you think? Should the government enforce trash policies? And which do you think will work?

Photo from Green Living Online.

The World's Greenest Garbage Can

jplatt — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Did you know that the average garbage truck gets just 2.8 miles to the gallon of diesel fuel? It's true. In fact, garbage trucks get the worst fuel economy of any type of commercial vehicle.

Why such bad gas mileage? Well, garbage trucks are big, fleets tend to be pretty old, and their drivers have to make stops every few hundred feet while keeping engines running the whole time.

With this in mind, and with fuel prices soaring, it makes sense for municipalities, universities and businesses with large campuses to find ways to cut their garbage collection costs. The BigBelly Solar Compactor can help.

No bigger than any other outdoor garbage receptacle, the BigBelly uses the sun's rays to power an internal compactor which crushes its content, allowing it to hold five times as much as your average garbage can. This means it doesn't need to be emptied as often, which saves fuel costs, cuts labor costs, and reduces a whole lot of greenhouses gases in the process.

The BigBelly Solar Compactor costs $4,000 -- but BigBelly says the device can pay for itself in just a year and a half. And that's not trash-talk.

Recycling Your Garbage: Where Does All that Trash Go?

jchatraw — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

My dad and I talk about recycling more than two people probably should. There's the "Hey, dad. How are you?" part of the conversation. Then at least once a week, we talk about recycling. I'm quite certain my dad thinks recycling in his city is a vast cover-up plot to make people feel good about doing something for the environment.

Regardless of his suspicions, my dad religiously recycles, just like any good preacher should. But he's seen one too many episodes of Alias and has suggested on more than one occasion that he would like to stakeout the recycling bins near his house and trail the truck to see if all the trash is actually recycled.

Fortunately, my dad doesn't have to waste hours of his life on such an expedition, although any kind of stakeout appeals to the investigative journalist in me, even if it is just trash. Elizabeth Royte has already done the dirty work for us, giving us not only the scoop but good ideas in her book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. Apparently, where garbage ends up is a secret -- and Royte unravels the mystery for conspiracy theorists like my dad.

She also gives us some great practical tips from her journey of discovery, In this green nugget from her book, Royte expresses the importance of composting and why using your garbage disposal is not the best tact to take if you're desiring an eco-friendly lifestyle:

The ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, which promotes the use of composting toilets and offers a multipoint plan for protecting clean water (it includes unhooking toilets from municipal sewers in favor of composting models), has campaigned to abolish garbage grinders. "It is as irrational to use water to transport food wastes as it is to use water to transport human excreta or industrial wastes," the foundation believes. "Water should be used only for drinking and for washing." ...

Mulling over the waste streams that left my house, I saw that sometimes they intersected—as food and sewage did at the wastewater treatment plant—and sometimes they came apart—at a recycling facility, for example. The line between compost and the majority of material at a landfill is all too thin.

Want to find out more about recycling?

Recycling Tips: Did You Know You Cannot Recycle Messy Pizza Boxes?

The Benefits of Recycling: Let’s Talk Trash

Recycling the Looking Glass: When Garbage and Art Collide

Top 10 Recycling Resources

Recycled Record Snack Tray

The Benefits of Recycling Cardboard

The Art of Garbage

Reduce, Reuse… FREECYCLE

Recycle Those Electronics!

Back to Basics—RRR

Picking Up Garbage TVs and Recycling as Art

Students Recycle and Reduce Garbage: Take It Or Leave It

Knight Rider Recycled—Reborn With Green Twist!

Urban Garbage Dumps

abhibnrj — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:13:38 -0400

Japan’s urban mines, aka landfills, are estimated to have in them 6,800 tons of gold compared to 765 tons in Japan's official reserves. This is more even than the official reserves of Germany and the IMF combined. Japan’s garbage dumps also contain 60% of the world’s reserves of indium and 22% of silver. In value terms there is $833 million worth of indium and $15 billion, $30 billion, $178 billion, $283 billion worth of lead, silver, gold and copper respectively in Japanese rubbish dumps. The amount of aluminum thrown away by Americans every three months is enough to rebuild every plane in every airline in America. Each year newspapers equivalent of 30 million trees are trashed in the US.

Growth and Garbage

Growth promotes making goods which don’t last long or which pass from style and are just as well thrown away. When people lose interest in a product, it paves the way for new purchases.Everything manufactured becomes garbage. Increased production results in more garbage. Some such waste can be recycled, but even if we are able to recycle 50 percent of the present waste we would be back to the same level in about 20 years. One of the most serious environmental consequences of the process of urbanization is the ever-growing amount of solid and liquid wastes generated by cities.

Industrialization and Urbanization

Garbage problem, particularly in the urban areas, started after World War II when expanding economic activities reached religious proportions. The exponential growth of production during the last half of the century created a whole new order of problems. The magnitude of economic activity grew to such proportions that it threatened natural resource supplies and created dangerous quantities of polluting waste.Then mass media made it possible to persuade people to purchase things they would never have wanted. This added extra waste, filling up all the landfills.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, many of the country's landfills have been closed for one or both of these two reasons:

They were full.
They were contaminating groundwater. Underground water is our drinking water and once it is contaminated, it is extremely expensive and difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to clean it up.

Too Much Waste for Nature to keep Up

Humans by their various actions create enormous impact on their surroundings. We create too much waste for nature to keep up. By leaving the garbage on the ground we destroy the atmosphere and by burning them we destroy it even further. Burning emits extremely poisonous gases into the atmosphere which can hurt human lungs and, if untreated, can result in death. Incineration may release toxins into the air and create ash that requires disposal in hazardous-waste landfills, and that takes us back to our starting point: Cities are running out of places to put their trash. The garbage doesn’t go away by burying too. It pollutes the ground and can seep into our farming soil and even into our ground water.

What We Can Do

For this it is important to recognize the differences between sustainable and unsustainable practices. The former provides ongoing economic and social benefits without degrading the environment, whereas the latter are attempts to fill an immediate need for resources. Over time these practices damage the environment to such an extent that future generations cannot enjoy them.

Our activities become sustainable when ·

Materials are used in a continuous cycle·

We use reliable sources of energy continuously

Our activities are unsustainable when·

We continuously require non-renewable resources. ·

Use renewable resources faster than they renew themselves ·

Our actions bring about degradation of the environment. ·

Our actions lead to extinction of other lives

Stop Litter From Our Yard

The origin of litter in the neighborhood is our own yard. One of the primary sources of litter in the community is mishandling of household garbage.

Here are some basic steps which can help reduce garbage creation to a great extent:·

Always dump your garbage in a can or bag and never in cardboard boxes which tend to get damp from the ground or because of rain water.·

Don’t overfill your trash cans and always put a lid on top securely fastened. ··

The containers and/or trashbags must be leak proof, waterproof and kept closed at all times while being stored.·

Avoid placing solid waste and waste containers in or on any curb, gutter, drainage area, sidewalk or paved portion of the street at any time for any purpose.·

Keep a worm bin to compost our food scraps into nourishment that can be returned to the earth instead of toxins that seep from the landfills. ·

Avoid paper or plastic bags.

Take your own reusable bags when grocery shopping.·

Cancel magazine and newspaper subscriptions and read online.

See Poster Highlighting Hygienic Garbage Disposal

Garbage Disposer

A garbage disposal is a must for kitchens as it helps make food preparation and cleanup easy and fast.

There are two types available:·

Continuous-feed style – this is activated by a switch as you run the water

Batch-feed type - activated by turning a stopper after loading the disposal with garbage.For effective garbage disposal consider the following tips:·

During grinding of food use cold water as hot water can melt fats and clog the mechanism and the pipes·

Avoid overfilling·

Keep the unit free from bleach, drain cleaners, or other chemicals ·

Avoid grinding fibrous materials, bones, or coffee grounds. Never grind materials like glass, metal, or rubber·

Run water before and after use

Energy From Garbage

In North America there are several approaches to creating energy from garbage using its garbage to generate energy, or to produce other usable goods from garbage. Currently, there are several approaches to creating energy from garbage in North America.

A US company Waste Management is increasingly turning garbage into energy -- enough to power over one million homes -- the equivalent of 14 million barrels of oil per year or 3.6 million tons of coal.Methane coming out of buried trash is burnt to run generators. Solar Hydrogen Energy Corporation (SHEC Labs ) uses solar energy to convert this methane into hydrogen. They hope to compete with the cheapest sources of Hydrogen that within 5 years.A large-garbage incineration power plant in the port city of Ningbao in east China's Zhejiang Province can incinerate over 1,000 tons of domestic waste per day.

Garbage power, therefore, like solar and wind power, is an environmentally friendly means of power generation. Ningbo is the third Chinese city to have a garbage power plant, following Shenzhen and Zhuhai, two booming towns in the southern Guangdong Province.

Did you know?

600,000 tons of waste is thrown out in Mexico City every month – enough to fill the vast Aztec football stadium FOUR TIMES!

How Garbage Collection Began

Visit The Beginning of Garbage Collection and History of refuse collection (or the garbage truck) for interesting details on garbage collection history.

Article Source:
CopperWiki

Biofuel Is Rubbish!

khallgeisler — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:59:33 -0400

A report released March 17 says that the solution to a home-grown biofuel industry in the Pacific Northwest may not rely on corn, oil-seed crops, or even timber waste. The solution may be in the trash bin.

The report, which has the sexy title, "Biofuels in Oregon and Washington: A Business Case Analysis of Opportunities and Challengies," made the front page of the Oregonian's Metro section Monday. According to the article, the biomass needed to create the cleaner-burning fuel, such as corn, isn't grown in the Northwest. Trucking it in would reduce the overall positive impact of making biofuel in the first place.

In order to keep the process local from start to finish, the report recommends looking into "non-traditional feedstocks, such as municipal waste," as well as investigatin new conversion tehcnologies that are currently being tested in Germany.

The article quotes Dennis Stiles, the report's lead author, as saying a commercial market for the fuel could be ten years off. This is just another example, along with EVs, hydrogen fuel cells, and hybrids, of the massive transportation paradigm shift that will take place in the next decade.

Photo by OldSarge.

Ellen Page, Juno Star, is Mad (Hot) About Garbage

jclark — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Whenever an actor or actress starts talking about their commitment to the environment, it’s all I can do to stop myself from shutting down, as if cornered by the party bore. Not another one! As a reporter, I can steer the conversation in another direction—we can talk about The Role, The Career, The Weather.

However, in the case of a recent interview with Ellen Page, star of the independent film Juno and legitimate contender for a Best Actress Oscar, it was easy to play along because she had such an attitude. Instead of mouthing the usual pieties about how we’re choking on our own garbage, she talked about the garbage.

“I arrive at the airport,” she says of a visit to New York, “and I'm just walking through with my bag and there are twenty large television screens on one side of the hallway and twenty large television screens on the other side of the hallway all playing a friggin’ Xbox goddamn advertisement. And I mean just that energy, forty goddamn television screens so that Xbox can advertise their friggin’ product.”

Page, who freely acknowledges how wasteful film productions are, does her carbon off-sets on-screen, playing young women who are more than just arm candy (in fact, her previous claim to fame was a film called Hard Candy). Her current film, Juno, is about a pregnant teen who decides to have the child and adopt it out to a childless yuppie couple played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The film is very hot – though Page does not give global warming any credit for that – or blame either.

Asked if she thinks her youthful eco enthusiasm might eventually wane (she’s twenty), she says, “I don't think so, because I think significant change isn't really happening, or it's made to seem like there's significant change because Wal-Mart will sell the nice light bulbs—like, whoop-de-friggin’-do—so I'll drive my car to Wal-Mart and go into a place that sells nothing that's locally made to go and buy a light bulb. Awesome.”

GoodWill Eases Computer Wasteland

tdupuy — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:00:00 -0500

So you got a new computer. It's super fast and way better than your last
one. You marvel at how quickly technology changes. You wonder how you're
going to get all your files to the new machine. You get your programs
installed. You set your preferences, put a little 'go green' sticker on
it and you are ready to go. But what to do with your old one? Sell it?
Donate it? What if its totally unsalvageable - broken beyond repair. You
can't just throw it out. Garbage collectors sometimes won't even pick it
up. That and uh, your computer is, uhm, toxic waste.

According to an article in Mother Jones:

"Electronic waste accounts for 2 percent of America's trash in
landfills but 70 percent of its toxic garbage. In 2003 alone, 3 million
tons of e-waste were generated in the United States."
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2007/03/iwaste.html

If you have thought that you were sneaky and your solution has been to
give it to the Goodwill and let them deal with it. You're not alone.
According to their website
(http://www.goodwill.org/page/guest/about/howweoperate/recycling) last
year alone Goodwill industries handled 23 million pounds of computers
and MOST of those donations were unusable.

The financial burden to Goodwill safely dealing with all this e-waste
was daunting. Now they have a very simple solution they are trying out
in my neck of the woods, Los Angeles. They're actually doubling as
e-waste recycling places, inviting people to dispose of their old
computers at donation centers. The last time I donated there was a sign
posted making the announcement. I called the Goodwill Headquarters to
follow-up and they are now accepting computers for recycling.

I'm all for making recycling easier and more accessible. The less
obstacles people have to jump through to get rid of e-waste the less
likely there will be hazardous disposals. And locating Goodwills is
easy. They are like foreclosure signs - they're everywhere.

So now when you're donating all the clothes that you have finally
admitted you'll never wear (ever) again, you can more safely dispose of
your e-waste.