Please enjoy this guest post by our friend Alexandra Ringe:
I spent this past week hunting plastic on the beach of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida. The Atlantic Ocean has its own version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and I redirected as much plastic detritus as I could from the shore to, well, the landfill.
Wish you were here
I couldn’t stand the thought of walking by a plastic bag that would later drift out to the undulating mass of petroleum product sitting in the Sargasso Sea, maybe choking a bird along the way.
I could let you think that this is a new obsession of mine, this attention to the beach’s accumulation of straws, candy wrappers, kegger cups, and everything else we make out of plastic. But that would be wrong. I grew up in Ventnor, New Jersey, about 100 ft. from the boardwalk. Whenever we went to the beach, my mother picked up other people’s litter in addition to our own trash. “Leave it better than when you found it” — that was her response to our neighbors’ quizzical looks.
Although she talked to me and my siblings about the impact of human garbage on marine life, my mom was driven only in part by a concern for the environment. She applied the “Leave it better” principle at the movie theater and the rest-stop picnic table, too — she felt responsible for the experience of the next person to come along. Her approach expands on the hiker’s “pack it in, pack it out” credo — if you bring something into the woods, you are honor-bound to take it out again — in a way that works especially well for the beach.
Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, FL
A good deal of the trash I encounter doesn’t belong to negligent beachgoers. It blows in from the streets, floats in from boats and ships, or is too small and light to be caught by the tractor-like beach-cleaning machines that skim litter from the sand. Thanks to my mom, I have always seen this vagabond trash as ours, something I need to help pick up. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It feels too good to keep that chunk of crumbling styrofoam out of the sea.
One of the best ways to keep up to speed with happenings in the world of trash is to fan this blog on Facebook. Our streamed feed lets you know when new posts go live and the comments and thumbs up button allow you to tell us what you like and interact with other trashies. Join the conversation.
Calling all trashionistas: Ecotopia, a Polish website dedicated to fashion made from recycled materials, is hosting a contest to find the next great trashion design.
Ecotopia
Contestants are asked to:
Create a new cloth, accessory or jewellery, which can be manufactured from items, things, materials which are not needed any more, redundant or broken and should be thrown away as thrash. Please, try not to buy new things – try to use only what you have available at hand. Strive to maintain simplicity in your project, but do not forget about the resourcefulness, comfort and materials which are available for your use.
If you are not already a regular reader, Art for Housewives should be part of your daily diet of nifty blog intake. Last night I discovered these lovely recycled paper shoes via A for H (nice to look at, though a bit steep in price given the materials…perhaps I’ll try to weave my own).
Paper shoes by Colin Lin
You may recall the same source led me to these hot fused plastic boots. It’s been an interesting year for upcycled footwear.
Just saw via Sicolab.org that there’s a new Staten Island blog on the block. Staten Island Dump‘s tagline is “News. Music. Politics. Life. Gossip. Garbage.” I like the sound of that. Check out the site for such intellectually stimulating content as an interactive poll on the greatest Staten Islander of the decade. I’m torn between Dennis Coles and Diane Savino.
As we had about a foot or so of snow falling down on Brooklyn, I’ve been enjoying studying how my new home city deals with snow. First impression, not surprising, is that it melts away, seemingly before it has time to shift from white to exhaust pipe brown. Second impression, a tad more surprising, is that the necessary remowal of snow from streets is being carried out by trash trucks. Three questions pop up in my head:
Why?
What are refuse collectors going to use to collect trash while there’s snow on our streets?
What happens to the system of picking up trash bags from the pavement when the pavements of our streets are covered in three feet of plowed snow?
Did you catch the NYT piece on the garbage patch last week and/or check out the accompanying slide show? The author of that article is Lindsey Hoshaw, a freelance journalist who spent three weeks this summer aboard the Oceanographic Research Vessel Alguita on an expidition led by Captain Charles Moore to explore that great swatch of plastic in the sea. Check Hoshaw’s blog and puruse the archive for a first-hand account.
Notice the link to spot.us at the bottom of the NYT article. It’s a tool for freelancers to raise funds for their reporting, supporters of which helped to finance Hoshaw’s research. How thoroughly modern.
Side note: in Googling links for this post, I came accross another Garbage Girl, a woman working at a landfill and blogging about it. Stay tuned for more on women and trash.
It’s been a full year since my friend, Virginia (a.k.a. Jenny) began Italicious, a blog that chronicles the Italian (and sometimes Southern American) cooking that nourishes the charmed life she and her Neopolitan husband seem to lead. My FAVORITE thing about her blog is that she not only shares ideas for how to mix mouth watering combinations of amazing ingredients—sausage, fennel, home made pastas, dark leafy greens, saffron, cheese, etc.—but she’ll often include next-day recipes for how to recycle the leftovers, old school Italian style. And you know how we love to recycle! Recently, she added an entire “Reused, Recycled” page to the site to cull these recipes in one place. Check. It. Out.
Crochette di Riso via Italicious
Pictured above are tasty rice balls made from leftover risotto. You may remember the zero waste pasta pie featured here before. SUCH amazing stuff. Happy birthday, Italicious!
So Laurapalooza yesterday was a big hit. I burned my face in the New Jersey sun again, but not as much as last time. Our flip flop hippo was item of the day, and we got pix with a president (coming soon). Also realized that people in Pennington have the cutest kids in the world. Many of them run around. Some are excellent trashion models:
Earlier this week the everydaytrash.com team was invited to a screening of “No Impact Man,” a documentary about journalist Colin Beavan, a.k.a. No Impact Man, his spouse Michelle Conlin, their cute-overload daughter Isabella and the family dog Frankie. Behind the documentary are directors Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, and producer Eden Wurmfeld.
For several years now, Beavan has been updating the world on his No Impact Project—his endeavor to spend one year wasting as little energy and as few resources as possible—via his blog, No Impact Man. The documentary follows Beavan, Conlin, daughter and dog over the course of the project, from November 2006 to November 2007. Throughout four phrases, the family gives up more and more, starting with taking non man-powered transport of any kind, buying anything new (including toilet paper), eating meat, using the elevator. Finally, they shut off the power in their apartment and attempt to live without electricity.
The No Impact Project is framed as a family project, but as the movie reveals, there’s no doubt that its really all about Beavan. As Conlin puts it “It’s called No Impact Man,it’s his project, it’s his book and he’s No impact man, but…the project is our family is doing this.”
Without going too much into detail to spoil the movie for those who plan to see it, we can tell you that the documentary is not so much about how to live without causing further damage to the planet (if you already have a flat in a posh condo and have bought all the laptops and bikes you need that is), but about a marriage in which one partner is very driven to embark on something that affects everyone in the family. Here’s the trailer:
And, as there are two of us, please find below two reviews:
Victor:
Why make a documentary about how a family tries to live emissions-free for a year, but not give you the results on screen? The concpiracy theory would be that the team didn’t want to give out spoilers from the coming book. I don’t think so, I rather believe that Gabbert/Schein/Wurmfeld realised that watching people live eco friendly isn’t terribly exciting on screen (the most action-ridden moment being when the family tries and fails to build an Nigerian pot fridge). What is exciting is the struggle with the contemporary context they’ve locked themselves into. In the end, it boils down to how much of a crazy person you are ready to be percieved as. Easier as freelance writer (Beavan) compared to Business Week writer (Conlin). The message we are left with from No Impact Man is that you probably need very supportive friends.
Leila:
As a documentary about a marriage, “No Impact Man” is pretty entertaining. As a lead-by-example environmental statement, it’s a bit muddy. The film skips along, touching lightly on some of the quotidian debates of the green movement: are cloth diapers really better for the environment than disposable? What are the outer limits of eco-chic (yes to reusable shopping bags, no to no toilet paper), without really saying much. If anything, it’s a nice ad for biking and eating locally. The Union Square green market features heavily and the family spends enviable amounts of quality time scooting and biking around town. Conlin’s transformation from a Starbucks-addicted shopaholic to sustainable supermom is the real story. As she whines then copes and decides what she can and can’t live without, we make the same assessments about our own lives. How embarrassing would it be to mooch ice from the neighbor because you are consciously living without a fridge; or if the whole office knew your husband air dried his bottom as an attempt to save the trees?
Remarkably, there is very little trash in “No Impact Man.” Right away, the family stops creating waste, so little time is spent tracking where waste goes when it leaves the 5th Ave co-op and what impact the family is averting. Aside from some arty close-ups of trash bags and a brief cameo by Sustainable South Bronx founder Majora Carter, trash plays a small role in the film.
Anyway, as someone constantly asked “but what should I do about it” I admire the notion of living out one’s own ideals and the attempt to make personal the huge and often eye-glazing topic of lessening our impact on the environment. But there is a difference between personal and personality-driven and I found Beaven’s project off-putting in its self-absorption. Kudos to this family for eating locally, biking everywhere and spending lots of quality time together not watching TV. At one point Beaven says that when people ask what one thing they can do to make a difference, he says volunteer at an environmental organization because the erosion of community is what is killing us all. THAT point should be better underscored on his blog and in the film. A first step might have been calling the film “No Impact Family”.
