Check it New Yorkers, the city has a site to match commercial waste to people who could put that crap to use and sells it to them on the cheap. It’s win-win: cheap stuff for the citizen, less waste for the city to haul.
The site lists neat stats on total cost savings, tonnes of trash averted and numbers of members and exchanges. The numbers date back to 1998, which leads one to believe this little-known-service has been around for a while but is just now getting a tech refresh. Does your community have something like this?
I got all excited when I downloaded the latest Moth podcast this morning and read the description: “A young man struggles with his role in the family sanitation business.” Luckily, this week’s installment lived fully up to those inflated expectations. It’s a sweet New York story and well worth a listen. Thank you, Terence Mickey, for brightening my morning commute. The outro references a novel in the works called The Gleaners. Trashtastic title, can’t wait!
After reading this article, I dug up my city’s solid waste management plan a.k.a. SWaMP to reread this chapter and refer to the map below. More to come. Consider this a heads up, trashies. I may wonk out on you for a post or few.
Last night I stopped by the bank to deposit some checks and was surprised to find all the paper slip slots empty.
Deposit slips be gone!
Turns out Citibank now lets you stick checks directly into ATM machines without the wasteful and outdated ritual of filling out a deposit slip, adding up the total and sealing them in envelopes. And there you have it, the last bit of math my life required I do all by myself, done.
Nuclear waste. It’s the most controversial kind of trash. Here in the U.S. our government has been talking about different ways to bury nuclear waste for years. Nearly a decade ago, Congress passed a law stating we needed a permanent underground storage facility by the mid-1990′s and later named Yucca Mountain, outside of Vegas, as the chosen spot.
Yucca Mountain
Lately though, the government has been rethinking that decision. For one thing, Japan’s nuclear disaster proved worrisome, causing experts to rethink the whole idea of storing toxic waste in pools.
But Yucca Mountain was the subject of debate long before the earthquake in Japan. It’s a bit of a messy fight to follow. I didn’t quite understand all the pieces until I read this handy list of FAQs published by Reuters. In a nutshell, people in Nevada have long been pissed about the choice of where to put America’s nuclear waste, President Obama campaigned on the promise to block the facility from being built, his administration did indeed block the Yucca Mountain site, inspiring the Government Accountability Office to prepare and release a report stating that politics rather than technical or safety concerns drove the decision.
The report also pointed out that since 1983 the government has spent $15 billion assessing Yucca Mountain, $9.5 billion of which was collected via extra charges on Americans’ electric bills.
BBC’s Panorama reported this excellent piece on electronic waste from the UK illegally dumped in West African countries like Ghana. (Thanks for the tip, Nic!)
BBC
The end section on taking responsibility hits the nail on the head, pointing out that while African governments legislating restrictions is one piece of the puzzle, the key piece is holding those at the source of the e-waste responsible in places like the UK.
You may recall that discovering that his e-waste ended up in Ghana was part of Swedish journalist Mattias Hagberg’s motivations in writing his book Skräp. Here’s a link to Vic’s interview with Hagberg and to a photo slideshow published later by a Swedish paper.
Which is a better motivator to get people to change their behavior: fines or incentives? The EU banks on incentives.
Problem: fishermen working EU waters toss back up to two-thirds of what they pull out of the ocean—over 100 million tons of edible fish per year—because the fish are either already dead or they want to make room for more valuable ones.
Solution: The EU’s first thought was to ban this practice and instate fines for dumping dead fish in the ocean. Unsurprisingly, this plan was unpopular with fishermen. Plan B is a new project to pay fishermen for the plastic debris they bring back. The EU will pay to subsidize this program until it takes off, after which the idea is that the sale of recyclable plastics will underwrite the initiative. Think it will work?
Happy Earth Day. To celebrate, I just watched the CBS News special on the very first Earth Day on YouTube. It ends somberly, as you can see here. And in some ways, not much has changed since 1970. Except, maybe, that environmental advocates have, in part, become more chic. One thing that struck me, watching these vintage clips, is how focused the activists were on big corporations and the major perpetrators of waste and pollution. That seems like a stark contrast to the hundreds of Earth Day emails and press releases I received this year, all pimping green products and encouraging very individualized actions geared at reducing my own little footprint. Did you do anything for Earth Day?
Somali pirates arrested by French commandos, photo via justfoodnow.com
A UN rep laments that they needed to build the prison because while countries will hold trials for stateless people, like pirates roaming the high seas, no one wants to make room for them in their prisons. So the UN decided to build one special.
This story, making the news wire rounds, puts Somali pirates in particular back in the international spotlight. It’s been a while, but you may recall the international melee a few years back when pirates off the coast of Somalia kept kidnapping Europeans and demanding high ransoms for their return. The most interesting part of the story, from a trash perspective, is that these pirates claimed to be defending African waters from the illegal dumping of toxic chemicals by huge European corporations.
Pirates operating off the coast of Somalia carried out 15 of the 16 hijackings at sea this year, according to figures released by the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center on March 24. There are currently 28 seized vessels with 576 hostages held by Somali pirates, the bureau said.
Piracy has flourished off the coast of the Horn of African nation, where a two-decade long war has left the country with no effective government and a moribund economy. Remittances from overseas workers of about $1 billion a year are the country’s main source of revenue, according to the London-based charity World Vision, which runs health, water and education projects in Somalia.
WITNESS, the organization that “uses video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations” made this short educational piece on trash pickers in India. Much like the dilemma at the center of Mai Iskander‘s film Garbage Dreams, trash pickers in India are seeing their livelihoods threatened as the government signs more and more contracts with foreign private waste hauling companies. This short and sweet video compares and contrasts New Dehli where trash pickers’ work has been eclipsed to New Dehli where the NGO Chintan has worked to integrate traditional trash pickers in waste and recycling collection even as the city modernizes its systems. But you don’t have to take my word for it…
Joana translates that Carnival in Bahia, Brazil this year involved a crowd of two million on the streets (20% tourists from Brazil and abroad) who generated a billion reais ($600 million) in profits and 30 tons of trash. After the party, Catadores de lixo (Brazilian gleaners) collected cans to sell to local recycling companies, some going so far as diving in the ocean to collect the cans that ended up underwater. The source blog, Global Garbage, says and English version is coming soon. Can’t wait! Obrigado, Joana!
Have you seen this show on Spike TV? It’s about one of the lesser-covered old school Brooklyn professions: scrap metal resale. This is truly trash TV. And in the vein of Jersey Shore, it’s also a study in regional vernacular exploiting the world outside of Brooklyn’s romanticism of the local accent. And since Spike TV is geared toward men, the show is super manly. Enjoy.
Thanks for the tip, Anthony.
In searching for Scrapper clips on YouTube, I also came across this intriguing documentary about the controversial scrapping of government explosives. People wait beside the fields where the military runs test drops of bombs, then run out onto the field to recover the remains of the weapons. According to this documentary, blowing oneself up accidentally is not an uncommon job hazard. Crazy.
The site lists neat stats on total cost savings, tonnes of trash averted and numbers of members and exchanges. The numbers date back to 1998, which leads one to believe this little-known-service has been around for a while but is just now getting a tech refresh. Does your community have something like this?
