The French officials responsible for illegally dumping toxic sludge from oil tankers around the Ivory Coast could get as many as 20 years behind bars. So far seven people have died from exposure and more than 60,000 have ended up in the hospital.
Related posts: Weekly Compactor, toxic slop smells like rotting eggs
On the far-less-commendable side of dumpster diving, information diving is the practice of salvaging (presumably personal) data from discarded hard drives. Luckily, there also appear to be do-gooder types out there saving the computers. Wikipedia lists several organizations who reuse computers, including Geeks Into The Streets, who bill themselves as “an opportunity for people who love computers to bring them to people who might otherwise not have access to them.” Rock on.
“Black My Story” is a series of photographs taken by Malawian artist Samson Kambalu when he first moved to Amsterdam and found inspiration amid the trash heaps of his new home. His and many other artists’ stories can be found online at the Dutch website the Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art; including this short essay on sea containers loaded with used materials from Holland that end up in Ghana and the art they inspire along the way.
My friend, salmon, recently informed me that wine-in-a-box can be purchased in individual portions, like jumbo juice boxes for grown-ups. I keep meaning to tell my grandmother this. For a short time after they retired, she and my grandfather had a small vineyard in New Jersey. They made and bottled their own wine, mostly drunk by our immediate family but also tasted at local get-togethers with other farmers struggling to make grapes happy on the East Coast. Grandma has told me more than once that wine-in-a-box, or more specifically wine-in-a-bag-in-a-box, is a better way to store wine over a long period of time without losing flavor.
It appears that vintners in Canada agree with her as several wineries have foregone traditional glass bottles in favor of the box. Usman Valiante, a contributor to Canada’s Solid Waste and Recycling Magazine, weighs the environmental and viticultural pros and cons of this decision on the blog he keeps off the magazine’s Web site. Aside from trashing the taste of the wines he sampled, Valiante explains that the materials used to store the drinks aren’t as green as the vineyards imply. He also points out the irony in the label “Recyclable–where facilities exist.” I guess I’ll have to stick to sangria in a thermos at picnics.
At the Brooklyn book fest this past weekend, Rats author Robert Sullivan informed the crowd that the clear plastic garbage bags favored by downtown establishments post 9-11 now allow the casual observer an unobscured view of rats eating dinner and therefore a better understanding of the rodent’s relationship with trash.
The World Watch Institute at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress released a new report today on American investment in and consumption of energy. The document states that: “Next to the Internet, new energy technology has become one of the hottest investment fields for venture capitalists.” Investment in ways to use vegetable oil and waste as fuel has quadrupled over the last several years; and more people seem to be recognizing the potential of harnessing the gasses found in much of what we landfill.
I remember in college when the show Futurama came out, many people I know were very excited. Some of them even convinced me to watch the first episode of the cartoon to see if, indeed, it was as funny as The Simpsons (I will refrain from live-linking here on the assumption that most readers are familiar with the show).
Not being a huge fan of The Simpsons, it’s not surprising that I didn’t end up following Futurama. I will never foget, however, a brief flash in one scene to a planet piled high with thousands of AOL CDROMs (and nothing else) as a nod to the fact that 1) everyone throws them away and 2) that’s where all our trash might end up some day.
So imagine my amusement when, years later, I came accross this CD coaster craft project on About.com. It’s one of hundreds of “Trash to Treasure” projects compiled on the site ranging from corny (avoid the “blue jean” section entirely) to inspired (see above). In fact, an entire section is devoted to ideas for those soon-to-be-obsolete disks once used to store music in the Global North and still used to ship research at cheap rates to the South.
An article over at Groovy Green (the sidebar, folks, it’s all about the sidebar) caught my eye with the catchy headline “How Starbucks Could Have Saved the World“. It’s about disposible coffee cups and incentives not to use them. While discounts for reusing mugs and encouraging people to drink from real cups while in the store are nice gestures, what we really need are some superstar style mavens to declare reusable “in” and disposible “out”. A friend and I were discussing the other day that while it’s one thing to refuse a plastic bag at the deli and tuck your groceries into a Brooklyn-chic tote, it’s another thing entirely to carry your own tupperware to avoid take-out packaging.
And speaking of style, the fashionistas at style.com, treehugger, fiftyRx3 and fabulously green are all raving about the green garments on display in London this week. If two points make a line and three blogs make a trend, then this eco fashion must be some hot shit.
This week in trash news:
The city of Toronto held an emergency meeting on trash today to draft a “contingency plan to handle the city’s garbage and sewage sludge in the event of a border closure.” You see, the U.S. and Canada have been at war, or at least at skirmish, for years over which country is the other’s dump. Michiganders in particular are angry that companies like Waste Management can import foreign trash and deposit it in landfills in their state. In response, the House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would grant states the right to ban garbage from other countries. The bill is a long way from becoming law and will likely undergo many changes along the way.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s senators are brokering deals with Ontario officials to slow the flow of trash from our neighbor to the North.
If you blog it, they will come! Today has been a great one for comments (new ones are peppered throughout the blog, so check out the archives). The gold star goes to the trashie who alterted us to an upcoming, international, artistic, trash-related event called WASTE and organized by a Czech collective known as CESTA. Applications are due November 15th, so you creative types might want to start your plotting ASAP.
Thanks for the tip, Stephanie!
Garblogging can be a thrilling pastime, but I couldn’t do it without your encouragement and active participation. Thanks to all who have been clicking through as I’ve launched everyday trash these past couple of weeks, thanks to the artists whose work I’ve been reposting and thanks especially to the peanut gallery for the snarky commentary. Please, please, keep it coming!
A reminder on the rules of the game: comments are very welcome, as are tips, feedback and suggestions for future items, new entries are posted at least daily and all posts relate to trash.
While searching for material for a ‘trash on the radio’ post, I came across this entertaining and informative transcript in which Terry Gross interviews Peter Coyote, an actor and a member of the now-defunct street theatre group The Diggers. In it, Coyote says that during his era “the feeling was: there’s more than enough to go around and that you could build a creative and even elegant life off the garbage.”
Plenty Magazine printed a story on 
everydaytrash 