And yay! Stockholm is the European Green Capital 2010! Read all about it, and inspire yourself on how your city too can reduce emissions per capita by 25% in just under 20 years.
Stockholm 2010!
Monday, February 23, 2009European Green Capital
Monday, February 23, 2009Tonight, at an award ceremony in Brussels, the European Commission* will announce which European cities will recieve the awards European Green Capital, for the years 2010 and 2011. The nominees are Oslo, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Bristol, Frieburg, Copenhagen, Münster and Hamburg.
The award has been established to reward local authorities’ efforts for a more sustainable urban environment. I.e., this is a reward for the politicians. And I do think we have to recognize that some of them indeed deserve a pat on the back, for fighting the tra$h industry, the oldtimers, listless voters and elecetion politics. Further, the coming environmental plans of the cities who win the awards will be presented on the award website, will return with a summary of that!
(*For those who might not know, the Commission is by far the most powerful institution of the European Union.)
“Trash infarct” and kids trash interaction
Sunday, February 22, 2009A news item in todays Svenska Dagbladet (2nd largest morning paper) talks about how Sweden is on it’s way to a “trash infarct” situation. As of now, we produce 1133 pounds (or 514 kilogrammes) of trash per person, per year. Even though we are top of the world in recycling, our garbage heaps grow with 3% every year, and then we haven’t even mentioned the unrecyclable (that a word?) toxic stuff that ends up at the bottom of our many trash combustion factories.
Another news item in the same paper is a cute story about kids in preschool making toys from trash, instead of buying toys. One challange seems to be that the municipal run tra$h company see risk of loosing profit in this sweet and educational activity. Makes me draw parallells to the only good scene in the movie Mammoth, where a grandmother takes her grandson to a scrap heap, showing him how kids work with collecting items that can be sold at a market, and how he doesn’t have to do that, since his mother works as a maid in the United States. (For those wondering why I would know of this particular movie, it’s from a Swedish director I will always love for his fantastic debut Fucking Åmål.)
Celebrity Trash
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Weekly Compactor
Friday, February 20, 2009
BBC News
This week in trash news:
- Western countries are still illegally dumping toxic electronic trash in Africa;
- Bill Gates invests more in trash hauling;
- Engineering students in Texas brush up on skills by recycling appliances; and
- Philly artists host a “pimp my recycle bin” event.
Space Trash
Friday, February 20, 2009Scientific American has a very bloggy post up on space trash full of live links to past articles and tidbits sourced to a Wired reporter’s Twitter feed. The question: will orbiting debris from interspace smash ups and other intergallactic junk endanger scheduled repairs to the Hubble?
ABC News
Side note: If Wikipedia and I have the count right, this will be the fifth mission to repair the space telescope. I remember when the Hubble first launched and started sending blurry photos back to Earth. I was gifted one of the best telescopes under $200 for the time and I started looking for space debris more than stars after that. I think I was in the sixth grade, just old enough to figure out that adults had very little figured out.
Worm Potluck
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Sounds like the Sustainable Flatbush crew had fun at their worm composting potluck this Sunday.
Locals can find out more about the Flatbush Supper Club here and more about urban composting here.
This reminds me, I really want to go to a how-to workshop on worm composting at home.
The Pick Up the Trash Day
Wednesday, February 18, 2009Went to one of those political breakfast seminars this morning, and shared the table with Emma and Elin from the cool Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. The KSTF run a couple of great campaigns, like the Agricultural Scrap Campaign, but my closest relation with them comes from my childhood, and the Pick Up the Trash Day.
The Pick Up the Trash Day has been a standing tradition for preeschools and lower compulsory schools all over Sweden for decades. It’s pretty straight forward: Kids go out in their communities with their teachers for a day and pick up trash. I have fond memories of the kid Victor running around the neighbourhood and it’s sorroundings with classmates in the late 80’s spring, armed with a black trash bag, picking up cigarette stumps and thrown away plastic stuff. If one of us spotted a broken bottle or any other shards, we would shout “Mrs! GLASS!!!”, and one of the adults would come and take care of the dangerous pieces.
The next Pick Up the Trash Day happens in the week of April 20th-26th. Last year 220 000 kids (Sweden’s total population is 9 million) participated, and the KSTF hope for even more this year. I have already decided to have my own Pick Up the Trash Day, wherever I am in the world in two months from now. Who wants to join in?
Japanatrash Art
Monday, February 16, 2009Every once in a while, I search YouTube for “trash art”.
Not sure what this clip is all about, but I am confident that if I spoke Japanese I would declare it blogworthy. It involves some sort of talent or game show and Jean-François Millet’s iconic painting “The Gleaners”.
Zero Waste Pasta
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Frittata di Maccheroni
My sister and I share an apartment, but rarely share meals. When we do, they alternate between Thai take-out and pesto pasta. The former, even if you implore the restaurant to include NO UTENSILS, creates an ethically uncomfortable amount of waste (and leads to bickering as I, in obnoxious big sister fashion, police the trash can and recycling bag to make sure packaging ends up in its proper place). The latter leads to heartbreaking food waste. Neither of the sisters Darabi is capable of making just the right amount of pasta. Inevitably, we end up with a dry lump of basil-flecked noodles in the fridge, where it lives optimistically for a week until our biweekly purge.
Luckily, I know a pasta expert. My friend Virginia has an amazing food blog called Italicious where she recently posted the perfect solution to left-over noodles: Frittata di Maccheroni. Those crafty Neopolitans. It’s resourcefulness like this that must have seen them through the trash crisis last year. I can’t wait to see if this works with cavatappi and pesto. Oh, and do share if you have other past rejuvination ideas.
The Office 3.0 – Silent Art
Friday, February 13, 2009This week I had an errand at the Stockholm based communications agency Futurniture. Founder and CEO Jakob Lind took the opportunity to give us a little tour of an art exhibition they currently host: The Office 3.0 – Silent Art, a reference to the 1963 classic Silent Spring, written by Rachel Carson. The exhibition is made up of work from several artists, my favourite being Johanna Gustafsson Fürst’s art, which is all made from two weeks of trash from the Futurniture office.
Gustafsson Fürst has covered all door handles in newspaper, hidden their aquarium (normally sporting a couple of plastic dishgloves flying around inside…) beneath a heap of I-don’t-know-what, taped flattened milk cartons to the floors, etc. It’s all over the place really, but since the office is such a busy creative creator’s space anyway, it takes a while before you realize what was actually there before Gustafsson Fürst’s takeover. I like it! Another, more serious, part of the exhibition, is a group of watercolour paintings made with toxic water, composed by Jan Stene Markus Anteskog. All curated by Jan Stene. Provocative as only art can be.
Recycle for London campaign goes mobile
Friday, February 13, 2009
The ever clever Recycle for London program is promoting its “Starve your bin” campaign with a mobile download game for Brits on the go. The object of the game is to block items from reaching the hungry trash bag by catching them first in a green recycling bin. Or rather, the object of the game is to raise awareness about the massive amounts of recyclable materials that end up in the trash. Londoners can download the game by texting a special number and oh so special iPhone users can get the game directly from the Apple store.
Your very own iPhone app? Very slick, Recycle for London. As a new media geek, I’m impressed. But really, you had me at viral video.
Weekly Compactor
Friday, February 13, 2009
This week in trash news and around the garblogosphere:
- Some genius created a recycling poster (perhaps while listening to a little too much Ice Cube) (pictured);
- Even megacompany Waste Management felt the impact of our dying economy;
- Canada’s recycling industry faces the same hard times as the one in the states;
- The peanut recall turns food donations into trash; and
- Etsy gives a trashy tutorial in making envelopes from discarded paper.
California knows how to…recycle
Friday, February 13, 2009
Men’s Health has ranked America’s cities on how well they recyle and three out of the top ten are in California.
Wichita and Las Vegas lead the worst.
Click here for a neat interactive map of the results.
Here’s how the editors explain their methodology:
To determine how well cities reuse their refuse, we started by asking them whether recycling is mandatory. Next we looked at how easy the cities make it for residents to recycle: No need to sort? Wonderful. Curbside pickup? Great. Then we added up the variety of materials that are recycled, giving bonus points to those places that go beyond paper, plastic, and glass. Lastly, we factored in the percentage of households that actually take advantage of the program their city offers, courtesy of SimplyMap.
NYC ranked an unimpressive 17th.
Belated newsflash
Wednesday, February 11, 2009The Stockholm trash collector’s wildcat strike is over, as of yesterday morning (sorry, haven’t had time to blog the news). But there is a but! Although the battle-axe has been buried after a meeting between workers and the new (hated) entrepeneur, an agreement hasn’t been finalized, and things are still a bit shaky. For now, we can only idly watch things unfold.
For myself, the 4-day strike gave a good opportunity to look at my own trash. What happens if I can’t take it out? The result has proven not to be very scandlous. I went from a bag filled about 20% to a bag filled about 40%. And this while taking at least two daily cooked meals at the house. No diapers, no food thrown away, no filling the trash with recyclables such as metal cans or paper. Living by yourself seems to be helpful in trash flow control.
(More drama happened in the house though! A new note appeared next to the first one, that had announced special trash bags would be placed in the trash room. The new note stated how revolting it was that these bags had now been stolen. Although it felt wrong, I did have a good laugh over this.)
Then again, more resources are used per capita for heating (we have Winter I kid you not) when people live by themselves, not to mention the multiplied numbers of furniture, bed fabric, houses and all that stuff that makes our lives so Modern. It’s a bit like cars really. Which incidentally reminds me of this terrible episode of Oprah when people were advised to save the planet by keeping reusable bags for groceries in your car, instead of discussing the debatable strategy of going shopping with your car. Crazy.
everydaytrash 