Posts Tagged ‘earth day’

Waste in Focus

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Glad (you know, the company that makes, among other things, trash bags) is teaming up with the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY) for an Earth Day (April 10) unveiling of a photo series featuring U.S. families and the trash they produce over the course of one week. 

Image

Charlene Wimms and Donell Brant of NYC, New York, with their children Darius Brant, 9, and Terrard Wimms, 16, surrounded by a week’s worth of their recyclables and landfill trash, in February. Recyclable items are on the left-hand side of the photo. Items destined for landfill are to the right. Their total household waste for this week was 28.9 lb. Seventy-nine percent of it (22.9 lb) was landfill and twenty-one percent of it was recyclables (6 lb). Photo credit: Peter Menzel.

Photojournalist Peter Menzel and writer Faith D’Aluisio interviewed and photographed eight families across the country for the project, gave each family instructions to save their trash and recycling for a week, then Menzel and D’Alusio cleaned and arranged the waste for very special family portraits. I normally dread Earth Day, because as a trash blogger it means tons of extra email for weeks from companies pitching inane (and often not very Earth-friendly) products and campaigns. I have to say, though, that I like this project. It’s trash specific, artistic and informative. They call it Waste in Focus.

New Yorkers can see the photos this Thursday afternoon (April 10) on display at Union Square. 

Earth Day

Friday, April 22, 2011

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?

Weekly Compactor

Friday, April 24, 2009

This week in trash news:

Oh yeah

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

It’s Earth Day.


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