Archive for the 'recycling' Category
September 4th, 2010 by Matt Zambito
In the news from Thursday, this: a California bill failed to gain a majority vote in that state’s Senate which would have banned the use of plastic bags by grocery stores, convenience stores and drugstores.
Before I go any further, let me admit something: I use plastic bags. (Gasp!) Second, after reading about plastic bags, I think I’m going to plop down a wee bit of cash and buy a reusable grocery bag or three. Why? The statistics are disturbing.
According to a recent report on CNN.com, the EPA estimates that 3.96 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were generated in 2008 in the United States. In the same year, 1.17 million tons of trash were created by tossing out paper bags. Of all of that, only a combined total of 830,000 tons of plastic and paper bags was recycled in 2008, while a combined total of 4.3 million tons was discarded, including 90% of plastic bags. For point of reference, this is the equivalent, speaking in terms of weight, of nearly twelve Empire State Buildings.
Sure, we live in a fairly plastic world. And we’re constantly adding more plastic to it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reverse the trend. And that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to continue on a course that we’ve previously accepted as the norm. If we were fatalists, then Progressive Wednesday wouldn’t exist.
So, why is all this using and dumping without reusing so problematic? In typical circumstances (for example in landfills), a polyethylene bag will take more than 1,000 years to degrade.
While some Californian politicians had good intentions, a ban on plastic really isn’t a solution. This would likely turn people toward paper and compostable bags, both of which carry with them serious environmental impacts of their own during the manufacturing process.
I’m sure I’ll still use paper and plastic bags. I’m sure some of those will hit the trash. But I’m going to make a conscious effort to change my ways.
Join me, friends. We’ll do this together. For information about finding a recycling center near you, just click this sentence. For information about buying reusable products, just click this sentence.
September 4th, 2007 by Eric
Here's the deal. Each time you run out of milk or eggs and make that trip to the grocery store you get a few plastic bags. Those add up to an average of 500 billion to 1 trillion each year globally with 380 billion being used from sea to shining sea. Since these “film plastics– are non-biodegradable, difficult and expensive to recycle, break down into smaller, more toxic particles, and can prove the bane of many of our co-habitants on land, in the air, and at sea, this is a serious problem.
You might think that the answer is to use paper bags. Nice thought, but only if they are recycled. The amount of energy used to make and distribute paper bags is more than double that plastic and, according to the Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment:
Paper bags need a recycling rate of at least 50% to be more energy efficient than twice the number of plastics.
So what is the solution? Chances are you would have to go way out of your way to recycle plastic bags. And even if you make the effort, there is no guarantee that they will actually be recycled. In fact, according to reusablebags.com:
Many bags collected for recycling never get recycled. A growing trend is to ship them to Third world countries like India and China which are rapidly becoming the dumping grounds for the Western world’s glut of recyclables. Rather than being recycled they are cheaply incinerated under more lax environmental laws.
One solution is to either reuse the plastic bags or don't use them at all. I bring my own reusable shopping bags to the grocery store; they’re bigger and easier to carry I, being incredibly lazy, don’t have to wrap ten plastic bags around my wrist in order to avoid making two trips into the house. Plus, how many times have those bags broken while you carried them, spilling your groceries all over the parking lot? So bring your own bags, empty them out at home and put them back in the car for the next trip.
But we’re a forgetful species, and sometimes those reusables get left in the house when you go to the store. So for those times when you have to get plastic bags, here’s a creative list of ways to reuse them.
But for you outside-the-box thinkers, and we know the Progressive Wednesday crowd is full them, consider writing to your local stores and/or legislature to encourage them to jump on board in helping solve this problem. This link has a great letter to send to local retailers suggesting a credit per bag for those who bring their own (Costco, IKEA, and Whole Foods are already doing this). Or use this letter to encourage your state or local representative to propose a tax on plastic bag usage. Countries who have used this method claim to have a 90% decrease in usage and have raised as much as $9.6 million to help benefit the environment. Either way, these are great progressive steps to solve this problem. So do your part, and encourage other to do theirs.
This photo’s daddy is recyle-obsessed. Good for him.
May 2nd, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday
Problem:
You need to read to your little ones, and you need to find some books that they can read to you. You know all children's books, especially those designed for the younger sets, have morals, sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes not. You want to find books that espouse a world view that doesn't conflict with yours, and may even help encourage your wee ones to believe what you believe, baby.
Or maybe you don't have any tikes of your own, or, you know, maybe yours are a bit older and can be found flipping through the pages of the latest Danielle Steel offering, The Bible, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Supercharged Kama Sutra, and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, which changed and inspired the lives of a few of the folks at Progressive Wednesday.
Regardless, odds are you believe in the important relationship between children and books. And here's the other problem: plenty of children don't own any books, and many others don't even have access to books outside of school. And as progressives, we owe it to children, all children, to let them have as close to the same youth as we'd want for our own. We owe them this because we want to protect innocence. And we owe them this because want a caring, intelligent, articulate, and creative generation to come. We want a better world, so we want a world with more books.
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Make Progress:
To take some action this Wednesday is simple, really. It's simple as A, B, C, D, one, two, three, four– ¦.
May 2nd, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday
Recycle:
There are kids out there who don't own books. While they might have access to a library, some, because of a lack of transportation, might not be able to make it to a library. Even if kids in poverty can get to a library, there's something special about owning books. There's sense of pride and confidence that comes with owning a book, and there's a treasuring, a lasting memory. I still remember the first book I could read: The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. And I remember my favorite picture book as a kid: The Monster at the End of This Book by Jon Stone. Besides, all children deserve a chance to feed their minds, both for their sakes as well as the culture's.
There are some very easy (maybe obvious to some) ways to donate used children's books: hospitals, your local Salvation Army or Goodwill, poor school districts, libraries, and shelters.
For whatever reason, if you're interested in other options, here are five organizations through which you can pass along the gift of language to kids truly in need of your kindness:
Gently Used Books:
Brand-Spanking New Books:
May 1st, 2007 by Eric
Let me just say, I love Macs. I'm writing this article on one. A dual processor, 867mhz, G4 tower to be exact. I don't think it's crashed twice in the nearly five years that I've had it and it still runs like the day I got it. It doesn't hurt my ego that Apple is considered to be one of the most progressive corporations in the country by bluefund.org. But they're not perfect. They're still a corporation. They're still worried about their bottom line.
Apple is at the front of the pack when it comes to diversity, employee relations, community activism, ethical corporate governance, human rights, and even most environmental issues. But they have recently taken some heat, and for good reason, for their subpar recycling programs as well as the continued use of toxic chemicals that other companies have agreed to phase out. But how much and what kind of toxic chemicals are used? According to newstarget.com:
About 70 percent of lead, mercury and other heavy-metal pollutants come from electronic waste. Thirty million computers are trashed every year in the United States alone.
Of course, not all of this waste comes from Macs, and Apple has since made a good deal of progress in the recycling of old computers. As of last year, they have greatly increased the scale and ease of recycling their products, including offering a 10% discount on a new iPod when you bring in an old one to be recycled. But these programs should be better advertised to increase their use. If you plan to buy an Apple computer, give this site a look as you decide what to do with the old one.
There is also a Greenpeace movement dedicated to getting Steve Jobs and The Apple Corporation to discontinue the use of many toxic chemicals in their products. While the information on the site doesn't give the whole story (it gives far too much credit to other companies' policies), it is important to let Mr. Jobs know that this is an important issue to us. So check out their “take action– page. It lists five small things that you can do to help make progress on this issue (What a great idea!). Let's make it clear that not even the most progressive company gets a free ride.
April 18th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday
“[People have] made at least a start on discovering the meaning
of human life when [they] plants shade trees
under which [they know] full well [they] will never sit.–
— D. Elton Trueblood
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Problem:
I made the mistake of watching mindless television the other day, and I caught a show called Flip This House. The premise of the show is this: a hot-shot buys a dump of a house, renovates the hell out of it, and tries to sell it for a sizeable profit pronto. On this particular episode, the temporary far-too-capitalistic owner decided to cut down an 80-year-old maple to, and I quote: “Make the property look, I don't know, you know, more modern.– And I literally thought: Poor tree. It was like watching someone chainsaw and wood-chipper my grandma. Well, okay, it wasn't quite like that, but it still sucked like a Dirt Devil. I had to change the channel, and instead I watched a woman get a tattoo of a fire-breathing butterfly on her chest. (I wish I could make up stuff like that.)
We've written about trees a lot already (see here, here, here and here). But we're here again today, getting a jump on April 27: Arbor Day. And besides, there's much more — more than we can even cover this Wednesday — to type about the topic. Why? Two reasons:
1. We're kind of addicted to tree products: toilet paper, sheds, pink tissues, paintings, houses, paper towels, Christmas napkins, fences, Coaco Puffs cereal boxes, chairs, tables, barns, books, Happy Birthday banners, park benches, condos, Marlboro Ultra Lights, wallpaper, ceiling fans, hell, even letters to our aforementioned grandmothers. We're not trying to suggest we don't need this stuff (especially the Coaco Puffs). Most of it we do. But we (and by “we– I mean almost every single one of us including your friendly-neighborhood editors at Progressive Wednesday) forget about how this stuff came to be.
2. Trees are beautiful. We treat them like they're not.
And, if we needed more reasons to reconsider our treatment of trees, then there are these six brand-spanking-new troubling and weird facts about trees:
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Make Progress:
When I sat down and thought about it this week (and I don't mean on the couch in my shrink's office), I realized that I have fond memories of trees. I spent much of my youth in very, very rural America. The current population of my town? 1,488. I'm shocked we even have a zip code. The number of traffic lights? One. It serves no other purpose than decoration. While my area was short on, you know, humans, I did grow up surrounded by beautiful trees.
Swamp elms, silver maples, crabapples, pines, a redbud, a king crimson maple, ornamental pear trees, a little leaf linden, arborvitae, ash, and a river birch thrived in our yard. My parents planted a dwarf red delicious tree, an early Macintosh, a peach tree. We picked fresh fruits and gobbled them up, often able to eat an apple a day. Come early autumn, my mother peeled, pulverized and presser-cooked the fruits into jars of homemade applesauce.
My sister and I called the undeveloped land next to our house “the woods,– and we climbed trees, played with our pals, built forts, swung on vines, and sought out rabbits and groundhogs and squirrels. When a tree died in our yard, my old man pulled out an ax, and we stacked firewood to warm us during the frigid winters. Summers, our trees filled with robins, sparrows, and doves, and I woke, not to an alarm clock, but to the songs of birds.
As stewards of the environment, we have a duty to help trees, those towering plants, flourish. For the sake of the air, the animals, and, lest we forget, ourselves, let us celebrate Arbor Day the right way.
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April 18th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday
Write:
We know you live hectic lives, and so let us help you help others. While we always will encourage you to write letters to the editor of your own, we recognize that this can be a time-consuming and potentially daunting task. So, below you'll find a letter we've written, revised, and vetted over the past week. Feel free to copy, paste, alter, print, sign, fold, envelope, stamp, address, and ship this sucker off to your newspaper of choice.
Dear Editor:
April 27 is Arbor Day, a somewhat forgotten day celebrating trees, and celebrate them we should. Trees are like the lungs of our planet, inhaling carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen. They clean toxins from the air, and give us better air to breathe.
There are many things we can do to help the population of trees. We can plant trees ourselves — the National Arbor Day Foundation even offers free seedlings for a measly $10 membership fee.
We can help stop the destruction of the rain forests — at EcologyFund.com, folks can make a few simple clicks of the mouse and help save rainforests and the animals thriving in them.
But there's a third, very easy thing we can all do: we can recycle paper products. I encourage everyone to take another look at this fine newspaper. Learn from its stories. Mourn its obituaries. Chuckle at its comics. Then, my fellow readers, please recycle it.
Sincerely,
You
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