Anheuser-Busch, via an industry sponsored fake environmental website, promotes the idea that recycling of waste is not the problem of, or responsibility of, the companies that produce and distribute the disposable products.
Their Baldwinsville, NY facility is the 11th largest discharger of toxic waste into water in the US.
How many recycled cans would make up for that?
The Garden State Subversive writes about disposable clothing, suggesting we “buy alternative fibers such as bamboo and hemp”, OK, but what about wool? Pretty much lasts forever. Kind of a pain to wash, I guess. Also comes from sheep. Not efficient.
Anyway, in the article she links, the claim is made that “once bought, an estimated 21% of annual clothing purchases stay in the home”.
Does this mean people throw out 79% of the clothing they buy every year?
Just finished Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte. Quite good. It starts out like a sort of new-journalism Rubbish, but gets tougher. She goes places Cullen and Rathje didn’t (like, the Mafia and carting), and asks good questions (why do we bring drinking water from the Catskills, only to shit in it, then expend a huge amount of energy removing the shit so it can be dumped back in the river?).
Recommended, though I will be taking a break from reading books about waste. Really, and she talks about this at the end of the book, source reduction is the solution. For everything we buy, there is a huge consumption of resource just to get it to us. That’s where the real environmental and resource problem lies. Pushing recycling on the consumer is a way to divert responsibility from the manufacturers of this crap.
Couple of companies in Evanston Indiana want to be the first in the world to provide full-scale waste-to-energy plants with processes previously used only in demonstration projects. This means turning not just a specific, controlled industrial waste stream, but the insanity that is municipal solid waste.
“The thorny question of where to build such a plant is yet to be answered.”
Pretty good timeline courtesy of the Daily Apple blog
[Via the delicious Wasted Food blog:]
Using excreta in the digesters helps manage human waste at source and avoids ground water contamination. BIOTECH’S use of latrines is considered to be a major breakthrough in combating water and air-pollution. Mrs Anna Benedict from Kumbalangi island panchayat, comments: “Before we had the plant, all the waste went into the sea. Now we have a latrine and biogas plant, the waste is treated properly.”
BIOTECH is a company that sets up waste digesters in Kerala. A small digester for a home can produce two hours’ worth of gas a day. The effluent is suitable for fertilizer. Larger plants use waste from the municipal fish market.
Makes me wonder what the local municpal fish markets do with their waste.
Treehugger points to a portable biomass generator as well.
My writing style is stiff and boring, and wholly unfit for the business of writing about such a lively subject as municpal solid waste. I need to garbage-juice it up a bit. To this end shall all my powers of cogitation be employed.
Fruit, especially expensive fruit, is now often sold in little foam sleeves.
Before you get too upset about this practice, though, think about the amount of energy it takes to grow and transport a banana to your local grocery store. If the banana gets damaged, it’s going into the waste stream uneaten, as does about half of the food in the US, according to a study by Timothy Jones of the University of Arizona. [Link via the hyper-specialized Wasted Food blog. I am so happy that there is a wasted food blog.]
This is extremely disgusting. I warn you: frog heads. But, as one commenter says, “Studying garbage is studying its culture.” (You get the idea. I don’t suggest you try to diagram that sentence.)