Similar to No Impact Man this couple undertook a year long challenge to stop making trash! Check out their website and film!
Tag Archive for 'trash'
At an event recently I met a great guy who created Garbage for Lent! This year, for the first time, he has signed on several churches to participate in giving up garbage for 40 days! Wow!
What is Lent? Well! According to Wikipedia:
Lent (Latin: Quadragesima, “fortieth”[1]) is the Christian observance of the liturgical season from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday.
Lent is a time for sacrifice for Christians. You must sacrfice something dear to you, and some believe you may take pleasure in it on Sunday, however most believe that you cannot for the entire forty days. Its institutional purpose is heightened in the annual commemoration of Holy Week, marking the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events of the Passion of Christ on Good Friday, which then culminates in the celebration on Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
During Lent, many of the faithful commit to fasting or giving up certain types of luxury as a form of penitence…
There are so many traditions in the world and I think they all have a message of compassion. I think it’s great when we can use that compassion to extend to the Earth as well!
For some reason I have garbage on the brain this week. And yes, I’m talking down in the gutter, dirty, nasty, filthy stinking garbage. The kind of garbage you hide from your parents; that you would be ashamed to show your neighbors. Trash so bad that it has to be taken out to some remote location in the scorching, barren desert and abandoned.
Welcome to the desert country of Pima County in Tucson, Arizona. Home to some of the worst and most blatant illegal dump crimes in the Nation. It is also home to one K.C. Custer — Environmental Investigator at large.
ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S BATTLE
Think of him like a trash Private Eye: an Eco-Sherlock Holmes. Armed with Surgical gloves, sanitary wipes, a GPS, a digital camera, a 4×4 pickup truck named Watson (okay, so I made that last part up)… K.C. Custer spends his days covering vast tracks of desert pursuing, rummaging through and ultimately uncovering the hidden secrets of abandoned refuse. It is a job he has been doing for the last 20 years. A job which he created and maintains out of his passion for justice and a trash free community.
Here’s how it works: Custer finds an illegal dump site (know as “wildcat dumps”) out in the desert. He searches through the trash by hand, looking for any clues: discarded documents with phone numbers, names written on the washtag of shirts, serial numbers on hardwire or discarded furniture. Then he uses his deductive skills and gathered information to track down the perpetrators and bring them to justice. In this case, as an enforcer of state law, Custer hits illegal dumpers with heavy fines (up to $500 a day for every day the trash sits there)… as well as making them collect and dispose of their illegal trash properly.
Here’s the inspiring part — while Custer now makes a decent living as an Environmental Investigator, he started out as an ordinary eco-conscious citizen who refused to let the garbage piles grow. For years he protested so vocally about illegal dumping that the county finally passed an ordinance banning it. Then they hired him to enforce it. It is a job he designed, built from his passion and pursuit of environmental awareness and responsibility. In his opinion,a crime against nature is just as wrong as a crime against humanity. In fact, a crime against nature IS a crime against humanity
Which reminds of the comment Superforester Candance wrote in response to my last post on trash that was so diamond-sharp and brilliant, I have to share it here:
“The other day when picking up trash I was thinking about how gross it is. Trying to use the least amount of fingers for the job, holding it as far from my clean t-shirt as I could. And then I thought about how gross it is for the Earth. How does the soil feel about plastic? It can’t be broken down and created into new beautiful flowers or worm food. Yuk.”
So true. K.C. Custer is a one-man trash crusader. And we need more people like him who care this much about our environment; who will get their fingers and clothes dirty in the process of making our world a better, cleaner place. And guess what, “those people” are YOU! What’s to stop you from grabbing a cloth bags, throwing on some running shoes and collecting loose trash? Or starting your own Environmental Investigation Bureau? All it takes is a little awareness, an extra inch of effort and a whole lot of enthusiasm.
And as we here at Superforest already know, once you get momentum… positivity is the most sustainable energy there is.
–Aaron
Tim Noble & Sue Webster, two lovely, London based artists in LOVE create magnificent shadow art from trash. A pile of seemingly ugly rubbish is meticulously arranged by the duo and back lit to create glorious scenes of simple lovely human existence.
LOVE,
TV
Hey everyone,
“An estimated 133,000 computers are discarded by homes and businesses EVERYDAY!”
If you haven’t realized yet, I love finding out what happens to all of our trash we throw into trash cans.
By now, we all know that we need to recycle our electronics. In fact, there are signs all over NYC right now for an Electronic Recycling Event happening this weekend.
The short of it is that it all gets shredded on a 60 ft. long conveyor belt and made into shreds, no longer than 4″ long.
“At the end of the shredding process, the e-scrap is shipped in 2,000-pound storage containers to a company in Canada where it is ground and pulverized into its very low-tech base components: small particles of copper, plastic, steel, silver, gold, platinum. This material is then sold to companies that use it in other products.”
This seems like a long way to travel, but I can only hope that they are doing their homework and this is the most efficient way to be handling these scraps.
I love the images: (courtesy of Maxine Hicks for the NY Times)
Thank you to the New York Times for getting the dirt on this!
Happy Thursday!
Niki
Good Evening!
Just saw this crazy chandelier on SwissMiss:
You may not want to hang this chandelier in your living room (or maybe you do?), but the concept is great.
“Dutch Designer Anneke Jakobs collected discarded cartons in the street during her days as a student at the Utrecht School of Product Design. Ten cartons make up the luxe chandelier. Desktop paper fasteners hold it all together.”
It is from a site called Point Click Home, where they have an article with a bunch of well designed products, all made out of items that normally end up in the trash.
Take a look, they have some great looking stuff:
This is made out of 334 newspapers the artist collected off the street.
This is made from 100% domestic recycled plastic waste.
This chandelier is made from hundreds of discarded plastic stirrers.
These lamps are made from bottom of clear bottles.
These lamps are made from used plastic packaging.
For more information on each of the artists that created these items, you can go to their site.
Of course, we prefer when trash is reused, but we love when it receives CPR, has a much longer life and looks even better than before!
Thanks again to SwissMiss for the info!
Have a great evening,
Niki
Morning All!
I read Niki’s post about NYC’s recycling plan with interest, because trash and our methods of dealing with it have been in the forefront of my mind ever since I saw an amazing piece on Korean television about a Canadian company called Plasco Energy.
Plasco just may have got this whole “trash” thing figured out.
Using a technique called Plasma Gasification, they’ve devised a way to reduce landfill content by 99.9 percent. You heard that right: Ninety-nine point nine percent.
Here’s how their system works:
Municipal solid waste arrives at the Plasco facility where it is shredded.
Recyclables are sifted and sorted out.
What’s left is run through past electric plasma torches in high heat, but almost zero oxygen. This results in decomposition, not combustion. So no smoke is produced, just usable gases. These gases are refined into fuel gas and used to power Plasco’s operation. Meaning, once the system is started, it is self-sustaining, needing only more trash to keep running.
Furthermore, the gases produced are also used to run a series of generators which create electric power. This power is then sold to the grid.
All material left over is then run past the plasma torches a second time, turning decomposed ash into a crystalline, glass-like material which is non-toxic, non-leaching, and can be used as roadbed aggregate, in construction materials, even polished and set to create jewelry. It looks a bit like obsidian, and personally, I think it would make some very cool black brick.
Any water that comes out of the process is perfectly clean and can be used for irrigation purposes.
So, just to recap:
Trash in.
Recyclables, power, fuel, salt, sulfur, clean water, and black glass-like material out.
What’s left? .1 percent heavy metals from improperly disposed trash; things like batteries and paints.
And it gets better. Plasco’s operation, besides being self-sustaining and extremely productive, is very quiet, modular so it can be scaled to whatever size you need, and doesn’t stink up the neighborhood.
New York currently has to pay $90 per ton of trash in hauling and disposal fees.
With a Plasco system in place, NY could be making $15 a ton.
Think what this technology means to the future of NYC.
Instead of looking at trash as a problem, we realize that it is a huge asset.
Fresh Kills Landfill becomes Fresh Kills Mine. Plasma gasification quietly and efficiently turns countless tons of our trash into wonderful usable products like gas and electricity while making our city money!
How nice is that? A landfill is just a mine in reverse!
And you don’t even have to sort your trash anymore.
(Personally, I’ve never understood why the onus of dealing with municipal waste fell on the private citizen. Isn’t the whole point of a state and federal government to deal with that issue, among others? Isn’t the point of those institutions existing to let us live our lives happily, cleanly, and productively? Shouldn’t we be free of the worry that our trash is going to harm our environment?)
Really, what are you and I supposed to do with an aluminum can? A dirty diaper? Our take-out containers?
Plasma gasification, that’s what.
Waste = Food!
Waste = Energy!
Waste = $$$!
What do you think? Should we start a “polite declaration of intention” and ask Mayor Bloomberg to invite Plasco to set up shop in NYC?
It would eliminate 99.9 percent of my concerns about the future of NYC’s trash.
Love to all,
-Jackson
Here’s Plasco’s website: Plasco Energy
And here’s Plasco’s wiki
Hello All!
I was on the subway today when I saw these lovely trash cans.
I’ve heard rumors about all our trash being sorted and recycled, but is it true? Why not have separate bins? I did some digging and I thought I’d share what I found out. Apparently, all the trash goes to a place in NJ called All American Recycling in Jersey City. It gets sorted on conveyer belts and 25 people pick out the trash that can get recycled. 40% of the trash can actually be taken out and recycled! Which is about 7100 tons! That’s lots!
Click here to see an interview with a lady who followed the trash to the recycling center and explaining why separate bins wouldn’t help the situation (which is debatable).
So, it’s true! Pretty impressive.
That’s all!
Niki
Morning all!
Just saw this post over at treehugger about a Japanese man who made a gorgeous canoe out of discarded chopsticks.
That post led us to another post about a Florida man who made a full-scale Viking ship out of popsicle sticks.
Okay, here’s the main point.
As these makers have shown us, there is no such thing as trash.
“Trash” is just a jumble of resources whose useful life we’ve arbitrarily decided to end.
Trash, in its component bits, is all good stuff. Recyclables, compostables, precious metals, ship-building materials.
A “landfill” is just a huge pile of crushed and layered resources. Think of how many boats could be made out of the materials in Fresh Kills Landfill? How many houses? How much gold is layered in there? Silver? Diamonds?
Luckily, landfills aren’t going anywhere. They will sit quietly until we are ready to face them.
So, the idea of trash is trashed. Use your resources to the fullest possible extent. Make a boat.
Love to all,
Team SF
Apparently, Switzerland’s trash situation is so together, they have specific trash cans just for batteries.
NYC needs these too.
Here’s a great International Herald Tribune article about “waste collection” in Zurich.
Have a good Monday.
-Jackson
(Thanks to Andrew for the photo.)
Recent Comments