Difference between revisions of "Category:Solid Waste"

This category relates to landfills with regard to space and hazards. Also recycling, sewage and e-waste. See also Plastic as well as Consumption and Sustainability, and Chemicals, as well as Global Warming, and beleive it or not Art for some creative recycling.

News Articles and Reports

Sewage

No flush toilets

A gourmet meal is cooked in compost

Four teenage girls in Africa have invented a generator powered by pee

Hack the toilet 9/12.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell": Concerned Citizen Uncovers Whole Foods' Policy on Selling Food Grown in Sewage Sludge 12/12

Matt Damon toilet strike

Food Waste (see also Food Scarcity

This restaurant fines customers who waste food .

Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal TEDtalk. (his book).

For Restaurants, Food Waste Is Seen As Low Priority, contributes methane to global warming. 11/12.

Omaha teenager starts a program to donate ungrateful kids’ fruit to the hungry

AmpleHarvest connects home gardeners to hungry people.

Food waste in rich and poor countries for different reasons.

Don’t toss your cookies: Curbing the crisis of food waste 8/12.

Fuel From Waste, Poised at a Milestone 11/12

Starbucks' Food Waste Fuels Experimental Biorefinery 9/12.

Low waste grocery store 7/11

College Composting programs (includes UCSC) 12/10

Peer to Peer

Collaborative Consumption is named by Grist as trend of year more, i.e., the fine art of networked, consensual mooching. At the risk of sounding like a dangerous commie: It turns out there's basically no reason to be the sole owner of anything ever again. A great directory. More programs 5/12. Interview with Shareable founder on his epiphany. (Also see social entrepreneurs). 1/13

Trashswag allows people to post the location of these curbside treasures online, with photos, to alert other potentially interested parties of their find.

Bike-sharing program peer to peer. 12/12 other programs.

eBay is trying to help solve the ewaste problem with their Instant Sale program, a new way to sell electronics for cash or recycle them for free through their extensive network of electronics resellers...They’ll send a box for free shipping and deposit the money into your PayPal account. Even if the item has no value, you can still earn karma points by sending your gadget to them free of charge so it can be recycled.

Other News

Green Nobel Prize won by Rossano Ercolini, Italy (video). An elementary school teacher, Ercolini began a public education campaign about the dangers of incinerators in his small Tuscan town that grew into a national Zero Waste movement. Also, unfazed by powerful political opponents and a pervasive culture of violence, Nohra Padilla organized Colombia’s marginalized waste pickers to make recycling a legitimate part of waste management.

Zero Waste, Packaging-Free Grocery Store to Rock in Texas. 3/13. wastebasket with built in recycling/composting.

Disappearing packaging could save 70 million tons of waste a year 2/13.

NYC may ban styrofoam, up composting (cf. SF).

This office building is made entirely out of recycled paper.

Sweden recycles so effectively that it has to import garbage to incinerate 9/12.

Apple opts out of green standards. 7.12 (e-waste)

The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson wrote a simple and solid overview of a report released this week by the World Bank. The report, “What a Waste: A Global Review of Solid Waste Management,” is a thorough assessment of the world’s current and future garbage production. 6.12.

Recycling in America series from KQED's Quest.

Seattle gets creative 4/12.

Smart-trash uses barcode or RFID to track waste

Excellent article on plastic in the Pacific Gyre

Article on plastic bags at Salon.com

Article "The truth about recycling" in The Economist (Jun 7th 2007) has good history

An excellent article on bottled water. One on Fiji water.

Overview of Plastic's effect, especially on Marine ecosystems. Includes videos and legislation you can take action on.

Info on recycling cans and bottles.

humor

Video

Cars made into bikes

San Francico has gotten to 80% diversion from landfills with composting, heading for 100%. PBS NewsHour 1/13.

Director Lucy Walker spent months filming the stories of garbage pickers working at Rio de Janeiro's Jardim Gramacho, one of the world's largest landfills, for her 2011 Academy Award-nominated documentary, Waste Land. (trailer)After her Waste Land experience, Lucy set out to learn what happens to Los Angeles' garbage. slideshow and video) 7/11

The Story of Stuff is a fine overview (but don't cite it in a college paper, it's a cartoon).

The Story of Electronics, about e-waste, from the people who brought you The Story of Stuff. See also the story of bottled water.

Penn and Teller's humorous take on the subject of bottled water.

The Story of Cell Phones (video) and what to do about them. Link.

Music made from landfill junk.

No Impact Man is the story of a family in New York that does an experiment: live for a year without impacting the environment. Surprisingly entertaining and enlightening.

Bag It documentary on plastic.

Fun mocumentary on the plastic bag.alt link Related: Lords of Recycling. Humor

Are mushrooms the new plastic? (TEDtalk video)

Energy from floating algae pods Call it "fuel without fossils": Jonathan Trent is working on a plan to grow new biofuel by farming micro-algae in floating offshore pods that eat wastewater from cities. TEDtalk 9/12.

Tapped, a new documentary about the bottled water industry from director Stephanie Soechtig and the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car?, is a pretty damning look at how consumers have been tricked into spending too much money on water packaged in plastic and quite often not as clean as what's available from the faucet.trailer

Trash free couple, Julia Butterfly Hill, trash becomes art.

Trashed is quite good, now showing on PBS.

The Secret Life Of Paper. Americans consume more paper than anyone else on the planet. In 2006, Americans consumed 663 pounds of paper per person, versus 448 pounds in the UK and 136 pounds in Mexico. Yet very few of us stop to think about what constitutes responsible paper usage. Most are also unaware of the connection between the production and consumption of paper and global warming. In fact, the pulp and paper industry is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the US manufacturing sector.

Tom Szaky visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss his book "Revolution in a Bottle: How TerraCycle is Redefining Green Business."Green@Google series. (video).

Poop and paddle demonstrates how sewage and rainwater can be converted to cattails and clean water. (video).

Websites

Get info on your dump

EPA Waste page

Six least recyclable packaging

Books

In Trash Backwards, journalist David Naylor spotlights intriguing ways entrepreneurs are reducing our trash burden. He travels to major US cities including Los Angeles, Charleston, Seattle, Milwaukee, and Atlanta to meet creative thinkers who put a fresh perspective on the saying 'one man's trash is another's treasure.' (published by Island Press, go Slugs!)

Moby Duck (short article/audio) and longer interview with text excerpt. In 1992, a cargo ship container tumbled into the North Pacific, dumping 28,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys that were headed from China to the U.S. Currents took them, and news reports said some may have eventually reached Maine and other shores on the Atlantic. Thirteen years later, journalist Donovan Hohn undertook a mission: He wanted to track the movements of the wayward ducks, from the comfort of his own living room. It didn't work out that way, as you can tell from the complete title: Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It)by Jonathan Bloom.

Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880-1980 by Martin V. Melosi S&E Stacks TD893.M44 review

Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World by Daniel Imhoff

Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser

Elizabeth Royte's new book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It (includes Podcast interview) Her previous book Garbage Land is a good read.

Peter Gleick, a freshwater expert, is the author of Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water link to book and npr audio interview. Here's another interview 6/10, with an industry representative. The book is published by an UC alum who runs Island Press, which offers videochats with author. KQED interview.

Audio

Recycling in America KQED series.

How to Get to Zero Waste: Is the curbside garbage can headed for the dustbin of history? The city of Palo Alto has launched a pilot project that eliminates curbside garbage bins, using only compost and recycling bins. The aim of the project is to achieve zero landfill waste, a goal San Francisco and other Bay Area cities also hope to reach. We talk about what consumers can do to reduce waste and keep their compostable and recyclable trash out of the landfill.

Elizabeth Royte interviewed on new book Bottlemania on water bottles.

Elizabeth Royte's new book Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It (includes Podcast interview) Her previous book Garbage Land is a good read.

Boat Made of Plastic Bottles to Sail the Pacific. How do you raise awareness about plastic debris floating in the Pacific? You sail a boat made out of 15,000 plastic bottles from California to Hawaii. Marine scientists Joel Paschal and Marcus Erikson discuss their voyage.

Images, Maps and Charts

E-waste infographic.

US waste facilities

Plastic Ocean Waste Poster

Stunning images of accumulated consumer goods and resources by Chris Jordan. TEDtalk video PBS episode. Chris Jordan's heart-rending images of Albatross chicks who starved to death with their stomachs full of plastic. video of same

Photographer Edward Burtynsky documents how humans alter the world, and to a lesser degree the people engaged in doing the work (example). Video of TEDtalk accepting his award. A video, Manufactured Landscapes, (trailer) was made about his trip to China and its factories and the Three Gorges Dam. Excerpt.

Specific Topics

E-waste (see also Environmental Justice)

Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition is a great resource. See also Mapcruzin by Slug Mike Meuser *** South Bay map, SF Bay cumulative exposures, contaminated Bay Area groundwater. E-Waste recycling in Ghana by kids from Global 3000. 60 Minutes expose on China.

The Digital Dump: Exporting Re-Use and Abuse to Africa.

bike powered e-Waste recycling device.

Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia.

Your Smartphone's Dirty, Radioactive Secret. The rare earths inside microcomputers make our lives easier. But just how toxic are the guts of your smartphone? See also conflict minerals, e.g., coltan in Africa.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch See also Plastic page

Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. TEDtalk. See also Synthetic Sea Preview from Algalita Foundation on plastic gyre.

Pacific gyre filled with plastic. PBS news segment featuring UCSC folk. [7/16 update audio. Gyre slideshow

Sewage/Composting

College Composting programs (includes UCSC) 12/10

Gates funded toilet 11/12

No flush toilets

A gourmet meal is cooked in compost

Four teenage girls in Africa have invented a generator powered by pee

Hack the toilet 9/12.

Local Resources

Compost Santa Cruz Country has resources including vermicomposting with worms, see also The Worm Dude who abideth.

UCSC Sustainability video overview, including dining hall efforts.

College Composting programs (includes UCSC) 12/10