Tag: trash

Can’t Flush This

Posted on by robbie

Safe sex can be bad for the environment — if you don’t dispose of your condoms correctly.
It’s one of the larger problems for sewage plants around the world: lovers who toss their used condoms in a toilet instead of the trash. Condoms cause problems by clogging sewage drains around the world.
From London’s infamous “Johnnyberg” to an Austin, Texas, clog that led to a prostitution bust, the latex that protects you from STDs and unwanted pregnancies is costing taxpayers millions a year to unclog from pipes and sewers.
But condoms aren’t solely to blame for sewage backups and overflows. Many things clog sewers, which can lead not only to pricey repairs, but the resulting gunk can also overwhelm treatment plants and get washed out to our waterways and oceans.
Here’s a list of just a few things that experts say not to put in the toilet, along with some alternatives to just flushing it all away.

Grease

If you really want to be terrified of the sewer, don’t just look for Pennywise. Look up “fatberg” on Google.
This is your trigger warning.
“Fatbergs” are fairly common. A 2014 study found that 47 percent of the 36,000 sewage overflows in the U.S. occurred because of fat clogs in sewers. And it happens because the fat you pour down the drain mixes with calcium in the drain pipes and it all globs together like…a big sewer-clogging glob. Ultimately, that buildup can cost thousands of dollars to repair, not to mention that oil and grease from our sewer systems damages our beaches and oceans.
As an alternative: Throw that bacon grease in the waste bin. Or, if you use a lot of vegetable oil when you cook, you can turn your beater into a greaser.

Dental Floss

Typically, what goes in your mouth will end up in your toilet. But there’s a caveat to this rule: dental floss.
Dental floss is made of nylon or teflon and doesn’t biodegrade easily. Eventually, what it turns into is a big ol’ ball of yuck.
“When [floss gets] into the wastewater system [it ends] up balling up into these big clumps and getting the workings of our system stuck or broken,” Andrea Pook, spokeswoman for the East Bay Municipal Utility District, tells the Huffington Post.
As an alternative: Try biodegradable silk floss or a water flosser.

Toilet 2
Small household items that we flush down the toilet add thousands of tons of waste to our oceans.

Tampons

Despite their small size, tampons don’t do well in sewage systems. Their absorbent qualities and the string attached to them makes it difficult to break down in sewage systems.
The best way to dispose of them is just to toss them in the garbage.
“It’s best to simply wrap a used tampon in toilet paper and toss it in the garbage, or, if you’re in a public washroom, place it in the waste receptacle for feminine hygiene products,” Playtex, a company that makes tampons, says on its website.
As an alternative: Try using a menstrual cup like the silicone Diva Cup, which can last up to 10 years.

Medicine

Wastewater treatment plants aren’t designed to filter out medicines. As a result, only half of the drugs people throw down the toilet are actually filtered out by sewage treatment.
In 2002, the US Geological Survey found that 80 percent of stream waters studied were contaminated to some degree with pharmaceuticals or hormones. In a more recent survey, 118 pharmaceuticals were found in 25 treatment plants across the states.
In the Great Lakes, six chemicals were detected frequently and had a low rate of removal in treated water, including an anti-seizure drug and an herbicide.
As an alternative: Stockpile your medicines and then turn them in on Oct. 27 during the National Prescription Drug Take Back Day (the website also has a handy collection site locator tool).

Contact lenses

Contacts might just be little bitty things, but when you figure that more than 45 million people wear them in the U.S. alone, and collectively throw away around 14 billion lenses annually, that adds up to a lot of plastic getting flushed down the john. Making matters worse, contact lenses — like most plastics — don’t biodegrade easily, and tend to break down into microparticles that float into the ocean and add to the 93,000 to 236,000 metric tons of microplastic current in our oceans.
As an alternative: Extended wear lenses…or just get glasses. If you do go disposable, TerraCycle and Bausch + Lomb have partnered to create a free recycling program for some lenses and packaging.

This Hardworking Group Is Restoring the Shoreline of America’s Last Frontier

Posted on by robbie

About 30 years ago, then-construction worker Chris Pallister discovered that some of the most remote shorelines in America were also the most polluted. The cause? Currents off the infamous North Pacific Gyre — the site of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — propel a disproportionate amount of detrius towards Alaska’s coasts.
To cleanup the Last Frontier, Pallister founded Gulf of Alaska Keeper, an organization that’s been actively cleaning beaches in Prince William Sound and the Northern Gulf Coast since 2002. The nonprofit’s five boats, seasonal crew of 12 and dozens of regular volunteers has removed an estimated 2.5 million pounds of marine debris (mostly plastic items) from more than 1,500 miles of coastline. Pallister knows that there needs to be an immense effort to stop this pollution at the source, but in the meantime, he says, “somebody has to keep this stuff cleaned up.”
See the largest ongoing marine debris cleanup by watching the video above.

Why This Man is Dumpster Diving for His Meals

Posted on by robbie

Did you know that about 40 percent of the food in this country is completely wasted to the tune of $165 billion a year? After hearing that, does it make you wonder why 1 in 6 Americans don’t have enough money to put food on their table? Or why 46.2 million individuals rely on food stamps? Where does all this food even go?
The answers are multi-faceted (and you can read why here). But one reason why a mountain of waste piles up every day is because grocery stores dump perfectly edible food.
Environmental activist Rob Greenfield is trying to bring awareness to this troubling practice by biking across the country and solely eating out of the dumpsters of supermarkets and convenience stores. With a solar generator, his bamboo bike and $2,000 in cash that he earned through his marketing company, the 28-year-old started peddling from San Diego on June 2 and hopes to reach New York City by Sept. 26.
Trust us, even though he’s eating “trash,” the pickings aren’t slim. “The most surprising thing is the quantity of food I find,” Greenfield tells NationSwell, during a stopover in northern Baltimore. “Time and time again, it’s full to the brim of perfectly good bread, fruits and vegetables. [It’s food like] packaged rice and oatmeal — things that never go bad and don’t get people sick.” Recently at a local dumpster, he found unopened Sunchips and Oreo cookies along with meat that was still cold, including chicken breast and steak. He even found a pack of vitamin supplement Emergen-C with a Feb. 2015 expiration date.
He also shares an experience at a CVS drugstore in Mays Chapel where he found boxes of feminine pads, toothpaste and diapers. “That stuff women’s shelters could use,” he says. “There is no excuse to throw away diapers.” After confronting the drugstore chain on Twitter, the store responded, “We have a product donation policy that our stores follow for unsold products that are being removed from our stores,” adding, “Occasionally there are products that seem ‘perfectly good’ but are in a condition that wouldn’t allow them to be donated.”
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
Following that exchange, Greenfield noted that the date of expiration for the products wasn’t for months.
It’s time this country gets smarter about food — and an easy way to do so is to start with where we shop. “The purpose of all of this is to motivate and encourage grocery stores to stop dumping food and start donating it [to] food rescue programs and food banks that exist already across America,” Greenfield writes on his blog. “There is a huge misconception among many people that grocery stores are either not allowed to donate excess food or would be liable for lawsuit but the law is actually on their side.”
Greenfield himself lives an extremely modest lifestyle. His 4,700-mile solo trip, dubbed “Off the Grid Across America,” is removed from all our modern comforts, including electricity and showers. That $2,000 he initially started out with dwindled down to $420, which he ended up donating to charity. (“I found that when you don’t have money you’re forced to be part of your community and you’re a problem solver and not a consumer,” he says) As for where he sleeps, Greenfield crashes at a friend’s home or sets up camp at a public park, the desert or the woods.
Greenfield has stayed remarkably positive throughout his journey, especially when he finds that so many people he’s met along the way support his mission: “It’s mind-blowing how many people care. No one thinks food should be in the dumpster in the first place.”
“It’s going to take a lot of changes to completely solve this, but definitely the most important is that everyone in America knows the problem,” he adds. “Awareness comes first.”
So how else can we help Greenfield’s cause? “Take out your smartphones, walk behind your grocery store, and open up the Dumpster,” he tells TakePart. “If you see food inside, take a picture or video and tweet it at the store, telling them to #DonateNotDump.” Greenfield also suggests asking store managers if they’re donating unwanted edible food to shelters or food banks (such as Feeding America).
Even if we don’t have the stomach to eat food out of a dumpster like Rob Greenfield, together we can help make sure this food doesn’t get there in the first place.
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DON’T MISS: NYC’s Solution for Food Waste Should Happen in Schools Everywhere

When San Jose’s Homeless Work to Clean Up Their Community, They Receive Food, Housing, and Even Jobs

Posted on by robbie

Now this is an idea that can potentially transform communities.
In San Jose, California, the homeless are being hired to clean the city streets in exchange for food, housing and job placement, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
This program comes from a novel partnership between Groundwerx, a group that provides cleaning services to downtown San Jose, and the Downtown Streets Team, a nonprofit that works to combat homelessness in Silicon Valley. According to KTVU, this is a new initiative for the north California city and is being tested for a year.
MORE: This Innovative Program Found Housing for 200 Homeless Veterans in Just 100 Days
Everyone wins with this approach since it helps reduce the city’s litter while providing much-needed assistance to people who are down on their luck. Although the program only launched earlier this month, the Mercury News reports that it’s already seen its share of success stories. Participants such as Chester Shattuck, 53, who helped clean San Jose’s downtown, was finally able to find housing after being on the streets for four years.
Not only that, but participants are also learning all-important job skills, too. Former high school peer counselor Marcellous McDonald told the publication that thanks to the regularity of his job as a trash collector and working with others who also want to get back on track, he was able to find his footing and secure employment with Levi’s Stadium, which is home to the San Francisco 49ers football team.
It’s initiatives like these that prove those without homes need a second chance. “People can be iffy about the homeless, and we are here to show that we don’t want to be homeless anymore,” McDonald said. “I might have lost my way, but I am getting there. Some people are slow to get back at it, some people pick up right where they left off.”
DON’T MISS: Utah Is on Track to End Homelessness by 2015 With This One Simple Idea
 

Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)

Posted on by robbie

If you’re anything like us, you’re constantly trying to figure out, Can I recycle this or not? We wish the rules were simple and consistent, but what you can recycle (takeout containers? shipping boxes? junk mail?) and where (curbside? recycling center?) largely depends on what your local municipality can — or will — handle.

The good news is that with a little effort, you can achieve zero waste. If you can’t leave a particular item curbside or in your apartment building’s recycling bins, for example, you can probably take it to a recycling center or donate it to a specialized recycling company like TerraCycle, an international firm that collects hard-to-recycle items and repurposes them into resalable products.
In 2012 alone, Americans recycled and composted 87 million tons of municipal solid waste, eliminating more than 168 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, and saving 1.1 quadrillion British thermal units of energy — enough to power about 10 million households in the United States for a year. Decent numbers, but given that U.S. households create more than 251 million tons of trash a year, half of which ends up in landfills, we still have a long way to go. So, we asked Albe Zakes, global vice president of communications at TerraCycle, to help us get there. Here’s his simple guide of recycling do’s and don’ts. We hope you’ll pick up some key pointers. We sure did.
MORE: How One County Makes Sure Their Trash Doesn’t Go to Waste

5 Items You Can’t Recycle

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ALSO: You’ll Never Guess What NYC Is Turning Its Biggest Trash Heap Into

5 Items You Should Always Recycle

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These 10 tips are just a starting point. The ultimate goal is to rethink your lifestyle and reduce the amount of waste you produce to begin with. As the mantra goes: Reduce, reuse and recycle. “They’re in that order for a reason,” Zakes says. If you can’t reduce your consumption, reuse what you can; if you can’t reuse it, then recycle — even if it takes additional effort. “In reality, almost everything can be recycled,” Zakes says. “The only reason that something is considered ‘nonrecyclable’ is the economics behind it. So the cost of collecting and processing the material is too high versus the revenue that the end material creates.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that all aerosol cans cannot be recycled. NationSwell apologies for the error.
ALSO: One Company’s Quest to Reduce eWaste in Landfills
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This Sandwich Shop’s Ridiculously Small Amount of Waste Will Shock You

Posted on by robbie

The amount of garbage produced by a Chicago restauranteur might surprise you. No, there aren’t mounds and mounds of black plastic trash bags heaped in back of Lake View’s Sandwich Me In. Rather, all the garbage that has been collected in the two years the shop has been open sits in just one eight-gallon trash bin, Truth Atlas reports. And most of that waste didn’t come from the restaurant; it was created by customers tossing their disposable coffee cups.
Clearly, the owner Justin Vrany is serious about the environment. Because he only buys fresh, seasonal food from local farmers markets, he avoids processed foods and the packaging that comes along with it. He also uses as much of the food as possible—smoked skins for his salads, bones for broth, vegetable leftovers for burger patties. Any leftover waste is all composted or recycled. In fact, he personally takes his trash to a Whole Foods so he knows that it’s being recycled. He also sends his compost to a local farm so it goes back to feed the livestock or fertilize the land. (In case you’re wondering how the rest of us stack up in comparison, EPA estimates from 2011 found that the average American generates 4.40 pounds of trash a day.)
MORE: How Used Cooking Oil Can Have an Extraordinary Second Life
And it’s not just sustainable food that the shop can boast about. According to Sandwich Me In’s site, 90 percent of the restaurant was built out of reused materials from the existing store, and all of their equipment and furniture was refurbished. They recycle their oil to maintain bio-diesel engines and use wind to generate all the power for the restaurant. Sandwich Me In says on its site, “Our goal is to help the community become aware of sustainable options available to them and to grow together in knowledge to create a healthier city.” Sounds like a noble model we can all follow.

Got Two Hands and 30 Minutes? You Can Help Clean Up Our World

Posted on by robbie

When it comes to social action, we can accomplish much more together than we ever could alone. That’s the idea behind the Two Hands Project, a worldwide collaborative campaign that seeks to eradicate plastic pollution from the environment, 30 minutes at a time. Two Hands is taking a grassroots approach to cleaning up our world, by asking citizens to complete a simple task: pick up (and ultimately recycle) trash for 30 minutes at a time, anywhere in the world. Originally launched in Australia by Paul Sharp and Silke Stuckenbrock, the Two Hands Project has used successful social media campaigns to inspire people from every continent to get involved and upload pictures of their “hauls” to the organization’s Facebook page, which now boasts more than 40,000 “likes.”
The organization is also working with governments and other industries to promote the development of a global reusable packaging and deposit system to replace disposable packaging — one of the main causes of plastic pollution — and a “cash for butts” program to deal with the overwhelming amount of cigarette butts found in the environment. But they’re not waiting for government intervention to realize their goal of a better world. “The broader idea is, you can take your two hands and apply it to anything in your own community that needs fixing; it can be social, environmental, anything at all,” Sharp says. With more than 7 billion people in the world, just imagine how much we could accomplish if everyone chipped in.
MORE: What Would a City With No Plastic Bags Look Like?

Must See: Amazing Sculptures Out of Alaska

Posted on by robbie

Some of our country’s most beautiful places are also most vulnerable to pollution and environmental damage. That’s why this art project in Alaska is so cool. Kachemak Bay community members are turning ocean trash into eye-catching sculptures. The idea is to raise awareness about better ocean stewardship by without turning people off. You won’t believe the amazing sculptures that local residents have created with the Marine Debris Art Workshop, like a supersized Lion’s Mane jellyfish. Could something like this work where you live?
Source: Earth 911