Weekly Green Challenge: Reduce Your Trash

This past week, I traveled a total 14.8 miles on my bicycle in replacement of my car. In my car, 14.8 miles translates to .68 gallons of gas, which is worth $2.48. That may not seem like a lot, but if I saved that much each week of the year, that amounts to $128.96 and 769.6 miles of exercise and miles not on my old car. The money savings are great, but I must say, I really enjoyed the exercise I got over the week. Not to mention, the sun has been shining, and I got a great tan! (Well, a sunburn that turned into a tan. Wear sunscreen when biking!)

I plan on continuing to use my bike more often!

How far did you travel on your bike? How much did you save? Email me at viridorari@yahoo.com and let me know! Did you miss Green Challenge #14? Read it here.  

This week’s green challenge is inspired by Amy and Adam Korst, who I featured in an Activism Spotlight. If you haven’t read about them yet, here’s the punch line: over an entire year, they only produced a single shoebox full of trash (items that could not be recycled, reused, reduced, or composted). Since the average American produces 4.5 pounds of trash a day, that means they prevented over a ton of trash from entering a landfill.

Using their advice for a trash-free life, which you can find here, for this entire week, I want you to commit to either significantly reducing or eliminating your trash production. Like Amy said, you don’t have to give up life as you know it to be environmentally friendly. A lot of the transitions they made were easy to do, and much more efficient. Adam believes that living trash-free can be a perfectly normal lifestyle.

Suggested Reading & Activism Spotlight: Trash-Free Living

Activism Spotlight

“Every time you reach for the trash,” Amy said, “if you make that motion a conscious thing, [you realize that you] reach for the trash so many times a day. I really was kind of amazed.”

Imagine living for an entire year without producing garbage. Impossible, right?

Apparently not, because that’s exactly what a young professional couple, Amy and Adam Korst, did from July 6th, 2009 to July 6th, 2010. Their original goal was to produce no more than one garbage bag of waste, and instead, they ended up with only a shoebox full of items that could not be recycled, reduced, reused, or composted between the two of them. 

Picture courtesy of: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2010-07-21-trash_N.htm

In comparison, the average American produces 4.6 pounds of garbage daily, three pounds of which goes to a landfill. We recycle only 32% of our total waste, and we trash 99% of everything we buy within six months. So, according to these estimates and averages, the Korsts saved about 2,190 pounds of waste from the landfill, which is over a ton.

How did they do it?

Green Challenge: Repurpose Your Plastic

20-25% of landfill weight is from plastics. An average plastic container takes about 500 years just to begin the decomposition process. The timing varies depending on environmental conditions and the chemical makeup of the plastic.

Picture courtesy of: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/29/japan-leads-field-plastic-recycling

I wanted to come up with a way to make people understand how many plastic products we go through. I don’t think we always realize it, myself included, because we view plastic bottles and containers and the like as disposable. They hold no true value to us.

So, this week, as an eye opener, you’re not allowed to throw out (even into the recycling bin) plastic products. With every plastic product you use, you must either reuse it or repurpose it throughout this week. This will probably be a little cumbersome and obnoxious, but hopefully, that will help you understand how much you really go through and motivate you to avoid or reduce plastic use in the future.

Freewrite: Through the Train Window

Today, I’m traveling to the capitol of my state, Albany, by train. For all the long hours I’ve been on the train, the view out the window is rarely anything but dismal. It seems that the tracks typically run behind or in between industrial parks. The tracks weave their way from city to city: Buffalo, Rochester, Utica, Syracuse…
    All I see are the ugly decaying backs of abandoned factories, junkyards of cement hills and rusty construction vehicles, wires and caution tape, dead swamps with bare, twisted trees, muddy plains riddled with tire tracks, and the backyards of run-down houses full of discarded junk.
    When we go through the cities, the roads and bridges we pass by, under, and over are littered with trash. Carried by the wind, it seeps in to the surrounding stretches of sickly forests. The rivers and streams are a cruddy brown. We travel beneath massive highway bridges with legs large enough to be the trunks of redwood trees.
    I could go on, but everything else I have to describe is the same: dead, grey, brown, and depressing. I find myself wanting to stay on the train rather than step out into the repulsive world I see beyond my window. It seems as if I were to inhale a single breath of the air out there, I would die from the toxicity. 
    We did this. We cluttered our habitat with buildings and cars, many of which we abandoned in the slums and neglected outskirts of our cities where we thought no one would see them. But I see them now as my train weaves through the industrial parks and concrete jungles. I see a continuum of deserted items. All these inventions, once used and cherished, are now forsaken, like the plastic bags and napkins gathering at the edges of the forests like an invading army.
    As I see all of this, one word keeps persisting in my mind, over and over.
    Why?
----
Thank you for reading my first freewrite post on Viridorari.

Harsh Facts & Ecofriendly Economics: Tube-Free Toilet Paper

Harsh Facts of the Week

The average American office worker uses 500 disposable cups annually. 

Every year, Americans throw away enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons to circle the equator 300 times. 

During the International Coastal Cleanup of 2009, the Ocean Conservancy found that plastic bags were the 2nd most common item found, or one out of every ten items picked up. 

Each year, California spends about 25 million dollars sending plastic bags to landfills, and another 8.5 million dollars to remove littered bags from streets. 

In comparison, recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000, and the recycled product can be sold for $32, yet less than one percent of plastic bags are recycled each year.

No matter where you live, you can make simple changes in your life to reduce your waste output. You can exclude disposable dining ware, plastic bags, paper bags, disposable lighters, razors, and many other wasteful products without creating a noticeable difference or discomfort in your day to day life. It’s so easy, and often cheaper, so really, what’s holding you back? 

Ecofriendly Economics & Harsh Facts: Food Waste

Thank you for your understanding and patience about Monday's postponement. Again, please excuse the inconsistent formatting... I have sent a complaint to Blogger about that. 

Harsh Facts of the Week

These harsh facts will be part of a theme I have decided to focus on this week: food waste. I thought the topic of food waste would go along nicely with this week's Green Challenge, which takes some of your food waste and recycles it into rich, healthy soil. I pulled some of the facts from a web page entitled: "Americans go hungry in a land of massive food waste," which is starkly and sadly true. Stay tuned for Friday's "Suggested Reading" post, which will actually feature a video instead of a book: a TED Talk by Tristram Stuart on the topic of food waste. Stuart is mentioned in today's Harsh Facts.

Roughly one-third of the edible parts of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year.

  

The average American wastes 209-254 pounds of edible food each year, while 17.2 million American households in 2010 were deemed “food insecure,” meaning it was difficult to provide food for everyone in the family. About 46 million Americans, or one in every seven people, relied on food stamps that same year. 

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the consumer level food waste in industrialized countries is almost as high as the total net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa (222 million tons of food waste as compared to 230 million tons of net food production, respectively).

Tristram Stuart visited British farms to understand how quality standards affect food waste, including M.H. Poskitt Carrots. In total, 25-30% of all carrots handled by M.H. Poskitt Carrots were out-graded. About half of these were rejected due to aesthetic defects (i.e., wrong shape or size, not orange enough, broken, having a cleft or blemish).

Harsh Facts, Ecofriendly Economics & March's Animal

            I hope that including harsh facts about the state of our environment on Viridorari will give people the jolt that they need to start taking action to incorporate greener habits into their lives. This week's facts are geared toward Americans, and these facts did not surprise me. I love being a United States citizen, but the one thing about my country that I’m most ashamed of is our staggering amount of inherent wastefulness. Waste is something all of us, not just Americans, but especially Americans, need to work on. Brace yourselves!

The United States has 5% of the world's population and 30% of the waste, and the United States industry admits to 4 billion pounds of toxic pollution released each year. They key word in that sentence is "admits." We generate 4.6 pounds of trash per person per day on average int he United States, an amount doubled from thirty years ago, and the most in the world. If we put all the solid waste collected in the U.S. (I'm assuming annually) in a line of average garbage trucks, that line of trucks would cross the country, from NYC to L.A., more than 100 times. Finally, 99% of the things we buy are not in use after 6 months. 

            

One website also offered up a very moving quote:

"Our enormously productive economy... demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into ritual, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption... we need things produced, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate."
-Retailing analyst Victor LeBeau just after World War II.