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from KUOW

Amy Radil Seattle garbage collector Anousone Sadettanh empties a small residential garbage bin into his truck in 2014. It is now illegal to toss out food with the trash in the city. Residents will get warning tags for now; the city will start imposing fines in July.

Elaine Thompson/AP

The bright red tag, posted on a garbage bin, tells everyone who sees it that you’ve violated a new city law that makes it illegal to put food into trash cans.

“I’m sure neighbors are going to see these on their other neighbors’ cans,” says Rodney Watkins, a lead driver for Recology CleanScapes, a waste contractor for the city. He’s on the front lines of enforcing these rules.

Seattle is the first city in the nation to fine people for not properly sorting their garbage. The law took effect on Jan. 1 as a bid to keep food out of landfills. Other cities like San Francisco and Vancouver mandate composting, but don’t penalize homeowners directly. 

Amy Radil/KUOW

As Watkins made the rounds in Maple Leaf, a residential neighborhood of Seattle, earlier this month, he appeared disheartened to find an entire red velvet cake in someone’s trash bin. Any household with more than 10 percent food in its garbage earns a bright red tag notifying it of the infraction.

Seattle Public Utilities estimates that every family in the city throws away some 400 pounds of food each year. The city gives households bins to fill with their food and yard waste. But residents don’t have to compost it themselves: They can just leave the bins curbside and have the city pick it up for a fee.

The new law is meant to help Seattle increase its recycling and composting rate to 60 percent of all its waste — the city is currently 4 percentage points below that.

The red tags are part of the public education campaign about the new law; the city won’t actually start issuing fines until July. Single households will pay $1 per violation, but apartments, condos and commercial buildings could be fined $50. That has apartment and condominium dwellers a little nervous.

Jim Ward owns a condo in a large building in the Laurelhurst neighborhood. He says his neighbors include people from many different countries who may not be familiar with Seattle’s recycling rules. Ward came down to the building’s recycling bin recently and it was a mess.

“I found dirty rags with oil on them and just really messy pieces of plastic that were wet,” he says. So Ward took the opportunity to do some outreach.

“I ended up actually taking those things and putting them on the main counter in the lobby of the condominium, and I just wrote a note to everyone and I said, ‘Are these things recyclable?’

Seattle’s push for more recycling comes as the state’s overall recycling rate has gone down slightly. The Washington Department of Ecology says the recycling rate slipped to 49 percent in 2013 from 50, although that’s still among the highest in the nation.

The city’s consumer recycling capabilities are pretty high-tech, with machines to separate paper, glass and plastic. And come July, Seattle will also start issuing fines for too much recyclable materials mixed in the trash. That has been illegal for several years, but haulers had just been leaving garbage on the curb when that happened.

Now, leaving an empty tub of butter or mayonnaise jar in the rubbish bin could earn you a red tag, too.

Amy Radil is a reporter with member station KUOW in Seattle. A version of this story first appeared on the KUOW website.





Happy Face.


 




The list is not terribly popular with my friends, (see Taking Apart The List.) The overall response has been a variation of, “Good luck with that.” I think most of us are willing to clean our homes with vinegar and baking soda when it comes down to it, but no one is anxious to part with their facial cleanser or antiperspirant. A welcome exception was my friend Elise who tackled the list with wit and enthusiasm, but she’s Parisian so what do you expect?

Some of her suggestions:

Shampoo/Conditioner —> Change your style for Christ sake!! Shave your head. It will give you that sexy look of Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3 and reduce the need for shampoo for a while… ah but yes! Razor is the issue. See ‘razor’ section.

razors — invest in a proper barber’s razor, see pic — actually as far as I am concerned I don’t shave with a razor but with honey and sugar (yes, truly). What? Look into this. bath oil — OMG is it a cultural thing??? I am not using any?!?

toothbrush — use Bamboo toothbrush (yes that exists it is called Brush With Bamboo) Brosse à dents en bambou

This is an idea that appeals and would probably make me feel very hip and European. They sell them at the local apothecary, but really you still have to throw it away, right? My MSF doesn’t recycle bamboo with bristles. Besides, most of us are now addicted to our electric toothbrushes. Mine runs on batteries, which I’ve just realized is worse. Is there no end to this?

toothpaste — hmm, can’t really do without yes? Wait to be older and lose them all?

hair product — still : no hair

lip balm — use butter (can carry in some wooden container — requires DIY skills but can be done) This is disgusting.

Le Mardi 16 décembre 2014 5h28




I started my deconstruct at the top of the list with shampoo

Lastly, there are shampoo bars. 


Some of the items floating around?







Trash Planet: Germany


Federal Waste Management Policy

Marie Look, Earth911.com





Reviewing the blog made it painfully obvious that the ordering of posts seems inchoate. Sadly, this is a fairly accurate reflection of my thoughts/feelings about the garbage problem. I find myself dashing off in several different directions. The one thing that’s been obvious from day one is that there’s too much garbage. I’m not sure how far beyond that basic fact I’ve gotten. I think we can all agree that anything is better than landfill, (except perhaps for incineration, but I don’t really want to get into that whole discussion.) Suffice to say that recycling and composting are better than landfilling. Reusing and re-purposing should always be attempted before discarding AND buying and using less stuff to begin with is the best solution of all. But all of this leads off in many directions.

Recycling is complicated for so many reasons. It tends to lull us into believing that it doesn’t matter how much we use as long as we recycle it, which ISN’T true. Every Materials Sorting Facility has a different set of guidelines on what it can and cannot accept and even within those guidelines discards have to be in a certain condition AND this varies from facility to facility. If you discard some plastic that’s sticky and residuey it can contaminate a whole batch of materials at your local MSF. It makes one begin to feel a bit hopeless, doesn’t it? I don’t want to feel hopeless, but it’s hard to discern the wisest course. Educating ourselves on exactly what is and isn’t accepted, and in what condition, by our local MSF and then adhering to those guidelines is obviously an excellent first step. Composting or contributing to a local composting effort deals with organic waste. But even if everyone did those two things, we would still need to think about how much we’re consuming.

Then there’s the question of packaging and whose responsibility it is to deal with all of the packaging and how much waste is involved in the production of those things we’re consuming. What if every toothbrush you use actually represents 20 times as much refuse in its production? And what about e waste, a whole new category of garbage that isn’t actually all that new? And then there’s the effect all of this stuff is having on the countries to which it is being shipped in greater and greater quantities. I never used to think about what happened to my laptop when I was finished with it, or my cell phone, which is designed to last about a year, which brings me to planned obsolescence. Perhaps you can see why the blog might begin to seem a bit unfocused. It is that there are just so many things to focus on. So, instead of trying to manage the unmanageable, I’m going to start categorizing posts by what I see as the main subject. Of course there will be lots of overlap, but you can bring up info on recycling or composting or product packaging by clicking on the that category name under a given post. That way I can follow where the research leads without feeling like I’m all over the map. The map will have a map so to speak.


 Photograph: Alte Fabrik Finkemeier 002

Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_producer_responsibility Photograph: Jim Puckett/AP




When we drop our old computers off to be recycled we assume this will be done in an appropriate and environmentally safe manner, but e-waste is expensive to recycle and a shadow trade has developed around it. Computers, monitors, and cell phones are dumped by the millions of tons and shipped around the globe by numerous middlemen. The Guardian published a photo essay on e-waste dumping in Ghana. Follow MyTrashYourTrash on WordPress.com Photograph: Elise Botiveau


