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POPSOur Trash Circles the Globe: Combating E-Waste in India The fruits of our high-tech revolution are pure poison if these products are improperly disposed of at the end of their useful life. The electronics industry is on the brink of a paradigm shift with respect to cost avoidance v/s risk avoidance. Firms such as Eco-Reco are taking advantage of a booming but hazardous industry, where e-waste is usually dismantled by workers with little protection in recycling plants that have even fewer safety and environmental contamination guidelines. In Mumbai, Eco-Reco will pick up your e-waste and at their plant, the e-waste then goes through a shredder on a conveyor belt, and the components are separated by a metal extractor. Workers then break up the plastic from the metal by hand. The entire system is based on the principles of clean environment and zero landfill.
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POPSHow Does San Francisco Keep 70% of Their Trash Out of Landfills?
“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage. We see food, paper, metal, glass.” The 70 % diversion rate includes recycling, composting and source reduction (meaning reusing things instead of throwing them out.) The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint. For example, much of the concrete from demolished buildings is recycled in new sidewalks. Unwanted paint is blended it in 55-gallon drums: resulting in 3 colors — off-white, beige and green — are packed in 5 gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in Mexico. They can collect scrap paper to re-sell because of low levels of glass contamination. Garbage trucks can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles. Compare 2006 diversion rates: Chicago 55%, New York City 30.6%, Milwaukee 24%, Boston 16% and Houston 2.5%.
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POPSThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Also Know As The Trash Vortex Sad Picture: No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words: litter. Sadly - many people take the "out of sight, out of mind" approach. Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up. We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic. All succeeding generations will only see an ocean filled with trash. Net a piece of plastic, and you’ll find barnacles and small crabs clinging to it. Not a good thing for fish, birds, and mammals that mistake it for its natural food, such as eggs, jellyfish, or other sea creatures. Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves.
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POPS7 Eco-Resolutions for 2008: I Will Try To Live Green Do you really need berries from Chile? Don't collect stuff you will never use. If you trash those once-new goodies when you’re no longer interested in them, they will live in a landfill for years and years. Cut the power to your electronics by plugging them in to a power strip and flipping the switch to off when you’re not watching or listening. Public transportation use saves 1.4 billion gallons of gasoline each year, and can reduce household expenses by $6,200. Plastic bags are made from petroleum and only about 1 percent of the estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion Annie Bell plastic bags consumed worldwide are recycled each year. Most end up in landfills (wherethey take perhaps 1000 years to decompose) or in the sea. By purchasing recycled paper products you’re preventing trees from being chopped down, and paper waste from ending up in landfills. In addition, less energy and water is required to produce a recycled paper product.
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POPSEco-Sin Tax? Chicago Fights the 7 Sins of Bottled Water Chicago's 5-cent tax on bottled water took effect on Jan. 2, 2008. The tax is expected to bring an extra $10.5 million annually into the city's coffers while encouraging people to drink tap water and eschew the environmentally suspect bottles. Illinois residents consumed 270 million gallons of bottled water in 2005, making the state the seventh-biggest bottled water consumer in the United States. The Earth Policy Institute estimates manufacturers use more than 17 million barrels of oil in making polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles. Only 23 percent of those bottles are is recycled, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The rest are tossed into landfills.
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POPSNaples Is Drowning In Garbage...Mozzarella In Danger The streets of Naples, Italy are filling up with garbage thanks to the country's mafia. The problem is having a devastating effect on the local cheese industry. One of the biggest, healthiest industries in and around Naples is milk, butter and cheese producing.
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