Epic sustainability

So some other things I wanted to report on from the month of May.

I went to the Epic sustainability conference when it was here. Had a surprisingly interesting time. Picked up some cards of green wedding dress makers for my affianced friend, checked out roofing options with my friend who's renovating. Had a big chat with the London Drugs representative about their packaging take back program. They recycle styrofoam! Which I thought was pretty exciting. Or rather, they'll take the styrofoam you get from whatever you buy at their store and bring it to Genesis recycling who squishes it down to ship off somewhere to be recycled. Ok, so sometimes the styrofoam ends up in China and that's definitely not a good thing. But let's focus on the fact that they TAKE BACK their styrofoam! Crazy, no? They'll also take back old appliances to recycle if you buy your new one at LD. Something to consider the next time you are appliance shopping, perhaps.

Now why can't all stores do that? Or why can't the legislature, parliament, whoever, legislate that stores are required to do that?

Of course, I'd rather see the styrofoam just not used. But I like the direction of the take back program. Pushing responsibility for garbage up the chain is a good step, I think.

What are your thoughts?

mining for plastic

I rewatched Addicted to Plastic the other day, and a few of the recyclers featured had a really interesting view on plastics and garbage dumps.

They had both developed technologies that would turn any kind of plastic into one type of usable material. And both of these guys talked quite matter-of-factly about mining plastic from garbage dumps in the future.

The first thing that struck me about this is the scary beauty of capitalism. When recycling plastics becomes sufficiently profitable, I expect it will be amazing how quickly things move, technology develops, and garbage starts disappearing. Literally, dumps will disappear. There will be no such thing as an unrecyclable plastic. Of this I am absolutely certain.

The other striking thing about this proposed cycle is the no guilt aspect. "Oh, it's ok if we have a disposable culture now, because we'll just go clean it up later when we run out of what we need to make it and we'll just make it again! No harm done."

I assume I don't have to point out who the losers are in this scenario.

But I digress. What these segments really did was make me curious about the feasibility of this, and whether or not it's already happening. And it appears it is! I've only done a quick search, but I've found a few articles about garbage mining, one about the likely prospect of dumps in the UK from the 80s being opened up and mined for their plastics sometime in the next 20 years or so, another from back in '93 about some towns that were already mining their dumps in Pennsylvania, and this one from San Francisco which also mentions that SF already diverts 70% of their waste to either recycling or composting. This seems like a huge number to me and makes me really curious about Vancouver.... so that is my next project. What exactly does Vancouver do with its waste? And where does the recycling go they collect in the Blue Boxes? And how am I going to find this out?

recyclable milk bottle lids

Excitement abounds! I have just discovered that the milk bottle lids I've been collecting are recyclable! I don't know why I thought they weren't, but I did. But they are! #4 plastic, 100% accepted by the blue box recycling program. yay!