Went for my first trash walk today, 3 blocks west on Ellsworth, across the street, and then back again. I spent most of my time picking up trash on the edge of the street near the sidewalk, including some incredibly nasty stuff embedded in the dirt.

Bending down to pick up the trash over and over took a little bit of effort, but it wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t as feverish or as tired as I was on Sunday.

In 6 blocks total, I filled my bag with trash. 

Next time I think I will wear gloves, and I will carry two bags so that I don’t have to sort through all the dirt to get to the recyclables.

Oh, and I won’t wear white pants.

***

This trash pickup was inspired by It Starts with Me.

I’ve updated the About page on this blog and checked the links. Soon I will begin providing examples of DIY restoration projects.

All the old posts are still up, so you can still browse them for ideas about restoration. And be sure to check out the Links page to find out about organizations involved in restoration.

As an obsessive recycler, I look for recycling facilities wherever I go. I tried to find them in Baton Rouge when Todd had surgery on his ear, and I think I succeeded, though I apparently left no record of it on Beth at Home and Abroad except a note that I had emailed someone about it.

Missoula is a little more recycling-friendly. My landlady told me I could buy a blue trash bag, put all my recycling in it, and put it out next to the trash can. The trash company would then take care of sorting the paper from the cans and plastic bottles. I haven’t bought any of those bags because, as far as I know, they’re available only at the Missoula Recyclery, and if I have to go there I might as well just take my recycling there.

Until recently, glass wasn’t recycled in Missoula, but now it can be taken to Target or to the Recyclery. Glass doesn’t seem to be a profitable recycling material (glass isn’t recycled much in Kansas City, where I grew up, either), perhaps because so many things that used to be made of glass are now made of plastic.

When Todd and I did laundry last week, I noticed that Grimebusters wasn’t recycling. I was tempted to fish the plastics out of the trash can and take them home, but then my fear of being weird in public kicked in. Later I thought of asking the owners if I could collect their recycling for the month I was in Missoula. But then I thought, Am I going to do this for every non-recycling business I patronize in Missoula? That didn’t seem very practical either.

Correction: Grimebusters does recycle aluminum cans.

I guess I could take the recyclables I find on the days I do laundry there.

I was spoiled in Boulder; I know that. There were several trash companies that recycled; I could take my recyclables to Eco-Cycle’s centers in several cities nearby; I could take even more esoteric items to the Hard-to-Recycle Center in Boulder or the hazardous waste center in Boulder. Boulder residents enjoyed a “pay-as-you-throw” program which made it cheap for them to recycle.

Missoula isn’t that far along. When we attended the Out to Lunch concert and market on Wednesday, I noticed that cans and bottles were being recycled, but most people were providing plastic utensils with their food, which then get thrown away after one use. It wasn’t Zero Waste, but it was definitely better than nothing.

I need to figure out what I can do to promote Zero Waste on this trip. It’s hard to do much in a month, but there must be something I can do.

Todd and I sold our house on Wednesday and left Broomfield, Colorado, on Thursday. We put some things in a 10 by 15 storage unit, but most of what we owned ended up being given away, sold, or recycled.

And what a recycling job it was!

For our technotrash, we used Green Disk, headquartered in Sammamish, Washington. When we mailed them CDs and VHS tapes and cables and diskettes and other unusable electronic bits, we sent them to Missouri. We sent them over 100 pounds of technotrash.

For less esoteric items, we went to Eco-Cycle’s Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHARM)  in Boulder, Colorado. There we recycled Todd’s huge box of cables, which cost only the $3 entrance fee, since cables are free to recycle at the CHARM; at Green Disk, it would have cost a lot more. We also took in 4 boxes of papers to be shredded, styrofoam, scrap metal, shoes and clothes and fabrics, books, and compostable items.

Hazardous waste could be disposed of at Boulder County’s facility behind the big blue recycling center at 63rd and Arapahoe. We took in compact fluorescent light bulbs, paint, spackle, shoe polish, expired medicine, and lots of batteries. One cool thing about this place: the staff saves items that still have some use (like half-full cans of varnish) and lets people check them out and use what they need. That is so great!Is my BlackBerry taking crappy photos, or what?

And, of course, we used our curbside recycler, Waste Connections, for the regular stuff. They have single-stream recycling, so we can throw it all in one bin. We had to schedule an extra collection, though, because we had filled up our bin a week before we were supposed to move.

If you ever want to downsize, or even get rid of most of your stuff, as we did, I suggest you start a year or two in advance. We did most of our downsizing in a month, and it was painful. Even now our old neighbors are probably still mocking us for all the stuff we tried to palm off on them.

How is this restoration?

It’s preventive. The less we use, the less we need to extract.

Where are we going?

Check out 12 Cities, 1 Year to find out.

Just spent 15 minutes or so dealing with recycling.

No, it doesn’t take me that long to find the recycling bin. I had to rinse out a small plastic bag so that I could recycle it; plastic bags are made into Trex decking, and apparently they need to be super-clean and dry. Then I took the 3 bottles of pop we were never going to drink and poured them on the compost pile (here’s hoping it will do something interesting to the compost), rinsed them out, and threw them in the bin. Then I hand-washed a baggie that I thought I might be able to reuse if I could just get the chili-grease off it, and after that I stuck it in the dishwasher using the Bag-E Wash.

Whew! Are you tired yet? I know I am.

No wonder people don’t want to recycle. This stuff is a pain in the ass!

Not only do Americans need companies to step up to the plate and design products for recycling, but we need places like Big City Burritos to stop wrapping burritos in foil and then plastic. And that’s only one issue I had with all the plastic at that place. I’m going to write to them about it.

We also need to cut ourselves some slack and avoid going to places that set off our plastic warning alarms. I don’t mind eating a meal out of a plastic basket lined with paper, but using plastic forks and trying to get guacamole out of a little plastic tub just begins to get on my nerves, especially when I’m staring at 100% recycled napkins. Sorry, Big City Burritos, your eco-friendly napkins are offset by all the plastic crap you use to serve your food.

Which is too bad, because your chicken mole burrito was pretty good.

Years ago I forwarded an article from Audubon magazine to Eric Lombardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle in Boulder, because I thought he would be interested in hearing about a landfill being reclaimed (I think it was on Martha’s Vineyard). It was considered to be an easy reclamation project because the landfill contained no toxic materials.

Now comes Advanced Plasma Power, a British company, which has a contract to reclaim the contents of a Belgian landfill, recycle what can be recycled, and convert the methane produced by the decomposition of the remaining products into energy. The project will be operational in 2014 and will last for 30 years.

I love it. It’s my dream that rising prices for electronic parts and glass and metals will make it profitable to get the goods from landfills. And Tim Webb, the author of my source article in the Guardian, seems to agree:

The idea of digging up old rubbish is not new. The chief executive of one British landfill operator told the Guardian he had considered it 15 years ago. But the increasing shortage of landfill space, a need to produce more electricity renewably and higher metal prices are now combining to make firms consider it more seriously.

According to the article, the idea is taking off in Europe because of a shortage of landfill space. The United States probably has more room for landfills than Europe, but nobody wants them around. NIMBYism could make these kinds of projects possible.

Of course, removing items from a landfill is not without problems. The trash may include toxic materials such as asbestos, and methane can explode.

Yet another reason to recycle everything.

Source: “Why Landfill Mining Could Be the Next Big Thing,” Tim Webb, Guardian, October 11, 2010

I know plastic travels that far because the trash exhibit I saw in 2004 at the Centro Ecologico Sian Ka’an (CESIAK) includes some plastic from Poland that had washed up on the beach in Mexico.

I hate trash. If it were up to me, everything would be recycled, whether we think it’s possible now or not. But that’s the eco-dictator in me speaking, which does not generally go over well.

If it’s any comfort to those of you who feel judged by recyclers and other environmentalists, I have to restrain myself from picking up recyclables wherever I go. When I was at the Toyota dealership the other day, I wanted so badly to pull the plastic bottles out of the trash and place them in the recycling container 15 feet away. People! Put the recycling and trash bins right next to each other! Don’t make us walk extra steps to recycle.

I was reminded of CESIAK recently after reading “When Garbage Doesn’t Die” in the Spring 2010 issue of Alert Diver (you’ll have to create an account to read it). This article lists several things people can do to reduce trash blowing into the oceans (stop using plastic bags; carry your own water bottle and coffee cup) but, most interesting to me, also names organizations working to prevent and clean up marine debris.

Algalita Marine Research Foundation was founded by Captain Charles Moore in 1994 to preserve and protect the marine environment. In 1997 he was sailing through the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (between Hawaii and California) and discovered the Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch. His foundation is currently planning to survey all 5 gyres worldwide.

Project Kaisei (“ocean planet” in Japanese) recently led an expedition that took pictures of plastic in the ocean and experimented with various cleanup efforts. (Much of the plastic in the world’s oceans has photo-degraded into pieces small enough to be eaten by sea creatures. How are we supposed to get rid of that? Pour the ocean through cheesecloth?)

Plastic Pollution Coalition: No, it’s not a nefarious plot to increase plastic pollution. It’s a website where people can get together to reduce the amount of plastic we throw away.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris page: self-explanatory.

How is this restoration?

Most of it is in the planning/research stages. Those steps are necessary: people could just go out in a boat and pick up trash. But it’s better to investigate the best methods.

I often ask myself why Americans don’t recycle more. I’ve lived in my current home for 14 years and the same percentage of my neighbors recycle: about 30%, or 2 of the 6 families on the cul-de-sac. At times I have made efforts to get them to recycle more, but neither the efforts nor the recycling lasted.

I’ve been tempted lately to have a cul-de-sac event and have all of us bring out our trash and sort it into piles of recyclables and un-recyclables. But I can’t bring myself to broach the subject. I’m afraid—that my neighbors will think I’m a pest, that nobody will want to do it, that I’ll feel slighted. I wish I were better at getting groups to do things. My husband is good at that, so perhaps I should recruit him. Perhaps he could teach me.

Somehow I developed an exaggerated sense that I should not bother people, that I should not impose my own views on them. Yet people do that all the time. It’s called “getting to know someone.” I wish I could find a pleasant way to talk to people about my recycling obsession in person, but for now I’m doing so on my website.

The only way Americans will get to Zero Waste is if they are forced by the government. I wish it weren’t so; I wish there was a business solution. But with landfill fees at only $12/ton in Colorado, recycling doesn’t stand a chance. The state of Colorado could encourage recycling by raising landfill fees, but I have a feeling there’s a pretty effective lobby against that.

Here’s a link to a Boulder nonprofit that’s going for zero waste. This particular page features the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials (CHARM).