Terracycle - Reusing Plastic Bottles

My friend Frank recently told me about this company: Terracycle. These guys are making plant food by feeding organic waste to worms and then packaging these gardening products in old soda bottles, which would otherwise enter the waste stream. Pretty clever. Of course what we really need to do is to produce far fewer of these plastic bottles in the first place - reusing just isn't enough of an answer to our waste problems. I also would like to know how much fossil fuels these guys are using to make their products. But in any case, there is some clever thinking going on here.

Relections on Why I Do What I Do (at least what I report on doing here)...

So, being away from my usual life, haunts, and activities makes it a little more difficult to post in my usual way. That is, for the next several weeks I don't expect to drag much stuff out of the trash (I doubt that my hostess would appreciate it!). If I can remember to lug my big old camera along, I will take some pictures of relatively relevant things. But meanwhile, I thought I'd reflect on and write about the general content of this blog in a more abstract, general way. (Trained, and for many years employed, as a professional philosopher who, by definition thinks abstractly, this blog has been a welcome change of pace -- into the particular, the specific.) So, the question is, why do I take things from the trash, a practice that others find distasteful, even embarrassing? One reason is that because stuff in the trash is, well, FREE. I'm frugal, some would say cheap. (Here in the U.K. they say "tight". A British friend of mine likes to say "Tight as a gnat's chuff." Don't ask what a chuff is. But visit this great blog by my friend the Lynneguist to learn about all sorts of British/American linguistic quirks.) Why would I buy something that I can freely take from someone's pile of trash instead? Being raised by New Englanders I was early on taught to value my pennies, and this lesson certainly stuck. So, one reason to take stuff from the trash is simply to save money. I like stuff, especially old, used stuff, and trash day is one easy way to get it. Another reason though, is that waste really, really bothers me. The amount of waste in our society is staggering, and the waste we can observe is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. So, when I see some perfectly usable something out with the garbage, my inclination is to take it home and, well, use it. (Or, if I can't use it, find someone who can.) Every used thing that someone else has discarded (either in the trash or by giving it to a thrift store) that I take home is one less thing in a landfill.

Never Buy Potting Soil Again

This is the new thing I've recently started taking out of the trash: abandoned planters with soil still in them. The big square one has pretty nice potting soil in it, which I'm going to hold on to for the next time I need to repot a plant, or something like that. The other two are going to end up in my compost pile. I've thrown some other abandoned soil in it already. All of which brings me around to pointing out that my compost piles (there are in fact two), are in serious need of expansion...

Fallen Fruit - Saving Good Food

I just finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press 2006). This book is a must-read for anyone interested in food, sustainability, the environment, and so on. I learned a lot about how food is wasted, and how to be a less wasteful eater. Anyway, towards the end of the book, he mentioned the legal principle of 'usufruct' in the context foraging food either from public places or where fruit was going to waste. I like this idea - that if others are allowing something perishable to go to waste, then you may have the right to take it and use it yourself - very interesting. In that context, he gave a footnote to this site: fallenfruit.org. The website is devoted to the idea of foraging fruit in the city (of LA, but they would like to expand their mission across the U.S.). I am very taken with the politics of this idea (I like any idea that keeps private property in its proper place), and the fallen fruit website is very much worth looking at, including the manifesto and maps. There are some apple trees on the edge of a public recreation center a five minutes walk from my house, which I noticed last Fall, and which did have edible apples growing on them. And then, walking my dog, I've discovered an old empty house lot that I think has apple trees. This Fall I am definitely going to go back, pick a bunch, and put up apple sauce. So now what I need to find in the trash is a good old fashioned apple picker! What fruit do you have growing near you that you can collect?

When Did Plants Become Disposable???

So, I got this lovely orchid plant(it's a Phalaenopsis) as a gift from my brother and sister-in-law several weeks ago, as housewarming gift, when I finally got around to throwing my housewarming party. (The party was a great success, if I say so myself.) When they gave it to me it had a lovely stem with four or five very pretty white blossoms on it. The last of the blooms died recently, and after removing the flower stem, I was reading the tag that came with the plant to find out how best to care for it. Reading the tag, I was rather discouraged to read the last line:It's that last line that really struck me. This is a lovely plant, even without the blooms, but the company that made it would prefer that I throw it away and just buy another one, rather than keep this plant and nurture it while it readies itself to bloom again. Now, throwing it away isn't directly wasteful. If I were to throw it out, I would put it into one of my compost bins (you aren't surprised that I compost, are you?), so the plant itself and its soil would get recycled. (One of the many reasons I look forward to Spring is that I can once again drag home my neighbors dead plants in order to add them to my composting efforts.) But all the energy that went into growing it, watering it, transporting it from Florida to Massachusetts (where my family bought it), would all be a waste. And much of that energy is, of course, in the form of fossil fuels. And so this little example of planned wastefulness strikes me as the perfect microcosm of the biggest source of our environmental woes and coming disasters: our economy depends on all of us wasting as much as we can, which always means, among other things, wasting fossil fuels. The company that grew this Phalaenopsis makes more profit the more we waste these plants by throwing them away and buying more. We are in serious trouble if we don't change our ways and waste less.