Sugar!

In a serendipitous series of mouse clicks, I was listening to the song “Sugarman” by Scorcher [insert grime/trash joke] when I opened up a post on biodegradable packaging made from Sugarcane over at The Temas Blog. I interpreted this coincidence as a sign that I should post both links for you and turn you on to two great sites, in case you’re not already in the know: Last.fm for free music streaming and The Temas Blog, for all things trash in Latin America.

Photos ripped from Myspace and Temas respectively

taking less out

I found this admirable GreenBiz link on take-out containers while contemplating/googling over-packaging. Consider this a call for entries. What’s the most ridiculously over-packaged food item you purchased in the past year?

bittersweet news about polyethylene terephthalate

Plastics News, in a piece picked up by Waste News (yes, the trash media industry is that large and that specialized), reported this week that while recycling of resin made from used PET is on the rise, it has yet to make a dent in mass consumption of plastic bottles. Polyethylene terephthalate, better known as PET, is “a thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family“. The mass throwing away of PET products is a real shame when you consider that they could be melted down and reincarnated as carpet, clothing, hypoallergenic pillow stuffing and all kinds of other neat products. Not to mention the creative uses people have found for raw PET, such as the building and construction products extensively reported over at the The Temas Blog.

wine-in-a-box

  My friend, salmon, recently informed me that wine-in-a-box can be purchased in individual portions, like jumbo juice boxes for grown-ups.  I keep meaning to tell my grandmother this.  For a short time after they retired, she and my grandfather had a small vineyard in New Jersey.  They made and bottled their own wine, mostly drunk by our immediate family but also tasted at local get-togethers with other farmers struggling to make grapes happy on the East Coast.  Grandma has told me more than once that wine-in-a-box, or more specifically wine-in-a-bag-in-a-box, is a better way to store wine over a long period of time without losing flavor. 

It appears that vintners in Canada agree with her as several wineries have foregone traditional glass bottles in favor of the box.  Usman Valiante, a contributor to Canada’s Solid Waste and Recycling Magazine, weighs the environmental and viticultural pros and cons of this decision on the blog he keeps off the magazine’s Web site.  Aside from trashing the taste of the wines he sampled, Valiante explains that the materials used to store the drinks aren’t as green as the vineyards imply.  He also points out the irony in the label “Recyclable–where facilities exist.”  I guess I’ll have to stick to sangria in a thermos at picnics. 

Starbucks and fashion stigma

An article over at Groovy Green (the sidebar, folks, it’s all about the sidebar) caught my eye with the catchy headline “How Starbucks Could Have Saved the World“. It’s about disposible coffee cups and incentives not to use them. While discounts for reusing mugs and encouraging people to drink from real cups while in the store are nice gestures, what we really need are some superstar style mavens to declare reusable “in” and disposible “out”.  A friend and I were discussing the other day that while it’s one thing to refuse a plastic bag at the deli and tuck your groceries into a Brooklyn-chic tote, it’s another thing entirely to carry your own tupperware to avoid take-out packaging.

Hedgehog Wars

  I just read on the Grist List (yet another kick-ass sidebar link) that McDonald’s has changed the packaging it uses for McFlurry ice cream to something more “hedgehog friendly”. Clicking through to the article, I learned that hedgehogs were squeezing into the containers and getting stuck inside.

It seems there is an entire organization in the UK dedicated to saving hedgehogs from just this sort of garbage-related peril and what’s more, they have a rival group out to kill the little guys.

Just goes to show you, under every trash lid is an entire world of quirks, nuance and issues. How does “Hedgehog Wars” sound as a working title for the first everyday trash documentary production?

This is a blog about trash.

This is a blog about Oscar the Grouch. It’s about the smoke of burning trash piles wafting through every developing country in the world. It’s about the billions of dollars a year spent exporting garbage from one state to another. It’s about diving into a dumpster and coming up with a still-warm burger and three packets of mustard. It’s about detonating landmines with old truck tires and building bookshelves out of milk crates. It’s about barges. It’s about battery acid. It’s about paying sixty bucks for a change purse made of soda can tabs because the label says a women’s group in Latin America glued them together. It’s about sorting plastics. It’s about beaches built on landfills and landfills built on beaches. It’s about the “away” in throw away and the “out” in toss out and the “rid” in get rid of it. This is a blog about the art, money, power, politics, people and literature of garbage. It’s a subject that shocks and amuses me nearly every day, which is about how often I imagine I’ll be posting. I hope you’ll share in the fascination.