This weekend I had been planning on going to the green festival, but I ended up not. I did other things with my time.
- I got my pally pal up to the same level as
‘s shammy sham. - I had dinner with Nick and Kris.
- I had a date with some one I hope to play board games with in the future (but probably not go on another date with)
- I went to leah’s “last college party ever”
- I put out an ad for a new roomie.
- I planned the menu for the dinner I’m hosting tuesday
- I went to the gaygamer prom and played “who’s the biggest pervert?” (I came in 2/6, for the curious)
- I played board games at Pitt’s (race for the galaxy: lost all 3 games I played; thurn und taxis: won)
- and did some character generation exercises for the tabletop rpg
will soon be running. - biked a lot (though mostly as “means of transportation)
- did some upper body lifting for the first time in a month or two.
And I critiqued this event I’ve never been to. I said it would be full of “yuppies who fly all over the place and then pretend that buying compact flourescent bulbs make up for it.” I was in mid sentence when I realized I was mostly talking about myself.
I am bitterly disappointed in my own failed environmentalism. Or maybe just by my mediocrity. Hard to say, really.
I do wonder what happened there, but at the same time, I doubt that I missed anything truly life altering. I feel in need of something of that nature.
I walked back from the airport; does that green me up?
A couple years back I was visiting friends in Toronto, where the city has a stated goal of having something like 80-90% of their trash recyclable by 2010. I was looking at their garbage, and for the entire week they had two small bags of sorted, compacted recyclables and a single, small bag (slightly larger than a plastic grocery sack) of regular trash. My friend was expressing disappointment that they hadn’t been able to reduce their weekly trash further, as he felt this was just an unacceptably large amount of trash to be putting into the landfill every week. I pictured how much stuff Jeffrey and I had taken the curb the week prior and realized that there is simply a different mindset there, and that nothing short of a wholesale re-booting of our national mindset was going to change things on this side of the border. I’m not sure what it will take, though: Americans are so slow to change the way they think about things….
I’ve never been clear on how one can generate as much trash as people generally do. But I wouldn’t separate Americans from Canadians on this issue: I grew up with a week translating to two or three gigantic garbage bags for our place, and for everyone else up the road. Now I generate a grocery bag every other week (per capita, let’s call it two grocery bags per week) and I don’t even compost.
I guess I was making the point that here is a major city that has set a very aggressive goal for trash and recycling — and its citizens are actually responding. I don’t know of any American city that is doing anything remotely like that, and if they did, I don’t think a significant portion of the population would do what it took to pull it off.
A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More
[…]
Interesting! Figures San Francisco (and California in general) would be ahead of everyone else on this. Thanks for sharing this info!
I’m very surprised Chicago is that high. I question the validity of that statistic. Recycling is really not a big part of our mindset here. The silly blue bags never caught on. The city claims that our trash is sorted after it’s collected and recyclables are picked out regardless of whether or not they were put in a blue bag, but I’m a bit skeptical. And paper that isn’t separated is tainted and can’t be recycled, as far as I know.
And the stuff on their web site on for Multi-Unit recycling makes me laugh. I would link to it, but the city’s web site puts Session IDs in the URL, so I have no idea if the link would be permanent or not…
“If you live in a building of five units or greater, you are serviced by a private waste hauler, which is mandated by law to recycle applicable materials. Your building management is also required to offer you an effective recycling program, which is defined by three things: source reduction and separation, an education program and a written recycling plan. “
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “written recycling plan” and I’ve lived in quite a few multi-unit buildings. I don’t remember any of them even mentioning recycling.
“All residents must be told what can be recycled and how to prepare it. Your landlord needs to either distribute pamphlets or post signs in common areas, and tell tenants about changes in the recycling plan 10 days before they happen.”
There may have been one high-rise I lived in that did something like this. I don’t remember. But that’s it.
If it really is 55%, that’s pretty good (though it should be much better) but I find it very difficult to believe.
A lot of trash is not residential, but workplace. I don’t know what the city does with restaurants, but a restaurant composting initiative can be pretty big. The next thing is recycling office paper, which is pretty ubiquitous.
All the yuppies I know recycle their trash (perhaps I should say “our”). But I don’t really know any real Americans. All I can say is that the recycling bins in my building get used.
One thing you’ll note is that you can increase the recycling rate by printing more junk mail, and on higher-quality paper so that you can recycle it all. So these figures are nearly meaningless. What we actually want is to reduce the lbs/person, perhaps counting a pound of recycled or composted material as less than a pound of unredeemable garbage.
from keith in seattle
seattle green festival was okay though basically it consisted of vendors selling their green products (no mention of reduced consumption as path to sustainability, at least not as far as i could tell). did have the chance to see amory lovings though; his belief in science and innovation as a universal cure-all makes me a little uneasy, but that doesn’t detract from his brilliance.