More New Laws on the Horizon

New laws are always coming, especially for a city like the City of New York.  This one was initially proposed by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and it’s about banning something.  Not surprising, since Bloomberg tried to get a lot of things banned and was successful in some and not so much in others.  This time, it is polystyrene, more popularly known as Styrofoam.  On Jan. 8, 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio made it official.  Starting on Jul. 1, 2015, Styrofoam items, such as cups, food containers, and packing material cannot be sold. New York City will follow the footsteps of over 70 cities in the USA, including Washington, DC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, Albany, and Seattle.  There will be a six-month grace period for the companies to switch over.  Businesses and nonprofits with an annual revenue of $500,000 or less can be exempted from the ban, but will have to prove that the use of materials besides plastic foam would cause them financial hardship.

Unlike the ban on large sugary drinks that Bloomberg tried to ban in the city, this one, like the ban on electronic wastes in the trash, was met without much resistance and fanfare.  Of course, the Styrofoam manufacturers and sellers made a fuss.  However, the average consumer doesn’t really care whether the food comes in a Styrofoam carton or plastic container.  Same thing with a cup of coffee, whether in a paper cup of Styrofoam cup.  However, it is true that coffee can remain warm longer in a Styrofoam cup than a paper cup.  Therefore, say “good bye” to enjoying warm Dunkin Donuts coffee hours after the purchase.

The ban was delayed to give companies who make them come up with a way to recycle used Styrofoam.  Dart Container, the largest Styrofoam producer said it is possible to be recycled in a cost effective manner.  It even guaranteed that in five years time, all the Styrofoam waste in New York City will be recycled at no cost to the city.  That was back on Dec. 29, 2014.  In the Huffington Post article that was uploaded on Jan. 9, 2015, “’While much of the waste we produce can be recycled or reused, polystyrene foam is not one of those materials,’ explained Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia in a statement. ‘Removing polystyrene from our waste stream is not only good for a greener, more sustainable New York, but also for the communities who are home to landfills receiving the City’s trash.'”  Therefore, the ban will commence.

My previous posts have not discussed this material at all, I suppose I fell into the out-of-sight-out-of-mind trap.  Occasionally, I do get a cup of coffee from Dunkin Donuts, their medium cups are Styrofoam.  Each time I do, I think about how bad it is for the environment.  Other than that, I don’t encounter Styrofoam that much anymore.  When I order things online, I find paper products or plastic bags filled with air used as packing materials.

Why’s it bad anyway?  Like plastic, it is made of oil based substances, in a way, it is a form of plastic.  Oil, the one commodity that we just cannot get away from, a not renewable one too.  Unlike plastic, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and International Agency for Research on Cancer have determined styrene as a possible human carcinogen.  Many years ago, I’ve learned that if Styrofoam is heated with food in a microwave, carcinogens may get released into the food.  When I used to order food from my boss’ restaurant, I always cringe when the person behind the counter pops the food in a Styrofoam container into the microwave to heat it up.  I worked in a freight forwarding company and the boss also had a restaurant at the time.  Isn’t that bad enough already?  One can develop cancer from eating or drinking out of these things!

According to Earth Resource Foundation, “The National Bureau of Standards Center for Fire Research identified 57 chemical byproducts released during the combustion of polystyrene foam.”  I don’t know what those byproducts do and what harm they impose, but the articles make them sound bad.  Upon searching for what they are, more articles come up about the harmful chemical byproducts that get released into the air and water from the making of Styrofoam, chemicals considered to be harmful to the environment, as well as to plant and animal life, including humans.

There are other environment impacts, such as all the used Styrofoam products ending up in landfills.  However, that pretty much goes for everything else that goes into the trash.  At least now, it’s going to be severely limited as more metropolitan areas in the USA start to ban its use.  I think this post should act as a reminder of things that we don’t care about or are popular in the news media.  This topic did not occur to me until a friend pointed it out on Facebook.  Ignorance is not bliss.  What one doesn’t know can be hurtful.

Here’s an interesting video that can sum up a good portion that was mentioned above, and then some.  Only problem I have is the waste of paper in the video.  http://youtu.be/1HlwB26DTw0

New Year, New Laws

A little over a week ago, the world rang in the new year one time zone at a time.  When it got to the United States, ringing in the new year also brought in new laws, state by state and city by city.  USA Today had a headline, “New year brings in hundreds of new laws.”  Some of them are as follows.  21 states and five cities raised their minimum wage.  Five states increased their taxes on gasoline.  In California, dogs are allowed to dine with their human companions in restaurants’ outdoor patios, if the restaurant allows.  Illinois imposed a beer tax.  Massachusetts will allow “hold open” clips on gas pumps, so customers do not have to hold on to it while pumping gas into their cars.  In Oregon, if the home was previously used as a meth lab, sellers must disclose it to the potential buyers.  Although, the article didn’t say whether recreation vehicles are included in the law, because they are considered, as per “Breaking Bad,” as “private domicile,” and the occupants shall not be harassed.

In the City of New York, I received an official notice stating, “Starting January 2015, you can’t discard electronics in the trash.  Look inside for recycling options.”  When I received it in the mail, I thought, “Great!  The city’s doing something positive.  Let’s see how this great city is going to get this done.

When I opened it, I was extremely disappointed.  The notice lists five recycling options.

1) DSNY (Department of Sanitation New York City) allows apartment buildings with more than 10 units to enroll for “free and convenient” pickup service.

2) Retail drop-off programs.  Electronics can be dropped off at Goodwill, Salvation Army, Best Buy, Staples (no TVs), or the Gowanus E-Waste Warehouse.

3) Free mail-back programs.

4) Electronics recycling events.

5) Donate or sell working electronics.

Seriously?!  This is one very irresponsible law.  So the law is to turn everybody in New York City into someone like me, who ends up sitting on a bunch of electronic waste and don’t really know what to do with them.  Apartment buildings are asked to voluntarily enroll for pickup service.  What if somebody lives in a building with fewer than 10 units?  They will have to physically move their electronic waste to a drop off facility.  What if the tenant is physically incapable of moving the items to a drop off location?

Missing in the notice is punishment.  Electronics cannot be discarded in the trash, but it doesn’t say what will happen if they do.  Sure, large items are easy to spot; such as large monitors, computer towers, all-in-one printers, etc.  What about the MP3 players, mice, and video game consoles that are listed in the notice?  They’re small enough to be thrown out with tonight’s dinner trash.  When thinking about it, so what about large items?  Who will stop me if I decide to bring a computer tower to the corner and drop it next to a trash can at the intersection in the middle of the night?  DSNY does not work that late, although, it is an agency that is allowed to issue summons.  Better yet, the New York City Police Department is on a work slowdown, so chances are, I will not get a summons for such a menial offense.  What will happen to the computer tower?  Will it just sit in the intersection until it rusts itself away?

A responsible law will not only have punishment, but also solutions.  For example, normal trash, we’re not allowed to discard it anywhere else in the city, except at designated locations.  It is the same with recyclables, such as cans, bottles, and papers products.  They are normally convenient, for high-rise apartment buildings, there are garbage chutes.  The garbage gets compressed and left at the curb for collection.  For houses, residents haul the garbage out to the curb in front of their home.  It should be the same for electronic waste.  Disposing of it should be simple, not the same inconveniences as before the law.  The law doesn’t really change anything.  Even with convenient collection of non-recyclables and recyclables, some people still don’t do it, what made the lawmakers think that having a law in place will make people do more work?

I’m quite disappointed.  Maybe on the bright side, at least it’s a step in the right direction, albeit, a very small step, more like a twitch.

25 Extremely Bizarre Laws: http://youtu.be/S_NEBE2n3QE

Real or Fake Christmas Tree?

My brother once read somewhere on the Internet that it’s better to have a real Christmas tree than a fake one.  The article said that real trees come from farms, so there’ll always be an abundant of them, year after year.  Fake trees end up in landfills, which is not a good thing.

I’ve been wondering about that.  Real trees can land up in landfills too, sure they can decompose, biodegradable, but as mentioned in a previous post regarding paper bags, organic decomposition releases carbon dioxide.  Therefore, a bunch of real trees decomposing will produce carbon emissions, which is not something that we want to do.  Plastic trees, same as plastic bags, will not release anything in landfills, they just will stay around for a very very long time.

Real trees can be recycled.  In New York City, trees are collected by the Department of Sanitation and chipped into mulch for distribution to parks, playing fields, and community gardens.  That’s not much of a recycling effort, since it’s just making the trees into smaller pieces for further decomposing.  At least it serves some function in the meantime.

Fake trees can be recycled too, plastic can be reused into other materials.  However, it’s just that currently, it’s not widely done.  They do end up in landfills if thrown out.  However, most people don’t buy a plastic tree, use it once, and throw it out.  After the season is over, they get packed into the box that it came in with, then stashed away for the next season.  In places where I’ve worked and working now, they’ve been using the same fake tree year after year.  As long as they keep getting reused, they’re not contributing to the landfills.

According to an analysis done by an outside organization commissioned by the American Christmas Tree Association, the carbon footprint of using either tree is negligible.  Real trees, of course, can only be used for the current season.  If the plan is to get one tree and use it for as long as possible, then a fake tree works best, the minimum use is 7 years to be “green.”

Of course, there are supporting arguments for both sides.  Fake trees are typically made in China and it uses more energy to transport to the United States.  There’s also the manufacturing process that is damaging to the environment.  On the other side, real trees require fertilizers and pesticides to grow.  Unless the tree farm is certified organic, apparently, there’s an organic farm in Oregon.  Oregon produces the most Christmas trees in the nation.  There’s also the whole process of cutting them down and transporting them to their designated markets.

In the world of transportation logistics, it is quite efficient to ship fake trees from China to the United States. There are so many vessels circling the Pacific Ocean, it doesn’t matter that a few more containers get loaded onto the ship bound of the United States.  These containers will be loaded with all the other consumer goods coming for the United States; electronics, clothing, floor tiles, dried foodstuffs, and everything else that is made in China these days.  No new ships get added for the holiday season and taken out of service afterward.  The complexity of rotating container vessels is a whole topic on its own that can cover many pages.  Once the containers reach the ports, usually on the West Coast, they will get railed to the major markets.  It’s not until the last few hundred miles of their journey that the merchandise will get moved by truck.  Ocean containers are typically not moved across the United States on the road.

Real trees, however, need to move fast.  Once they’re cut, the clock starts ticking before the pine needles start falling off.  In term of “moving fast,” I mean it quite literally.  I used to attend the University at Buffalo, on one of my trips back to New York City for the holidays, a flatbed truck loaded with Christmas trees was flying down the Interstate.  It was a snowy night on this road, this truck went by so fast, I was pushed partially onto the shoulder.  As it kept going, I see cars ahead of me getting pushed over as well.  The logistics company I’m working for now recently shipped a couple hundred of live trees to Hong Kong, it went by airfreight.  Carbon footprint of an airplane is much larger than a cargo ship when compared to a per kilogram of goods moved.  There are added flights for the holiday season, mostly in the form of chartered flights.  Live trees are largely moved over the road, carbon footprint from trucks are much larger than trains per kilogram of goods moved.  A truck with a two-man team can get from Oregon to New York in 3 days.  It can take a train up to a week and a half to cover that same distance.  The big difference is because the train makes stops along the way to offload and load more cargo, the truck only stops for fuel and for the drivers to get food and shower.

The real damage to the environment, is customers driving to go get the tree.  If one drives 60 miles round trip to go pick up a real tree, it is more damaging than driving 5 miles to get a fake tree.  If that fake tree gets used for 7 years, then that’s more environmentally friendly than getting a real tree.    In New York City, it is possible to walk down the block and pick up a real tree, best mode of transportation of all.  My question is, “Are they using plastic netting to wrap the trees with?”

So what’s the conclusion?  It’s up to you.  Get a real tree close to home and dispose of it properly.  Or get a fake tree close to home and use it for the next 10 years.  10 years later, we will hopefully have better recycling methods.  Another environmentally damaging concern is how the tree gets decorated; with a lot of energy sucking electric lights, or just very sparkly ornaments using ambient light?  Let’s leave decorations alone this time.

Enjoy the holidays, have fun with your friends and family, and don’t worry too much about using a fake or real tree.  Compared to the grand scheme of things, they’re negligible.

Weather Channel Article

State Impact Article

NYC Christmas Tree Recycling Program

O Christmas Tree – http://youtu.be/b3d6JMLaRzQ

Recycling Makes You More Attractive

One day, scanning the headlines, I saw a title, “The weird thing that makes you sexier (You probably already doing it!).”  Curious, to see if I finally have a sexy trait in this fast changing world, I clicked on it.  It is a Glamour blog post.  To my great delight, I’m attractive!

• 40 percent of people would have a more positive opinion of someone after learning they recycled. That’s way more than those who would take more kindly to someone after finding out they have a graduate degree (25 percent), an impressive job (18 percent), or even a bank account with beaucoup bucks (8 percent).
• More than 21 percent of people surveyed would be turned off if someone they were on a first date with doesn’t recycle.
• At 22 percent, almost a quarter of those polled have shown disappointment when someone did not recycle in front of them.
• Two in five respondents want an S.O. who cares about the environment.

Although, I can’t find the survey itself, I found the PepsiCo Recycling Facebook page.  The survey was done by PepsiCo, the research team behind the survey polled more than 1,140 Americans over the age of 18.  This is huge!  This means that the next time I attend a party, I can talk about recycling, and to further impress the person, I’ll perform the actual act of depositing a plastic bottle into the blue bin.  For everybody who will be attending Christmas and New Year Eve parties out there, this should be the topic of discussion.  Especially on New Year Eve, impress that hottie before midnight enough to get that ringing in the New Year kiss.

What is more important is anthropological meaning behind this.  This means that the environment is becoming extremely important to the average person.  As the saying goes, “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.”  Attraction depends heavily on current times.  There was a time when fat was beautiful, some societies now still believe it today.  Fat means the person doesn’t have to work hard, has more than enough food, and most likely has money.  As recent as the 70’s in the USA, men like women to be curvaceous and not skinny, as shown in past advertisements.  Today, there are major debates on supermodels depicting extremely skinny women and Barbie dolls giving young girls a misconception of body image.  Not only women, men as well, body image for men is important too, which is why I find this Honest Trailer of “300” to be extremely hilarious.  Especially the narration saying, “[T]he movie that made guys everywhere feel out of shape.”  Watch the trailer, the male images depicted in the movie is quite self-explanatory.

What does this survey tell us?  I think it is more in the, I can’t see people actually talk about it up front and use it as a pickup line, “Hello gorgeous, I like the way how you recycle.”  I’ve done Match.com, have never seen it listed as a trait or hobby, “My favorite hobby is making sure that all my trash is separated properly into paper, plastic, compose, and landfill.”  Therefore, it is more in the subconscious, it’s not something people do to enhance their looks or use materials to show off status.

It is just too simple to pass up.  People work hard to impress others, such as spending large sums of money on super cars, workout at gyms to achieve a certain body image, get good grades in school, get hired by prestigious firms, post achievements instantaneously on Instagram, and the list goes on and on.  Recycling, however, can be done without a lot of work, and it’s so impressive already, more than a graduate degree, impressive job, and having lots of money.

We are ready!  Our environment can be saved!  We just need the little nudge, with political and industry support, to squarely put us into that direction.  That’s where the big changes will be.

Keeping up the holiday spirit: http://youtu.be/S6AAdFMGoJ0?list=PLE7E8EB7C18B2E04A

I need it!

We are now into the shopping season.  Thanksgiving marks the beginning of it.  I’ve been keeping my ears open when I listen to the radio to see if there are any mentions of Thanksgiving as the holiday itself, or products and services for the holiday, I didn’t hear any.  When I’m on the street, I looked for clues of Thanksgiving, not including workers setting up for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in New York City or delis advertising cooked turkeys.  There were any hardly Thanksgiving decoration, but Christmas decoration is all over the place.  Every advertisement points to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and shopping for the holidays.  Christmas equals shopping now.

I also felt that the boundary for “need” and “want” have been obscured.  Someone I know bought an iPhone6 Plus for a lot of money.  She said that it was “needed.”  I can’t imagine why it’s a need, I’ve never seen her do anything spectacular on the phone.  All I’ve seen her do has been making phone calls, texting, play Candy Crush, normal smart phone stuff that other smart phones can do as well.  I recently got a smart phone myself, a Motorola Droid Maxx, because I’m part of a family plan that was activated since way back, it cost me 99 cents to get it.  There was a want, I want to be able to text, read e-mails, browse the web, and other normal stuff comfortably.  I will probably never use the full potential of the phone.  It’s not like I’m a spy in one of those awesome spy movies where I’ll save the world by stopping terrorists from launching nuclear strikes against American cities off of it.

That’s the power of marketing, to get consumers to need things.  All the deals, the percentages taken off of the original price, the signs, sometimes with lights, along with holiday decorations, all the mind manipulations and sensory attractions, are all very overwhelming.  It gets people to trade in their money for material stuff.  As I’m typing this, I am considering making a purchase for dress shirts.  There was a time when I needed these shirts, when I started a job that requires me to wear them.  For one year, I just cycled through four shirts a week, we get “dress-down” Fridays.  That became a problem when an extra day popped up that required another day of me in a shirt.  If it’s an event which I needed to wear a suit, that wasnt’ not so bad, I’ll just find the less wrinkly shirt and wear it again, just had to keep the jacket on throughout the event.  Sometimes it got hot.  Other times, well, I’ll just show off the wrinkles.  Eventually, I bought four more shirts, simply for the sake of the per shirt discount.  Right now, it’s a want, I already have more shirts than the calendar week.  Maybe a semi-want, since some of the older shirts are getting worn out, I wear those when I don’t think I’ll see anybody else, other than co-workers.  Or did I just made an excuse for myself?

In our consumption society, we often buy a lot of things that we don’t need.  During the holiday season, we buy things to give, which are sometimes what people don’t need, in some cases, don’t even want.  I’m sure a lot of people have gotten a holiday gift or birthday present that’s not wanted.  How about those wedding gifts for guests?  Some of them are nicely personalized, so something that can be kept as memories.  Others are a small pouch of M&Ms, so they’re easy to get rid off, just hand it off to the next kid running by.  Then there are those that I have no idea what to do with.  What am I supposed to do with a 3D heart shaped plastic case that changes color when I turn it own that have the bride’s and groom’s name on it?

What do we do with most things we don’t want?  Either we put them away in some forgotten corner of our home and that’s where they’ll stay.  Or we send them away and make them not our business.  We simply throw them out.  How many of us kept all of our gifts anyway? There are probably some of my gifts in landfills that I don’t even remember ever receiving.

All I want to say is: Let’s practice being more responsible this season.  For gifts, give items that are meaningful. Maybe it’s okay to just give a gift card, let the recipient make its own purchase. Whenever possible, decline the shopping bag, whether paper or plastic.  If needed, try to consolidate the items from different stores into one back. I’m sure nobody wants to walk around with their arms wrapped around their newly bought items, bags will be used, that’s when consolidation helps.  Instead of having a bag for shirts from one store and another bag for a pack of socks from a different store, put the pack of socks into the bag of shirts, use one bag.  Be sure to sort what’s recyclable or not prior to disposal.  Don’t ever litter.

A little late, but a quick and entertaining video on the history on Black Friday.  Not sure how accurate all the facts are, but it’s funny.  A little note, there’s some expletive language.

Plastic is Good for Us

In a couple of my previous posts, I pretty much bashed on plastic whenever I had a chance.  Well, it’s quite damaging to the environment, yet, we can’t do a lot about not using it.  In a modernized society, it is part of our everyday lives.  I can’t imagine a day without touching plastic.

Plastic is great!  It’s durable, can be molded into just about any shape or form, and has multiple functions.  So much can be done with plastic, if you’re reading this, chances are, you’re using a device in an area that has access to the Internet.  In such a setting, all you have to do is simply look around, there’s probably plastic around.  You’re probably touching it right now.

Like all good things, too much of it is bad.  For example, vitamin C, people say taking it will keep you healthy.  I recently found out that too much vitamin C can cause diarrhea.  My doctor said that to me when I went for a physical check up, she was grilling me on vitamin supplement intake.  Apparently, it has other side effects as well, here’s what the Mayo Clinic says.

Diarrhea, that’s what the world is having with plastic pollution.  Uncontrollable amount of plastic waste is getting washed out into the oceans and causing a lot of concern.  Plastic waste doesn’t stay in their own form once out in the ocean like glass bottles.  Glass bottles stay intact, a record of a recovered message in a bottle was first thrown into the sea in 1913.  The bottle was recovered in 2014, 101 years at sea.  LINK

Plastic breaks down under long exposure under the sun, it “photodegrades.”  It doesn’t disappear though.  The smaller pieces still slosh around in the ocean and eventually come together from ocean currents.  One such congregation places is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  There’s one in every ocean, the one in the Pacific is the largest of them all.  It’s one gigantic soup of degraded plastic pieces that scientists don’t know how to track or clean.  Full environmental impact is still not known.  There are many theories, such as sea life eating them and in turn messes up the ecosystem, therefore the food chain, and our food supply.

Faced with such dire scenarios of our near future, environmental groups got politicians to pass laws to ban single-use plastic bags.  It’s one of those items that are extremely abundant in the trash world.  Tons get thrown out everyday, not only into trash receptacles for the landfills, but onto the streets, on high ways, directly thrown into the waterways, the oceans, etc.  There are so many plastic bags, people don’t know what to do with them.  I have a part of my closet dedicated to hold plastic bags that I keep for trash bags.  There’s a smaller section where I hold plastic bags that I don’t know what to do with.  They’re too small for my garbage can.  There’s simply no other uses for them.  When I’m out and about, I keep an eye out for plastic bag collection bins, they can sometimes be found in large pharmacies or supermarkets.

On Sep. 30, 2014, California became the first state to ban single-use plastic bags.  LINK

On Nov. 17, 2014, Baltimore City Council banned single-use plastic bags.  LINK  This one is quite interesting, it might get vetoed.  The veto is more of a political action than an environment issue.  Here’s one of those times when politics became more important than the issue at hand.

With single-use plastic bags banned, what can shoppers use?  They can bring their own bags.  I normally decline the plastic bag when I go shopping.  If I have a backpack, I throw them in.  It can get quite heavy if there are liquid items, such as milk, orange juice, etc.  A small price to pay to carry a heavy load for a few blocks with one fewer plastic bag used.  Other times, I will bring my own bag.  What if I bought too much stuff for me to carry in my arms and I do not have a backpack or my own bag?  The answer is the store-supplied paper bag!

If one step back and take a moment to think about this.  Paper bags, paper, paper comes from trees.  Wouldn’t this mean more trees will be chopped to make paper bags?  California requires that 40% of the paper bags must be post-consumer products.  What about the 60%?

There is an organization in San Francisco suing against the ban, called Saved the Plastic Bag.  Their website has a bunch of interesting information.  For one example, carbon dioxide emission.  Paper bags, as with most organic compounds that degrade or decompose, such as dead animals, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere.  The estimated amount of paper bags that will replace plastic bags will emit annual carbon dioxide estimated to be equivalent of 92,280 passenger vehicles.  According to this theory, switching solely to paper bags will make things worse for us.  The site also went on to say that the U.S. and California governments are working on keeping carbon dioxide from being released from landfills.  Plastic bags are said to last a very long time.  During that time, nothing is released into the air.

What does this mean for us?  We’re in a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” scenario.  Others will call it a “Catch-22.”  Use plastic bags, they can potentially go into the ocean and add to the patch.  Or use paper bags, they go into the land fills and release carbon dioxide into the air.  Carbon dioxide is largely blamed for global warming.

I believe it comes down to responsibility.  If we try our best to not use store bags, whether paper or plastic, then there’ll be less waste.  Sometimes I see people buy one single small item, such as a bottle of water, and ask for a bag.  That’s silly!  What’s the point of carrying a bottle of water in a bag when it can be carried in the hand?  The hand is needed to carry something anyway.  If we do our part and pitch in to the recycling effort, then less waste, paper or plastic will end up in the landfills or oceans.

Another thing that we need to be responsible is to do our own due diligence and don’t rush to conclusions.  When passing these laws banning single-use plastic bags, did the law makers do their own research?  Did the environmental groups perform research on the alternative?

Do you know that they can turn plastic bags and other waste plastics into diesel fuel?

If you’re going to try this at home, do so at your own risk:

http://youtu.be/njIYHtFmcSs

Our Own Demise through Consumerism

The world is changing very fast.  Things really sped up in the 90’s and does not seem to be slowing down. Consumer technology exploded and things became obsolete much faster than ever before.  As individuals, if unable to keep up, we fall behind.

Take my father for example.  His mindset is still set in the late 70’s of Communist China.  Multiple attempts to recalibrate have failed.  Sometimes he gets hit by a dose of reality and for one small instant, he gets amazed by technology.  He doesn’t understand recycling as the word is being used today.  Growing up, nobody threw anything away, nobody had enough in their possession to throw things away.  Recycling was cutting up old clothing to patch up the better conditioned clothing.  He said that it didn’t even matter if one had money at the time, if you go to a store, all you can buy was salt.

Now, he’s in the United States, living the American Dream.  He worked hard, raised a family, has money in the bank account, and can be a consumer.  Something he was not able or allowed to do in China.  Consumption in the United States, the freedom to do anything, buy anything one wishes.  Quite interestingly enough, something he never saw when he was in China, or anybody else, it’s that China is now along the same lines as the United States.

Consumerism has become part of our culture.  In the United States, Thanksgiving is more and more marked as the day of eating right before the start of the shopping season than a day of family gathering and be thankful.  Commercials have Christmas themes already, decorations are already up.  Stores are now opening on Thanksgiving evening.  Christmas is more about buying things than religion and festivities.  The marketing machine of this nation is merging shopping with the holidays, holidays means time to shop.  This resulted in a lot of people buying a lot of things that they don’t need.  Eventually, these items turn into trash.  Most of the things that we throw out can harm the environment one way or another, inadvertently, we end up harming ourselves.

It has also showed up in politics.  After the events of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush made a series of speeches that included the words “shop” and “shopping.”  He also said we should travel and visit America’s great destination spots, “and one of the great goals of this nation’s war is to restore public confidence in the airline industry.”  Many critics said that Bush asked Americans to sacrifice for the nation and spend more money.  In 2008, both candidates, Barak Obama and John McCain criticized Bush for saying such things.  Some even accredited the collapse of the economy on what Bush said, because now that people spent so much then, the bills are due now.  Karl Rove defended Bush by saying that he didn’t tell people to go shopping, but to “participate in the economy.”  My personal take on it, Bush was just telling people not to cower from these terror attacks and continue to go about our normal lives.  We shouldn’t be afraid to go outside, “This great nation will never be intimidated. People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball games.”  However, with our ingrained commercialism mindset, Bush gave us a pass to spend frivolously.

There’s also the comfort of convenience.  Fast food trash is a very big issue.  There are tons of plastic utensils, straws, cups, food containers, etc. being thrown out every single day.  Most of those go to the landfills.  In the United States, the patrons bring their own trash to the waste bins in establishments such as McDonald’s.  Most Asian countries, such as Hong Kong and Taipei, the staff collect the trays.  The staff will separate the items on the tray into their respective group, plastic utensils into one bin, paper wrappers in another for recycling, even liquid has its own place to go.  Staff can be instructed to do the sorting, patrons cannot.  When I go to Starbucks, the contents of the landfill bin looks very similar to the recycle bin, customers just deposit their trash without any care.

An alternative is to let our children teach us how to do it, provided that they are taught properly to do so.  Most of us were taught as kids to bring our own trash to the trash bin in McDonald’s or similar places.  We were also taught other things that stick with us the rest of our lives, such as saying “thank you” and “you’re welcome,” hold the door open for the person behind us, and both ways before crossing the street.  Some kids were taught to like certain sports, certain teams, and certain players.  They can be taught to be environmentally conscious and do their part by sorting their own trash.  I was exposed to recycling in third grade, students from a sixth grade class working on a project on paper recycling gave us a presentation on it.  Then they set up a box in our classroom for our waste papers.  Have been putting paper in the right place since.

They can also be taught to be less materialistic, stemming wasteful consumerism.  At least be more responsible consumers.  There is often no need to buy the next generation of electronics.  If one wishes to do so anyway, that person should dispose their previous ones accordingly.  Once taught, they can in turn teach the older generation on how things should be.  Children teach adults things all the time.  A family was saved from a tsunami by a 10-year-old British girl in Thailand in 2005 because she recently learned about it.  Here’s a link to that article.  That’s extreme, but kids do share what they learn in school.  Parents do listen from time to time.

For every single individual willing to do their part, we are all better off.  One person might not seem like a lot, but collectively, the impact is tremendous.  If the older generation refuses to listen, at least we can have a whole generation working on it, therefore, not a waste.  Maybe it can be seen as the clean up crew.  It’s a big mess, that we are trying to “clean up.”

China is going the way of how Americans behave, but in its own way.  There is rampant consumerism and materialism.  The Chinese government is actively pushing these ideas, one method is rapid urbanization.  It is building cities, seizing farmlands to do so, then place the farmers into town homes.  All with the idea to transform the farmers from their subsistence ways to urban, consumption ways.  In a way, the planners felt that by putting a farmer who has no use for a flat panel display in their farmhouse will immediately purchase one for their apartment, along with smart phones, kitchen appliances, etc. to further spur the economy.  LINK (Fox) For those who like CNN more, here’s an opinion piece from it LINK.

China is on its way to surpass the United States as the largest economy, it has one of the largest populations on the planet with 1 billion individuals, compared to 300 million Americans.  Growing up, I’ve always been told that Americans are wasteful.  Imagine a group much larger than Americans being equally wasteful.  What kind of world are we moving toward?  Educating on environmental issues should not be a single country’s duty.  It is the duty of all nations, to every school child, especially of industrialized nations.  Politics should not be in the way of such an important topic.  Toxic air, water, and land do not discriminate against sex, religion, race, etc.

By no means do I want the economy to slow down for the sake of solving environmental issues.  It can expand if done right, probably at a faster pace.  Some industries can expand from it.  New industries can spring up.  Sure, some will go away, but that’s what progress is.  How many people shed a tear when the last shoe shine man made his last rounds on a cold January day in 2005 not the Staten Island Ferry?  How many people feel bad by sending e-mails when the U.S. Post Office is always on the verge of laying off thousands of letter carriers?  Change doesn’t have to be drastic, like China’s massive urbanization campaigns and forcing millions of people to relocate.  It can start small and pick up momentum, with change being more evolutionary and easier to adapt.  However, we’ll never know, but one thing is certain, if we are not more responsible, we will be in our own muck very fast.

Ever felt like this that compels you to buy things?  http://youtu.be/dN8vyO8ILD8

Working Hard to Recycle E-Waste

Some things are easy, such as paper products, beverage cans and bottles.  Those receptacles are all over the place.  It should be a crime for somebody to throw a bottle into a trash bin that goes to the landfills.  Even if there isn’t one in the immediate vicinity, it can be brought home.  Towns in the USA provide recycling bins to residences with street pick up.  Apartment buildings tend to have them as well, either in the compactor room, staircase, or basement.  It’s not that hard to do your part to put the right contents into the right bin.

E-waste, however, is quite difficult.  There are no regular pick ups.  When I went to school at the University at Buffalo, there were bins in the libraries for floppy discs and CDs.  At the University at Buffalo, I used to roam the halls of the different buildings on campus.  From time to time, I saw used computers and monitors left outside in the hallways for collection.  I also went to Baruch College, there were collection points for used cell phones.  That’s e-waste disposal in schools that I’ve seen.

To recycle e-waste, a person must do some work.  Where does one go?  One obvious place will be the large electronics retailers, such as Best Buy, Staples, and Dell.  Best Buy, there’s a recycling link at the bottom of the homepage in under Product Support.  Click on it, and it explains why Best Buy recycles and why it’s important.  There are some exceptions to what it will accept in their stores, “Recycling is intended for residents only. Products from businesses and organizations are not accepted. Items that present a health or safety hazard are not accepted.”  For business e-waste, one needs to go through an outside company, MRM.

A quick look with Staples, I didn’t see a recycling link, so I moved on.  With Dell, I had to click through Corporate Responsibility at the bottom of the homepage in the Company category.  Then I have to click on Environment, where it talks about how Dell is trying to help.  It has a wide range of services for recycling for businesses, private individuals, toner recycling, and others.

Most of these services are free and safe.  Dell ensures that business data gets destroyed and not be released into the world.  However, it’s a lot of work.  It’s not easy clicking through through all these links and read so many words.  First, these links need to be seek out, they’re not at the top of the site.  After all that, one has to decide on whether to pack up the car and bring it to a participating Goodwill location or call in and make an arrangement for pick up.  Ever tried to move an all-in-one printer?  They’re quite heavy!  It’s much easier to throw them into the Dumpster.  What if I live in a city and doesn’t have a car?  I don’t want to drag pounds of e-waste for several blocks, into the subway, or onto a bus.  Worth it to flag a taxi?  Rent a van?

Worst of all, they’re not advertised!  A person like me will have to consciously go through all the steps of searching and do what’s necessary.  I ran a search once and drove my e-waste to a collection facility in my county in New Jersey.  In my trunk, I had two used printers, one 19-inch CRT monitor, three used towers, and other peripherals.  It was heavy load, the drive was a short 20 minutes away.  Someone else who does not know or does not care will not think twice about sending their e-waste to the landfills.

Unlike a person with a plastic bottle in hand and faced with a bin with three deposit options.  Even if a person who doesn’t care about recycling, it doesn’t take much to move the hand a few inches to drop the bottle into the right hole.  E-waste requires work to hand over to the correct party.  There’s just no real incentive in doing it, aside for self-satisfaction of doing something right.

I’ve worked in a few places over the years.  In some of those places, I get to change the toner cartridge of the laser printer(s).  Sometimes, there’s a UPS label in the box of the new cartridge.  When I see one, I’ll pack the old cartridge into the box, tape it up, and affix the UPS label to the outside of the box and wait for UPS to pick it up.  When I do that, my colleagues asked why I do it and if I get money for it.  I tell them that I don’t receive monetary compensation, it’s just the right thing to do.  They don’t get it, they rather just throw the cartridge into the trash.  I don’t understand why they would rather throw the cartridges away than to send it the delivery address on the UPS label.  My previous employers have warehouses, where tape is readily available, and has daily UPS pick up.  A couple of those places have so much UPS packages going out, they’re loaded onto the UPS trucks on pallets with a forklift.  It was not hard to throw one of these old cartridges onto the outgoing pallet.

I think there are two things that are preventing the masses from doing their part in e-waste recycling.  One is education.  Most don’t know how bad e-waste is to the environment, creating a sense of non-caring.  With paper, the majority feels bad about killing all those trees to make the paper that we use.  Wasting paper is not good.  Cans and bottles, in some states, there are monetary incentives, so even if people throw them into regular trash receptacles, there will be collectors going through the trash to retrieve them for recycling.  In New York City, it is a common sight, people digging in the trash to pick out the cans and bottles for their 5-cent value.  For some, that’s their main source of income.  Recycling cans and bottles are also hammered into people’s brains, it became automatic for some.

Second is regulation.  There are laws against e-waste being in landfills, however, they are not enforced.  If a computer tower goes into a Dumpster, then buried under a bunch of trash, to be loaded into a garbage truck and compressed, it goes to the landfill with everything else.  There’s no legal consequences, no fines issued.

How do we get others to do the right thing?  How do we stop the growth of e-waste?

How big of a problem is electronic waste?: http://youtu.be/UyIpG7UJKyI

Hardship of Recycling Plastic

In electronic waste recycling, there’s a lot of talk in extracting the metal.  Metals important, they’re worth a lot of money and are easily transformed into other things.  Recycling metal is also more energy efficient than refining from ore straight out of the ground.  One of the previously posted videos, it mentioned that gold extracted from circuit boards can be used for gold dental fillings.  In a video on Guiyu, plastic casings from monitors were burned and thrown into irrigation canals.  That got me wondering about plastic, “Is plastic that hard to recycle, especially computer monitor plastic?”

To find out why, my first step was to reach out to my cousin living in Hong Kong.  Her husband’s family owns a plastic recycling plant in China that turns scrap plastic into little pellets, much like what was shown in another previously posted video, the Reading Rainbow one.  The company imports hundreds, if not thousands of containers of plastic from the USA and other parts of the world of scrap plastic for the plant.  Her response was so shocking, there’s not no reason to continue with the research.  She wrote, “Monitor and PC plastics are not hard to recycle, plastics from these items are our main plastics recycle stream.”

Let’s repeat, “Monitor and PC plastics are not hard to recycle, plastics from these items are our main plastics recycle stream.”

Guiyu is 200 miles northeast of Hong Kong.  Therefore, tons of plastic are burned and discarded in a distance similar to New York City and Boston.  That blew my mind!  There are companies importing scrap plastic legally, from all over the world into China.  Yet, there are tons of these types of plastic smuggled into China.  This means that if these plastic recycling plants can get their hands on these smuggled plastics, it can potentially save them a lot of money.  It can’t be that expensive to send a truck over and collect all the plastics that were marked for burning for recycling.  That should be much more cheaper than buying the plastic, shipping it, and pay duties and taxes on them.

My cousin also said that the plastic must be treated first.  Scrap plastics bought in the USA and other well established recycling program countries are already treated.  If that’s the case, why not build the plant in China to process the plastic?  The plastic recycling factories are close to Hong Kong, consumer product factories are in the same area, the source of plastic is a little further away.  Logistically, it is perfect.  The cost of processing the plastic to be recycled is already built into the price that these plastic recycling companies are paying for already.  Besides, I believe that the cost of building and running a processing plant should be cheaper in China than in the USA.

I don’t think there should be any reason why plastic should be all over the place, such as the ocean, landfills, and discarded here and there.  There is no question that we use a lot of plastic.  Not one day goes by that plastic does not somehow be part of my life; the computer keyboards that I type on, the structure of the seats on the commuter rail, the pen I write with, the takeout container that I bought food in, etc.  Tons and tons of plastics are discarded in the modern world.  Almost everything in a trashcan can be recycled.  Yet, collectively, we still feel that it is much easier to send our trash to the landfill than to get them turned into new things.  What are we missing?

Another amazing thing is that most people don’t see how interconnected things are.  We buy electronics made in China.  When we discard them, those that get recycled, the plastic goes back to China.  Then products come over from China to be purchased by us again.  Except the ones that end up getting burned, they’re not really coming back.  However, there are reports that Guiyu is being cleaned up, the electronic wastes are being moved into a newly built industrial park for recycling.  Maybe they will come back as some consumer product for us to buy, possibly cheaper.

It can work, we have the technology in place, we just need the infrastructure.  Electronic waste doesn’t have to be an environmental issue.  Most waste don’t have to be as well.  Are we willing to solve it?

Not a video this time, but a fun interactive on how T-shirts are made.  Similar to plastic, American cotton travels to China to be turned into T-shirts for us to buy in the stores here.

http://blogs.kqed.org/lowdown/2013/06/04/making-your-t-shirt-a-journey-around-the-world/

Start at Home, Start Young

It’s understandable that some people will continue to do what they do.  They’re just set in how they do things and some of them don’t understand why there’s a need to change.  My father is the same age as the People’s Republic of China, and from the same place.  He doesn’t know why we need to recycle.  I don’t think he even understands the word at all.  It’s a gigantic bafflement to him whenever my mother gives him a hard time when she’s digging through the trash recovering the bottles and cans that were thrown in by him.  Occasionally, she’ll find a battery, a little Duracell AAA copper top.  That’s when he’ll really get it from her.  Even after so many years, he doesn’t understand.  As far as he knows, a soda bottle can help a poor soul obtain five cents if that person can get it to those bottle crushing machines.  That’s it!  A drained battery that does not have enough power from him to turn the TV on does not fetch any money at all.  Why shouldn’t it belong in the trash?

Same with electronics.  If it stops working, it should go where trash goes, to wherever that’s not here.  A lot of people, like my father, has no interests in learning and doing what needs to be done.  My mother is ten years younger, from Hong Kong, and receptive of its public announcements.  In Hong Kong, during commercial breaks, in place of commercials for a soft drink or cosmetics, it informs on how people can work together for the betterment of the community.  Topics on helping elderly people cross the street or up the stairs, use a tissue to pick up a discarded potato chip bag on the street and deposit it in a trash receptacle, and of course, make sure recyclables are separated from non-recyclables and what are and what aren’t.

In a different view, one can say that those messages are propaganda for brainwashing.  Sure it is!  Just like Nazi and Communist propaganda on why their party is so great and everybody else is evil.  Or getting American kids to eat Cocoa Puffs over Cinnamon Toast Crunch or to choose an Audi over a Mercedes-Benz.  We call that marketing in the USA.  A topic that maybe we should revisit some other time.

Education!  A form of brainwashing, or brain molding.  Education is key to help us save the environment that we need to live in.  I’ve been strongly influenced by “Jurassic Park” by Michael Crichton on the human philosophy of technology.  One of the characters, Dr. Ian Malcolm essentially said that there’s no sense in “saving the planet.”  Earth has been around for billions of years, long before humans came along.  If we manage to kill ourselves off, something in the toxic soil will begin to grow and life will begin again after all humans are gone.  I’m paraphrasing, but it makes a lot of sense to me.  Earth doesn’t care what happens to us, we need to care about what happens to us.  We created the technology, it is up to us to control ourselves to make sure that our creation will not destroy us.  There are plenty of movies out there on how our brought the apocalypse onto ourselves.

The best way to slow down, stop, and even reverse course is to provide the information to children as young as possible.  It’s sad that education is normally the first budge to get cut and public school teachers get paid so little.  Politicians don’t care about individuals from the high school level down, none of them can vote.  We need to teach our kids what needs to be done to save our environment.  I learned about recycling paper, bottles, and cans from elementary school in the mid ’80s.  There are more of me who are willing to do the bare minimum than those who are 10 years older than me.  There will be more who are 10 years younger than me willing to do the same.  A lot of environmental programs come out of universities.  The 5-cent deposit in New York State was spearheaded by college students, an incentive to turn in cans and bottles.

Kids should not be educated for the sake of education.  Each an every individual American student needs to be prepared to compete with students from abroad.  Not only in school, but in their professional lives as well.    In order for the United States to remain strong, we need to make sure that we will have the leaders to keep us there.  Those leaders are the ones playing on the playgrounds of our schools.  They need to be prepared to take on the oncoming tasks.  Most importantly, it is our environment.  Political situations change, economic woes are unpredictable, old enemies get defeated and new enemies emerge.  The only things that are under  constant threat is our quality of air, water, and land.  We need to correct the wrongs, because there’s nobody else that will do it.

Reading Rainbow on Recycling: