An actual complete piece that only took me forever to do.
Vidal, Garbage, and Vaughn (from left to right) are all here in the opening to entrance to their little place called The Mori Circus. They’re happy to have to you and hope that you enjoy your stay, no matter how long or short.
We’ve all been told that we should recycle plastic bottles and containers. But what actually happens to the plastic if we just throw it away? Here are the life cycles of three different plastic bottles.
Bottle One, like hundreds of millions of tons of its plastic brethren, ends up in a landfill. This huge dump expands each day, as more trash moves in and continues to take up space.
As plastics sit there being compressed, rainwater flows through the waste and absorbs the water soluble compounds it contains, and some of those are highly toxic. Together they create a harmful stew called “leachate”, which can move into groundwater, soil, and streams, poisoning ecosystems and harming wildlife. It can take Bottle One an agonizing 1,000 years to decompose.
Bottle Two floats on a trickle that reaches a stream, a stream that flows into a river, and a river that reaches the ocean. After months lost at sea, it’s slowly drawn into a massive vortex, where trash accumulates - place known as “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” This is one of five plastic filled gyres in the worlds seas.
Some animals mistake the brightly colored plastic bits for food. Plastic makes them feel full when they’re not, so they starve to death, passing the toxins from the plastic up the food chain, eventually to us.
Bottle Three, on the other hand, is recycled. It’s taken away on a truck to a plant, where it and its companions are squeezed flat and compressed into a block. The blocks are shredded into tiny pieces, which are washed and melted, so they become the raw materials that can be used again. Bottle Three is ready to be reborn, as something new.
So, what can you do? First - reduce your use of plastic altogether! And when you do find yourself needing to buy a bottle, don’t forget to recycle it. You’ll be doing Planet Earth a great, big favor.
Many of us have seen the photos of plastic refuse in the ocean, the large islands of bags and waste that collect at tidal crossroads. Yet when scientists took a survey of the ocean earlier this year, they found a suspicious amount had disappeared. Was it just our good luck that pollution was decreasing? Hardly. It had simply been sinking, breaking apart and embedding itself…
Shirley Manson and her band Garbage performing during the last week of the band’s 20th Anniversary tour celebrating their acclaimed second album ‘Version 2.0’ at the Riviera Theater on October 17, 2018 in Chicago, Illinois. It was an absolute pleasure to finally get to photograph this incredible band that I have loved for over 20 Years.
Takeout creates a lot of trash. It doesn’t have to.
Even if you are one of the virtuous few who try to make a home-cooked meal every night, some nights cry out for takeout or delivery. Someone else taking care of dinner for you after a long day — it can be just what the doctor ordered.
And it’s popular: Food delivery is a $43 billion business in the US today. In many cases, not only are these services delivering food, they’re delivering lots of extra stuff: bags, boxes, wrapping, napkins, utensils, packs of condiments, colorful branded bits and bobs.
These little containers and wrappers may not seem like a big deal, but in the U.S., packaging makes up the largest category of municipal waste.
On top of that, single-use items like disposable plates and utensils, junk mail, and paper towels make up another 10% of our discards.
It piles up in our landfills, while manufacturing, shipping, and disposing of all of this stuff — often used for mere seconds — creates big greenhouse gas emissions.
“We really do need to prioritize reduce and reuse over recycling,” said Anne Krieghoff, solid waste and recycling program coordinator at the University of California Irvine. “Recycling is great to deal with a product once it’s already in your hand. But waste minimization is more important.”
Under Krieghoff’s watch, UC Irvine has reduced waste to the point that it now diverts 80 percent of its garbage from landfills. The goal: zero waste. UC Irvine isn’t alone: cities, counties, and large companies across the country are shooting for zero waste.
Watch the video above featuring to learn more about some simple ways that we can drop our single-use habits.
Lauren Singer lives a nearly trash-free life, but she didn’t go zero waste overnight. Her story, and some easy tips to get started on reducing your own waste.
A growing number of waste experts think that shooting for zero waste is realistic, not just for individuals, but for large organizations, even cities. And there’s good reason to try: waste is a major contributor to global warming, both in the production of goods that end up in the trash, and the emission of greenhouse gases from the trash itself.
Conservation International CEO and UCLA Visiting Researcher M. Sanjayan talks with Lauren Singer about how she went from an average trash-producing person, to someone who can now fit five years of garbage in a small jar. Singer provides simple tips to help you start down the road of reducing your waste, even if you never hit zero.
And the University of California is committed to going zero waste by 2020. Across the UC system, we’ve already diverted 69 percent of our solid waste from landfills.
