Response to the article "Incinerators"

This article talks about all the reasons why incinerators are not a good idea. Not only does it destroy our environment, but it also harms our bodies and our food supply. They produce several toxic chemicals that are later revealed into the environment. They also produce ash that contains heavy metals and dioxins that release carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. Incinerators also have the capability to impact on our climate changes. In some ways I agree with the fact that incinerators are a bad idea after reading all the negative effects it could cause, but the improved incinerators with filters discussed in the previous article I've read is not such a bad idea. If we make these machines filter out all the bad toxins before it could be able to be released into the air, will we still have a problem? I'm curious to find out. 

Garbology: Chapter 12

The last chapter of Garbology discussed about a woman named Bea Johnson and how she was able to change her ways after she realized the bad habits her and her family had gotten used too. It begins with a short anecdote about how her and her family had moved from a big house to a small apartment, and how all of the extra furniture were either tossed in the trash or thrown in storage. Just like Johnson's thoughts to think before she buys something changed after realizing her habits, reading this book did that for me. It made me realize all the things I did wrong and influenced me to buy less non-biodegradable items. 

In the last page of the chapter, Humes states Bea Johnson's ten ways to get started on a low-waste path. 

Garbology: Chapter 11

Chapter 11 of Garbology talks about Portland, Oregon. It discusses how Portland is one of the most greenest cities in America. They are so obsessed with staying green that bicycle lanes are found everywhere and even some businesses offer more parking for bikes than cars. I can't imagine a world like that, considering the fact that I've been living in a busy city like L.A. all my life. Although Portland has established an environmental friendly environment in their city, they lack the ability to keep the trash they throw to a minimum. They make a lot of trash. Humes states that they waste about 7.14 pounds a day per person. Portlanders had organized ways to use up their trash for composting or to generate electricity from the methane found in the trash. Due to the fact that getting energy from trash is unpopular in America, generating energy from trash will practically never happen. 

What I really liked most about this chapter is Nickolas Themelis's views on on our trash crisis. He says that the best plan that would get rid of this problem completely is the plan to change our cultural habits. If there's a change in the way people think, then we would be able to buy less non-biodegradable items, and companies will stop making less of those items. I feel that some day that change will come, but unfortunately it will be too late. It will come to a point where it will not only be a choice but something we have to do in order to not ruin our planet completely. We need to do something now. 

Garbology: Chapter 10

Chapter 10 discussed about a man named Andy Keller and how just one glance at a local dump changed his life completely. Keller talked about his experience and how there were some things that he was expecting to see and things that completely blew him away. He expected the dump to contain loads of trash that caused an unappealing stench. What he didn't expect was to see so much plastic bags. He defined it as something that you just can't miss. One visit changed his life. He got to thinking and had decided to start a company that manufactured reusable bags that he labeled as ChicoBags. By 2011, his company expanded. Keller also made school visits and demonstrated how much plastic bags we make and use. He calculated that if all the plastic bags we use were to be tied to each other, it would circle the Earth 776 times. That's crazy! The next thing he did was to try to get people to use thermal containers that could hold the food they buy, instead of having restaurants use take out boxes that are made out of plastic, paper or foam. At first the restaurants refused to accept, but after a while they realized that they were losing those customers that suggested that their foods be placed in the containers they brought with them. They eventually changed their minds. 

Reading the story of an average person that first started as unemployed and eventually became a businessman from one brilliant idea that could not only help him but also our environment is amazing. The main reason why we haven't gotten rid of this epidemic is because we have so many people assuming that they are just one person and their change of habit won't make a difference. The truth is it can. On a personal note, just like one glance to local dump changed Keller's viewpoints on his actions, reading Garbology has changed mine. Reading all these facts and stories told by people who've studied trash for years, made me realize the changes I need to make in my household. 

Garbology: Chapter 9

 

Chapter 9 of Garbology was both fascinating and disappointing. What fascinated me was how Recology, a waste company located in San Francisco, had talented artists like Andrew Junge and Hector Dio Mendoza create astonishing artwork from items found in local trash dumps. The disappointing side of this is the fact that we accumulate enough trash to make enormous art pieces. Humes specifies in Chapter 9 how Mendoza had put his designs together. The trunk of the tree is made out of drug ads, its branches built from credit card offers, and its leaves made out of catalog pages. It's a symbol of our terrible wasting habits in tree form is what I call it. Andrew Junge built a life-sized Hummer out of plastic foam.  

     I truly was amazed by Recology and the duties they perform. It is now one of the biggest trash companies around, as well as, the biggest organic compositor. Recology found a way to sort reusable trash and use them for fertilizer. By creating this cycle, we could reduce trash drastically. 

    

      After finishing Chapter 9, I began to realize the difference between recycling and actually making less waste. I agree with Humes' beliefs that, getting rid of this trash epidemic doesn't just mean that we have to waste less and take less to the landfills, its trying to change the mentalities of people. We have to make people understand that buying paper plates or throwing away tones of plastic bottles is not what our culture should be adapting to. We shouldn't make decisions with a scale of how convenient you could make your daily tasks. As people's mentalities change, people will buy less non-biodegradable products, manufacturer's will stop making them, and our landfills will stop piling up with things that just stick around.  

Response to "The Incinerators as Eye Candy" Article

I have just finished reading an article called "The Incinerators as Eye Candy" by Elizabeth Rosenthal. It talked about how she had discovered that in Vienna, they are building new plants and redesigning old plants by adding filters into it. These plants produce heat for electricity and are even artistically designed. To answer the question that is asked at the bottom of the article, I would honestly not mind having an incinerator in my backyard. Its decorated, filters toxic chemicals, produces electricity for my home, and is a step forward to helping our environment. An important factor is that it gets rid of my trash. Why not?

Garbology: Chapter 8

Chapter 8 discussed about a man named Bill Rathje, founder of the Garbage project. He became the world's first garbologist and his discoveries revealed our lack of understanding of our own waste. I have to say, he should be known as a legend across the world. His project began when two of his students from the athropology class he was teaching, decided to study stereotypical ideas by studying neighborhood trash. They concluded that too much food was being thrown away. In the U.S. Army alone, they were throwing away food that were still perfectly edible. They later began to save 2.5 million pounds of wasted foods. This influenced Rathje's ideas and drove him to start the Garbage Project.

Throughout his discoveries, Rathje concluded that the biggest issue with trash was indeed food wasting. About 17 percent of our average waste is comprised of good waste. He also discovered that hazardous household waste such as paint, was illegally being dumped into ordinary trash bins. Humes mentions how Rathje and his workers had designed special collection days but that only felt like it was making it worse. At first the term "garbology" was a joke, but now it is actually accepted in various English dictionaries defined as "the study of a community or culture by analyzing its waste"(qtd by Humes 168). We have so much trash that we've created a term and a study of garbage.

Rathje's main purpose for this project was to make people understand that they do not necessarily know what their own trash consists of. To prove this theory, he surveyed American households and concluded that families overestimate their average intake of healthy foods and exaggerate the amount of unhealthy food and alcohol they actually consume. 

What surprised me the most was Rathje's discovery about how the garbage that we think gets decomposed, actually just sits there in the landfills. They had found newspapers from hundreds of years back that was still easily readable. The devices that were built to be biodegradable did not break down at all. In the first few chapters of Garbology, Humes discussed an important discovery that talked about how it is possible to create electricity with the amount of methane found in landfills. Well is this not the answer to our landfill problems? The trash found in landfills is found to last for a long time, as it just sits in the dumps. Can't that also mean that we could use this to our benefit and create long lasting electricity source? Thats a question I would like to ask Humes himself.

The part of the chapter that really got me thinking was when it discussed about how society has made the word "trash" a synonym to "waste". As Humes says, it is something we want to disappear, but isn't waste a verb, an action? 

After finishing this chapter, I got to thinking. How is it that people prefer to buy so much as they're wasting their money, trash it shortly after, and pay  taxes with their money just to keep it out of sight. They shouldn't waste money on things they don't need in the first place. As I continue reading, I begin to process more and more information that I was blinded to all this time. We need to change routines that shouldn't be routines in the first place. 

Response to "The Story of Electronics" Video by Annie Leonard

In this video, Anne Leonard talks about how electronics are "designed for the dumps", as in-made in a way so it could be broken easily in order to drive you to buy a new one, therefore allowing companies to make more money. It is impossible to get a broken device fixed. This has happened to me so many times. I walked into the store hoping to get my phone fixed and I leave the store with a new phone I paid $200 for. They put the price high in order to convince you to buy a new item for a few dollars less, making you think that you're saving money.  These devices contain toxic materials such as mercury and flame retardants. These chemicals not only cause harm to our environment, but also to our bodies. "Workers making computer chips had 40% more miscarriages, together with having blood, brain, and/or kidney cancer" (Leonard). In order to get rid of this issue, we need to buy less, have regulations on companies and small businesses, and become educated on what we could do in order for these useless electronic products to be properly recycled. Workers who often work with these materials are from developmental countries that have no access to protective gears that can stop the intake of high chemical exposures. We need to go to its source. In order to make less trash, we need to use less trash. In my opinion, we should make companies get rid of warranty policies, and actually buy back broken products, and use its parts to create a new product. They can even consider to fix a customer's device instead of indirectly convincing them to purchase a new and improved one. We can even set regulations on the amount of trash each companies or small businesses throw away, and force violation fees to those who choose to not follow these regulations. We could even force electronic companies to make their products safer and long lasting. If manufacturers decide to take responsibility for the recycling of their own products, the problem will decrease incredibly. We need to sacrifice in order to save the planet we live on. 

Garbology Chapter 7

In Chapter 7 of Garbology, Edward Humes talked about how he believes that the reason why we have so much trash is because people are not educated about where all the trash leads too. What Humes specifies is that people carelessly dispose their trash and do not even wonder where all their junk goes, not even the people working in waste companies. The Waste Management Inc was the first "trash trackers". They had actually followed where their trash leads too by placing tracking devices on certain trash in order to count how far trash actually goes. They had selected one hundred homes and listed certain items to test: paper, cardboard, organics, leather, rubber, plastic, glass,metal, and e-waste. Someone had seen their old sneakers 337 miles away from where she was. A plastic traffic cone made it 6.6 miles away from where it originally was. From all the waste we create, e-waste by far has the worst consequences. Humes specifies that it raises serious questions about how much effort we actually put in order to prevent this. "Recycling in particular has long served as a balm and a penance- a way of making it okay to waste.."(Humes 154). We are always told to recycle or donate broken cell phones or computers but do not actually know where it goes. I myself have donated broken cell phones in order to feel better about "saving the environment", but now I am curious as to where it exactly goes. Are we recycling as much as EPA says we are? I wonder where all my trash is going.

Garbology Chapter 6

         Chapter 6 was by far one of the most interesting chapters of Garbology. It talked about how plastic was created, its unplanned influences, and how it is found everywhere. It begins by talking about Miriam Goldstein and her discoveries of nurdles. Nurdles are small grains of broken down plastic that is washed up on the shores of our beaches. Although they are found at almost every beach, people miss it almost always. It is easily taken for sea shells. Miriam Goldstein has been on extended sea voyages four times in less than two years trying to gather data. When she had gotten reports of the Pacific Garbage Patch, she had expected to see visible trash but she had found nothing. What they found instead were high concentrations of small plastic. What people do not understand is the impact that plastic is making. Half the oxygen we breathe in, come from plankton that live on the surface of the ocean. We depend on them. Plastic asks as a magnet or a sponge that attracts toxic chemicals. As these plankton eat the toxins, they bring toxins in the food chain, which is not only bad for the marine fish, but also to the humans that eat those fish. About 7 million tons of trash ends up in the ocean, with plastic being 80 percent. Plastic had started with an American chemist named Leo Baekland. Plastic first started off with radios, telephones, and retro items and soon ended up everywhere. It was this flexible, interesting new product that interested everyone.
       I feel like we have become so dependent on plastic because of the fact of how quick and convenient it makes everything. Instead of washing so many dishes for example, people use plastic cups, plates, and utencils. All that plastic is disposed and washed up into the ocean. Plastic feels light and harmless, but in reality it affects our environment tremendously. After I had finished reading this chapter, I looked around my room and realized how much plastic there is. I am just one person in one house and I accumulate this much plastic. It's pretty disappointing.