squanderless

Residents to Pay Waste Fees?

jeanbrennan — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 16:27:44 +0000

A recent article, “Dutchess loses waste expert at crucial time” in the Poughkeepsie Journal, talks about legislative proposals to add a standard waste fee for households.

Under the solid waste user fee proposal, residential units would pay a standard fee per household unit, while higher waste generators would pay a higher fee per square foot. Properties could be classified as anything from residential to parking garages to minimarts. The user fee would replace the net service fee the county was obligated to pay the agency.

While shifting fees to residents is not a bad idea, as it may involve citizens more actively in waste decisions, a standard fee offers no incentive to reduce waste.

Legislator Joel Tyner, D-Clinton, has concerns about the user fee. He said the user fee doesn’t reward households that compost and recycle because residential units would have to pay a standard fee. “It’s not fair,” Tyner said. “It’s not fair that tens of thousands of households would be paying the same user fee, regardless of whether they compost or recycle.” Tyner, who headed the Green Ribbon Task Force on Solid Waste Management, said he wants a “zero waste” expert to prepare a report on how the county can reduce waste as much as possible by recycling and composting.

Grandma’s Gifts Need Extra Reindeer

jeanbrennan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:21:48 +0000

Christmas, one of the most daft and delightful holidays, is a waste massacre for some parents of young children. Read this insightful article from the New York Times on managing family gift giving to find out how some are coping:

Online message boards are filled with pleas from exasperated parents seeking advice on managing the endless influx of toys, and preventing what they see as the dual tragedies of creating waste — financial and environmental — and raising spoiled brats…

Shoppers are able to “buy a lot of toys for not a lot of money,”…which has created “a crisis of overabundance.” And one result is that parents often feel tyrannized by their children’s toys, because “they have to spend so much time managing them, cleaning them and organizing them, instead of spending time on what matters most.”

Design Opportunities

jeanbrennan — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:52:43 +0000

As a designer, I hope to discover opportunities for real change regarding trash in my community. As I sorted my family’s trash for one month, I noted evolving solutions in the way of packaging; the real innovation here being in the materials. Landfill-destined materials eventually being replaced with recyclable or biodegradable materials that may head, if one exists, to a domestic compost pile. If we are able to reach Cradle to Cradle‘s projected ideal, trash will follow nature’s laws. Trash will no longer be waste, but rather biological or technical nutrients to further feed the earth and our consumption. We will happily toss our packaging on the ground much like cherry trees lose their blossoms. Those things that won’t biodegrade will be upcycled as ‘technical nutrients’. In the interim, we are still creating mountains of trash. “In 2007, Americans generated about 254 million tons of trash.”

Perhaps there is a design opportunity not just in materials, but in the receptacle. According to anthropological studies conducted by The Garbage Project, people are more conscientious and produce less garbage when trash cans are limited in size and availability.

Though unpublicized, Royal Carting has 35 gallon cans available to local residents upon request. I hope to get an initial 30-50 families to switch to the smaller receptacles. I will supply colorful stickers with informative facts for these families to attach to their new cans. On trash days these curbside receptacles become a neighborly ad campaign for waste reduction. The sticker will also let residents know how they can procure a 35 gallon version, a physical reminder to reduce weekly waste.

Another idea on the receptacle front, is to redesign the kitchen can as a smart home device, giving households access to information regarding volume and weight on a daily and/or weekly basis. Rather than camouflage, the domestic waste can would reveal, helping consumers make better choices.

Rubbish Theory by Michael Thompson

jeanbrennan — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:40:05 +0000

Future Ruins by Michelle Lord via Ballardian

I recently took out the book, Rubbish Theory, by Michael Thompson from the Pratt Library. Thompson looks at the creation and destruction of value in man-made objects, cultural artifacts and ideas. He notes how an object’s economic and/or cultural value diminishes over time rendering the objects worthless or redundant. (This cycle has picked up speed with the advent of consumer culture, our most recent technological gadgets becoming obsolete within 3 years.) The book, written in 1979, looks at how some of these objects then regain value, such as antiques or historic homes. It reminded me of reading Karl Marx’s theory regarding use value during my undergrad degree.

Thompson had a career as a Himalayan Mountaineer, taught at the Slade School of Fine Art and at Portsmouth University’s School of Architecture, worked for an East-West think tank in Austria and recently in 2008 published a new book about cultural theory entitled, “Organising and Disorganising: A Dynamic and Non-Linear Theory of Institutional Emergence and its Implications.” An interview with Michael Thompson from BBC.

Zero Waste Committee

jeanbrennan — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 10:46:23 +0000

I recently attended a Beacon Zero Waste Committee meeting. Zero Waste is a subcommittee of the Beacon Mayoral Conservation Advisory Committee (CAC). Unlike CAC, Zero Waste is not an appointed committee just concerned citizens who act on projects related to reducing waste. (Learn more about the zero waste movement.)

Zero Waste is currently working with Sargent Elementary School to encourage more comprehensive paper recycling in cooperation with Royal Carting. The Green Team, a group of Beacon teens, will create a video of the project and make it available to other Beacon School District schools. Zero Waste has also been involved in the discussion regarding the possibility of a city-wide composting proposal that would provide food waste pick up by trash services for all city residents. However, given economic challenges this proposal is unlikely to pass at this time.

Prudence Posner and I hashed out some ideas on how to encourage composting. We decided upon a Beacon House Tour without the houses, simply composting. Participants can see first-hand how local residents do small-scale residential compost, allowing knowledge-sharing amongst neighbors. The event would follow the same logistics as a house tour might. A more formal composting workshop could be presented by a group like Green Teens and/or Stony Kill Educational Farm. Look for more details early Spring!

Pacific Garbage Patch

jeanbrennan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:05:31 +0000

There was another article in the NY Times posted yesterday regarding the whirlpool of garbage, now roughly twice the size of Texas, in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean.

PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals cannot dissolve in water, but the plastic absorbs them like a sponge. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles…Scientists speculate that toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat…
Researchers measure the amount of plastic in each sample and calculate the weight of each fragment. They also test the tissues of any fish caught in the nets to measure for toxic chemicals. One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.

Future Fossils

jeanbrennan — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:24:30 +0000

Two of the four ‘Future Fossils’ prints recently exhibited at Beacon Open Studio. These are clay monoprints overlaid with laser cut drawings of specific items of domestic waste destined to be future fossils. ‘Aunt B’s Cupcake Foils’ was selected as a ‘Best of Open Studio’ and will be exhibited at the Rhinebeck Savings Bank in Beacon, NY during November and December 2009.

1. Spiral binder fragments: clay print, laser cut paper
2. Aunt B’s Cupcake Foils: clay print, laser cut paper
3. Aunt B’s Cupcake Foils: detail

Zero Waste in the NYT

jeanbrennan — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:54:58 +0000

A recent article in the New York Times, entitled Nudging Recycling From Less Waste to None, describes the growing trend toward zero waste.

Across the nation, an antigarbage strategy known as “zero waste” is moving from the fringes to the mainstream, taking hold in school cafeterias, national parks, restaurants, stadiums and corporations.

The movement is simple in concept if not always in execution: Produce less waste. Shun polystyrene foam containers or any other packaging that is not biodegradable. Recycle or compost whatever you can.

Though born of idealism, the zero-waste philosophy is now propelled by sobering realities, like the growing difficulty of securing permits for new landfills and an awareness that organic decay in landfills releases methane that helps warm the earth’s atmosphere.

For a more in-depth look at creating zero waste, take a look at Zero Waste: From Philosophy to Practical Implementation. This is documentation from a seminar held this Fall by the U.S. Environmental Protection agency’s solid waste management. There’s a video as well. Here’s the introductory quote:

The “zero waste” philosophy aims to minimize waste and resource consumption in order to conserve energy, mitigate climate change, reduce water usage, prevent toxics creation, and minimize ecosystem destruction. With almost one-third of greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the acquisition of materials, reducing consumption has the potential to significantly affect climate change.

Topography of Domestic Waste

jeanbrennan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:41:59 +0000

I have been working on a series of prints that explore common materials in domestic waste: tin foil, plastic wrap, foam packaging and newsprint/paper. As man made materials populate our world in the form of trash, these materials become our landscape both figuratively and literally. The prints transform these everyday objects into topographic maps, exploring volume, shape and materiality and the similarities between these and natural forms, breaking down the construct between the natural and the man made as one becomes the other.

Maeda on Shintoism

jeanbrennan — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:19:05 +0000

John Maeda speaks about the ancient Japanese tradition of animism in his book, ‘The Laws of Simplicity‘:

Growing up, my siblings and I were taught that everything in our environment, including inanimate objects, had a living spirit that deserved respect…Under this strict code of life, my taking a clean sheet of paper, crumpling it up, and throwing it away was grounds for punishment. I would be denying the paper’s existence to perform a useful task, and divine retribution would result from the disrespect I had shown the paper…

Aichaku is the Japanese term for the sense of attachment one can feel for an artifact. When written by its two kanji characters, you can see that the first character means “love” and the second one means “fit.” “Love-fit” describes a deeper kind of emotional attachment that a person can feel for an object. It is a kind of symbiotic love for an object that deserves affection not for what it does, but for what it is. Acknowledging the existence of aichaku in our built environment helps us to aspire to design artifacts that people will feel for, care for, and own for a lifetime.