Posts Tagged ‘trash’

People generate too much garbage and waste

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

I was out running the other morning, and it just happened to be garbage day. I couldn’t help but notice that close to half of the houses sadly had an overflowing garbage can, or even two, out at the street. This is absolutely amazing to me. How can one household generate that much waste in 2 weeks?

When I lived alone several years back, I wouldn’t even generate one plastic bag’s worth of waste. And I don’t mean a garbage size bag — I always used leftover plastic bags that found their way into my apartment, typically your average plastic bag that you would get from a grocery store.

Now that I live in a house with my girlfriend, we barely generate more waste than that. And now since we use reusable bags for shopping, we’ve turned to using other plastic that comes into the house for garbage bags. An empty bread […]

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Photos of American Mass Consumption

Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Cell phones, Atlanta 2005 44 x 90
Cell phones, Atlanta 2005 44 x 90, Chris Jordan

Thanks to Matador for pointing me to this series of photos, “Intolerable Beauty, Portraits of American Mass Consumption” by Chris Jordan. It definitely makes you think about how much we as a society use, and more importantly, waste. In addition to this photo of cell phones, there are photos of enormous piles of cigarette butts, old hard drives, old cars, sawdust, bottles, and more. Go over and check them out.

Quick Green Office Tip — eliminate cubicle and desk trash

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

At home and when I’m out I always try to avoid wasting plastic bags, and actually I try to not even use them when possible. But when I do get them, I always re-use or return them to the store for recycling. I can not ever bring myself to throw an empty plastic bag into another plastic bag, which is usually lining the trash!

In my office, each desk has a trash can, and each trash can is lined with a plastic bag. Well, recently I realized that if I put anything into the trash at my desk, even just a tiny little piece of trash, that it gets replaced at night by the cleaning crew. It just seems so wasteful to replace that bag every night, especially when I work so hard to avoid ever throwing out plastic bags.

So here is my tip for all you […]

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Biodegradable and Eco Friendly Trash Bags

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Eco friendly trash bags? A contradiction?

I had written an article on another site that continues to have quite a bit of interest, so I am putting an updated version of the article about eco friendly and biodegradable trash bags here.

Typically for my trash I actually use extra bags that find their way into my home, however I have had great luck using these eco friendly biodegradable compostable three gallon trash bags. They are called BioBags and I use them for collecting kitchen scraps and then composting, so I can vouch for the fact that these bags actually do biodegrade very quickly.

According to the product description they are “manufactured from GMO-free corn” and “are 100% biodegradable and 100% compostable. The 3 Gallon Kitchen bags work well in a small trash container or composter, but are also great for food storage. Since Biobags […]

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