Every evening in my workplace, shortly after 5PM, the Jani-King feller with his headphones on, comes by and strips the white plastic bag (empty or not) from the little industrial plastic trash can in my office cubicle. He then quickly replaces it with another white plastic trash bag and heads to the next cube to dispose of another empty trash bag to be replaced by a new empty trash bag… and on and on until the entire buildings day old plastic trash bags have been refreshed with new trash bags. There is no consideration as to if the current one is completely unused, or might only have a piece of crumpled paper in it. (the fact that there is paper in there to begin with is a whole different topic – of which I’ll not delve into now)
One might offer “Biodegradable or Recycled Trash Bags” as a solution. Although biodegradable bags are much more environmentally friendly and can decompose in 10-45 days – they incur tons of overhead. Recycled trash bags are also more environmentally friendly than non-recycled trash bags – yet they still take 100 years to decompose.
One might suggest the “empty when full” or “empty when required” or “use best judgment” method, but would then assuredly find themselves dealing with the Bureau of I’m Gonna Sue You, cause you can bet there’s someone whose going to complain that they got sick because of some banana peel that smelt bad. Talk about a waste of time & money.
Some might go as far to say “no more trash can liners”… YUK. Can you imagine? Better invest in some pressure washers.
How about suggesting something like making folks get up from the cubicle and walk to a shared trash can, where right next to it are recycling bins for plastics & paper. Sue me for that one; I dare you. I’ll come back at you with a mean case of here’s the new company policy that states you need to get up and walk a few times a day due to the recent findings linking sitting at a computer all day to thrombosis. Not to mention failure to comply with the “quit wasting company resources” policy that I just put into effect along with the fact that you’re in direct violation of the Formal Code of Ethics on Healthy Living and Environmental Friendliness.
I’ve worked for several large corporations and am amazed in this day in age how some still go through petroleum based plastic trash bags every day. The global numbers would be gut wrenching. I’d be willing to bet that on a daily basis, you could fill the world cup stadium to the brim with the amount of plastic trash bags that are tossed into landfills around the globe. Think about it – just the company I’m at, 1 of its over 40 locations will generate at least 20-30 lbs (roughly 1 or 2 square ft.) of empty or nearly empty trash bags. 40-80 square feet for this company alone – and we’re small in comparison to the tens of thousands enterprise corporations out there. Sickening. Of course some critic writing for The Devil’s Advocate will come along and make nonsensical comments like “the bags weren’t compacted – there’s no way it would fill the that many square feet.” Right on; he’s missing the point entirely.
I realize not all companies work this way and that there are in fact many who do utilize centralized locations, do have recycling available and many who even use the “empty when full” or “empty when stinky” methods. The point here is that there are still many, many companies throughout the world that for whatever reason or policy… continue to waste millions of plastic trash bags.
So how bout it – take the cans away from the cubes and desks and make centralized departmental bins available?
NEW stuff as defined by me for the purpose of this blog: NEW stuff is the plethora of material items being made by human beings, from synthetic, non-recycled, non-biodegradable, and very, very unnatural processes.
Per usual, I was driving when the thought sparked. I had a backflash image of the mass exodus of stuffed animals being created in Chinese factories, headed for Wal-Marts everywhere. The night previous I’d been watching a CNBC documentary on Wal-Mart called “The NEW age of Wal-Mart“; very intriguing. In doing my research to write a bit about this particular topic… I came across the prequel to this documentary done five years ago called “The Age of Wal-Mart“. I recommend watching both; eye openers to say the least. What most affected my viewpoint during the documentaries, was the sheer amount of NEW stuff being generated on a daily occurrence around the globe, for distribution by Wal-Mart; and this was just Wal-Mart. Granted Wal-Mart is big (the biggest)… but there are hundreds of thousands of companies like it distributing more of the same and different NEW stuff. Agreed, NEW stuff isn’t big news… we’re all privy to its newness and availability. Many of us buy it, some more than others… every day. Commercials, commercials, commercials. Billboards, radio ads, movies, television in general; the list goes on and on – it’s everywhere. Propaganda for the comfortably numb consumer is anxiously waiting around every corner, preying on humans all over the world.
To the point. What if we stopped producing NEW stuff?
Humans have produced enough stuff, that if we stopped producing NEW stuff today… we could effectively continue living off what exists for the next 1000 years. Reuse what’s already been made & recycle whats “reuse” life has ended. This act alone would cause a domino effect of awareness & consciousness about other very important things we humans should be concerned with for generations to come; namely population. We’re plenty capable of creating a plethora of reNEW stuff (the new stuff we invent from recycling our old stuff) from all that we’ve made thus far, as well as creating truly new things from all of the natural and harmless ways of producing goods that have been surfacing more and more over the years. Yes, I am theorizing an absolute opposite paradigm from the current standard of “Build it cheaper, Dispose of it Faster, Buy more NEW Now.” It’s cyclical and it’s destroying the only earth we have.
So, what if we stopped producing NEW stuff? Share your thoughts.
Climate change activism goes Hollywood
Taken from http://www.pri.org/business/social-entrepreneurs/climate-change-activism-goes-hollywood2948.html
Hollywood is taking activism beyond “An Inconvenient Truth” in hopes of creating a global, environmental movement against climate change.
This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.
Hollywood producer Marshall Herskovitz has a history of making audiences pay attention. He’s best known for TV shows like “thirtysomething” and “My So Called Life,” and films including “Blood Diamond” and “I am Sam.” About 10 years ago, Herskovitz had a revelation. He told Living on Earth that he said to himself:
“Gee, you know, I’m in a business where we make a movie, no one has heard of it. We then have a marketing department that spends $30 or $40 million, and then, a few weeks later, 80 percent of America knows about the film and some large percentage of those people want to go see it. That’s a very well established craft. Why are we not applying that to climate change?”