365 Days Of Trash: 8/3/08

Friday, August 8, 2008

Day 220 - Friday 8/8/08

Today's Haul:

1 broken glass carafe - recycle *
1 glass carafe plastic top - repurpose
1 sticker from fish monger - garbage
1 muffin wrapper - worms

* Have to check if this is recyclable or not but i believe it can be

Day 219 - Thursday 8/7/08

Today's Haul:

2 studio passes - worms
1 tea bag - worms
1 tea bag cover - worms
5 ozs receipts/bills - worms/recycling
1 piece scotch tape from passes - garbage
1 set of film sides - worms/recycling
1 staple from film sides - garbage

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Things have been jumping here since the 6 month mark and i've been fortunate enough to do a bunch of radio shows. The most recent, BBC Outlook, went up today and is quite funny if you ask me. Waiting on a lot of MP3s but some of the others are listed below. I'm still shocked that people want to hear what i have to say, but at least it gets more people thinking about things, so for the moment, I'll keep talking.

Thanks

Dave

100.9 The Farm Tennessee

Aluminum Cans

I was at a restaurant with a friend yesterday and was feeling really low on energy. It was hot, so I ordered a coke, something which I rarely do. As you can see from yesterdays haul, the coke came not in a glass, but in a can. Now I'm the first to admit that if it comes in a glass there is still waste involved, but it is not anything that i can quantify, and not specifically as a result of me as those bags of Coke goo get used for many many drinks. But the can is another thing entirely. I think I posted a piece about aluminum cans a while ago, but I figured it might be high time to throw it up again. Think you know how much energy goes into that can? I thought I had an idea, but boy was I wrong. Read on.

A striking case study of the complexity of industrial metabolism is provided by James Womack and Daniel Jones in their book Lean Thinking, where they trace the origins and pathways of a can of English cola. The can itself is more costly and complicated to manufacture than the beverage. Bauxite is mined in Australia and trucked to a chemical reduction mill where a half-hour process purifies each ton of bauxite into a half ton of aluminum oxide. When enough of that is stockpiled, it is loaded on a giant ore carrier and sent to Sweden or Norway, where hydroelectric dams provide cheap electricity. After a monthlong journey across two oceans, it usually sits at the smelter for as long as two months.

The smelter takes two hours to turn each half ton of aluminum oxide into a quarter ton of aluminum metal, in ingots ten meters long. These are cured for two weeks before being shipped to roller mills in Sweden or Germany. There each ingot is heated to nearly nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit and rolled down to a thickness of an eighth of an inch. The resulting sheets are wrapped in ten-ton coils and transported to a warehouse, and then to a cold rolling mill in the same or another country, where they are rolled tenfold thinner, ready for fabrication. The aluminum is then sent to England, where sheets are punched and formed into cans, which are then washed, dried, painted with a base coat, and then painted again with specific product information. The cans are next lacquered, flanged (they are still topless), sprayed inside with a protective coating to prevent the cola from corroding the can, and inspected.

The cans are palletized, forklifted, and warehoused until needed. They are then shipped to the bottler, where they are washed and cleaned once more, then filled with water mixed with flavored syrup, phosphorus, caffeine, and carbon dioxide gas. The sugar is harvested from beet fields in France and undergoes trucking, milling, refining, and shipping. The phosphorus comes from Idaho, where it is excavated from deep open-pit mines—a process that also unearths cadmium and radioactive thorium. Round-the-clock, the mining company uses the same amount of electricity as a city of 100,000 people in order to reduce the phosphate to food-grade quality. The caffeine is shipped from a chemical manufacturer to the syrup manufacturer in England.

The filled cans are sealed with an aluminum "pop-top" lid at the rate of fifteen hundred cans per minute, then inserted into cardboard cartons printed with matching color and promotional schemes. The cartons are made of forest pulp that may have originated anywhere from Sweden or Siberia to the old-growth, virgin forests of British Columbia that are the home of grizzly, wolverines, otters, and eagles. Palletized again, the cans are shipped to a regional distribution warehouse, and shortly thereafter to a supermarket where a typical can is purchased within three days. The consumer buys twelve ounces of the phosphate-tinged, caffeine-impregnated, caramel-flavored sugar water. Drinking the cola takes a few minutes; throwing the can away takes a second. In England, consumers discard 84 percent of all cans, which means that the overall rate of aluminum waste, after counting production losses, is 88 percent. The United States still gets three-fifths of its aluminum from virgin ore, at twenty times the energy intensity of recycled aluminum, and throws away enough aluminum to replace its entire commercial aircraft fleet every three months.

Day 218 - Wednesday 8/6/08

Today's Haul:

1 cardboard backing from video tape package - recycle
1 plastic packaging from videotape package - recycle
2 videotape plastic wraps - recycle
1 plastic pasta bag - recycle
1 soup tetrapak box - recycle
2 metallic emergen c packets - garbage
1 aluminum soda can - recycle

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Day 217 - Tuesday 8/5/08

Today's Haul:

1 beer bottle w/top - recycle
1 emergen-c metalic packet - garbage
1 paper bag - worms
1 muffin tissue - worms
2 muffin cupcake holders - worms
3 sugar packets - worms
1 used q-tip - worms
1 paper table cloth - worms
1 cardboard cereal box - recycle
1 wax cereal bag - recycle
1 large plastic bag - repurpose

Monday, August 4, 2008

Day 216 - Monday 8/4/08

Today's Haul:

1 beer bottle w/top - recycle
1 cardboard beer 6 pack holder - recycle
1 plastic safflower oil bottle PETE 1 - recycle
1 paper napkin - worms

Sunday, August 3, 2008

My Friend Anya's Mother In Law (a bit off topic)

A tad bit off topic, but i figured it's for a good reason. The woman you see at the right holding the bananas is Lucie, the mother in law of my dear friend Anya (and mother Anya's coolio husband Max). Lucie is holding the bananas for the profile pic of her blog Green Bananas Cancer Blog which as you can guess, details her fight with cancer, pancreatic cancer to be specific (you'll have to see why the bananas for yourself). In spite of the heavy reason for it's existence, it's actually a really good read since Lucie seems to be a pretty cool lady, a good writer, and a fair bit funny to boot.

Anyway, as she writes in her blog, she's always happy for folks to stop in and offer some good thoughts and the occasional bad (or good) joke. Anya emailed me just the other day to say that the surgery that Lucie had to remove her tumor failed and they're all in need of a few good jokes around there, (although as you can see by the most recent post, apparently Lucie's spirits are doing well). So I thought I'd throw this out there and ask anyone with a moment to drop on by her site and shoot her a joke or two and some good thoughts as well.

Thanks, and now, back to the trash.

Dave

Harvard Towers

I was working on a tv show the other day with my friend Karen (looking inquisitively you at the left there) who I hadn't seen in a while. As the day progressed, Karen and I got to talking about what I had been up to with my life, the blog, the trash hoarding, the gyre, and a whole host of other things (lots of down times on sets sometimes). I guess I made an impression on her because the next day she posted this on her blog.

She basically went home, started thinking about what i had been talking about and decided that she was going to cancel her cable tv. Now we hadn't been talking about that, so you'll have to read for yourself why she did it (it's a really funny post), but the thing that i love about this is how each of us, in our own way, can do better, be better, consume less, whatever you want to call it. It just takes recognizing what we are doing, and if you're like Karen, taking a stand once you've come to the realization that you're not happy with things as they are.

Thanks for the post Karen and keep spreading the word!

Dave

A note about the tallies

At the beginning of every month I try to do an honest tally of all the junk in the basement so that i can track where I am at and what has changed. A good friend pointed out to me that some of my numbers seem to fluctuate and indeed, they do seem to do so. I just finished tallying for last month and to go by the numbers, the bags seems to be getting lighter.

While I try to be as vigilant as I can, perhaps my methodology may explain something. At the end of every month I take a bathroom scale down to the basement and weight myself. While this helps me keep down what i eat (or at least should), it does let me know where I'm at for the moment. Then I pick up each piece, one by one, weigh myself holding it, and then subtract my weight, giving me the final weight. While this is an inexact science, it's the best i have at the moment. Since the scale only goes by half pounds, I find myself changing the 2.5 pounds of plastic bags to 2 pounds this month. My guess is that with plastic bags being so light, I am actually around the 2.25 weight and depending on how I stood one month or where my weight was, I could be off by .5 lbs.

All of that said, this is merely a benchmark and not rocket science, so i think it's all good. At the end of the year I'll borrow a serious scale and see what the numbers are exactly, but until then, bare with me and thanks for keeping me on top of things!

dave