Recycling

Fast Fashion Is Haunting L.A.’s Wildfire Relief Efforts

February 1, 2025 Maylin Tu, Next City. Educate! California, Disaster Recovery, Fashion Industry, Los Angeles, Recycling, Wildfires

The Sunday after the wildfires hit L.A. County, I found myself sorting through piles of clothing with other volunteers outside of L.A. Climate Week’s host, the nonprofit Collidescope Foundation. Even as we packed dozens of 13-gallon trash bags with items sorted by gender, age and type, mountains of more donations were stacked floor to ceiling inside. In a crisis, Los Angeles residents like Halle Berry packed up their dresses, sweaters, jeans, jackets and more for wildfire victims. It’s a heartwarming gesture, but donation hubs ended up with more used clothing than they could realistically pass on to wildfire survivors.

When Is ‘Recyclable’ Not Really Recyclable?

August 21, 2024 Lisa Song, ProPublica. Educate! Environment, False Solutions, Plastics, Recycling

Is there anything more pathetic than a used plastic bag? They rip and tear. They float away in the slightest breeze. Left in the wild, their mangled remains entangle birds and choke sea turtles that mistake them for edible jellyfish. It takes 1,000 years for the bags to disintegrate, shedding hormone-disrupting chemicals as they do. And that outcome is all but inevitable, because no system exists to routinely recycle them. It’s no wonder some states have banned them and stores give discounts to customers with reusable bags. But the plastics industry is working to make the public feel OK about using them again.

Selling A Mirage

June 24, 2024 Lisa Song, ProPublica. Educate! Environment, Fossil Fuels, greenwashing, Plastic, plastic pollution, Recycling

Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup. It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis. Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies. Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year. But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Texas Needs Radical Solutions For Water Conservation

June 3, 2024 Martin Castro, Next City. Create! climate crisis, Drought, Environment, Recycling, Texas, Water

South Texas is facing a water crisis decades in the making. Much of the region’s growing population relies on the Rio Grande as its sole source of drinking water. Yet in recent years, as climate change has gripped Texas and caused hotter, drier summers, the river’s flow has diminished to a trickle in some areas. This year, months before summer has officially set in, major reservoirs on the Rio Grande are nearly empty after reaching historic lows last year. Falcon Reservoir is less than 15% full as of mid-April, and Amistad Reservoir hovers below one-third full. Last month, Hidalgo County issued a disaster declaration as a binational agreement with the Mexican government fails to deliver water from the Rio Grande, as it is obligated to do under the terms of a 1944 treaty. Farmers fear losing their crops.

NYC’s Independent Recyclers Emerged From Pandemic Stronger Than Ever

May 25, 2024 Oscar Perry Abello, Next City. Create! New York City (NYC), Pandemic, Recycling, Worker Rights

New York’s canners and lateros have acquired property, created a redemption facility and community hub – and begun to organize. Josefa Marin and her partner Pedro Galicia arrive at 6:30 a.m. most mornings outside the Sure We Can Redemption Center in Brooklyn’s trendy Bushwick neighborhood. The facility itself won’t open for another hour, but in the meantime they get a head start on sorting through the cans and bottles they’ve collected the previous night from apartment buildings, restaurants, bars, clubs or events where organizers have tabbed the couple to help out with recycling.

Report: Plastics, Oil Industry Deceived Public On Recycling Use

February 17, 2024 Adam M. Lowenstein, DeSmog. Educate! Big Oil, Corporatism, Deception, Plastics, Recycling

An explosive new report finds that the plastics industry has misled the public for decades about the viability of recycling plastic, promoting reuse despite the fact that mechanical recycling was not feasible – perpetuating the plastic waste crisis the world faces today. “The plastics industry has ‘sold’ plastic recycling to the American public to sell plastic,” according to the report by the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), a nonprofit organization that advocates for legal action to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable. In a statement, CCI claims the study, called “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis,” includes “evidence that could provide the foundation for legal efforts to hold fossil fuel and other petrochemical companies accountable for their lies and deception.”

Upcycling 101: Everything You Need To Know

January 11, 2024 LibLeonard, EcoWatch. Create! Circular Economy, Recycling, Sustainability, Upcycling

Many of us are familiar with the phrase, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” in terms of sustainability, but it’s become apparent that “Reduce, Reuse, and Repurpose” might be a smarter avenue in terms of reducing waste streams. Right now globally, 2.12 billion tons of waste is dumped annually. Many industries, particularly textiles, contribute not only to microplastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, but also poisonous gases in the atmosphere. Doubling down on not always purchasing new things helps to reduce waste and conserve valuable resources. Upcycling is the process of using items that might be discarded to create a new use for them, often one with higher value.

The US Moneyless Economy Is Booming

September 8, 2023 April M. Short, In These Times. Create! Communities, Consumerism, Free Stores, Recycling

Humans have a serious stuff problem. We keep making and buying new things when most of the time we could find those things in great condition, secondhand. Instead, we’re making trash at such a rate that an unfathomable 40 percent of the ocean’s surface is now covered in trash islands, and there is literally more than a ton of trash for each one of the 8 billion people on this planet (9 billion tons, and growing). If these heaps of waste (the lion’s share of which is produced by corporations rather than individual households) aren’t mortifying enough to drive people toward the free economy of reuse, maybe the lack of a price tag is — especially given the staggering wealth gap and cost-of-living crisis in the United States.

New Greenpeace Report: Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street

October 24, 2022 Greenpeace. Educate! Global Plastic Treaty, Plastics, Recycling, Washington DC

Washington, DC - Most plastic simply cannot be recycled, a new Greenpeace USA report concludes. Circular Claims Fall Flat Again, released today, finds that U.S. households generated an estimated 51 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, only 2.4 million tons of which was recycled. The report also finds that no type of plastic packaging in the U.S. meets the definition of recyclable used by either the Federal Trade Commission or the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastic Economy (EMF NPE) Initiative. Plastic recycling was estimated to have declined to about 5–6% in 2021, down from a high of 9.5% in 2014 and 8.7% in 2018. At that time, the U.S. exported millions of tons of plastic waste to China and counted it as recycled even though much of it was burned or dumped.

Can Urban Mining Help To Save The Planet?

March 30, 2022 Tansy Hoskins, Progressive International. Create! Environment, Recycling, Sustainability, Urban Mining

We live in an era of mass overproduction. Offices, apartments, cars, ships, aeroplanes, mobile phones, laptops, batteries, televisions, furniture, air fryers, hot tubs, elevators and escalators. A countless multitude of objects that belong to the anthroposphere – a term for everything that people have made and how it all interacts with the planet. Many of these products end up as waste, buried in landfill, incinerated or dumped – with catastrophic environmental consequences. At the same time, mining companies continue to pollute the planet, exploit local communities and produce huge CO2 emissions in the drive to make more products. But what if there was a way to use what we already have, instead of mining for more raw materials?

City Denies Controversial Metal Scrapper Southside Recycling’s Permit

February 19, 2022 Maxwell Evans, Block Club Chicago. Resist! Chicago, Environment, pollution, Recycling

East Side, Chicago — The city’s health department Friday rejected the final permit needed for a controversial metal scrapper to open on the Southeast Side, a victory for local activists who spent years organizing to block the industrial facility’s move from the North Side. Southside Recycling, owned by Reserve Management Group, will not be permitted to move troubled scrapper General Iron’s assets and employees to 11600 S. Burley Ave. in East Side. Reserve Management Group spent $80 million in anticipation of a permit for the facility at the Burley Avenue campus, where the Ohio-based firm operates four other recycling facilities, company officials said. Since General Iron’s plans to leave Lincoln Park were finalized in 2019, Southeast Siders have resisted the plan to open another industrial facility in an “area of environmental justice concern” for state regulators.

Corporations Tried To Blame You For The Plastic Crisis

September 14, 2021 Kate Yoder, Grist. Create! Climate Change, Corporate Accountability, Plastic, Recycling

If you’ve ever tossed a plastic water bottle in a trash can and felt a wave of guilt wash over you, well, judging by its marketing campaigns, that’s exactly how the packaging industry planned it. Consider this recent public service announcement, where two uncanny squirrel puppets sit in a tree, watching passerby on the sidewalk and cheering when they put plastic bottles in the recycling bin. A man nearly throws a bottle in the trash (gasp!), but at the last moment, puts it away in his bag to “recycle later.” “Way to go, Mr. Brown Shoes!” one squirrel says. Then a message pops up on the screen: “Recycle your bottles like everyone’s watching.” This ad is from Keep America Beautiful, a nonprofit backed by big corporations (think Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Nestlé) that’s been delivering versions of that message for more than half a century.

Baltimore Aspires To ‘Zero Waste’ But Recycles Only A Fraction Of Its Plastic

September 12, 2021 Agya K. Aning, Inside Climate News. Educate! Environment, Maryland, Recycling, Zero waste

Baltimore, Maryland — Leaders here aspire to create a city with zero waste. But new research shows that Baltimore has only attained an estimated residential plastic recycling rate of 2.1 percent, far below the national average of about nine percent. The report, by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, a coalition of 800 groups and individuals who advocate for zero waste, found that Baltimore’s plastic recycling rate was the lowest of the five cities surveyed, which included Minneapolis, Minnesota; Long Beach, California; Newark, New Jersey; and Detroit, Michigan. “Well, I’m not surprised because plastics recycling has been an abysmal failure despite the millions of dollars spent by the plastics industry trying to get the public to believe that you can actually recycle plastics,” said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and the president of Beyond Plastics, an organization that seeks to end plastics pollution.

Recycling Is Not Enough. Zero-Packaging Stores Show We Can Kick Our Plastic Addiction

January 18, 2019 Sabrina Chakori and Ammar Abdul Aziz, Nationofchange.org Create! New Economy, Plastic, Recycling

Zero-packaging stores show, in their own small way, a viable and healthier alternative to the current system. Both for ourselves, local economies and the planet. Wrapped, sealed, boxed, cling-filmed and vacuum packed. We have become used to consumables being packaged in every way imaginable. The history of “packaging” goes back to the first human settlements. First leaves, gourds and animals skins were used. Then ceramics, glass and tin. Then paper and cardboard. But with the invention of plastic and the celebration of “throwaway living” since the 1950s, the environmental costs of an overpackaged world have become manifest.

Going To Jail For Recycling

May 10, 2018 Eleanor Goldfield, Occupy.com Resist! Jail, Recycling

This week on Act Out! water wars in the west are heating up – and did you know you could go to jail for more than a year for recycling? Next, Iran is on our shit list now more than ever – but why? And who actually deserves that prime spot? Finally, Michelle Saahene joins us to talk about the Starbucks call heard round the world – she was there and as a black woman, she has a few things to say about the layers of racism manifested in that incident and beyond.

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