#land fill

[petula-xx]

This is a photo of Harry and Meghan’s son, Archie, on his 2nd birthday.

I like Meghan and Harry. They are a contemporary, forward thinking young couple.

I do wish though that they had have avoided all those polluting, non biodegradable foil balloons. Archie’s generation will be facing catastrophic environmental conditions if urgent changes are not made right now.

Time for foil balloons to go the way of lead paint and asbestos.

[petula-xx]

PPE:

- Personal Protective Equipment

- Plastic Polluting the Earth

I dread to think how many thousands of tons of single use, disposable, plastic medical items and hand sanitiser bottles have already found their way in to the rubbish system so far during the Covid 19 pandemic.

It’s nowhere near over yet either.

[petula-xx]

I got this Marella Sport top for $2 at the tip shop. It was unworn.

I’ve since found out that Marella Sport is an expensive brand. Incredible to think that something with such a large price tag ended up at the tip in the first place.

I would never have paid a three figure sum for this new, but am quite pleased with the $2 that I spent.

Nothing at all wrong with thrift shopping in my book.

[petula-xx]

THE FRUGAL AND THE FREE

TOP: collected all this today for FREE from someone’s nature strip. They were throwing away a huge amount of stuff (shame they didn’t donate to charity). A quick wash and this bake ware is off to my kitchen cupboard instead of land fill.

BELOW: I now own a pasta maker! This little baby cost me $3 from a charity shop.

This girl loves to cook, save $$ and save the planet. Happy days!

[oliviacueva]

Independent Study: Fashion, Waste, and Reuse - Project Background

Mounts of trash piled up behind a wall in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. Across the street was the ocean. [image description: mounds of trash pile up behind a blue painted cement wall, with telephone wires and seagulls flying over head].

In november I ran away and traveled all around Mexico -- a crazy, horrible timed trip cuz COVID, that if anyone else did I would be hella mad at BUT i did it anyways because I needed to GTFO after loosing my job and I took serious care to make sure I was keeping myself and others safe from any possible transmition of this ever evolving virus. So we'll leave the mexico travel experience during COVID for another post (but it was truely amazing and held me well during that mourning period) and just bring it up here to talk about the way they deal with their trash. TRASH TRASH TRASH. what a lovely topic.

So in mexico, like many other countries in the world, they don't bury their trash like we do to hide it, they burn it. So when I was traveling around i often smelled the smell of buring garbage which has a particular kind of smell, not like you would think, maybe more like buring pastics which is probably the majority of what is burning. Anyway -- this experience reminded me that the entire world has no solution for our mass consumption and mass waste problem that is killing our planet and that any thing we do whether thats burning, burying, dumping into the ocean, all of it remains here even if we can't see it, we still breath it, eat it, consume it.

I have as an adult been very aware of how much I consume and how much I waste. Growing up in Berkeley, CA in the 90's we were composting in our backyard before the green bins were mandated by the city. We recycled! We bought second hand. We kept things for as long as possible until they literally turned into rags. Rea liberal shit with that peasant mentality twist. When I moved to new york city for undergrad those habits quickly changed. There wasn't composting readily available. I remember reading a recycling sign that disclosed that the only bottles NYC reclycled were those that had necks smaller than the body! What?! I read that but kept throwing everything I was used to reclying into the bin, hoping that it would be sorted and wind up in the right place. HOPING!

So it had been on mind for a while that recycling was probably fake, at least in New York City and then of course this past year (2020) it came out that all recycling of plastic is actually truely a lie and that all the producers of plastic BIG OIL COMPANIES knew it was a lie the whole time and still sold it to us like that sweet ol american dream. For many years we actually sold all of our plastic waste to china. Which shouldn't mean we don't care where it ends up! But a few years back china stopped taking our recycling so we were left to figure it out on our own. But basically plastic is not recycled because it takes more money to recycle plastic than it does to make new plastic. And so of course it all links back to capitalism and caring more for profit than for people. You can learn more about this by reading/listening to it here.

So when I got home from Mexico in December of 2020, I decided to save all of my trash. Everything that can be [actually] composted goes in the green bin and everything that can actually be recycled [aluminum and glass and paper] goes in the recycling. But everything else I decided to keep, to wash, and now I am embarking on a project to turn one month' of trash into a wearable piece of some sort. I have no idea what this looks piece looks like yet. But it's gonna happen.

The Process: Sorting Trash

When I am ready to throw something away I consider it. Is it a piece of food waste, bones, organic material, or wet paper that can decompose back into the earth with out any extra process? If so it goes in the compost bin. Is this an aluminum can, a piece of clean tinfoil, or a CLEANED glass jar or bottle, or newspaper or cardboard? If so it goes in the recycling. If it something that is questionable, like it says compostable but it looks like plastic or it says recyclable but its something like tetrapack, which can only be recycled in certain facilities, it gets added to my trash collection, washed, cleaned, dried and ready to be transformed into this garment of trash.

Next Steps

Currently I have collected all of my trash and begun the cataloging of it. Please keep in mind that I am already not a huge consumer so my trash for the month is far less than the average american I THINK. Most of the trash was collected for just the month of December and some things I have continued to collect into January and February. Like daily disposable contact lense cases! there are so many! It's hard to throw things away now so this project may continue to grow in trash amount. We will see. Becuase this getting long, I'll save the process cataloguing photos for the next post.

TTYL

[myhumanityrescue]

Victorian Government bans e-waste to land fill. I think that is a good move and I hope the law is obeyed and enforced.

[myhumanityrescue]

That is a great opportunity for people to find out why e-waste is banned from land fill and what happens when it is recycled.

[evelyningermany2017]

This was from a land fill we visited, but one that specialized in more than waste management. This was the facility for Frankfurt, so they had a larger input than some of the other typical facilities. They also were exploring sustainable practices, like compost, wind energy, solar energy, and bio energy from processing the organic waste they had. The facilities manager talked about the importance of sorting trash, not only to make sure that the appropriate materials were recycled, but also because it made it easier to prep the organic waste for being turned into bio fuel.