Creative reuse centers keep leftover and unwanted art supplies out of landfills — by giving them a second life in the hands of other creator
From the article:
But, as Brownell explained to new customers, Smart is different from the typical craft store: Everything on its shelves has been donated. The shop is what is known as a creative reuse center. These crafting thrift stores keep leftover and unwanted art supplies out of landfills, and instead get them into the hands of other creators at affordable prices.
Smart combines that model with another mission. Many of the employees and volunteers who run the shop are adults with disabilities. Over the last decade, the organization has diverted more than one million pounds of art and craft materials from landfills, while providing over 37,400 hours of job coaching, volunteering and employment for adults with disabilities.
I think this is a really great example of how expansive environmental work can be--and how it can coincide with other forms of community action.
Protests and politics aren't the most effective or sustainable form of action for everyone (though there are more diverse ways to participate in that kind of action too!)--providing a service to your community that increases sustainability and aligns with your passions and interests is also an extremely valid and needed form of environmental action.
hey hey hey everyone! I'm doing a school project on climate change and tech waste and would really appreciate it if u took the time to fill out this survey :)
(no pressure or anything)
Please fill this out I would appreciate it sooososoososo much!!
also you don't have to answer every question if you don't know/dont want to!!
We create a lot of waste and, at least for now, much of that waste goes into landfills. Properly managing garbage requires much more than digging a hole in the ground, as Grady from Practical Engineering shows in this video. (Video and image credit: Practical Engineering)
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Weird sustainability hack: collect pumpkins after Halloween and roast them! Thousands (if not millions) of tons of pumpkins go into landfills every year after spooky season
While I didn't purchase any for myself, I put out a message on my local buy-nothing group and was amazed at the number of responses - way more than I could ever use. I ended up with eight, which I'm working on processing: roast the flesh, keep the guts for broth, and roast the seeds
Planning on lots of baked goods (breads, muffins, squares etc), soup, pumpkin butter... I think when people think pumpkin they think pie and that's it. The possibilities are endless!
The country incinerates nearly half its garbage to create the energy that powers its homes and buildings.
Excerpt from Reasons To Be Cheerful:
In the vast majority of countries, landfills are growing at an unsustainable rate. According to the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), 40 percent of worldwide waste ends up in open, uncontrolled dumpsites. As many as 38 of the 50 largest landfills threaten to pollute the sea and coastal areas, while 64 million people are directly affected by them, often with severe health problems. Perhaps worst of all, landfills’ decomposing trash spews climate-altering methane into the atmosphere. “At the current rate, at least 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions will come from the world’s landfills by 2025,” reports the ISWA.
As the world seeks out ways to shrink its open mountains of garbage, Sweden, a country that sends less than one percent of its waste to landfills, offers an alternate path. Much of Sweden’s success in reducing landfill waste can be credited to its high recycling rates: between recycled solid waste and composted organic matter, Sweden recycles nearly half of what it throws away.
What it does with the other half is what sets Sweden apart from much of the world. Nearly all of Sweden’s non-recycled waste is burned to generate electricity and heat. It’s a method that, while emitting CO2, is far better for the climate than sending garbage to landfills, according to the Swedish government and proponents of waste-to-energy technology. “Energy recovery is the best available technology for treating and utilizing the energy in different residual wastes that can’t easily be recycled,” says Klas Svensson, a waste-to-energy technical advisor at Avfall Sverige, Sweden’s waste management association. “For many other countries in Europe, it represents an opportunity to both replace Russian gas, and at the same time phase out landfilling.” It also happens to earn Sweden a good deal of money.
Sweden was an early adopter of waste-to-energy. Its first plant started operating amid a post-war home-building boom in the late 1940s. The new houses were connected to district heating networks, which generate heat at a central location and pump it out to individual homes, rather than each house having its own boiler. Over the years, more of the energy powering these district heating networks was supplied by waste-to-energy power plants, with major expansions beginning in the 1970s. Today, Sweden has 34 waste-to-energy plants supplying 1,445,000 households with heat and 780,000 households with electricity — impressive figures for a country with a population of only 10 million.
Their main benefit is keeping trash out of landfills. In many countries, such as the U.S., landfills are one of the largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas that is far more toxic to the climate than carbon dioxide. Over a 20 year period, methane is at least 84 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, according to the UN Economic Commission for Europe.
This is why waste-to-energy advocates argue that, despite their CO2 emissions, such plants are far less harmful than methane-oozing landfills, and why the rest of the EU, which sends 24 percent of its waste to landfills, should adopt the Swedish model.
