A blog set out to explore, archive & relate plastic pollution happening world-wide, while learning about on-going efforts and solutions to help break free of our addiction to single-use plastics & sharing this awareness with a community of clean water lovers everywhere!
Showing posts with label Zero Waste Cities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zero Waste Cities. Show all posts
See how many pieces of plastic you can find in this small sample of stuff that washed ashore after a storm. This is all over Ocean Beach in San Francisco. For more on plastic in the ocean and what it does to our food chain (and ultimately us humans), just Google or Bing "plastic ocean" or "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "North Pacific Gyre" (Photo : Flickr/Kevin Krejci)
The city of San Francisco in California will no longer allow food packaging and other products made of polystyrene starting next year. The news came after the SF Board of Supervisors unanimously voted on Tuesday, June 28, to restrict its use in the city.
According to Time, the ban, which will become effective starting Jan. 1, 2017, includes foam items like coffee cups, coolers, packaging for food, disposable dishware, toys for swimming, and other foam items. Trays used for meat and fish will have an additional six months to be phased out, until July 1, 2017.
This new ordinance, Mother Jones reports, is part of San Francisco's "zero waste" goal by the year 2020. The city already forbade to-go food containers made of polystyrene in 2007. And while other cities in the United States also have similar regulations, San Francisco's latest ordinance is considered as the toughest ban on foam products thus far.
Polystyrene foam, a synthetic aromatic polymer, is non-biodegradable and is deemed as a pollutant. The sponsors of the new bill reportedly reasoned that foam pollutes waterways and are harmful to animals.
Environmentalists have been trying to make such a point for a long time. The ocean is accumulating plastic debris, which fish, birds, and other marine animals end up eating.
"Plastics biodegrade exceptionally slowly, breaking into tiny fragments in a centuries-long process," reads the post by non-profit organization Algalita, which focuses on plastic pollution. "It entangles and slowly kills millions of sea creatures; that hundreds of species mistake plastics for their natural food, ingesting toxicants that cause liver and stomach abnormalities in fish and birds, often choking them to death."
Polystyrene is commonly called Styrofoam, although the latter is a trademarked brand for a material produced by the Dow Chemical Company. According to Time, Styrofoam products like those used in construction and insulation are not included in the outlawed items.
Published in In Habitat.com by Lidija Grozdanic / Dec. 28, 2015
These 3D-printed floating villages could be a means to future energy independence. The structures, envisioned by architect Vincent Callebaut,
would recycle ocean waste harvested from international waters as
building materials for new, sustainable marine architecture. The
composite material would comprise a mix of plastic waste and algae.
Biomimetic and completely self-sufficient, these sustainable habitats
are a vision of an egalitarian society for environmentally conscious
individuals.
The project aims to resolve long-lasting tensions between Western governments and African countries when it comes to global energy consumption.
Thanks to Archibiotics, a discipline pioneered by Callebaut, a new type
of architecture would be born-one that combines renewable energies and
information and communication technologies (NTIC) in order to offer
energy independence to each state in the world and end oil-related
conflicts.
The inhabitants of these utopian structures,
called the People of the Seas, would invent new underwater urbanization
processes to mitigate ocean acidification and pollution, while living
in a self-sufficient way. They would recycle 100 percent of ocean
plastic waste to create a sustainable habitat called
Aequoreas. Once built, these ecosystems would continue to grow on their
own, using calcium carbonate contained in water to form an external
skeleton, semi-permeable membranes to desalinate seawater and microalgae to produce energy for heating and climate control.
The villages move like submarines and ships and can accommodate up to
20,000 people. The main access is located on the surface of the water
and leads through four marinas covered with a mangrove rooted on a
floating dome 500 meters in diameter. All residential units are modular
and accompanied by co-working spaces, fablabs, recycling plants, science
labs, educational hotels, sports fields and aquaponic farms.
Algae, plankton and mollusks rich in minerals, proteins and vitamins
are grown for food and maintained as “nurseries for the aquatic fauna
and flora”. Produce from on-board organic farms, orchards and vegetable gardens are distributed in bulk, in reusable, biodegradable containers. Even the furniture is made from bio-based materials glued together with materials synthesized from mussels.
Aequoreas villages are not only an architectural proposal. The
architect devised an economic system to complement its energy
self-sufficiency. A horizontal egalitarian model envisioned by Callebaut
is based on ” eco-conscious individual entrepreneurship” acting as the
social and economic backbone of a utopian society.
Achieving
"zero waste" might seem impossible, but these cities have implemented
plans that are getting them very close. Now it's time for the rest of
the world to follow along.
New York City not too long ago had a landfill you could see from space. Now it has a plan
to get to "zero waste" in the next 15 years—a task that might seem
impossible to anyone who has wandered the city’s litter-strewn streets
on a weekend and tried to find a public trash can that’s not
overflowing.
So how does the nation’s largest city go about getting rid of its
garbage? And what is zero waste anyway? Since the term became a buzzword
two decades ago, it’s been adopted as a goal by many cities around the
world. In practice, however, "zero" is a goal that's out of reach for
even the most well-meaning cities. They can go far—even to 90% reduction
of landfill waste—but the last bit requires a higher-level of change
than cities can usually achieve, such as getting more industries to
design their products for zero waste in the first place.
But there are a few cities around the world that have become leaders
in the zero-waste movement. While New York City has gotten a start—with a
pilot composting program and a long-needed ban on styrofoam
containers—it still has a long way to go. Drpixel/Pete Niesen via Shutterstock
San Francisco became the largest U.S. city to commit to zero waste in
2002, promising to divert 100% of its waste from landfills by 2020.
Likely, it will be the first to come close to this goal. Doing this,
according to the Guardian,
has taken "great political determination," including passing unpopular
legislation (such as banning plastic bags and making composting
mandatory) and working with restaurants, hotels, landlords, and the
construction industry to get them to participate. It’s helped that the
city had a good partner in the employee-owned, local waste management
company Recology, which, for example, offers 20% discounts to residents who skip waste collection days twice a month.
Today, at more than 80% landfill diversion, San Francisco is well on
its way to zero waste, but the last bit may be the hardest. The city says
it can get to 90% landfill diversion by continuing its current
activities. The last 10%, however, will require state or national laws
that require or incentivize more product manufacturers to get on board
with the program. Huguette Roe/William Perugini via Shutterstock
Sweden (and every city in it) has a slightly different approach to
zero waste. It fuels itself off of trash, burning about 2 million tons
of trash a year in waste-to-energy plants, replacing a not-insignificant
amount of the nation’s fossil fuel use, and drastically reducing
landfill waste. This, however, has a caused a problem: Sweden has also
become so efficient at recycling and reducing waste that it doesn’t have
enough trash to burn to power its facilities. It imports about 800,000 tons of trash annually from neighboring countries to feed its incineration plants.
As the Huffington Post notes,
Sweden’s success was rooted in a cultural shift around attitudes
towards trash that began in the 1970s and took decades to bear fruit. kastianz/Olga Selyutina via Shutterstock
This city of 3 million struggles under its heaping amounts of trash.
In 2005, it set a zero-waste policy goal on an ambitious 2020 timeline
that banned landfilling of recyclable and compostable waste. But with
the amount of trash generated by the city growing and the city’s trash
services mostly run by private companies that have a profit motive to keep landfilling, this goal has been hard to meet.
The heroes of Buenos Aires’ recycling program are the cartoneros,
or waste pickers, who sort through trash every night on the streets,
pulling out recyclables and leaving the rest for waste haulers. In the
last decade, these impoverished workers have organized into cooperatives
that the city is only now starting to embrace. According to City Scope,
about 5,000 are now working in city-built warehouses where they can
sort in cleaner and safer working conditions and negotiate better prices
with recycling companies. The city, however has a far ways to go before
meeting its goals to capture 100% of its recyclable waste. Flickr user Luigi Torreggiani /kaarsten via Shutterstock
Capannori is a small town that is leading Europe
towards its continent-wide zero-waste goal. It started in 1997 when
local activists defeated a proposal for an incineration plant and
developed an alternative instead: a waste tax that would reward
residents for reducing non-recyclable waste. According to IPS News,
the town gave residents garbage bags with codes on them to track each
household’s waste production. This was only the beginning of a long
education effort that saw a nearly 40% reduction in the amount of waste
generated per person between 2004 and 2012. Because of recyclables it
sells, its zero-waste program is financially self-sufficient and even makes money for the city.
Like San Francisco, the city is nearing its zero-waste goal but will
have trouble with the remaining small bit that keeps getting sent to
landfills. But it it won’t take no for an answer: The city is working to
convince companies to change. The coffee company Lavazza, for example,
responded to the town’s concerns with a pilot that changes the coffee
capsules in espresso machines to recyclable materials.
Zero waste is a full-fledged movement today, one that is spreading
from cities to states to countries as well as the corporate world. The
cities above show just a fraction of the work that is happening, but
represent a spectrum of approaches to the problem of waste. The biggest
barrier is the shift that needs to happen in the mindsets of everyone
who produces waste, which, of course, is all of us.
