Ever wonder what’s in a landfill? Ever been asked that before? This morning, I stumbled across an interesting article entitled "
Looking into Landfills". In 1987, after learning that no one had ever actually dug into a landfill to determine the contents, Dr. Rathje, an archeologist from Arizona, and his colleagues began the process of excavating 4 landfills. With a truck-mounted bucket auger, they dug approximately 90 feet into each landfill, taking samples of the garbage at 10-foot depths. After analyzing the garbage, they discovered that what we think is in landfills and what happens to it over time, may be based more on myths than on facts.
Dr. Rathje concluded that the space taken up by items like fast-food packaging (.25%) and disposable diapers (1%) were far less than originally thought. But, keep in mind, these statistics could be old. After doing some quick research, I found an article at
Restaurant USA Online (now defunct) that compared the year 2000 to 1981.
Average annual consumption of commercially prepared meals has increased by roughly 15 billion meals since 1981, when an average of 3.7 meals per person, per week were consumed — an annual total of 38.4 billion meals. That number is now 4.2 meals per week for the typical American age 8 and older.
According to the Garbage Project team, newspapers averaged about 14% of the landfill volume. That doesn't surprise me considering it takes 75,000 trees to print the Sunday Edition of the New York Times. (See
article.) I'm optimistic that that number will decrease significantly as more people start reading newspapers online.
Dr. Rathje also proved that biodegradable is a joke. (He didn't actually use the word joke, but I do.) "Biodegradable” refuse breaks down extremely slowly in the anaerobic (oxygen-free) conditions of a landfill. Foods such as hotdogs and pastries that were buried for as many as fifteen years, were still recognizable. Grass clippings were often green. Any many newspapers were still readable. In fact, they are used to verify when the waste was buried. Now there's a positive. No carbon dating was necessary to determine the age of the gazillion pounds of junk in the landfills.
Thomas Friedman's March 27th article about the energy crisis in the US "Geo-Greening by Example" appears at the top of the New York Times's "Most E-Mailed" list. Friedman describes the opportunities our country is missing and the risk we are assuming by not putting together a "geo-green" strategy to help the US lower oil consumption. He ends the article with a powerful statement, "The country is dying to be led on this". And, what are we dying to be led on? Well it ain't Social Security reform.Friedman's article is a must-read for environmentalist. For me, one statement was particularly disturbing. Friedman to this quote from Wired magazine's April issue about Hybrid cars:
Quadruple the cars?? And we think we have it bad now. So the big question is, just who is going to lead on this issue?
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 10:15 AM 0 comments
I'm still writing our latest NerdyBook: "Just the tips, man for the Environment" and I'm on the "Awful Automobiles" chapter. I just wrote a tip about car air conditioning that I have to share. To be honest, prior to researching this topic, I thought all AC was bad. It's amazing how a fact like "Car air conditioners emit chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) which contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer" stick with you - for life.Little did I know, this hasn't been true for 10 years. (Where was I when this fact came out?) According to the EPA's web site, So how do you know if your older car's AC system uses CFC-12? Again, according to the EPA, The next fact that startled me, and this came from several sites including WorldChanging's web site,Of course, sitting at home and not driving your car emits no CFCs and uses no fuel. Zilch.
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 12:33 PM 0 comments
Saturday, I took my two kids, my 5-year-old niece and 10-year-old nephew to a park in Union, NJ. After playing an hour or so of baseball, we all raced to a cute little bridge with a creek below. A disgusting, trash-filled creek, shiny from the shards of glass covering the rocks and dirt.I immediately found an old, dirty shopping bag and yelled, "Hey, let's pick up some of this trash!" My two kids immediately started picking through the garbage, calling out, "I found a shoe. I found a radio. Look at this gross shirt!" My niece and nephew pretended not to hear. They eventually came around and we took 6 bags of garbage to the trash cans about 50 yards away.
This isn't the first time I've done this with the troops. Last spring, I went to my then 12-year-old niece's software ball game in the same town. It was hard for me to concentrate on the game. Instead, I was trying to imagine someone (a lot of someones), throwing ice cream wrappers, water bottles, soda cans, etc. on the ground when 4 or 5 garbage cans were nearby. The place was a disgrace.
We stayed the night so the next morning I woke everyone up (including my sister and brother-in-law) and told them to grab the industrial-strength garbage bags because we were going back to the field to pick up trash. (I can still hear the moans...) But, they did it and returned with about 7 or 8 huge bags full of garbage - separated into recyclables and non-recyclables, of course.
Since this was their first time doing something like this, I had to get creative. I made up contests - Who can pick up 25 items first?, I divided us into teams where the winner was the team that found the most plastic bottles and cans. I timed us to see if we could clean up under the bleachers in 5 minutes. Just when they thought we were finished, I'd make up another game. Don't get me wrong, it's not easy motivating kids who've never done this kind of "work" before, but it paid off. They got ice cream and my niece got a softball field that was no longer an embarrassment. For me the pay off came when I overheard the kids bragging to their friends that they spent the morning picking up trash at the local softball field.
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 12:07 PM 1 comments
I just found a great article entitled "So You're an Environmentalist; Why Are You Still Eating Meat?" I've pulled a few quotes from the article. I've emailed the article to my meat-eating, environmentally-concerned friends to again try to entice them to eat lower on the food chain. I can vouch for those last two statements. I love to cook and have used many meat substitute products - "fake meat" as my kids refer to them - and am always amazed at what they can do with soy. My favorite is "Smart Ground" fake ground beef. I go to Emeril's web site, Food TV and allrecipes.com and search for ground beef recipes. We're not big on tofu at our house.POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 11:50 AM 0 comments
According to an article from the American Obesity Association, 65% of Americans are overweight or obese. This morning, after running back into the house to get my travel mug for the umptenth time, I came up with a weight loss solution that doesn't involve diet pills or a change in eating habits. (Although, a true environmentalist wouldn't eat meat which is high in fat and calories.)On the way to work, I came up with the following calorie-burning list that I do as part of my normal, daily routine. If all Americans made the same effort, we'd have a cleaner environment and a much skinnier population:Looking back at this list, I've concluded that the more forgetful an environmentalist you are, the more calories you burn!
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 12:19 PM 1 comments