In my last post, “What a Waste”, I shared some statistics concerning the amount of waste produced from the consumption of goods and services, both nationally and internationally. I also listed some ideas for you to reduce your own personal waste, at home, at work, and while you’re on the go. What I want to share with you in this post, are some relevant sources for you to go to if you’d like more details about 1) tracking trash from our community to its final destination, 2) the impacts our waste has on our economy, 3) the impacts our waste has in our communities, and 3) the impacts our waste has on the environment.

Tracking Trash

You probably know more about your trash ‘supply chain’ than you do about your trash ‘removal chain’. I’m providing you with two relevant sources to learn more about how cities and nations are tracking their removal chain, and using what they learn to develop systems that work to manage our resources and promote behaviors that limit our production of waste.

According to this website, http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/ “  Trash Track uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust – networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems.These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through (a) city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.”

“The project is an initial investigation into understanding the ‘removal-chain’ in urban areas and it represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies. TrashTrack builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab in its exploration of how the increasing deployment of sensors and mobile technologies radically transforms how we understand and describe cities.”

All Rivers Do Lead to the Ocean

The Algalita Marine Research Foundation, in Long Beach, California, has mapped ten years worth of research showing the highest debris accumulation in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. For those of you who have heard of the North Pacific Garbage Patch, this is it! Go to their website to watch and learn how they collect their data, and what they’ve found: http://www.algalita.org/research/Maps_Home.html

Environmental Impacts

If you’ve seen the movie ‘Bag It’, you’ve seen the clip showing the remains of Albatros chicks on Midway Island. If you haven’t seen the movie, you can go to Chris Jordan’s website (http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/midway/#CF000313%2018×24) to view his photos of Midway Island and the effects of plastic on the lives of the Albatros who live there.

Community Impacts

Are there alternatives to purchasing more products to live our lives comfortably, while reducing the impacts this waste has on our community health?

Consider this advice, posted in The Green Life, a Sierra Club online journal:

“If your neighbor has a shiny new toolbox, why would you need one too? Rather than ”keeping up with the Joneses,” many people are opting for opportunities to pool and share resources. By planning clothing exchanges, crop swaps, and tool-lending libraries, you’ll save money, reduce waste, and build a stronger community.”

Learn more about planning clothing exchanges in your community by going to this website, http://swapforgood.org/.

Learn more about starting a crop swap in your community by going to this website: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-10-11/how-start-crop-swap

Learn more about starting a tool-lending library in your community by going to this website: http://tinyurl.com/tool-library

How do you share with friends?

Post your ideas on our comment page. And, if you start a crop swap, clothing exchange, or tool library, let us know and we’ll share it.

Economic Impacts

Is all this waste costing our communities valuable money and resources that could otherwise be spent on more productive, worthwhile projects? With all the talk about reduced spending and budget cuts, doesn’t it seem odd that our spending habits haven’t decreased more than 2.0% since the 2008 ‘recession’ (Bureau of Labor Statistics.Sept.27,2011). According to this Bureau of Labor report (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm) spending on food, housing, entertainment, cash contributions, personal insurance apparel and pensions decreased. The only major components of spending that increased were health care and transportation.