I'll take refuse and recycling in the US for a thousand, Alex.

A: It's twice the size of the state of Texas and is killing marine life at a frightening speed.
Q: What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Was reminded of this by watching a bit on Nightline this evening.

I plan to retire there and be Lord of the Gulls.

by the time i'm old enough to retire i'm afraid everywhere will look like there

http://www.philanthromedia.org/archives/wall-e.jpg

Wall-E's working title was "Trash Planet"!

Save the planet: scavenge more.

My little town has finally contracted with a recycling service! Downside: now I don't have any save-the-world rationalizations to drive to Columbus to my favorite Mexican restaurant.

I have a pile of old clothes that are unwearable (so can't donate) - bulky coat, woolly sweaters etc. Does anyone know if there's any better way of getting rid of them/recycling other than just putting them in the garbage?
Similar with a few kitchen items - badly chipped china, scratched up pans, broken metal stuff. Any ideas?

We have these big yellwo clothes donation boxes near convenience stores and things like that. You don't have those?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IUxcx3c3gNo/TtD1ja7S9yI/AAAAAAAAg2s/tAQI8Iyy4XA/s1600/family+picture+2011+020.JPG

wiggy woo sure loves watching the news

I never watch the news

Yeah, but they all say they want 'gently used, unsoiled, and functional clothing'. I'm talking coats with no buttons and broken zips and almost worn-through trousers and stuff with paint all over. (Don't ask... my husband never clears out his closet so now THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE)

I've heard of rag dealers that bundle such stuff and ship it to india for manufacture of rugs and probably other things (insulation?), but they usually deal in large quantities. You might try calling your local thrift stores and ask what they do with their unusable donations. And post it here because I have stuff I don't want to throw away either.

http://www.sfenvironment.org lets you select unusable clothing and they list drop-offs for http://www.campus-california.org/ - but then this site says it's for clothing to be re-sold, so I dunno.

Also found this: http://ask.metafilter.com/87215/SpringCleanFilter-Help-me-get-rid-of-old-clothes-when-Goodwill-wont-take-em
Animal shelters is a suggestion (probably not so much for my stuff).

Stuff with solvents or paints on most of it should maybe go to the hazardous household waste handlers.

Buttons are pretty straightforward to replace (broken zips not so much but depends), so you might check with private social services that get clothing to the homeless if they are interested in repairable coats. If you garden, open up the seams on the wornout britches and cut to use as weed blocker. Natural fabrics (cotton, linen, ramie/rayon/tencel, silk, wool) can be made into paper/felt. Check with any fiber artists. Artificial fibers are a problem - shredding into insulation/batting/pillow stuffing is maybe the only reuse and they don't decompose really - possibly the right thing for making animal shelter beds.

Campus California says this:

Diverting textiles from landfills is also a worthwhile environmental program in itself. A portion of the textiles deposited into Campus Caifornia's colletion boxes are past their useful life as clothing; these end being turned into rags, cleaning materials or threads that can be used to make new clothing. Only by collecting the recyclable textiles together with the wearable pieces of clothing it becomes economically viable to process and transport them to places in the USA and abroad where the textile industry can take advantage of these materials.

so maybe it is OK to donate unwearable stuff.

I know Deseret Industries thrift stores take donations of all your shit old clothes and recycle the unwearable ones into padding that you put under carpets.

Oh my God, we finally got these huge 64-gallon bins that we can roll out to the curb every fortnight for recycling. Biggest thing I love is that somehow, we don't have to separate everything. Just throw it in the bin, you don't even need a bag.

sunny wrote a letter to someone up there last year about doing this, even mentioning a points program as an incentive. We got that too now!

Had to take one last picture before the thing got stained with Coke and beer backwash.

http://cdn.kinotopic.com/system/paperclip/kinos/pics/4f7c/e653/a531/8005/a100/0060/thumbnail/4f7ce653a5318005a1000060.gif

Somebody told me recently that the amt of energy and fuels and etc it takes to recycle something far outweighs the benefits and it basically amounts to a device for us to feel more OK w/ our disposable lifestyles. Y/N?

was that somebody penn jillette.

well they're not wrong about the second half

A very good summary detailing just how awful the microplastic problem is.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/12/1081129/plastic-recycling-climate-change-microplastics/

To date, humans have created around 11 billion metric tons of plastic. This amount surpasses the biomass of all animals, both terrestrial and marine, according to a 2020 study published in Nature.

Currently, about 430 million tons of plastic is produced yearly, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—significantly more than the weight of all human beings combined. One-third of this total takes the form of single-use plastics, which humans interact with for seconds or minutes before discarding.

A total of 95% of the plastic used in packaging is disposed of after one use, a loss to the economy of up to $120 billion annually, concludes a report by McKinsey. (Just over a quarter of all plastics are used for packaging.) One-third of this packaging is not collected, becoming pollution that generates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean.” This causes at least $40 billion in damages, the report states, which exceeds the “profit pool” of the packaging industry.

These numbers are understandably hard to make concrete sense of, even at the scale of specific companies, such as Coca-Cola, which produced 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017. That’s the equivalent of making 200,000 bottles per minute.

Notably, what doesn’t get reused or recycled does not chemically degrade but rather becomes a fixture of our world; it breaks apart to form microplastics, pieces smaller than five millimeters in diameter. In the past few years, scientists have found significant quantities of microplastics in the further reaches of the ocean; in snow and rainfall in seemingly pristine places worldwide; in the air we breathe; and in human blood, colons, lungs, veins, breast milk, placentas, and fetuses.

One paper estimated that the average person consumes five grams of plastic every week—mostly from water. About 95% of the tap water in the United States is contaminated. Microplastics are also widely found in beer, salt, shellfish, and other human foods. Significant quantities of these plastic bits have turned up in common fruits and vegetables, as one recent study in Italy found.

This, and the penchant for depeche mode as it were, is a HUGE issue. Places like yer Kmart/Target and online retailers, ASOS etc, they cycle thru new seasons on the weekly and eveyrthing they don't sell just gets *thrown out*. It cant even *be* recycled. Its horrifying.

The non-profit The Ocean Cleanup has an IG account ( theoceancleanup ) that regularly posts info and what they find. Even better, they're very active in answering questions posted in the comments.

Last week, they posted a mini-video of their latest odd findings, but one person noticed that there was a lot of fishing-related plastic in their catch. (It was originally widely reported that the majority of ocean plastic pollution comes from fishing, though an enormous portion of it still comes from consumer pollution.) When the commenter asked about this, the response was:

"Last year we studied plastics caught in the GPGP in order to identify their origins. We found that more than 75% of floating plastics there can be traced back to fishing, and were mostly produced in Japan (34%), China (32%), the Korean peninsula (10%) and the USA (7%)." Pretty astonishing - I've been to Asia quite a few times, and I know Seoul has an incredible recycling ethic that puts everyone to shame, but I wonder if Japan and China have made any effort to curtail their fishing industries' plastic pollution? Regardless, it still leaves a lot of plastic from the past in the ocean that needs to be removed since it's unlikely to break down anytime soon.

Someone also wondered why so much of the plastic shown is laundry baskets. The response: "Such baskets are commonly used in the fishing industry (origin of 75% to 86% of plastic in GPGP). They are likely to accumulate in the GPGP as their dispersal is mainly driven by currents (not wind), and they are thick objects made from PP and PE."

Also there's an excellent video posted this year that clarifies some figures. For example, the large majority of plastic pollution comes from plastic entering the oceans via rivers, and this is generally described as consumer pollution.

So why is the GPGP mostly composed of fishing industry plastic? Because most of the consumer plastic that enters the ocean via rivers ends up back on coastal land, a different but equally shitty problem. They estimated that 20% of that plastic continues on, with some plastic sinking into the water and some eventually collecting in places like the GPGP. They also note that substantial plastic pollution in rivers doesn't figure into these numbers because they don't enter the ocean, staying in those rivers and polluting them as well. So a thoroughly shitty problem all around.

Direct link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CsGv7XULn26/

Also one more thing - Ocean Cleanup more or less started about ten years ago (during which time this thread was pretty much inactive). Most of that time was spent in research and development as well as trial and error as they built and deployed their first ships and interceptors. After a couple years of slowly building up their cleanup operations, it seems like everything more or less fell into place over the past year or two, and they think they can have 90% of the ocean's plastic pollution removed by 2040.