All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

Unknown's avatar

About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

Top Ten Facts You Need to Know About Terracycle NOW!

Year Of No Garbage, , , , , ,

You know what makes me crazy? List articles. You know the ones: Top Ten Things You Could Be Recycling NOW! Or: Recycling! Ten Ways You’re Doing it ALL WRONG!!

The reason I don’t like these articles is because they often purport to give you good advice about important issues, like recycling, but actually end up just skimming the surface in a way that isn’t at all helpful. We feel good about reading the article, but don’t end up with enough information to effectively change anything.

What does using Terracycle really entail?

Exhibit A: in the article 10 Household Products You Never Knew You Could Recycle on Food 52, the author breezes past the thorny issue of what to do with used toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes with the advice to “mail toothbrushes to alternate recycling systems like Terracycle” adding, “Terracycle’s got you covered”!

Great! I’ll use Terracycle! we think.

But… what does that actually mean? Like… can I just write Terracycle’s address on an envelope and mail them my old toothpaste tube?

  • FACT #1: No, you can’t just mail them your old toothpaste tube. The actual deal, as you will see, is far more complicated.

To begin with:

  • FACT #2: You have to pay for Terracycle’s services. Unless you have a school group or business that is locally collecting for Terracycle as a fundraiser or promotion, it is a fee-based program.

On top of this:

  • FACT #3: It is not all that easy to figure their system out. I myself have visited Terracycle’s website about a dozen times since the Year of No Garbage project began. Every time I visit I am determined to figure out how I, as a reasonably intelligent ordinary person, can use it. And every time I’ve been utterly defeated.

This much is clear: for the pay programs, you order a “Zero Waste” box for a fee, which includes the postage for mailing it back when it is full; they recycle the contents. So the next logical question is how much does it cost?

  • FACT #4: The fee varies a LOT depending on what goes in the box, and this is where it starts to get complicated.
  • FACT #5: There are 79 different types of Zero Waste Box, at least by my count. This includes boxes devoted entirely to subcategories like 3D Printing materials, toy action figures, and (my personal favorite) used chewing gum. I know. I’m not sure I want to know what they do with that.

On top of this:

  • FACT #6: The Zero Waste boxes come in three sizes, the middle one of which is about the size of a kitchen garbage can… which is pretty big for someone who is just looking to recycle some empty toothpaste tubes.

    Besides these three, there are 76 more categories to consider

Between the categories and the sizes, so far you have at least 237 boxes to choose from. Stymied yet? Well, they do have a “one size fits all” option.

  • FACT #7: The “All in One” box is the easiest solution, but it is also the most expensive: the medium box in this category costs $287.

Hmm. Still trying to recycle my empty Tom’s toothpaste container here, and $287 feels a little steep. How about the “Personal Care Accessories” Box? The smallest box measures 11″ x 11″ x 20″ and costs $115. To recycle a few toothpaste tubes?

But wait! In the list of acceptable items for the Personal Care box, nowhere does it mention toothpaste tubes or toothbrushes! Back to the drawing board.

In the search bar I type “toothpaste.”

Sorry, we could not find a program matching your request. 

ARGH.

I flip over to “Free Recycling Programs.” Maybe I could start one of those in our community, like at the local school or library? Then everyone could recycle their toothpaste tubes! For free!

  • FACT #8: All the “free” recycling programs sound like advertising: “Febreze Aerosol Recycling” “Gillette Razor Recycling,” and so on. So does that mean you can only recycle those brands in these boxes? It’s not entirely clear, but it turns out it doesn’t matter, because:
  • FACT #9: The free boxes seem impossible to get. When I go through the effort to register and make separate requests for three different kinds of free recycling boxes, I get a message for each one saying I’ve been placed on a “waitlist for this program.” That was several months ago.

Back to the drawing board. A search for “dental” brings up boxes for Disposable Gloves, Garage Waste and Pet Products.

I’m swimming in a sea of random objects. Vitamin bottles! Cassette tapes! Shoes! It’s all so frustrating and tantalizing at the same time. I’m so very glad Terracycle is recycling these things, but so very frustrated I can’t figure out how to use their system in a way that makes any sense. It’s like I am looking through a glass door at a wonderful world of recyclability, but the door is locked and I can’t get in.

From sheer number of categories, to the huge boxes, to the bureaucratic layout, the Terracycle website feels designed for industry, not ordinary people. Which it may be, but I’m awfully glad that it is open to ordinary people. Despite the fact that I’m giving Terracycle some crap here, I’d nevertheless like to point out that:

  • FACT #10: What they’re trying to do is groundbreaking and kind of heroic. Yes, I wish it was much, much more user friendly. But as far as I can tell they seem to be the only game in town trying to recycle everything, and I think that counts for a whole heck of a lot.

The last time I checked out the Terracycle website was last week. I was seeking a solution to the burgeoning containers of plastic building up ominously in my kitchen-recycling corner. My husband Steve has started to say things like “Soooo, after the project’s all over, if this stuff is still here? We can throw it away then, right?”

Well, yeah, but that wasn’t the idea, of course. The idea was to find actual solutions. It was time at last to bite the bullet and just try ordering something from Terracycle and see how it all turned out. I selected a Zero Waste box called “Plastic Packaging.” I had both phone and email exchanges with Terracycle customer service, to be reassured this particular box was appropriate for what is building up in my recycling corner the most: crinkly cellophane plastics and co-extruded multi-layer plastics (such as packaging for meat and frozen vegetables). Then I checked on the one last thing that had been bothering me.

Did I really have to remove all paper labels?

A customer service representative wrote back: With regards to paper labels, we do ask that they are removed before you place them in your Zero Waste Box. I know these can be a bit tricky at times so please know that we sincerely appreciate your efforts in removing them!

Ugh. Well… What choice did I have? Buying the “All in One” box for at more than twice the price? No… I’d worry about the labels later.

I was finally ready.

I ordered a medium size box for $134. At some point during the ordering process I stumbled across an envelope marked “Oral Care Waste”!! At last a solution for my toothpaste tubes!!! It was $42, for a size slightly smaller than a manila envelope but I was so grateful to at last find it, I added it to my cart without hesitation.

The elusive Oral Care Waste envelope

I’m not quite sure how to feel about this pay-to-play recycling. Of course, there’s always the problem of what-is-the-carbon-footprint-of-all-this-package-mailing? There’s the wondering what really happens to the stuff once it gets to the good people of Terracycle? There’s the hope that this really doing good things, but the lurking fear that I may just be paying Terracycle to assuage my first-world-problem guilt.

But cost is clearly the most obvious deal breaker. What! PAY to throw things away?? Although, many, if not most of us do that all the time. Currently we pay $57 per month for combined garbage removal and single-stream recycling. So, if I manage to get six months otherwise-unrecyclable plastic stuffed into that Terracycle box and recycled by paying $134, and a year requires two boxes, that would work out to just over $22 per month. Now, whether or not one thinks that price is: A. possible and B. worth it is another question entirely.

Vanna White fears me

 

In cases like this, Steve likes to quote the movie National Treasure: Harvey Keitel’s FBI agent is confronting main character Nicholas Cage who asks if he really has to go to prison, even though he’s the good guy. Keitel says, “Someone’s got to go to prison.” What he means is someone, somewhere always has to take responsibility, to pay the bill. If the companies who make these almost-impossible-to-recycle products aren’t going to do it, we have to. Or the government does. Or the environment does. Someone does.

A lot of Zero Wasters advocate for eliminating the plastics and other unrecyclables by not buying the products that use them, and they have an excellent point. But it’s a point that only goes so far. During this period of quarantine, like most people, I’ve not had as many choices in food packaging or shopping as I’d like. Plus, I’m well aware that there are an awful lot of people out there who just aren’t going to willingly give up their shrink-wrapped cheese and their vacuum-sealed hamburger meat. Not for the polar bears, even.

If we’re realistic, we need more than just the committed Zero-Wasters. We need people like my mom and my dad, who are seventy five and definitely not about to start making toothpaste out of baking soda and tree bark or whatever in order to avoid using plastic toothpaste tubes. But they might do a Terracycle envelope. Maybe. We need a whole roster of solutions at our disposal, reaching larger groups of people, in order to get on the side of the environment and eliminate the concept of “garbage.”

Would it be preferable to make non-recyclables illegal? Or force companies to provide reasonable recycling opportunities for their product packaging? Yes.

But until we get there, there is something appealing to me about being able to do something besides shrug my shoulders and keep adding to the landfill. Whether or not Terracycle really makes sense in the grand scheme of things is a question to which I’m still trying to find the answer.

Meanwhile. Anyone know a ridiculously easy way to remove paper labels?

—–

Postscript:

Okay, I’m pretty blown away by how much has fit into my Terracycle box so far. My ENTIRE five-month supply of cellophane/crinkly plastic went in, about half of the multi-layer plastic went in (the other half has the dreaded paper labels I have yet to figure out) and literally two-thirds of my large I Don’t Know box. This feels like the first major breakthrough since I discovered all the things that can go into the supermarket plastic bag recycling. So far I’m pretty impressed, and the box isn’t even full yet.

Don’t tell the irony police that your Terracycle box shows up in a big plastic package.

Things I discovered can ALSO go into the Plastic Packaging box, that before now were giving me agita in the non-recyclable pile:

-plastic blister packaging

-hard plastic with no recycling numbers

-mailing tape containers

-plastic ribbons

-those little plastic tags they sneak onto the rubber bands around vegetables

-styrofoam

-heat activated shrink-wrap seals (those bands around the cap or lid of products)

 

EXCITING, right? Stay tuned for more adventures in Extreme Recycling, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Lovely Vintage Things

Year Of No Garbage, , , ,

Note from Eve: This week features a post written by my daughter Greta. If you read Year of No Sugar you met her at age 11; now at age 20 she is an aspiring young actress studying at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City. Since school closed for the pandemic in March she and her boyfriend Steven, also an actor, have been staying with us here at our home in Vermont, but even before that she had been living Year of No Garbage along with us, navigating the project in an urban setting.

Greta has been fascinated with the 1940s since early high school. Online, she has discovered an entire vintage community who shares her passion for the styles and culture of this period (but, Greta is quick to point out, not the prejudices or politics). For her 17th birthday we celebrated with a “VE- Day” Party that featured Big Band music, a Victory Garden and signs pointing to the nearest Anderson air raid shelter. The other day Greta was waxing poetic about how neatly her interest in this time period fits with Year of No Garbage and I said Why don’t you write about it? So here she is.

Greta in a 1940s bed jacket and “curler cozy” she knit from a vintage pattern. Special occasion? It’s Tuesday.

Wilkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome! Okay, to be fair, as a musical theater actress that was a really exciting way for me to open this piece.

But now you are wondering why I am here on my very, very exquisitely talented mum’s platform and I must reveal all: I love vintage! (And by vintage, I mean old stuff from a particular time period.) I particularly love 1940s vintage but I do dabble in 1930s as well. And for the Year of No Garbage this has turned into a strange asset.

Today when I go to the store to buy items for my apartment, everything seems meant to last about five minutes before you go buy yourself a new one. In ye-old days of the 1930-40s, as you probably know, plastic was yet to be widely used, excepting of course such early forms as Bakelite and Lucite. (And from those have come some truly lovely purses and bracelets that are getting very pricey to acquire. But I digress.)

You know what I like? Pyrex. Take a moment and think about Pyrex: it’s one of the most time-tested kitchen items we have today, but it hasn’t changed much since it was introduced in the early 1900s: you can buy it old, you can buy it new. It’s still the same Pyrex. (No, Pyrex is not sponsoring me, however if anyone out there has any they don’t want? Please call me.) Made of borosilicate glass, it is so sturdy it is often used in the sciences because heat won’t warp it or cause a “laundry effect” (shrinking or expanding). Once upon a time if you forgot a bowl at a potluck— without the masking tape with your surname firmly stuck to the bottom— it was possibly a life-altering event. I mean, Mrs. Maisel went back for her Pyrex, and look what happened to her! (Spoiler alert: it changed her life.) Today, however, we’re conditioned not to expect things to last.

But Pyrex lasts.

My Mom’s favorite kitchenware includes Pyrex from my great-grandmother and cast iron from my great, GREAT grandmother

Because of this, to vintage-fans in the know, kitchen items made 80 years ago are still being used and coveted. Not only vintage casserole dishes and mixing bowls, but other things too: cast iron pans, food mills, potato mashers, and baking molds are among the practical vintage items still in use in kitchens today. Could you say that most of the things we produce today will still be around in 80 years? In good working order?

And this brings me to clothing. I do so love being a girl! So many dresses, so little time. I love them, I care for them, I worry about them, and no matter how many I have, I always need more. If you’re gentle you could say I’m a collector, but if not you might say I’m obsessed.

If you ever have the breathtakingly lovely experience of wearing vintage clothing you will immediately notice the different fit and shape it gives you. But what I find equally fascinating are the hems and seams and buttons- the way they’ve held up for all this time. They, too, were “made to last.” I’m not referring only to select designer brands, mind you- the presence of ready-to-wear clothes in all the vintage stores I visit attests to the attention and care that was paid to the making of these everyday garments. So again we must ask ourselves: if you were to go to a store today that sells ready-to-wear clothes, do you think those clothes would withstand 80 years of good care and regular use?

Maybe Victory Rolls are also sustainable? Somehow?

Buying vintage is the most rewarding kind of recycling. Rather than buying something new, you’re taking something that has already had a life, and giving it another one.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I like to get all dolled up like it’s the 1940s in the name of sustainability; in my case the chicken came before the egg. I am drawn to the clothes and the style, but what I find compelling is the promise to stand the test of time, something I think we lack quite often in our fascination with “fast fashion.”

I’m also not saying anyone but me should conflate environmental responsibility with wearing their hair in a snood, nor must everyone enjoy the thrill of realizing your new dress still has its Bakelite buttons or the original matching belt. But I think it’s important to see what value an older piece can have. I often see matching vintage nesting bowls sell online for over $250. Even I think that’s pricey, but the fact that patrons are willing to purchase such things shows how much many of us crave things that are made well and last a lifetime.

My newest find! A 1950s aluminum cookie press

There’s a lot of wonderful stuff out there, in the antique and vintage shops, at the rummage sale and the local charity shop, on eBay and Etsy, stuff that has a life and a history and it isn’t done yet. Why settle for the second best, throwaway production we are given by so many contemporary manufacturers and by doing so accept the responsibility of hurting our planet? Making our objects well and treating them as resilient rather than expendable gives us hope as consumers as well as residents of the planet.

Now if you’re still here after all that? Brava! Brava! Bravissima! (See what I did there? Phantom of the Opera? Anyone?) Just to wrap this up: I’m not saying everything must be perfect and that I have no garbage vices of my own. I like to wear disposable, false lashes when I dress up. I like to order vintage dresses and hats online which, of course, has a carbon footprint. But what is important is that we don’t settle to pay for something that won’t last.

Why should we when there are such lovely things already out there?

Are “Compostable” Products a Fraud, Or What?

Year Of No Garbage, , , , ,

Have you ever received a product in “compostable” packaging and felt good about it? Me too! But recently I realized, maybe I shouldn’t.

I got to thinking about compostables while on a food run the other day with my daughter Ilsa: we were picking up a dozen bagels from a local shop and she asked for a smoothie to go. When we checked to be sure the cup was recyclable  it appeared to be even better than recyclable. It was something called “Greenware,” and a cheerful message across the bottom of the cup read: “yay! i’m compostable so don’t trash me already”!

What a friendly cup!

Nice! Compostable Plastic! It was a cup that looked like plastic, felt like plastic, but, as I discovered after we got home and I looked it up, was actually made from “Ingeo,” the trademark name for a “PLA resin derived from plants.” “PLA” stands for polylactic acid which comes from corn, sugarcane or beets.

Ilsa was impressed, but then said: Waitaminit. If it is possible to make compostable disposables, why don’t all take away places use them? I explained that eco-friendly products made with natural, renewable materials like bamboo are usually more expensive, so using them is something the company has to believe provides “added value” to their brand for customers. Which is to say, it’s a reason to patronize their shop as opposed to somewhere else.

And for sure, we are those customers if anyone is: Ilsa and I are precisely that demographic who are willing and able to go out of our way, and pay a few cents more, to “do the right thing.” I feel very fortunate to have that option of choice.

But how often do we make an assumption that something labeled “GREEN!” is automatically the “right thing”?

After the smoothie had been drunk and I had washed the transparent cup, I wondered: does this very, VERY sturdy looking thing really go in our compost bin? It just didn’t feel right throwing something so… so plastic-resembling in with all our squishy banana peels and grainy coffee grounds.

Searching for reassurance I looked it up, and that’s when I was surprised. Greenware “compostable cups” are not compostable… in a backyard compost. Their website explains: “These products are compostable in actively managed municipal or industrial facilities, which may not be available in your area. Not suitable for backyard composting. (emphasis mine)”

There are other brands out there of similar products: Ecotainer is another one I’ve encountered; in the UK there’s Vegware. All the websites contain the same message: Compostable? Yes! But hold on! Don’t try this at home.

(It reminded me a lot of the recent existential debate I had over plastic wrap: Recyclable? Yes! Will anyone recycle it? No! So if in reality no one will recycle it… can one really call it “recyclable”?)

So let me make sure I understand this. I’m supposed to get my one-use, takeaway cup, and as the name indicates, I take it away. And then when I’m done I… bring it to the nearest industrial composting facility? Oh sure, I think there’s one of those at the mall in between the Hallmark Store and the movie theater.

To be fair, yes, in-store they have a bin for compostables, which presumably goes to the mythical industrial composting facility. If you consumed the drink in-store (presumably during a non-COVID-19 time when people did such wild and crazy things) then this all might make sense. But in this scenario surely it’s even better to have the vendor provide a real glass cup that gets washed and reused.

Alas, the point of the take away cup is to Take. It. Away. Am I really supposed to drive the thirty minutes back to town to return my compostable cup? And if I did wouldn’t I get pulled over by the Irony Police?

It gets worse. Although the cup is labeled with a recycling code number (#7), the Greenware website also explains it is not really a normal #7 plastic made of things such as acrylic, polycarbonate or nylon, so it should not be put with single stream recycling, lest it contaminate actual plastic recyclables. What do they recommend instead?

If a commercial composting facility is not available, please dispose responsibly in a trash receptacle.

So it goes to… the landfill. Where, despite the fact that it is made from plants, means it never degrades. And Greenware knows this. Again from Greenware’s website:

The sealed anaerobic environment of a common landfill severely limits the ability for compostable materials to break down. Oxygen and microbial activity are necessary for the breakdown of all compostable items and unfortunately is not present in most landfills.

To recap: You’ve come home with this awesome good feeling about being kind to the planet with your better choices. Yet, when you discard your feel-good cup, you end up either contaminating recycling or adding to the landfill.

It’s enough to make a regular recyclable plastic cup look downright sustainable by comparison.

If you think all this is confusing or misleading to customers, it turns out we aren’t the only ones. I called up the shop where the cup had come from and asked the employee who answered if I could put the Greenware smoothie cup into my home compost pile. She said, “I don’t know… I think you can.”

Now, just to be clear, I love my bagel shop. And right now, in particular, I applaud them for being open, heroically feeding hungry, pandemic-panicked patrons, not to mention answering weird, random questions from some crazy lady on the phone. But if the very people who work at the shop can’t tell you about the cup, I ask you: what good is it?

Is it me or are all the objects getting unnervingly friendly?

Then another development: yesterday a package arrived at our house in a flexible mailer that had a familiarly cheerful message emblazoned upon it: Hey! I’m a 100% Compostable Mailer.

As you can imagine, I was suspicious. First of all: why are all these inanimate objects talking to me? Second: why are they all so friendly? Third: Compostable?! Yeah, right.

But as it turns out these mailers— made by a company called Noissue— really, truly are what they say they are. Again- they look like plastic, feel like plastic, but when you are done with them you can throw them right into the backyard compost bin. In six months there will be no trace of them- I learned from the Noissue website that there is a technical term for this capability: home compostable.

Green-washing is a very real thing. Just because something presents itself as an earth-friendly alternative, doesn’t mean it actually is one. Sometimes I wonder if we aren’t all just so busy feeling good about trying to be better to the planet, we don’t stop to realize we might actually be being worse to the planet instead?

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it shouldn’t require a host of Google searches to get to the heart of whether a product is what it claims to be, but until we get better regulation and public awareness around such issues, the onus will still be on the consumer to ferret this stuff out on their own. We could all benefit from clearer, legally defined terminology that recognizes that between “industrial compostable” and “home compostable” there is a BIG difference.

So, are compostable products a fraud? Noissue is clearly the real deal and kudos to them for walking the walk. As for products like Greenware, Ecotainer and Vegware, I’d like to think that they are well intentioned. But the problem is that using these products alone isn’t enough, because using them improperly can be worse than not using them at all. Informing the consumer and the vendor about what a product can and can’t do is key, and obviously that isn’t happening enough. In cities that offer curbside compost pick-up, these products probably make more sense than they do elsewhere. But there are an awful lot of places that don’t fit that description. Maybe you live in one. I do.

Until the pandemic recedes and we get back to being able to bring in our own reusable containers for take-out, I’d rather choose a recyclable plastic container over products that are only compostable in an industrial setting. At least then I know it’s part of a circular economy, and not destined for a landfill.

Then I’d know I’m doing something real, with intention, and not just accepting the veneer of sustainability as fact. Sometimes, when you peek beneath the surface, that shiny green veneer? Turns out to have been just a mirage after all.