Category Archives: Year Of No Garbage

My Mind Is Easily Blown: The Scoop on Cat Litter, Toothpaste and Reusable Bags

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As a confirmed cat person, I’ve never gone terribly long without owning a cat. Or two. Three at most- I swear.

We said goodbye to our last cat one year ago, so recently we felt like we were ready for a new furry addition again. We headed to the local humane society to find a new kitty to adopt.

We came home with two.

Gratuitous picture of our new kitties.

Cat Litter

Immediately I was faced with a dilemma I had been studiously avoiding thinking about up until that very moment: what will we use in the litter box?

In the past I was, admittedly, the worst kind of cat-owner in the environmental department; when it came to cat poop and pee, I just did NOT want to deal. In the interest of minimum effort and maximum cleanliness, I bought the most high-tech (read: expensive) litter I could find: silica gel based litter. Every week, when it was time to change the litter, I wrapped it all up neatly in the plastic disposable litter pan liner before sending it on its way to live in the landfill for the next several thousand years.

I shudder to think of it now.

Several years ago my brother had suggested trying a newspaper-based litter that sounded very environmentally friendly, but it also sounded messy, smelly, dusty, and difficult to find. At that time in my life, in addition to two small cats I also had two small children, so generally speaking if it wasn’t at my supermarket, I wasn’t buying it. Period.

Fortunately times have changed and environmentally friendly litter is now less messy, more effective and more available. While at the humane society I noticed that their litter boxes contained an unfamiliar pellet mixture.

Wood pellets marketed for kitty litter on the left, and for pellet stoves on the right- it’s the same stuff.

“That? Oh, those are wood pellets,” the shelter worker said. “They work great and they’re biodegradable. You can buy them as cat litter but it’s cheaper to just use pellet stove pellets.”

Cat litter I can put in my compost?

“You can also use chicken feed.”

Mind blown.

Toothpaste

In other good news, I recently noticed that Tom’s Toothpaste has made a small but significant change to their packaging: no longer does the tube have a Terracycle logo on it. Instead, new tubes have a blue recycling triangle with caption below reading: “Once empty, replace cap and recycle with #2 plastics.”

If I was a cartoon I would’ve rubbed both eyes with my knuckles before taking a closer, saucer-eyed look. Easily recyclable toothpaste tubes? Was I dreaming?

Tom’s tubes before and after.

But no, once I looked it up on Tom’s website I found a whole page devoted to explaining that they’ve changed their packaging and that they haven’t totally broken up with Terracycle, but you know, they just want to see other people.

To recycling nerds like me, this is pretty big news, because dental care is one of the very hardest categories to recycle. Of the two things I’ve ordered from Terracycle— which due to its cost I consider to be the recycling of last resort— one is their “Oral Care Waste” envelope just for toothbrushes, floss and toothpaste tubes. Because: what else can you do with these things? This is also why Zero Waste proponents give out recipes for making your own toothpaste out of things like baking soda and bentonite clay.

But I like Tom’s Toothpaste, and don’t know where to buy bentonite clay, so I’m delighted to learn I don’t have to do any more ninja-level recycling when it comes to toothpaste tubes.

The thing that truly stopped me in my tracks, however, is the fact that Tom’s paid to develop this technology, but is sharing it with other toothpaste manufacturers. According to their website, this is because recycling facilities can’t tell the difference between a recyclable toothpaste tube and a non-recyclable one, so the sooner everyone is using this technology the better.

How utterly… sensible.

Mind blown.

Reusables

The last thing I wanted to mention is the persistent myth that reusable bags are a potential source of contagion for the coronavirus. Although this idea has been thoroughly discredited, most recently in a report issued in June, signed by over 125 health experts including virologists and epidemiologists, it is still hanging on stubbornly in some places. Although my supermarket has gone back to allowing reusable bags, I’ve heard from many folks whose stores are still banning them.

The truth is that reusable bags are not dangerous, the plastics industry would just really, really like you to think that they are. In fact, they’ve been trying to make us think this long before the appearance of COVID 19. A 2010 study funded by the American Chemistry Council, (which in turn is funded by plastics producers) looked for Salmonella, Listeria and E.Coli on reusable bags and ooo— you know what?

They didn’t find any.

But they could have! Seriously, after the study was released, that was the headline.

Here’s what Michael Hansen, senior staff scientist at Consumers Union, had to say about it back then: “A person eating an average bag of salad greens gets more exposure to these bacteria than if they had licked the insides of the dirtiest bag from this study.”

more gratuitous cat pictures

Not that I’m planning on licking any supermarket bags any time soon, but what I think is important to notice is the recurring pattern of using fear to get folks to consume more plastic:

  • reusable bags could make you sick- better use plastic!
  • Tap water could be unclean- better buy bottled!
  • Someone might have touched that sandwich bread- better put a sealed plastic bag inside the other plastic bag!

Yes, keeping everyone safe and healthy is, and should be, a paramount concern. But we don’t need to fabricate problems where they do not exist just to keep the plastic people in business. Doing so puts the health and safety of the planet at risk, which—spoiler alert! — comes back to jeopardize us as individuals in the end.

But people are starting to catch on. You can’t fool the public forever. The fact that they thought they could? Well…

It’s kind of mind blowing.

 

 

 

 

The Problem With Getting Dressed

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We’ve all got to wear clothes, darn it. And clearly, we LOVE clothes made with plastic.

Name a popular clothing item today— yoga pants, fleece pullovers, stretchy denim— and odds are that item is made softer, more durable, more shrink- stain- and wrinkle-resistant through the use of synthetics. Which is to say, plastic.

Would you like some plastic with your plastic?

Have you ever tried to wade through the vocabulary of synthetics on your clothing tags? It’s worse than chemistry class. Here’s a super simplified guide:

  • polyester
  • nylon
  • acrylic
  • polypropylene
  • elastane
  • spandex
  • lycra

The above materials are all forms of plastic.

Here are some other mysterious terms you’ll encounter:

  • rayon/viscose (two names for the same thing)
  • acetate
  • triacetate

These materials are also considered “synthetic,” although they are not made with plastic. Rather, they are the results of chemically manipulating and extruding cellulose or wood pulp. Still bad, but perhaps not quite as bad.

Approximately half the clothes on the market today are made from plastic, (see charts below: 65% of our clothing materials in 2016 were synthetics, and at least 87% of those were plastics.) These plastics come from fossil fuels, whose production is a source of greenhouse gases.

 

Graphics from: https://www.commonobjective.co/article/what-are-our-clothes-made-from

But it’s worse than that.

We all heard not so long ago about the startling study proving that we’re all ingesting “a credit card’s worth of plastic a week.” So, where do these tiny plastics come from? In part, it is likely that we are breathing them in, from our clothes. As we are just starting to learn, plastic clothes regularly shed micro-plastics thinner than a human hair. The longer we own them, and the more times they are washed, the more these clothes shed: into the water of our washing machine and into the air around us.

I’ll admit it. I own all the plastic-filled clothes I listed above and more. In fact, I just realized that everything I am wearing right now as I type this is made with plastic: from the polyester in my t-shirt and jeans to the nylon and spandex in my bra and underwear… down to the plastic soles of the slippers on my feet.

All this is very bad indeed, but how does it figure in to a Year of No Garbage?

Beyond the concerns about climate change and micro-plastics, plastic clothes have much the same downside as plastic packaging does: each has a short useful life followed by an eternal afterlife. Unlike natural clothing materials from throughout history, plastic is permanent.

Thanks to “fast fashion,” that short useful life seems to get shorter all the time. Most of us are aware that today’s ever-cheaper clothes require poor conditions for workers around the world who are exploited, endangered, and underpaid. But it also means those clothes are usually made to a very low standard; much of “fast fashion” is intended to be worn only a few times before it starts to fall apart.

When these clothes do fall apart, they are much harder to fix than those made with materials like wool or cotton. When yoga pants develop a rip, hiding the stitching to fix the hole? Is virtually impossible.

I suppose it’s no coincidence, then, that the longest-lived items in my closet are not made with synthetic materials but natural materials such as cotton and wool. The cream-colored cardigan my mother bought for me on a trip in 1988, back when most Irish fisherman sweaters were actually knit in Ireland, is still going strong. After three decades of use it is only now starting to sprout the occasional hole or pulled stitch that needs darning, which is easily done.

Now that’s a sweater.

Was it expensive when my mom bought it? I’m sure it was‑ and for the knitter’s sake I hope it was. On the other hand, you don’t have to invest a fortune to wear real clothing like this, clothing that is made to last from natural materials. You’d be amazed what turns up at the consignment shop or thrift store for a fraction of the cost of buying new. On the right day you can get a gorgeous hand-knit sweater that will outlive you- and I mean in its usefulness, not at the landfill. I know this because my daughter Greta, who is twenty, has been dragging her family to vintage and secondhand clothing stores since she was fourteen. While I wait for her to try on a fabulous bead-encrusted 1940s-era something she’s dug out of the clothing racks, I’ll inevitably find a stack of Dale of Norway sweaters being sold for $20 or $40 (new they cost hundreds), or a gorgeous hand-knit pullover someone’s grandmother made, for $5. (Many of them still have the “Handknit especially for you…” tags sewn inside.)

Someday this sweater will be in the Smithsonian.

When good quality wool sweaters like these have lived a long life, passed from person to person, some day they will inevitably be beyond repair. When that happens, there are still lots of options. If you’re a crafty person they could be unraveled and reknit into other things, or cut up and sewn into pillows. Plus, there are innovative companies such as Smartwool instituting programs to reuse reclaimed wool fibers in new products, which is awesome.

But if worst comes to worst? Wool fibers are biodegradable, unlike plastic.

Yes, companies such as Patagonia are making fleece out of recycled plastic bottles, which is well-intentioned. But: that means you still have the problem that every time you wear and wash that fleece, micro-plastics are shedding into your wash water and maybe your breakfast cereal. Ew.

So I’m pledging to buy no more clothes containing plastic, old, or new. If I’ve learned anything watching my daughter Greta collect vintage clothing it’s that there are a lot of lovely clothes already in the world, made with natural materials. Wearing them doesn’t have to be about what’s “in” today and “out” tomorrow.

Instead it could be about what’s fun, beautiful, natural and well-made. We could spend less and get more. Better for both the environment and our bodies we could make better use of the tremendous abundance we already have.

It won’t always be easy. Greta’s favorite vintage clothing period is the 1940s, but have I mentioned what mine is? That’s right! The seventies. So if you find a crazy-patterned maxi-dress out there not made from 100% polyester, you will let me know, won’t you?

 

 

Single Stream Recycling is a Lie, and Other Recycling Facts No One Wants To Tell You

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It’s taken me months to get to the bottom of these Recycling Mysteries, and some of them are pretty shocking, so let’s get right to it:

  • The only plastic numbers that actually get recycled are Numbers 1 and 2, and possibly 5.

This is because 1 and 2 are the only varieties of plastic for which there is an actual market/ monetary value. Regardless of what your service provider is telling you, numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7 are not getting recycled. They are getting shipped to some unfortunate country to junk up their environment.

  • Plastics with no numbers don’t get recycled.

They end up in either the landfill or the incinerator. One form of “wishful recycling” I’ve heard a lot is “but it’s rigid plastic! That’s always recyclable, right?” The sad answer is: nope.

  • All screw-off caps should be removed.

 They make the containers difficult to crush and cause them to pop out of the machines. Anything that pops out of the machines is probably going to get trashed.

  • Anything smaller than 2 inches doesn’t get recycled.

These items are too small to go through the recycling machines, and will end up on the processing facility floor. Anything that ends up on the floor is probably going to get trashed.

  • Plastic films must have all labels and stickers removed before they can be recycled in the plastic film bin at the supermarket.

If you can’t pull stickers and labels off they must be cut out, or the glue on the sticker will contaminate the recycling and mess it up. Then the whole batch gets trashed. The sticker is not recyclable.

  • “Compostables” are pretty much a total lie.

They are not compostable, (at least not in the backyard compost sense,) not recyclable, (#7 gets trashed,) and do not degrade in a landfill.

 

At long last: ACTUAL FACTS. Depressing facts, but still.

If you are a person who pays any attention to the issue of recycling, you’ve likely been frustrated by how elusive basic principles of recycling can be.

You’ve heard “When in doubt, throw it out!” or “just ask your garbage/recycling service provider!” But these are not “recycling principles;” these are cop-outs. Real answers, like the ones above, are slipperier than an eel at a banana factory.

But why?

Because the system is much worse than just confusing. The system is broken. And worse than that, it’s dangerous: to us and to our planet.

Much of current, single stream recycling is, in fact, a lie, at least when it comes to plastic. The seas are filling up with plastic. Humans are drinking water and eating food contaminated by micro-plastics. The environment and our bodies alike are suffering the results of this onslaught of a material that never degrades, never goes away. Did you know they are finding micro-plastics in human poop now? We’ve all become walking micro-processing plants of trash.

As any environmental expert will tell you, the plastic recycling problem all comes down to who pays. Even when you’re talking about the plastics #1 and 2, China stopped accepting our plastic waste in 2018, leaving our cities and counties to make the choice between paying to landfill or burn it, paying to send this stuff away and make it some poorer country’s problem, or paying to recycle it (the most expensive option).

Sure, we as consumers can pay: we can contact Terracycle and go through a somewhat elaborate process to pay them to recycle, if we can afford that luxury. But in either of these two scenarios, the taxpayer is ultimately footing the bill for the packaging a large company is dumping on us.

It’s like we’re paying for our products twice.

When I look at the facts above, I have to wonder why companies are allowed to produce literally thousands of different varieties of plastics, with no responsibility for where they end up. I have to wonder why it is such a hush-hush secret that out of seven plastic categories, only two are legitimately getting recycled- sometimes.

Final Thought: What is the responsibility of the companies who are making this stuff?