Like a Rebel

“Look at them!  They're digging through the trash!”

Like a rebel? 

Yep.  Two Georgia Tech grads, digging through the trash.  Have we gone mad?!?  

Not at all!  My friend Lawrence and I chose to make a difference, however small, to impact our surroundings for the better.  In digging through the trash, we not only saved two full bags of recyclables from the landfill, we took a stand – setting an example for those around us.  We absolutely must have the mindset that we are in no way above digging through the trash to save valuable resources for Mother Nature.  If we don't take care of her, who will? 

This past weekend, 70,000 people descended upon Zilker Park in Austin, TX to celebrate live music at the Austin City Limits Festival.  To responsibly handle the waste from all those people eating and drinking, The Rock & Recycle initiative invited volunteers to help divert waste from the landfills by educating and promoting recycling and composting among ACL festival goers.  Anyone interested in helping out could pick up a large, green recycling bag and fill it up with cans, plastic bottles, and water cartons from around the park.  In return, you get the satisfaction of helping divert precious resources from the landfill (as well as a very cool, eco-friendly t-shirt … “the only t-shirt you can’t buy” at ACL :) 

So, how did Lawrence and I go about filling up our recycling bags?  We did it one bag at a time, and took different approaches for each.

Here’s a snapshot of my thought stream for the first bag:

At first, you hesitate.  Tentatively walk up to the trashcan.  Become super conscious that people all around you are going about their business as usual.  This is so wired!!  Look down into the bin, see if there’s anything in there.  At first, secretly hope there’s nothing there so you can walk away pretending like nothing happened.  Digging through the trash??   For the first dive, gingerly pick up the plastic bottle in the trash with two fingers and your pinky popped up, like it’s a foreign object.  A couple of bottles and cans later, walk away from the trash can with your recycling bag in one hand and holding your other hand away from your body, making huge efforts to not let it touch any other part of you.  It’s so dirty!  It’s probably super contaminated!

After a couple trash cans, your perspective does a complete 180.  It doesn't feel so weird.

Now, you're saving plastic and cans.  Saving them from a nearly permanent burial underneath huge mounds of other stuff with little hope of seeing the light of day again.

Ah ha!  There’s a technique to it!  Get the surface findings first, be sure to collect the recyclables that you can see on the top of the other trash.  Then go around the perimeter and pull up the sides of the trash bag and give it a little shake.  Usually you'll strike gold when you do this.  It’ll reveal other recyclables underneath the other trash.

The comrade with other trash diggers is great.  They’re hard to miss – lugging a huge green bag around with you does make you stand out. 

The unexpected amount of gratitude and thank-yous we get is awesome!  One guy even did a funny prayer and bow for us (... he may or may not have been slightly intoxicated).  

Turning in the full green bag is so satisfying.  Just think – otherwise, all that material would have stayed in the trash… on to the landfill and pretty much ending its useful life as material.  It may only be one bag at this point, but one bag helps make a really big pile.  And, not to mention, everyone that saw us in the process of digging through the trash might just think twice about what they’re throwing away next time. 

Now. Where's that Purell? J

For the next bag, we took a totally different approach. Cleaner, too. We walked through the AMD stage crowd while The Skins were playing and picked up cans and plastic bottles from the ground around people’s feet.  People would offer their used stuff when the saw us coming with our big green bag.  There was some competition, too.  Other Rock & Recyclers were out and about in the same area.  In the afternoon the program seemed to have gotten popular.

No more digging through the trash can - we have moved up in the world to picking trash up off the ground!!  It doesn't seem to take as long.  The better spots are where the crowd is tightly packed.... fewer volunteers are hitting up these spots.  They’re probably less aggressive and don’t want to push through people, but I say let’s go for it!  Toward the end we found an area in the middle of the crowd that no one had been to for a while and before we knew it the bag was full.  It felt kind of bad to have to leave stuff laying on the ground, and to turn people away offering us their trash :( Sorry guys......

We will be back!!

Dirty Work ... in Action!

What a weighty effort!! 

Lawrence and I in front of the Rock & Recycle tent at ACL 2012

Look at that Pile!!! :)

In the middle of it all ... collecting recyclables in the AMD Stage crowd
with great music playing in the background :D 

View of Zilker Park at night with the Austin skyline in the background.  What a beautiful sight!

Jerseys from China

Later this month, some buddies and I will be riding in the Austin Livestrong Challenge, a bike ride sponsored by the Livestrong Foundation as a way to raise awareness and funds for their efforts against cancer.  (Super excited!!!!)

Gloriana and I got lucky in meeting a great group of people through one of the Saturday morning group rides from Mellow Johnnys (Lance Armstrong's bike shop in downtown Austin).  They are a fun bunch of people and we ended up joining their team, Los Duros (an explanation of the team name requires a trip to the team leader, Alex's, house and a tour of his backyard and his peach tree :).

Anyways, Alex and Chris from Los Duros did something really cool - they made a custom designed race jersey!!  This is exciting because, usually, only really big teams with sponsors have cool looking matching jerseys.  Let's just say, having a personalized jersey has never been on my radar - till now.  They were able to upload a jersey design and have them made from www.eclipsecycling.com.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, there was a mess up with the USPS delivery of our jerseys, which led me to tracking it down and digging into its past travels.  What struck me the most was being able to see the direct path our jerseys took from China to the post office in Austin,Texas and now to my living room.  We all know that a huge portion of what we buy is 'Made in China' but I think it has become commonplace to assume and take for granted that what's produced in China will just show up in the US, ready for our consumption.  Seeing the timeline below really made the origin of the jerseys come to life.  

Ever since visiting China last summer, I've been more conscious of and interested in the Chinese factories.  Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang is an excellent insight into the life of the workers in the factory.  She also sheds light on the migration of Chinese people into the cities and factory towns.  Fun fact: China is experiencing what some call hyper-rapid urbanization, and by 2030, 1 Billion people are expected to be living in Chinese cities.

Dealing directly with the Chinese factory

It's actually kind of cool if you think about it.  When our package wasn't getting here on time, I was able to email the customer service address and get a reply within 24 hours.  Albeit was in broken English, I definitely could understand it enough to know that I had to contact the post office here to reschedule a package pickup.   It still blows my mind that it is cost effective to make something half way around the world and mail it here.  It's really cool how the infrastructure is in place for me to not only communicate what I want and get it here, but to be able to communicate with the manufacturers when there's a glitch in the chain.  

I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the label.  Funny thing is, nowhere on the tag or jersey does it say 'Made in China'.

Major flashbacks to some memories visiting a Chinese restaurant in Guilin, China:

But, back to the main motivation for writing this post.  For me, and probably a lot of other people, it's a pretty big deal to fly to San Francisco,  let alone Shanghai, China.  To think that sooo much of our stuff comes from China, traveling by ship or plane -- that's a lot of work, energy, and gas that goes into getting the goods to the US.  

I've heard that a lot of people want to reduce their personal carbon footprint by reducing air travel.  Stand around a runway and you'll start to smell that jet fuel.  But, here's some food for thought.  Is it enough to limit our personal plane travel when so much of what we wear and use on a daily basis has made that trans-Pacific flight?  Just something to think about.  

On a lighter note :)
Cool place I visited that promotes local artists and handmade goods in Austin:  The Burlap Bag (full story of visit :)
Ahhh!!! I couldn't help but reminisce about traveling when I was looking for that Chinese menu picture. Some fun travel videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/hhill3615?feature=mhee 

Over 'n out!
Heather

What Goes Around Comes Around

I first touched on the idea of composting in my Muffin Possible! post from February of this year.  Since discovering Hyde Park Community Garden, I've made quite a few trips.  Since it's a *long* walk over there, I started keeping my scrapes in a sealable, big (think twin size from Costco) empty Peanut Butter jar.   That started to fill up too fast and grew some interesting colored mold.... so to the freezer the collection went!   This prevented the bad smell from rotting veggie scraps and kept those pesky little flying bugs from taking up residence in my kitchen.  Looking at  a picture like this, I find it pretty impressive how far I've come.

Food Scrap DOMINATION!

Flip book inspired set of pictures portraying our Composting trip!!

Gloriana's Release

FREEDOM!!!

What goes around, comes around.  By going to the trouble of storing my veggie and food scrapes in the freezer and then taking them to the compost pile, I'm ensuring that the food waste is reintroduced into the cycle in the form of ... dirt!!  If my basil clippings from in.gredients successfully start growing roots, I'm going to get some soil from the compost pile and transfer my basil to a real pot! :)  Love the basil that we got last night.  It is SO fresh and flavorful.

Welcome home, Basil! :)

The 5 R's -- Vincent Stanley of Patagonia

An overflowing recycling bin.

Is this something to be proud of?  

~~~

On Wednesday, Vincent Stanley, the VP of Marketing for Patagonia, addressed a standing room only crowd at the SXSW Eco Conference.  He was a calm speaker and focused his talk on Patagonia's advertisement, released on Black Friday in 2011:

Certainly against the norm, what Patagonia was trying to drive home with this ad was an awareness of how materialistic our society is today -- to encourage people to think about what they are buying before they make purchases.  The ad reinforces Patagonia's Common Threads Initiative to promote their 5 R's:

Reduce

Repair

Reuse

Recycle

Reimagine 

So, how does the overflowing recycling bin tie into all of this?  That recycling bin was full in just one week.  In one regard, it's impressive that my roommate and I were able to divert that much waste from the landfill and send it to the recycling facility to be repurposed.  But, think of all the energy that must go into using those products and then recycling them into something new.  No doubt, the full recycling bin is a step in the right direction, and certainly better than sending it all to the landfill.  

But, like many of my peers and fellow conference-goers at the SXSW Eco conference, I have this constant nagging to take my efforts a step further.  Seeing a full recycling bin like this would have been satisfying a year ago, but now I see it and think there is something wrong with the picture --  there has got to be more that I can do.  What if there was none of that waste in the first place?  No energy would have to go into the recycling truck coming to pick up recyclables.  No energy would have to go into sorting and reprocessing the material.  

So, maybe Patagonia's 5 R's are on to something.  Recycling used to be good enough for me.  Now, I can't help but think about the energy that goes into having process that material.  In this materialistic consumer-driven world,  Patagonia as a company is thriving even while promoting ads telling people not to buy their products.  Their book, The Responsible Company, promises an explanation.  Stay tuned :)

PS: Interesting Fact - Stanley reported that sales for the jacket in the ad stayed relatively steady one week after the ad was released.  The Patagonia team considered this a win.

:D