Reduce, Reuse, Reimagine

Reduce, Reuse, Reimagine
Author: Beth Porter
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 9781538105399

People are proud to recycle, but in recent years many have become suspicious the process isn't operating as seamlessly as we'd like to think. Reduce, Reuse, Reimagine makes sense of the complex system for any reader who wants to learn how it works, what the problems are, and what they can do to help recycling thrive

Cash for Your Trash

Cash for Your Trash
Author: Carl A. Zimring
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2005
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780813536866

In Cash for Your Trash, Carl A. Zimring provides a fascinating history of scrap recycling, from colonial times to the present. Integrating findings from archival, industrial, and demographic records, and moving beyond the environmental developments that have shaped modern recycling enterprises, Zimring offers a unique cultural and economic portrait of the private businesses that made large-scale recycling possible.

Can I Recycle This?

Can I Recycle This?
Author: Jennie Romer
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0143135678

“If you’ve ever been perplexed by the byzantine rules of recycling, you’re not alone…you’ll want to read Can I Recycle This?... An extensive look at what you can and cannot chuck into your blue bin.” —The Washington Post The first illustrated guidebook that answers the age-old question: Can I Recycle This? Since the dawn of the recycling system, men and women the world over have stood by their bins, holding an everyday object, wondering, "can I recycle this?" This simple question reaches into our concern for the environment, the care we take to keep our homes and our communities clean, and how we interact with our local government. Recycling rules seem to differ in every municipality, with exceptions and caveats at every turn, leaving the average American scratching her head at the simple act of throwing something away. Taking readers on a quick but informative tour of how recycling actually works (setting aside the propaganda we were all taught as kids), Can I Recycle This gives straightforward answers to whether dozens of common household objects can or cannot be recycled, as well as the information you need to make that decision for anything else you encounter. Jennie Romer has been working for years to help cities and states across America better deal with the waste we produce, helping draft meaningful legislation to help communities better process their waste and produce less of it in the first place. She has distilled her years of experience into this non-judgmental, easy-to-use guide that will change the way you think about what you throw away and how you do it.

The Recycling Myth

The Recycling Myth
Author: Jack Buffington
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1440843082

This book states the harsh truth: that despite best intentions, our current environmental practices are doing more harm than good, and that the solution lies in creating supply chains of the future that design, produce, consume, and reuse materials in a manner that is balanced economically and environmentally. One billion beverage containers are used on a daily basis in the United States, with at least 600 million of them ending up in landfills. Even the 400 million that are recycled—at a great cost—are not accomplishing the task of helping the environment. This economic and environmental catastrophe cannot be solved by recycling programs. From his experience as a leader in the American consumer beverage industry and a researcher in Sweden, author Jack Buffington has developed a transformational solution that seeks to not just mitigate the environmental damage but jumpstart the economy while actually achieving zero waste. The Recycling Myth tells the story of how our current environmental practices are unintentionally doing more harm than good and how we need to create a radically different supply chain of the future that must, as best as possible, copy the natural system of growth, decay, and regrowth, and discontinue a disastrous pattern of material design and use. Backed by irrefutable evidence, the book destroys our comfortable notions of the recycling status quo; explains why recycling will never work in the United States, despite decades of attempts; and introduces a new system that will actually work—without asking consumers to consume less.

How to Live a Low-Carbon Life

How to Live a Low-Carbon Life
Author: Christopher Goodall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-05-04
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1136564071

Drastic reduction of carbon emissions is vital if we are to avoid a catastrophe that devastates large parts of the world. Governments and businesses have been slow to act - individuals need to take the lead now if we are to avoid climate chaos.Each Westener is responsible for an average 10 - 20 tonnes of carbon emissions each year (depending on where you live). In How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, Chris Goodall shows how easy it is to take responsibility, providing a comprehensive, one-stop reference guide to calculating your CO2 emissions and reducing them to a more sustainable 2 tonnes a year.

Resisting Garbage

Resisting Garbage
Author: Lily Baum Pollans
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1477323708

Resisting Garbage presents a new approach to understanding practices of waste removal and recycling in American cities, one that is grounded in the close observation of case studies while being broadly applicable to many American cities today. Most current waste practices in the United States, Lily Baum Pollans argues, prioritize sanitation and efficiency while allowing limited post-consumer recycling as a way to quell consumers’ environmental anxiety. After setting out the contours of this “weak recycling waste regime,” Pollans zooms in on the very different waste management stories of Seattle and Boston over the last forty years. While Boston’s local politics resulted in a waste-export program with minimal recycling, Seattle created new frameworks for thinking about consumption, disposal, and the roles that local governments and ordinary people can play as partners in a project of resource stewardship. By exploring how these two approaches have played out at the national level, Resisting Garbage provides new avenues for evaluating municipal action and fostering practices that will create environmentally meaningful change.

Garbology

Garbology
Author: Edward Humes
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2013-03-05
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1583335234

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist takes readers on a surprising tour of America’s biggest export, our most prodigious product, and our greatest legacy: our trash The average American produces 102 tons of garbage across a lifetime and $50 billion in squandered riches are rolled to the curb each year. But our bins are just the starting point for a strange, impressive, mysterious, and costly journey that may also represent the greatest untapped opportunity of the century. In Garbology, Edward Humes investigates trash—what’s in it; how much we pay for it; how we manage to create so much of it; and how some families, communities, and even nations are finding a way back from waste to discover a new kind of prosperity. Along the way , he introduces a collection of garbage denizens unlike anyone you’ve ever met: the trash-tracking detectives of MIT, the bulldozer-driving sanitation workers building Los Angeles’ Garbage Mountain landfill, the artists residing in San Francisco’s dump, and the family whose annual trash output fills not a dumpster or a trash can, but a single mason jar. Garbology reveals not just what we throw away, but who we are and where our society is headed. Waste is the one environmental and economic harm that ordinary working Americans have the power to change—and prosper in the process. Garbology is raising awareness of trash consumption and is sparking community-wide action through One City One Book programs around the country. It is becoming an increasingly popular addition to high school and college syllabi and is being adopted by many colleges and universities for First Year Experience programs.

Recycling Reconsidered

Recycling Reconsidered
Author: Samantha Macbride
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-12-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262297663

How the success and popularity of recycling has diverted attention from the steep environmental costs of manufacturing the goods we consume and discard. Recycling is widely celebrated as an environmental success story. The accomplishments of the recycling movement can be seen in municipal practice, a thriving private recycling industry, and widespread public support and participation. In the United States, more people recycle than vote. But, as Samantha MacBride points out in this book, the goals of recycling—saving the earth (and trees), conserving resources, and greening the economy—are still far from being realized. The vast majority of solid wastes are still burned or buried. MacBride argues that, since the emergence of the recycling movement in 1970, manufacturers of products that end up in waste have successfully prevented the implementation of more onerous, yet far more effective, forms of sustainable waste policy. Recycling as we know it today generates the illusion of progress while allowing industry to maintain the status quo and place responsibility on consumers and local government. MacBride offers a series of case studies in recycling that pose provocative questions about whether the current ways we deal with waste are really the best ways to bring about real sustainability and environmental justice. She does not aim to debunk or discourage recycling but to help us think beyond recycling as it is today.

Plastic Waste and Recycling

Plastic Waste and Recycling
Author: Trevor Letcher
Publisher: Academic Press
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2020-03-10
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0128178817

Plastic Waste and Recycling: Environmental Impact, Societal Issues, Prevention, and Solutions begins with an introduction to the different types of plastic materials, their uses, and the concepts of reduce, reuse and recycle before examining plastic types, chemistry and degradation patterns that are organized by non-degradable plastic, degradable and biodegradable plastics, biopolymers and bioplastics. Other sections cover current challenges relating to plastic waste, explain the sources of waste and their routes into the environment, and provide systematic coverage of plastic waste treatment methods, including mechanical processing, monomerization, blast furnace feedstocks, gasification, thermal recycling, and conversion to fuel. This is an essential guide for anyone involved in plastic waste or recycling, including researchers and advanced students across plastics engineering, polymer science, polymer chemistry, environmental science, and sustainable materials. - Presents actionable solutions for reducing plastic waste, with a focus on the concepts of collection, re-use, recycling and replacement - Considers major societal and environmental issues, providing the reader with a broader understanding and supporting effective implementation - Includes detailed case studies from across the globe, offering unique insights into different solutions and approaches

Recycling Is Fun

Recycling Is Fun
Author: Charles Ghinga
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 25
Release: 2012-01-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1404878718

Children learn that sorting recycling and giving new life to old things is not only good for the environment. It is a whole lot of fun, too!