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21 May 01 - Repair; college castoffs; new products; polystyrene; textiles ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- Excerpted from the 5/17/01 Online Shopper column by Michelle Slatalla in the New York Times: Several websites have made it easier for people to do their own repairs on home appliances and other products. For example, RepairClinic.com sells replacement parts for 200,000 appliances, including some manufactured decades ago. The website address is: http://www.repairclinic.com You need to know only the brand name. From there, the site promises to walk you through a few basic steps to help figure out the name of the part you need and the specific one that fits your appliance. This is one of a number of sites designed to help the mechanically challenged screw up the courage to fix things themselves. At Wrenchead.com, for instance, shoppers can buy replacement auto parts (http://www.wrenchead.com). Sears sells parts at PartsDirect (http://www.partsdirect.com). LiveManuals has a searchable database with technical information for more than 13,000 consumer electronics and major appliance products (http://www.livemanuals.com), and it points shoppers toward the sites of manufacturers like GE Appliances and Maytag. These sites are trying to survive in a culture where fixing things is no longer a necessary skill. The number of hours that the average worker has to work to buy a refrigerator has decreased by more than 40 percent since 1970, so it makes more sense to replace an ailing appliance than pay for repairs. "The ratio between repair and replacement costs has gotten closer and closer," said Chris Hall, a former owner of an appliance repair store and founder of RepairClinic.com, "and if someone comes to your house and says it will cost $140 to fix a dishwasher, the owner says, 'No, thanks, I can get a new one for $200.' But the majority of the repair cost is labor. If the part is only $40, it's worth it to get it and put it in yourself." --------------------- Link to an article by Mary Gail Hare in the 5/17/01 Baltimore Sun, about a project to collect reusable items from students leaving at the end of the school year at Western Maryland College (forwarded by Bill Ewing): http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-recycle18.story --------------------- From Tom Watson, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, and the National Waste Prevention Coalition: Here's some news about two new disposable products and (on a more uplifting note) one new version of a classic reusable product: DISPOSABLE STONEWARE - The Georgia-Pacific Corporation's Dixie brand (of "Dixie cups" fame) has introduced a new line of plates called "Dixie Rinse & ReUse disposable stoneware." According to Georgia-Pacific's website, "Dixie Rinse & ReUse disposable stoneware is a revolutionary disposable plate that will change the way Americans clean up after dinner. Made with real stone, it provides an alternative by offering tableware that looks and feels like a real plate, but is affordable enough to throw away. Dixie Rinse & ReUse offers incredible performance: it's totally microwave safe, holds up to six pounds of food, and is so tough it can even handle up to 20 cycles in the dishwasher." DISPOSABLE BABY BIBS - Procter & Gamble has introduced a new product in its Pampers line of baby diapers and related products: Bibsters disposable bibs. These are paper bibs for babies, which have a piece of tape that fastens in the back. They come in two or three different sizes, and are sold in a box of 20. A Seattle grocery store is currently selling them for $3.99 a box (about 20 cents per bib). For more information on this product, see the Pampers Bibsters web page at: http://www.pampers.com/en_US/products/bibster.html JELLY JAR GLASSES - Welch's has introduced a new edition of their famous jelly jars that can be reused as drinking glasses. This version features classic drawings from the Peanuts comic strip (Peanuts creator Charles Schulz recently died). According to Welch's website, "Welch's jellies and jams first appeared in collectible glasses in 1953 with images of Howdy Doody. Other classic series have included Disney Video Favorites, The Lion King II: Simba's Pride, Winnie the Pooh, Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes characters and the Flintstones. Collectors looking for Welch's glasses from the past should check yard sales, flea markets, antique shops and the Internet." To see what the new jars look like, go to: http://www.welchs.com/values_promotions/jellyglasses.html -------------------- From Renee Kimball, environmental musician and advocate, Portland, OR, responding to the recent postings about polystyrene: Aside from the energy/landfill issue is the painfully obvious world-wide dispersion of those wonderful polystyrene "dingle-balls." I did a cleanup in Sydney, Australia, on a beach totally inaccessible to humans. Over the year since the previous cleanup, the beach became littered with polystyrene cups and containers. Because of photo-degradation, most were extremely brittle and disintegrated into "dingle-balls" when you picked them up. The current flow at this location continuously re-deposited the old and new bits back up onto the sand year after year. They became so mixed with the sand that extracting them was impossible with anything but a pair of tweezers. While archeologists in the 34th century may find this interesting, I personally find it rather offensive. Whatever happened to that "leave nothing but footprints" thing anyway? E-mail: rrrrenee ( A T ) aracnet ( D O T ) com --------------------- Excerpted from a message from John Okun, Industrial Waste Recycling and Prevention (INWRAP) Program, Long Island City Business Development Corporation, Long Island City, NY: GUIDE FOR TEXTILE AND APPAREL MANUFACTURERS "To Riches From Rags: Profiting From Waste Reduction" is a new "best-practices" guide for textile and apparel manufacturers. It was prepared by the Textile Development and Marketing Department of the Fashion Institute of Technology and by the Long Island City Business Development Corporation's INWRAP Program, for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 2. If anyone would like a copy, please contact me at jokun (A T) prodigy (D O T) net and I can e-mail it to you, as a PDF (Adobe Portable Document Format) attachment to the e-mail. - end -