WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ARCHIVE   BACK TO ARCHIVE INDEX

02 Apr 02 - donation values; paper; Africa; cars; blocks ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- Link to a Seattle Goodwill web page that gives estimated values for various common donated items (clothing, toys, books, furniture, etc.), as a guide for people claiming deductions for donations on their federal tax returns: http://www.seattlegoodwill.org/donation_values.htm Scroll down. -------------------- Excerpted from a column by Malcolm Gladwell in the 3/25/02 New Yorker magazine (forwarded by Erv Sandlin): Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn't happened. This is one of the great puzzles of the modern workplace. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance - the most common kind of office paper - rose almost 15 percent in the U.S. between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don't agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: When it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk - or knowing that air-traffic controllers still track flights through notes scribbled on paper strips - arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives. The case for paper is made eloquently in "The Myth of the Paperless Office" (MIT Press, 2001), by two social scientists, Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper. -------------------- Excerpted from a 3/31/02 article by George Packer in the New York Times magazine: This article discusses how donated clothes that thrift stores can't sell themselves (because they are stained, torn, out of style, etc.) are often sold by the thrift stores to textile recyclers and shipped to Africa. The article traces one t-shirt donated in New York City in the fall of 2001, which eventually ended up in Uganda, where it was purchased by a 71-year-old man for the equivalent of $1.20. The article includes these tidbits of information: - Americans bought $165 billion worth of clothes last year. - Of the 2.5 billion pounds of clothes that Americans donate each year, some sources estimate that as much as 80 percent eventually goes to textile recyclers, who often ship some of it to Africa, where it is resold. Goodwill Industries, which handles more than a billion pounds a year of used clothing in North America, estimates that it sends 50 percent of its donations to textile recyclers. A textile recycler might pay a thrift store 3 cents a pound, for example, for its reject clothing. - In 2001, used clothing was one of America's major exports to Africa, with $61.7 million in sales. Africa is the leading overseas market for used clothing. Latin America and Asia have formidable trade barriers. A few African countries - Nigeria, Eritrea, South Africa - ban used clothing in order to protect their own domestic textile industries, which creates a thriving and quite open black market. Note from Tom: The entire article is currently on the New York Times website at: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/31/magazine/31CLOTHES.html Articles are usually on the New York Times site for free for just a few days after publication, and then you have to pay a small fee for access to them. Even to get access to the free articles, you may have to register with the site, but if you do that once, it makes to easier to view articles in the future. -------------------- Link to a Washington state Department of Ecology fact sheet on solid waste and pollution in Washington state related to automobiles (forwarded by Jay Shepard): http://www.ecy.wa.gov/pubs/0207007.pdf -------------------- From Renee Kimball, waste prevention advocate, Portland, OR: Has anyone ever heard any follow-up on an Australian project in the early 1990s which turned garbage and effluent into building blocks which looked and acted just like cinder blocks? They were closed-kiln fired and came out pretty well with better structural integrity than cinder blocks. I've never heard anything about it once I left Australia. It was based in Queensland. E-mail: rrrrenee [AT] aracnet [DOT] com Note from Tom: This sounds more like recycling than reuse to me, so if you have any information on this, respond directly to Renee. Thanks. - end -