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19 Apr 02 - junk mail; consumption; Eco-Talk; NYC; worms; California ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- From Tom Watson, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle, WA, and the National Waste Prevention Coalition (NWPC): I just want to share a letter I received from a Chicago area resident, expressing great frustration with junk mail. This person had seen information on the NWPC website about reducing junk mail and wrote to me, desperate for help in dealing with this problem. I'm afraid I didn't have much new to offer. But this letter really illustrates how junk mail is still a visceral waste prevention issue for some people. Here's the full letter: "I am up to my arm pits in junk mail! I've been working on it for years - to STOP! I've tried EVERYTHING! Heard some wacky ideas like send them a brick, postage due - yeah! They refuse and the post office has to store it. I have used their postage paid, or even their non postage paid envelopes to notify them to take me off their lists. I have called at least 50 catalogs and requested removing my name AND DO NOT sell, share, rent or BUY my name - no luck! This is a wasteful plague! By the time I've removed and refused they've already sold and shared! It keeps spreading with no stopping them! Do you have other ideas? Have I NO rights? Has the environment no protection? Have I NO privacy? Any ideas? I can't take these consume and waste terrorists anymore! Please help! I have written to the Direct Marketing Association and the Attorney General - no help there." - end of letter - ------------------ Excerpted from a special five-page section on recycling in the 4/17/02 Christian Science Monitor (forwarded by Jeff Gaisford): This section included several statistics and quotes related to waste prevention: - Every person in the U.S. receives junk mail that represents the equivalent of one-and-a-half trees a year. If only 100,000 people stopped their junk mail, as many as 150,000 trees annually would not be cut down for paper production. If 1 million people did this, up to 1.5 million trees would be left standing. (One tree can filter up to 60 pounds of pollutants from the air each year.) "Our economy is such that we cannot 'afford' to take care of things: labor is expensive, time is expensive, money is expensive, but materials - the stuff of creation - are so cheap that we cannot afford to take care of them." - Wendell Berry, environmentalist "That happiness is to be attained through limitless acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to humankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set." - Robert Bellah, "The Broken Covenant" The entire Christian Science Monitor five-page section on recycling is at: http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0417/csmimg/recycle.pdf ---------------------- Links to information on electronic discussions on the topic, "Overconsumption in a Globalizing World," sponsored by the World Bank (forwarded by Kinley Deller): - http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/B-SPAN/sub_overconsumption.htm - http://www.worldbank.org/devforum/forum_sust-consumption.html - http://www.worldbank.org/devforum/experts.html ---------------------- Excerpted from a press release from the "Eco-Talk" radio program on KCBS radio in San Francisco, CA, and from the Eco-Talk website: "Trash Talk," an award-winning radio program of one-minute environmental features, has been hosted by Betsy Rosenberg on KCBS in San Francisco since Earth Day, 1997. Now, on its five-year anniversary, the program is changing its name to "Eco-Talk." Trash Talk originally emphasized recycling, waste prevention and resource conservation issues, but has gradually included other environmental issues. The new name "fully embraces the scope of our mission," said Rosenberg, a 20-year veteran of radio news. She said listeners should look for more reports on environmental health, but she added, "That's not to say we're through with trash!" Eco-Talk is sponsored by the Alameda County Waste Management Authority and supported by the non-profit Tides Center. The program is available for national syndication and sponsorship. For more information on Eco-Talk, see the website at: http://www.ecotalk.net Note from Tom: Betsy has a strong interest in waste prevention, and has been involved with the National Waste Prevention Coalition for many years. Betsy had the original idea for the coalition's Dry Cleaning Waste Prevention Project in the late 1990s, and was on that project's steering committee. Congratulations to Betsy on her radio program's five-year anniversary, and its new name! ---------------------- Excerpted from a column by John Tierney in the 4/16/02 New York Times: New York City should stop providing free garbage collection, by setting up a "pay-as-you-throw" program. This program could start off just with houses, not apartment buildings. That way, besides avoiding the complications of a large building, you begin to address a fundamental inequity in the city's tax system. Houses for one, two or three families are taxed at only one-fifth the rate of apartment buildings and commercial property. Once New Yorkers started paying to get rid of trash they produced, they would produce less of it. People would make more efforts to get their names off junk-mail lists; they might not renew some subscriptions to newspapers and magazines; they would think twice about some of the packaging they bought at the store. "You might see a 10-percent reduction in the amount of trash," said J. Winston Porter, a former official at the federal Environmental Protection Agency who is now the president of the Waste Policy Center, a consulting organization. "People become more careful once they realize that garbage collection really isn't free." -------------------- Link to an article by Robert Salladay in the 4/7/02 San Francisco Chronicle about an office building in Sacramento where more than 100 employees have mini worm composting bins in their offices (forwarded by Barbara Zaccheo): http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/07/BA179175.DTL -------------------- Link to information on funding available to local and state agencies in California, for projects that advance the concept of sustainable building and utilize used tires in building projects, from the California Integrated Waste Management Board website (forwarded by Kristen McDonald): http://www.ciwmb.ca.gov/Contracts/details.asp?ID=93 - end -