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04 Jan 05 - ads; diapers; purse rental; shipping containers; clothing
** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM **
-- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition
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Forum archive: http://www.nwpcarchive.org
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The first two messages are in response to the 12/29/04 posting about the
"Maybe we could all use a little less" TV commercial for Honda Accord hybrid
cars. This ad shows several everyday examples of people wasting water,
energy and paper.
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From Barbara Frierson, City of Fremont, CA:
YES! I saw the Accord ad just once around the holidays. Almost fell off
the couch in my excitement! My only concern was whether literal-minded
viewers might think the Honda Accord is a "lesser" option or of "less"
value. But maybe I'm overthinking it. It was refreshing to see such a
creative approach!
E-mail: bfrierson [AT] ci [DOT] fremont [DOT] ca [DOT] us
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From Emily Weisenburger:
Speaking of ads - I saw an ad for an electronics store of a girl
snowboarding down a mountain of electronics. To me it resembled mountains
of garbage or old outdated electronics that were piled high. I found it
very disturbing with more than a grain of truth, especially after viewing
the Basel Action Network film "Exporting Harm."
E-mail: eweisenburger ( A T ) juno ( D O T ) com
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The next three messages are in response to the 12/29/04 posting advocating
cloth diapers and suggesting ways that government agencies could promote the
use of cloth diapers instead of disposables.
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From Sondra Flite, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection,
Trenton, NJ:
Are we ready to defend cloth diapers against plastic? The production of
cotton and its supporting pesticides is a problem. Since the bottom line is
that all babies will poop in diapers for a given time, and then stop, I
suspect that this is a "paper or plastic" issue that isn't going to save us
collectively a lot of pollution either way. People might feel really good
by choosing cloth, but still buy an extra car and a home gym, and new carpet
every few years. How do we incentivize source reduction of totally
unnecessary things?
E-mail: Sondra (D O T) Flite (A T) dep (D O T) state (D O T) nj (D O T) us
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Excerpted from a message from Christine Gardener, City of Columbia, MO:
A good resource on this issue is the Oct/Nov 1992 Garbage magazine article
by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, "Cotton vs. Disposables: What's the
Damage?" or the original chapter this article is adapted from in their book,
"Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage."
E-mail: CMGARDEN [ A T ] GoColumbiaMO [ D O T ] com
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Excerpted from a message from Julie Rhodes, independent contractor,
Indianapolis, IN:
We had our first child 4 months ago and were committed to use cloth diapers,
must to the discouragement of many of our friends (even our eco-friends) and
family. I did a great deal of research on what diaper products were
available today as I did not want to set myself up for failure by making it
difficult and inconvenient. I also spoke with other mothers who were using
cloth to get their opinions about brands of diapers, covers and all-in-one
diapers (diaper and covers in one). As Susan McDonald noted, there are so
many Web stores for cloth diaper information and products these days. And,
in many cases, the diapers today aren't our mothers' diapers of days past.
I did find it interesting that a city the size of Indianapolis has no diaper
service. While I'm not sure that would have been our choice, I was
surprised to learn that the only diaper service went out of business several
years ago.
I was also frustrated that Babies "R" Us did not carry any cloth diapers.
They carry one diaper/burping pad item, and they do have fitted cloth
diapers on their website that one can register for, but none in the
Indianapolis store.
We chose a fitted diaper called Kissaluvs for newborns as our starter
diaper, with a wool cover from Bumpy's. This combination worked great.
Wool is much more breathable and better than plastic, though there are
plastic covers today made from PUL (polyurethane laminate) instead of PVC
(polyvinyl chloride) as they used to be. I wouldn't recommend a Gore-Tex
cover even if available, since there is concern about perfluorooctanyl
sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and their link to liver
damage, cancer, and reproductive and developmental problems.
When we had baby showers, our hosts would convey what we wanted and asked
people to purchase gifts from those websites. Some people were not
comfortable doing so, but for those that were, it was great! Since the
diapers that we chose cost almost $10 each and the cover was $18, it really
helped when people gave them to us. We also got a bunch of hand-me-down
pre-folds and used a snappy (instead of pins), which worked great.
Now that he's grown out of his newborn diapers and we have more experience
with what we like and dislike, we use a fitted diaper with velcro closures
made by a local woman who makes all her diapers out of used flannel
receiving blankets and covers out of old wool stadium blankets and sweaters.
We like both the reuse and buying locally-made components. They are also
really cute patterns from a variety of baby blankets, and also some have
men's knit shirt stripes as the outer cover of the diaper.
The key to cloth diapering has been having enough diapers so that you don't
get into a pinch and run short. We have about 25 diapers and wash every day
or day and a half, but there is never a risk of running out. I know that
many day cares in Indianapolis will not allow cloth, but for use at home and
for short trips, cloth diapers are really no big bother.
For longer, overnight trips, we have found a couple of diaper brands that we
like in natural disposables. There is a disposable, compostable diaper made
in Germany called Nature Boy and Girl. These were great, though you cannot
compost human waste to apply to your garden. We simply buried them in the
front yard. Now we are using Second Nature disposable diapers and they were
great when we were traveling during the Christmas holidays - unbleached and
not all those scary chemicals found in commercial diaper products.
If not completely obvious from my posting, I very much recommend cloth
diapers. They are more breathable for the baby, so there's less chance of
diaper rash. They also don't have all the chemicals so again, less chance
of diaper rash. And, finally, you change cloth diapers more often (since
disposables hold so much fluid, parents often leave them on the child longer
than they should), so again, better for avoiding diaper rash.
E-mail: jrhodes4 ( AT ) indy ( DOT ) rr ( DOT ) com
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Excerpted from a 12/30/04 Associated Press article by Bruno Navarro:
DESIGNER PURSES FOR RENT ARE A HIT WITH BAGOHOLICS
Handbag enthusiasts disappointed that Santa didn't drop off the latest Fendi
baguette or Prada backpack this holiday season have another option: "Bag,
Borrow or Steal." That's the name of an Internet-based company that Lloyd
Lapidus and Greg Pippo founded several months ago, which offers access to
more chic handbags than an army of fashionistas could sport in a single
season. Customers can swap bags as often as they like for a monthly
membership fee, a la Netflix with DVDs.
Bag, Borrow or Steal boasts hundreds of handbags to rent at three monthly
membership levels, plus $9.95 per selection to cover shipping, handling and
insurance. There's "Diva," offering the latest from "new, emerging
designers," for $19.95; "Princess," providing well-known designer bags, for
$49.95; and "Trendsetter," giving customers their pick of the priciest, top
designer bags, for $99.95.
Customers can also send a "steal-it" request and purchase the must-have bag
at a fraction of the original cost, depending on its age and wear. And the
company reserves the right to charge customers for bags that have been
stained or damaged, though that has yet to be a problem. "Generally, the
bags come back shipped more carefully than we sent them out," Lapidus says.
The company's website is at: http://www.bagborroworsteal.com
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Excerpted from an 11/15/04 article by Jody Snider for the Newport News (VA)
Daily Press (first seen in the Pacific Northwest Pollution Prevention
Resource Center bulletin):
REUSED SHIPPING CONTAINERS HAVE POTENTIAL FOR HOUSING IN U.S.
Steel cargo shipping containers routinely unloaded at ports around the
country one day could be used in the construction of homes, businesses and
even office buildings. Although the idea never has been tried in the United
States, a New York architectural firm gave the concept some credibility last
year when it had the winning proposal in a national competition on solutions
to creating affordable housing.
The concept has been tried in several Third World countries. It not only
offers a remedy to affordable housing, it also offers a solution for reusing
shipping containers, that for whatever reason, sit useless in depots at
ports across the United States, says Mark Strauss, a principal of Fox &
Fowle Architects, the architectural firm that made the proposal. "These
containers can be stacked, and they are designed so that they can be
interlocked at the corners," Strauss says. "What we'd like to do is create
units that not only recycle containers but offer affordable living and
commercial buildings."
As costs for building homes escalate, residential contractors argue they can
no longer build homes in the $100,000 range because of the rising cost of
land and construction materials. The proposal to use containers for
construction suggests using 3,000 containers to construct 351 housing units,
170,000 square feet of retail, office and hotel space and 27,700 square feet
of civic and cultural space around a central green near a rail station in
Gloucester, MA. In the past year, the concept has gained the attention of
several national publications like The Wall Street Journal and a magazine
for the Urban Land Institute, the national think-tank for developers and
architects across the United States.
The idea also caught the eyes of national developers like Alex Conroy of
Conroy Development Co. in Fairfield, CT. He says the idea is credible for
developers like himself, who always look for ways to cut cost. "The idea is
to create prefabricated units from the containers that would include
plumbing and windows. The containers can be stacked and welded together, and
floors, ceilings, electricity and water can all be added. If you take the
metal side off a container, you can replace it with a storefront, which is
ideal for retail construction. It works," Conroy said. He said the low-cost
construction is fast because it can be prefabricated and assembled on site.
He said one benefit of using steel containers in the construction of
buildings and housing units is that the construction is strong, but less
costly than the traditional framing with lumber.
Shipping containers are built in low-wage exporting countries such as China
for about $2,000 each. Until this summer, the containers' heavy weight made
them expensive to return to China. As a result, containers were sitting
empty at depots, where a standard 320-square-foot container could be
purchased for as little as $600, or less than $2 per square foot. That's not
only cheap for steel, but it's also less than the cost of using lumber.
However, the market changed this summer when steel prices climbed, and China
began making fewer containers, creating a tighter market in the United
States. The changes have made it cheaper to unload the containers and send
them back empty. Although the surplus doesn't exist as it did a few months
ago, those in the shipping industry claim the container business is very
cyclical and turns easily with a shift in economics. "Right now it's cheaper
to send them back empty, but who knows what it will be like in five years.
It changes," Strauss says. "What this proposal did for us is open our eyes
to prefabricated materials that get stacked as a part of a design idea."
Conroy calls it a market-driven issue based on steel prices. "Some of the
hurdles we're going to have to face include educating the banks that this is
a reasonable idea so that they can see the value in it, and that these are
not just containers. It's like an Erector set. It's the reuse of something
to a much higher value, and most things don't end up that way," Conroy says.
"They end up as scrap."
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Excerpted from a 12/27/04 article by Bob Fernandez for the Philadelphia
Inquirer:
OUR CLOSETS OVERFLOW WITH CHEAP, DISPOSABLE CLOTHES
To the unending surprise of shoppers, and the deep concern of retailers and
U.S. clothing manufacturers, clothing prices have been plummeting, and not
just at Christmas. For about a decade, almost without realizing it,
Americans have benefited from falling prices for coats, dresses, men's
slacks, women's skirts and blouses, toddlers' outfits, and other apparel as
global quotas on clothing manufacturing have been systematically dismantled,
boosting low-cost imports.
Also keeping prices down is fierce competition among retailers who have to
sell more to maintain profits. So fashions change in the blink of an eye,
with as many as 13 seasons in the new clothing world. And if, in some cases,
quality isn't what it used to be, few seem to care. At such prices,
consumers often may want to wear an item just a few times before donating it
to Goodwill.
From 1993 through 2003, the large basket of goods that makes up the
government's Consumer Price Index climbed 27 percent. But clothing fell 10
percent during the same period, with dresses dropping the most, about 25
percent. For American consumers, the decline in clothing prices is one
upside of the trend toward globalization - the effort to expand free trade
to all parts of the world. Public debate over globalization has underscored
its negatives: the loss of 2.5 million U.S. manufacturing jobs since the
early 1990s to low-wage countries that can produce goods more cheaply. A
major victim was the U.S. apparel industry, which lost 630,000 jobs -
two-thirds of its workforce.
Some, such as W. Michael Cox, chief economist of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Dallas, see low prices for such things as clothing, electronics, toys and
sporting goods as a boon, raising many people's standard of living. "There
is a democracy of consumption out there," he said. "You don't need to be
rich to own many of these things."
The surge of low-cost imports has made waves, here and abroad, both personal
and economic. Shoppers are indulging in clothes as never before, buying
staggering amounts at bargain-basement prices, with the help of a year-round
markdown culture of newspaper coupons, discount clearance racks, and
frequent-shopper gimmicks. "One hundred pairs of shoes for a woman is not at
all unusual anymore," says Bob Lewis, CEO of a Voorhees, PA, company that
sells closet organizers throughout the United States. "If the price goes
down on anything, people buy more of it," said William Stull, chairman of
economics at Temple University. "That doesn't necessarily mean they need
it."
Another result of inexpensive clothes is a burgeoning used-clothes economy
that is filling the racks of local thrift shops, creating jobs, and
producing a windfall for some nonprofit groups. What can't be sold in thrift
shops is flooding the world market. New industries have emerged in Canada,
South America and Africa devoted simply to sorting, grading and repackaging
hundreds of millions of used U.S. garments for resale in merchant stalls.
The amount is so enormous that Mexico, Paraguay, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan
and Zimbabwe, among others, have banned imports of U.S. used clothing or
imposed tariffs to protect their textile-manufacturing industries, according
to a trade group.
Last year, 97 percent of the clothes sold in U.S. stores were made abroad,
up from about 50 percent in 1991. A fourth came from China and Mexico. And
more is to come. The last of the global apparel quotas are slated to
disappear next month.
Most consumer items in a capitalist economy rise in price. Health-care costs
jumped nearly 48 percent from 1993 to 2003, according to the U.S. Labor
Department. Private elementary school tuition soared 86 percent. College
textbooks are up 70 percent. And the cost of fresh vegetables climbed 49
percent, much faster than food prices overall. In sharp contrast have been
clothing prices, which fell broadly. The only other time that clothing fell
this dramatically was during the Great Depression, when the price of
everything fell because of high unemployment. Even without adjusting for
inflation, clothing prices are down between 1993 and 2003, according to the
Consumer Price Index (CPI) monthly reviews of thousands of price tags. Some
average price declines over the 11-year period: 13 percent for women's
jackets, parkas and coats; 15 percent for girls' clothing; 11 percent for
men's pants and shorts. One apparel category in which prices rose was men's
socks, underwear, ties, gloves and other furnishings. It increased 13
percent, still less than half the 27 percent jump in inflation.
Fun, affordable clothes have changed the way Americans shop and feel about
clothes. Some see shopping as a sport. Boston College sociology professor
Juliet B. Schor, who wrote the recent book "Born to Buy," estimates that
women bought 32 garment items a year in 1991. By 2002, according to her
analysis of census data, they were buying about 50 percent more: 50 pieces.
The gain was nearly as high for men. As a whole, the nation in 2002 bought
14.8 billion pieces of clothing, up from 8.5 billion in 1991, her data show.
"It's so cheap, people respond," said Schor. Some people "have never been
able to have these things."
The $166 billion retail clothing industry goes to great lengths to keep
sales volume up as prices fall and profit margins shrink. Banana Republic,
Ann Taylor, Gap, and other specialty chains present a "new look" every five
to six weeks - all to draw people back to see the new colors, the new
styles, the new fabrics. Coupons, one-day sales, discounts pegged to dollar
purchases, and a barrage of other markdowns are also aimed at getting people
to shop.
Clothing manufacturers and retailers, including apparel giants Liz Claiborne
and Charming Shoppes - which operates Lane Bryant and Fashion Bug stores -
have warned investors that clothing prices are likely to weaken further when
worldwide apparel-manufacturing quotas are dismantled next month. Until now,
a World Trade Organization quota system has limited how much apparel each
country could produce. The rule changes will allow apparel manufacturers to
make as much clothing as they want in any country. To ease worldwide
concerns that it will dominate the apparel business when quotas disappear,
China said recently that it would voluntarily impose export tariffs on its
clothing.
Frank Badillo, a senior economist with Retail Forward in Columbus, Ohio,
said companies are likely to cluster clothing factories in China and India.
Clothing prices, he said, could decline "twice as fast" in the next five
years as they have in the last five.
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