Of course, they’ve been accepting the higher number plastics for almost a month now, and there still hasn’t been a press conference or much press on it, other than a few posts on the Streets Department Facebook page and the article above. I’m not sure why they aren’t more on top of getting this news spread, and fast, but hopefully posting this will help with that a little bit.

But all that said, the announcement was enough to revive my interest in the topic and get me to post here again. We’ve been battling some really ridiculous trash-related issues on my block since the winter cleared up, and I just have been too fed up with how little my neighbors care about the situation. It had really just demoralized my entire drive to get involved and do research about recycling and trash collection in the city.

But this announcement proves to me that there is light at the end of the tunnel! There are people out there who care and can effect change. I just hope I can do my own little part and be one of them.

Do you know your plastics? Find out which plastic an item is by looking for the little recycling symbol, usually on the bottom, and reading the number in the middle of it. As far as I know, there’s nothing above #7.

So, in an effort to be more conscientious and aware of the real effects of my actions on the planet, I did a little research on the path my waste follows once I put it out on the curb each week for Philly crews to collect. This week: recycling. I’ll look into regular trash in a future post.

In Philly, the Department of Streets is responsible for trash and recycling collection. Recycling in Philly has been every week and single-stream (all-in-one) for a while now. Single-stream recycling is very convenient for residents, because it decreases the number of containers people have to have in their homes and the amount of work to separate one’s own trash. But each type of material must be recycled separately, after all, so someone has to do this sorting later. That “someone” in Philly is the Blue Mountain recycling facility in South Philly near Grays Ferry. The sorting facility uses different technologies to sort the different materials (paper, metal, glass, and plastic are the main ones), and then the materials are crushed, baled up and sold to purchasers who break down the material further in order to make it into something new. This video from the Blue Mountain website, though somewhat cutesy, shows actual conveyor belts and sorting technologies used to separate single stream recycling waste at their facilities.

The Blue Mountain website also describes some of the end-markets that purchase the raw recyclable materials and what they get re-used for. Some of their household-name partners include Anheuser-Busch, Kimberly-Clark and United States Steel. So next time you are putting out your recycling bin for collection, think of the future path of your waste: that beer can on top might end up as part of another beer can in the future, that detergent bottle could become part of a park bench, that glass pasta sauce jar might become asphalt for a parking lot. All much better than sitting in a landfill potentially for centuries.

That covers residential recycling in the city at least. Commercial establishments, large institutions and offices are another matter. So I challenge you to do some of your own research: what path does your waste follow after you toss it at work?

Never mind that the snow wasn’t even to hit until Thursday 02/25 morning, and that today’s storm has so far been middling at best.

To top it all off, there has been some confusion about what will happen to Wednesday’s postponed trash pick-up, since the official releases state (in addition to outright cancelling Thursday’s and Friday’s normal pick-ups this week–I feel for you guys!!), that Wednesday’s is rescheduled to Saturday 02/27…but when I came down this morning (Thursday 02/25), our stuff had already been picked up.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Check out the site from the 2009 show for a video of highlights (products are shown starting around 1:35 and again at 4:05). Also, I saw this great video (narrated in English, and subtitled) about a company that makes a machine called White Goat to convert used office paper into toilet paper, linked on everydaytrash.

If you’ll be in or near Jakarta by any chance from Mar 4-7, 2010, EPIF 2010 certainly sounds worth checking out!

Speaking of snow, if you have a Wednesday or later trash collection day in Philly, maybe you noticed the trash pick-up didn’t happen on time this week.

I wasn’t surprised that no one came by on Wednesday morning, due to the storm, but I figured trash would just get cancelled this week. I didn’t hear about Wednesday’s pick-up (our trash day) getting rescheduled to Friday, even though I was fairly glued to the news watching info on the storm (hoping for snow days from work!). So how was I supposed to know? Since I didn’t see trash in front of any other houses on the street on Friday, I am guessing no one else heard, either. But no one left trash out on Tuesday night because we all knew the storm was coming, and after all, with the city cracking down on trash violations, it can be risky to leave it if the trucks don’t come.

I guess my point is the need for better communication. In researching this post, I did find out that the city of Philadelphia has a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter feed…I’m going to give those a try to see if I can stay more up-to-date. It would be nice if they had such a thing for the Streets Department (which also handles trash) specifically, though. And I’m not sure just how many people would bother or be interested enough to subscribe to their municipal news feeds, besides strange and nosy people like me. But it’s a start and I suppose in the scheme of things, missing a week of trash collection isn’t so terrible…we’ll certainly be ok.

Oh, and just as a post-script: even though I did see the trash truck going by my house on Friday, they skipped the trash someone had left outside of my apartment … I guess the white bag on white snow was a little too inconspicuous for the good guys in green.

What happened to your trash this week?

About a month ago, there was a flurry of controversy on the blogosphere about the retailers H&M (one of my personal favorites, with two locations in Center City Philadelphia alone) and Walmart being discovered in New York City actually destroying merchandise before tossing it, presumably to prevent it being sold on the black market. In these hard economic times, with hundreds of thousands of people homeless and freezing, articles decrying the practice popped up everywhere, and ultimately H&M released a statement promising to investigate, stating the practice was not their usual policy. In all the coverage, I thought little attention was paid to what normally happens to unsold merchandise. I did some digging online to look into the issue, and here’s what I found…

According to this article, a lot of unsold clothing goes into the secondary market discount stores like TJ Maxx, Marshall’s, outlet malls, Overstock.com, etc. Furthermore, it says there is a lot of demand for discarded American goods in overseas markets such as Africa and Asia. Sports gear is a particularly prolific industry, it turns out. As you’ve no doubt seen, immediately upon conclusion of any championship game, from the World Series to the Super Bowl to the NCAA championships, the winners are wearing an emblazoned cap or shirt. How do they know which team to print gear for? Well, they don’t, of course; so they print both. All that extra gear for the runners-up has to go somewhere, and a lot of it gets donated overseas. Check out these articles describing children wearing Super Bowl losers’ gear post-game… According to this article, though, the MLB destroys its loser’s gear, which is a major shame considering the other leagues’ more charitable actions. I suppose it would be ridiculous to suggest that perhaps the teams could wait till the next day to get their t-shirts and caps, etc, but in a way, the enormous waste of energy and resources does help needy populations who may not have enough clothing that fits anyway, so perhaps this is one area where it makes sense?

The follow-up NY Times article interviewed the chairwoman of a NYC charity called Clothing Bank that accepts unsold clothing from retailers. I thought it was interesting that they still, in her words, “deface” the clothing, to prevent it being sold on the black market. Otherwise, people might buy normally expensive clothing when it got donated in order to resell it at a profit, or worse, from the retailers’ point-of-view, returning them to the original store (without a receipt) for full-price. Some commenters on this forum post mention that the defacing they themselves partook in included scratching out the UPC or writing “bargain store” on the barcode so the original store wouldn’t re-scan it. A far cry from ripping or cutting it up so it’s no longer wearable, though, and I can understand the purpose…

That’s all clothing, but what about other types of merchandise? In December, it came out that Borders, in its recent closure of its subsidiary bookstore chain Waldenbooks, had plans to destroy, instead of donate, the books. This is apparently a normal thing to do in the publishing business because the retailers get credit back from the publisher for unsold books. To save on shipping costs, they rip off the cover and just send that back, leaving the coverless book behind. And a book without its cover is illegal to resell. In my opinion, donating should still be an option, though (and perhaps issues of supply and demand ought to be revisited so that so many unsold books are not produced in the first place, deforesting our planet, but that’s another topic!). There has been a bit of a backlash since this story broke, though, so perhaps further pressure on the book retailers on this issue will yield change.

Articles donated to thrift stores have the potential to be “double cast-offs”–when they don’t sell at the thrift store, where do they go? This article describes some strategies different thrift stores use, especially for shoes, but they can vary from store to store, so your best bet is to ask specific stores you frequently donate to what they do. I always donate my used household items and clothing to the Goodwill in Cherry Hill, NJ, that I pass on my way home from work. According to the FAQ posted on their website (admittedly rather vague), they send all unsold items to a recycling or salvage center that can use them.

Who is your most commonly patronized retailer, and what do they do with their unsold merchandise?

• the bottle cap one–it’s really good to know metal lids are at least recycleable even if plastic ones aren’t.
• the window envelopes one–I always stick them in the recycling anyway but now I can be completely certain this is ok.
• the food waste on containers one–I hyper-rinse everything and sometimes even dishwasher items, so it’s good to know I can stop wasting quite so much water in getting them ready for recycling.

Which ones came as a surprise to you?

When we moved, I found out what I could about the recycling program in Philadelphia, and since I wasn’t sure how to get an official blue recycling bin, we just used an existing trash can we had that we didn’t need. As the city recycling website instructs, we wrote “recycling” on the bin and used it every week. One week we came home and it was not there.

How does that happen? Who steals a recycling bin? We did consider that perhaps the trash guys had just tossed it in the truck, but we weren’t sure if that could even happen. So then I started looking around for how to get an official one, hoping that would make it less likely to get stolen, but it wasn’t so easy.

Philadelphia does issue city recycling bins; they are blue and have a recycling logo on them. Technically, they are supposed to be available to anyone who wants one, for free. To get one, though, you must go to pick it up. There are four “sanitation center” pick-up locations, which are pretty far out in the outskirts of Philly (i.e., 63rd and Passyunk; or Delaware Ave and Castor Ave, etc); or you can try your local community recreation center (check the ist of centers here). Since they’re closer to more people and don’t get as many bins to give out in the first place, though, the community centers can be hit or miss. When I called around to several of the locations near my apartment in mid-June, no one had any bins left. Furthermore, even City Hall, another pick-up location, did not have any left. Apparently they are popular.

Although I was really surprised that I wasn’t able to get a city bin, ultimately, you don’t have to have one of these bins to recycle. The city will pick up recycling in any bin as long as bin says “recycling” on it, holds 32 gallons or less, and the recycling is not bagged inside the bin. They offer “recycling” stickers to put on your bin, too, but these run into the same issue as the bins–they run out of stock early in the year.

We still have the same cheap-o trash can we got from Target to put our recycling in, and so far no repeat thefts…but as the new year dawns, it’s a good time to go down and get a blue bin if you want one. Before they all disappear.

Do you use a city-issued recycling bin, or do you have your own?