Reuse it or lose it: Java Jackets

I am appalled on a regular basis about the sheer volume of garbage that my household generates. One question I frequently ask is:  how can I get more use out of the things I normally throw away, in such a way that I avoid buying new stuff, and delay putting things into the wastestream?  Recycling is great, but re-use is better (not buying it in the first place is, naturally, the best of all, but that is an exercise I leave to the reader) . For example, plastic bags from the grocery store, or which encase our newspaper delivery, become poop bags when we walk the dog, or line our household wastebaskets.  In keeping with the “one piece a day” ethos, I consider it a win every time I can get one extra use out of something.  If that plastic bag lives another day as a receptacle for my dog’s detritus, it’s one more day out of the landfill, and one less manufactured poop bag I need to buy.  I wash and re-use Ziploc bags, store or ship things in Amazon.com boxes… you get the picture.

The best wastestream reduction I came up with involved our pet rabbit and the overabundance of junk mail that comes to our mailbox. The non-plasticized portion of our junk mail went into our shredder, and I then used it as fill for the 3-story rabbit hutch on our deck that I built out of salvaged materials.  Each week, as I cleaned out the old fill (now soaked with nitrogen-rich rabbit urine and feces), I would dump it into our compost bin to convert it to soil for the garden.  In one fell swoop, I found a positive use for junk mail, eliminated the need to buy rabbit litter, increased our compost production, and protected my family from identity theft.  Alas, “T-bunny” passed away, and so did this marvelous lifehack. 

A more reliable way to practice re-use, and one that does not depend on the lifecycle of a pet lagomorph, has to do with that little cardboard sleeve that comes on your disposable coffee cup – the Java Jacket.

If you drank hot beverages in disposable cups prior to 1991, you had a choice – use a Styrofoam cup, or burn your fingers.  The impact of Styrofoam on the environment was already well-known, and as early as 1987, municipal governments were banning Styrofoam and polystyrene from use in food containers.  In 1991, Jay Sorenson invented what is now commonplace – the embossed or corrugated cardboard sleeve that comes on most disposable coffee cups. 

Today, Java Jackets are ubiquitous.  While some are generic, most coffee shops these days have sleeves with their own branding, accomplishing the dual goals of advertising and comfort.  How many of these are used annually?  Well, Starbucks alone claims on the order of 4 billion drink sales annually, and while many of these drinks come without an insulating sleeve (you don’t need one on your Pumpkin Spice Latte or your Very Berry Refresher), a good percentage of them do.  If you take a conservative estimate of 10% hot drinks with sleeves, that’s 400 million sleeves annually from Starbucks alone.  At about 12 square inches apiece, that’s about 34 million square feet of cardboard – enough to cover a little less than 600 football fields.  While that is small potatoes relative to the volume of the American wastestream, it’s large enough to consider making some small changes to reduce that impact.

The best start is to ensure that your cardboard sleeve winds up in the recycle bin rather than the garbage can, but you can do even better by re-using your sleeve multiple times.  It’s simple to slide the sleeve off when disposing of your cup, and to slip it into your glove box, jacket pocket, backpack, purse, or multifunctional camo man bag. 

When ordering your grande americano, let them know that you brought your own sleeve, or simply slide the sleeve they give you off of the cup and return it to them with a smile while sliding on your own.  I was pleased recently when the barista at Urban Coffee Lounge smiled back and said “I see more and more customers doing that.”

You can do even better by buying your own re-usable fabric sleeve (you’ll likely find a few at your local craft fair), or by always bringing your own mug (eliminating the disposable cup entirely), but for sheer convenience, re-using the disposable sleeve is the simplest way to ensure that you cut your sleeve usage in half.  Using the one-piece mindset, think in terms of making sure you use every sleeve twice.  Every additional use makes the world a little better.

Additional References:

• https://www.starbucks.com/responsibility/global-report/environmental-stewardship/cup-recycling
• http://www.gridphilly.com/grid-magazine/2011/8/3/kill-your-java-jacket-the-insulating-coffee-sleeve-and-the-d.html
• http://tylertalkstrash.com/

The journey of a thousand miles: applying the One Piece philosophy in your life

The key to the One Piece a Day philosophy is simple:  there are many things in life that just seem too large to take on.  Through One Piece, we learn that we can make a difference through small actions, even if solving the whole problem seems daunting (how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time).

This exercise started as a way of addressing my desire to clean up the urban landscape, and my feelings of hopelessness in the face of an endless and insurmountable project.  But the approach has broadened and generalized itself in my life.  Here are a handful of ways that One Piece has wormed its way successfully into my life.

Go Clean Your Room!

I am the father of a teenage daughter, one who has learned some bad habits from her parents - chiefly that of throwing clothes on the floor where they accumulate.  Clean, dirty, who cares - on the floor they go.  Add to that the books she has read, is reading, or wants to read.  Add to that the growing LEGO collection and other hobbies.   Telling her to clean her room forces her to face the accumulation, where she becomes overwhelmed with the sheer volume of things to be done.  She has not yet learned how to organize her work, so it looks like a huge bolus of undifferentiated chaos.

It was only recently that it occurred to me to apply the One Piece philosophy to the cleaning problem.  Tucking her in one night, I said "before I tuck you in, please pick up and deal with 5 pieces of clothes on the floor."  To my surprise, this was accomplished quickly and easily.  The next night I asked the same.  Soon, the accumulation on the floor started to look more manageable.  In a week, the floor was visible.  So, I made it a general condition: "whenever you go into your room, try to do one thing to make things better."

Leave it better than you found it

I don't know why it took me so long to provide this advice.  This has been part of my SOP for years - whenever I can, I try to do just a little more to leave an area better than I found it.  When I mow my yard, I often mow the neighbor's adjacent plot while I'm at it. When I wash my hands in somebody else's bathroom, I wipe the sink and buff the faucet.  Picking up a little bit of garbage at the bus stop or on the street is part of the same pattern.

Getting fly

When I mentioned this new pattern to my wife about our daughter and her newfound peace about cleaning her room a little at a time, she reminded me about Flylady.  My wife has used flylady for a good portion of the last decade to help guide her housework.  The practice is similar to the one Piece practice - choose one small thing to do each day to make the house better.  Clean one bathroom, or dust all the shelves, or wash the wall above the stove, or find 15 things to throw away or give to charity.  It builds on the same ideas about picking a manageable goal every day in order to accomplish a larger task.

A sprint doesn't have to be a marathon

At work this week, while these thoughts were percolating, a senior software engineer on my team gave a presentation about how he had helped the team to be more productive.  He introduced changes to the way the team split up their work.  Rather than allowing individual developers to take on complex tasks which required multiple weeks of work, he enforced a rule that limits the complexity of individual tasks - a large and complex task will be broken up into smaller tasks before it is assigned.  (for those of you familiar with Scrum, this means that we've enforced that no individual story can be more than 3 story points.  For the rest of you, my more general description will suffice).  What he found was that the impact of doing small tasks and marking them done caused a feeling of accomplishment for the developers on the team, and this creates a desire to complete more tasks and mark them done.  This has resulted in a greater throughput of work, better job satisfaction on the team, and better work life balance (when a task can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, he found, there are fewer developers working late into the night to try to close out tasks that were too big to complete quickly).

On reflection, he realized that this strategy applies some of the principles of gamification to the software development process.  Completing a task and being able to mark it as "done" in a place that is visible to the team (on the scrum board) creates a feeling of accomplishment and a desire to revisit that personal success.  Making the process public and visible creates a healthy competition between team members.  

Begin your journey

In the past, I've encouraged my readers to apply a very specific principle to their lives - every day, find a piece of litter to pick up.  However, I realize that the benefits of the One Piece philosophy are much broader and can apply to anyone's life in unique ways.  What kinds of insurmountable tasks occupy your life, and how can One Piece help you break those problems into manageable tasks?

Welcome to fall!

It's fall again, one-piecers.  What does that mean to my - to OUR - campaign?

Here's a few things I've noticed:

• The mix of garbage shifts.  Fewer people are hanging out in public places in the Northwest because of the turn in the weather.  That means fewer caches of beer cans on the street and in bushes.
• Paper garbage is decomposing in place.  That means more recyclable containers and plastic.
• Recyclables are gathering in drains again, brought there by storm runoff

Personally, I've been struggling with some frustrations.  

I was surprised last night to notice that my adopt-a-stop here on Finn Hill was full to the brim, less than two weeks after my last trip to empty it.  Visiting it today, I found it stuffed full of empty cans from our local teenagers' favorite brew - Steel Reserve.  I understand - I was a teenager once - but crushing the cans would be a nice gesture, boys :-).  

A lot of the rest of the garbage was neatly tied bags of dog excreta.  While I'm glad it doesn't wind up on the ground and in our storm runoff drains, I do see my adopt-a-stop can as somewhat of an attractive nuisance in that regard.  Again, I understand - as a dog owner, it's more attractive to drop my bagged poop in a convenient roadside can rather than packing it all the way home.  Still, it makes adopt-a-stop duty a little less pleasant.  

This week, the stop was littered with cigarette butts again.  What can we do to shift the societal norm towards putting butts in the trash rather than on the ground?  

Random musings from your faithful blogger.

Finally, we've been the target of theft - three times now - of our garbage cart.  Three times in the last year it's disappeared from in front of the house during the 12 hours between collection and walking it back to the house.  Finn Hill neighbors, are others being targeted?  

Enjoy the fall, Seatttle - and keep on picking up one piece a day.

One walk a day - Cleaning up the Cross-Kirkland Corridor

A few months ago, my wife mentioned that there was a new trail in Kirkland, where they were removing the disused train tracks.  There's been a lot of that around this area in recent memory - the Sammamish River trail and the Burke Gilman were both railroad beds originally.

The Cross Kirkland Corridor (http://www.kirklandwa.gov/Community/Cross_Kirkland_Corridor.htm) is in early stages, but already the rails are gone, and a thick layer of crushed quarry rock makes a rough but workable walking surface.  

My wife and I have made it a summer project to walk the length of the trail in short increments and to help remediate the garbage along the way.  I'm happy to report that the Adopt-A-Trail program is fully subscribed (http://www.kirklandwa.gov/Community/Cross_Kirkland_Corridor/Get_Involved.htm).  We aren't part of that program - we're just interlopers, bringing a bag and gathering trash as we walk.

Thus far, we've traveled from the North end of the trail in Totem Lake down to the Everest neighborhood, almost two thirds of the total trail length.  

Heading North to South, the trail starts in an industrial area, passing by Totem Lake and behind warehouses.  This end of the trail is/was thick with garbage, and we filled bags quickly.

Garbage and recyling at the North end of the trail

Once past the 116th street freeway onramp, the trail becomes more suburban, and there are some lovely stretches bounded by blackberry and horsetail.  

The area adjacent to Crestwoods park in particular is really nice and a great area for birdwatching.  A runoff stream runs alongside the trail for most of its length.

We're enjoying the walks, the scenery, and it feels good to collect trash as a family.  It's bringing us together and making us feel like we can make a difference.  

Enjoy your summer, friends - we are.

One coin a day - has a penny reached the status of garbage?

Recently while picking up litter at the bus stop, I found a nickel.  It was one of a number of coins I've found recently while scanning the ground, and it reminded me of a blog post I wrote in September 2006 about finding money while cycling to work.

9/29/2006

It's amazing to me how much money is just lying around in the street. Biking to work, I see coins lying in the street all the time. They sit there day after day and I'm the only one who seems to pick them up.

 This morning, at the most prolific intersection on my route, I spotted three pennies and a dime. I then picked up a quarter at the second most lucrative spot, which is on M$ campus. The first spot is about a mile and a half from home, so I just went for a walk and picked up the three pennies and a dime, plus a fourth penny I didn't see in the same spot. While I was on my way, I spotted a quarter in the gutter, and there was a nickel on the sidewalk about 2 feet away. Finally, I spotted another penny in the street about halfway to home.

 Don't know about you, but I still consider it worthwhile to pick up a penny.

The stuff that lies in the street gets all scuffed up - sometimes to the point where they are unrecognizable. 

Here's today's haul. All but the scuffed quarter were picked up on my walk just now.

One Coin A Day?

It makes me wonder:  in this affluent suburb, why don't we stop to pick up change?  Is it that the perceived value is so low?  Is it just unseen?  Or are we sending the same message with coins as we are with garbage:  that it's beneath us to bow to the ground and pick something up there, or that anything that has touched the ground is automatically contaminated?

Would you stop to pick up a coin on the ground?  Why or why not?

What MH370 is teaching us about ocean debris

March 8^th of this year, Malaysian airlines flight MH370 disappeared.  The baffling disappearance is a mystery that persists 86 days later despite what is perhaps the most technologically sophisticated search conducted to date.

While the disappearance of the flight remains an unsolved mystery, one side effect of the intense search has been to focus attention on the large amount of man-made floating debris in the most remote parts of the ocean, everything from lost or discarded fishing gear to entire lost shipping containers.

“Search efforts intensified on 20 March, after large pieces of possible debris had been photographed in this area four days earlier by a satellite. Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea assigned military and civilian ships and aircraft to the search. China published images from satellite Gaofen 1 on 22 March that showed large debris about 120 km (75 mi) south west of the previous sighting. On 26 March, images from French satellites indicated 122 floating objects in the southern Indian Ocean. Thai satellite images published on 27 March showed about 300 floating objects about 200 km (120 mi) from the French satellites' target area. The abundant finds, none yet confirmed to be from the flight, brought the realisation of the prior lack of surveillance over the area, and the vast amounts of marine debris littering the oceans.” - Wikipedia: Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

The referenced Wikipedia article has pulled together many of the reports of marine debris fields discovered in the vast and remotest parts of the Southern Indian Ocean, sourced from plane overflights, search vessels, and some of the largest from satellite imagery.  Imagine, garbage fields visible from space!

Can this ocean of garbage be cleaned up?  Unlikely.  The effort required to collect large amounts of garbage in remote and untraveled areas is prohibitive, and represents a drop in a very large bucket.  It’s hard to know how to start to help.  A large proportion of the garbage in remote areas comes from huge shipping containers lost overboard, loss of equipment from large-scale fishing operations.  However, some proportion of it is undoubtedly sourced on land, from household garbage.

On a recent visit to Port Townsend, Washington State’s quaint Victorian arts community and tourist haven, I walked the beaches along Discovery Bay, and was reminded of the lessons of MH370 by the trash all over the littoral zone.  I picked up a nice pile of plastic bags and sheeting. 

 I left the tires. 

It makes me feel helpless to think of the insurmountable task of cleaning up the ocean.  What I can do is small but impactful – pick up a piece or more of trash every day.  365 pieces a year.  Maybe a few thousand in a lifetime.  If we can spread this discipline, teach our kids, get 100, 1000, a million, a billion people doing the same, will it end the problem?  No, but it’s a start.  

Join me, won’t you?

The scoop about trash and wildlife: check your facts before you act

A good friend recently contacted me on Facebook, sending me a graphic that warned of the danger that discarded chewing gum poses to small birds. “Thank you for your counter-litterbug blog and activities.” she wrote. “This reminded me of you!” 

I’ve mentioned threats to wildlife before, and this seemed like a good prod in the direction of a full post devoted to specific wildlife threats.  I've heard a few horror stories: marine birds and other animals snarled in plastic six-pack rings, pigeons exploding after eating processed rice, and now, gum mistaken for bread by unsuspecting finches. 

Only, as it turns out, none of these appear to stand up to inspection.

We are a soundbite culture, and it is tempting to grasp onto something simple and graphic and rally behind it.  For example, there are documented cases of seabirds and other wildlife caught in the plastic rings used to hold soda cans.  It’s a shocking picture, and it’s easy to hold in your mind.  It’s a simple thing to talk about, and it makes us feel like heroes when we cut up the rings before putting them in the trash.

However, plastic rings are not the top culprit in the entanglement and death of animals, marine or otherwise.  Far more animals are snared in discarded nets and fishing line.  Here’s one article that summarizes the issue well:  http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1336/should-you-cut-up-six-pack-rings-so-they-dont-choke-sea-birds.   Does this mean you shouldn’t cut up the rings?  No, but you should realize that you may not be making the impact you think you are.  It may be more helpful to ensure that the rings are part of trash that is properly bagged and discarded in a responsible landfill (yes, even landfills are getting their act together: http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/hazmat/articles/trash.html).

My ask is that if you read about a compelling and viral environmental issue, please check your facts before you repost.  Other examples:

•           Chewing gum is probably not a credible health threat to birds, and no, birds are not so dumb that they mistake gum for bread: http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/gumbirds.asp
•           Birds do not explode when they eat dry rice: http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/birdrice.asp

So, if none of these are significant threats, what type of litter has a real impact on the natural world, and how can we best act to limit the damage?

Here are some likely culprits:

1. Litter on beaches or in waterways.  I’ve written about the great vortex of plastic trash in the Pacific ocean and the impact it has on the ecosystem.  Keeping garbage out of waterways and off beaches seems like a great investment of time.  The threat of marine animals attempting to eat floating plastic bags is alone cited more frequently than the problem of plastic soda rings. (http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/science/wildlife-under-threat-from-record-beach-litter-$1218176.htm, http://www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/debris/toolkit/files/Sec3.litterinwaterways508.pdf ).
2. Pesticides and household hazardous waste.  Runoff from fields, spills from industrial operations, and storm runoff that includes the results of your last oil change have a long lasting impact, and the bioconcentration that occurs over time is a direct threat to the species at the top of the food chain (that means us).  (http://www.chintiminiwildlife.org/Education/LivingWithWild/Litter.htm )
3. Cigarette butts.  Not only is nicotine a potent toxin, but cigarette filters contain toxic materials that I don’t even want to think about, let alone see leach into my soil (http://www.legacyforhealth.org/our-issues/cigarettes-and-the-environment, http://www.longwood.edu/cleanva/ciglitterarticle.htm, http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/45874).  By the way, in case you get into the trap of thinking there’s no hope, know that some scientists are making progress on solutions  (http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/newscience/2012/06/2012-0725-biodegradable-cigarette-filters/ ).

Those three are a good place to start.  Since researching this article, I’ve stepped up my efforts to clear the ground of cigarette butts.  I urge you to do the same.  

At least one piece, friends:  It’s for the birds.