Back to the Future: Please Litter
by George Spyros, New York City, USA on 06.19.07
This trash can from Whole Foods here in Manhattan comes labeled with a good reminder that the resources it swallows up are gone for the long haul. We might as well consider it to be "forever." Perhaps not forever in the string-theory sense, but within the extended temporal dimension we humans find ourselves living, it's apparent enough that there is no reversing the tide of time. So if we want the benefit of the energy inputs which have already gone into making that non-recyclable plastic bag from your organic chips, too bad, it's back to square one harvesting more raw materials and using more energy to make another bag from scratch. More to the point, there's no turning the clock back on designing a better product in the first place once your hand glibly, guiltily or guilessly feeds it to this trash can. TreeHugger reader Peggy asks:
How can anything that is used once and tossed be considered a 'great product'?
The elegant answer after the jump to hyperspace...
From the book Cradle to Cradle:
In China, Styrofoam packaging presents such a disposal problem that people often refer to it as 'white pollution.' It is thrown from the windows of trains and barges and litters the landscape everywhere. Imagine designing such packaging to safely biodegrade after use. It could be made from the empty rice stalks that are left in the fields after harvest, which are now usually burned. They are readily available and cheap. The packaging could be enriched with a small amount of nitrogen... Instead of feeling guilty and burdened when they are finished eating, people could enjoy throwing their safe, healthy nutripackage out the train window onto the ground, where it would quickly decompose and provide nitrogen to the soil. It could even contain seeds of indigenous plants that would take root as the packaging decomposes. Or people could wait to dispose of the packaging at the next train stop, where local farmers and gardeners would have set up stations to collect it for use in fertilizing crops. We could even plant signs that say 'Please Litter.'
Cradle to Cradle should be required readign in all High Schools.
The simplicity and common sense that Willliam and Michael present in this masterpiece inspire me every time I go back to it. The obvious solutions and common sence of the messege in this book is like great design....when we see it, we wonder how come no one came up with it before...
We evolved within Nature, Nature has no concept of waste, so we like most animals picked up the habit of throwing things away. We now have materials that won't degrade, so the old habit actually becomes a problem.
Looking after stuff is really a learned behaviour, so if we could alter some of our products to behave cyclicly, like Nature, they would be more in sync with our own psychology.
Oh gosh, Cradle to Cradle is indeed my go-to book for introducing people to real ecological awareness.
That book made me look at everything around me very differently. After that, The Nature of Design by David Orr succinctly and powerfully lead me further down these paths, recognizing the flaws of the infrastructure around me. I highly suggest it to anyone who hasn't read it yet.
this needs smart and heavy promotion to see that something like it go somewhere. the world be at peace if they could plant a garden in their own trash. Who in America even thinks about trash in its tangible form, just located somewhere else?
Has anyone ever heard about bio degradable plastic bags? I am writng from Bangalore, India and despite the huge problem with use of plastic bags, a few aware people have begun using bio degradable plastic bags....Bangalores first certified organic store, uses such bags...can wholefoods not do the same?