Greener Gadgets Keynote: Mass Consumption Photography
Read Full Article http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1344/
On the face of it, selecting photographer Chris Jordan as the keynote speaker for the Greener Gadgets Conference may seem like an odd choice...until you get a look at his work. He's best known in the green world for his collection Running the Numbers, which attempts to show the results of our country's addiction to mass consumption.
"You can't go see the total amount of garbage we generate every day because it's divided out all over the country," Jordan told the sellout crowd of 400+ at the Greener Gadgets Conference. "I've devoted the last five years of my life documenting the detritus of our consumer culture and mass consumption".
Jordan combines photography with some deft Photoshop work to build up giant images showing the number of items Americans use in a certain period of time. Some of the images he's put together include the:
410,000 paper cups used every 15 minutes
2,000,000 plastic beverage bottles used every 15 minutes
11,000 commercial flights every 8 hours
426,000 cell phones "retired" every day
1,140,000 brown paper supermarket bags used every hour
106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds
60,000 plastic bags used every five seconds
15,000,000 sheets of office paper every five minutes
38,000 shipping containers, the number processed through American ports every 12 hours
The Recycling Myth
The latter is actually true: everybody is recycling. But that is the result of government force, not a voluntary choice. The state's monopolist garbage-collection "service" no longer accepts garbage: they will only collect leftovers and other biodegradables. Any other kind of garbage that accidentally finds its way to your garbage bin can result in a nice little fine (it really isn't that little) and the whole neighborhood could face increased garbage collection rates (i.e., even larger increases than usual — they tend to increase annually or biannually anyway).
So what do you do with your waste?
Full Article http://www.mises.org/story/2855
11211 Recycling. The New Economy
Do we will have so a cleaner sidewalks a cleaner street and less waste around?
What about them..I mean the recyclers? TRASH is CASH.
According to them, they can make between $100 and 150$ a day and basically those are $ stoled from the city.
What is better let them have a Job or having a cleaner streets?
I have a solution....what about moving the recycler to Italy, over there there is a lot to do and I`m pretty sure they can make even more $.
