Talkin' and Walkin' Trash

Talkin' . . . and Walkin' . . . Trash

By Janice Valverde

April 6, 2015

I took my first steps on Saturday toward walkin' the walk and not just talkin' the talk about trash. For years I've complained that so much of what we buy and use is nothing but manufactured garbage. Disposable one-time-use plastic stir sticks. Paper plates. Paper towels.

Paper bags. Paper napkins. Plastic bags.

Plastic food containers. Plastic packaging of all kinds. Disposable diapers. Disposable latex gloves.

Disposable syringes. Consider all the single-use items in homes, schools, offices, hospitals, medical and dental offices, everywhere . . . it's ridiculous.

While working as an environmental journalist in D.C. for a few years, I was bombarded by bad news about the Earth and public health pretty much all day every day. It got to me. Now, when I say "no thanks" to plastic bags, I also give a short sermon to the grocery bagger about the islands of plastic floating in our oceans. Many of them say, "Wow. I didn't know that."

So, I joined Toward Zero Waste Newburyport (MA). I attended a committee meeting on Thursday evening and volunteered an hour on Saturday morning to do a little dirty work--sorting trash. Just as the name states, the goal of

Toward Zero Waste is no trash. Nada.

Zero. Carried to its logical conclusion, it means eliminating the need for any more landfills or incinerators. Imagine a Zero Waste Community where almost every bit of everything discarded goes somewhere other than the trash barrel. It goes beyond composting and the normal curbside recycling of paper, glass and certain plastics. Beyond what most of us have ever really considered as we put the trash barrel on the curb every week. Is it even possible to reduce household waste to nothing? Yes, it is. A small minority of citizens are already doing it, proving that it's possible for all of us.

In Newburyport, two forces are making it possible, Christin Walth and TerraCycle. Nobody walks the walk like Christin. She has lived the Zero Waste lifestyle for four years and accumulated less than one small bag of trash over the past year and a half. Energetic, encyclopedic in her knowledge of the subject, and totally committed to it, she is the instigator who got the city to devote space at its recycling center to TerraCycle collection. TerraCycle, Inc. is a 14-year-old company in the business of finding destinations other than landfills for hard-to-recycle stuff.

According to a post on Penn State's (my alma mater!) sustainability website: TerraCycle, Inc. was founded in 2001 by Princeton University grad and environmental entrepreneur Tom Szaky.

The company collects hard-to-recycle items and converts them into consumer products available at major retailers. . .

Items are collected and shipped to TerraCycle’s corporate headquarters in New Jersey, where they are then processed into household goods.TerraCycle pays all shipping costs AND makes a donation to charity for each [shipment] it receives.

At Newburyport's TerraCycle center on Saturday, we sorted the following into bags and bins: keys, chip bags, plastic bottle caps, candy wrappers, pet food bags, corks, pens and pencils, cheese packaging, energy bar wrappers, drink pouches . . . and the worst substance on the planet--styrofoam!

Although it's not part of the TerraCycle program, Newburyport's center also accepts printer cartridges that will go to Staples stores, where they will not only be responsibly recycled but will also benefit local schools. If teachers are willing to let the TerraCycle team use their Staples rewards card numbers when they drop off cartridges, they rack up $2 credits for each cartridge on their account. It can add up to a couple hundred dollars of Staples merchandise in a year. Talk about a win-win-win for the environment, the schools, and Staples itself.

It's a beautiful thing, sorting trash on a Saturday morning. It's a beautiful sight, bags and bins of stuff that will not end up in landfills that mar the complexion of beautiful Mother Earth.