Mid-life and changing horses. At 48, I've left work and gone back to school. In a deluge of math, biology, and summer internships at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA. I'm slogging toward an Engineering degree - interested in water: how to conserve it, protect it, clean it, keep it flowing in rivers, streams, forests, cities. Mostly, how to get it into mouths - a heck of a lot of mouths. This blog is about water, school, and changing horses.
In the US, we throw away 1.4 billion pounds of trash, say the organizers of in.gredients, the first-ish (if you don't count the developing world) package-free grocery stores, basing their business model on "pre-cycling" and this:
The US fills 63,000 25-ton garbage trucks every day; about 700,000 tons of garbage is placed in American landfills on a daily basis.
Packaging makes up about 40 percent of that. The packaging we throw away, then, annually totals nearly 39 million tons of paper/paperboard, 13.7 million tons of plastics, and 10.9 million tons of glass.
Every day. That's 100 space shuttles. Every day. Half that, 560 million pounds - 50 space shuttles - isn't products purchased, but the wrappers that protect or advertise them. 560 million pounds of boxes, bins, buckets, sacks, bags, bottles, cups, and clams that, typically, we use only once. On a global-scale, the numbers are mind-boggling. And quite scary. Not all packaging can be eliminated - you really don't want a handful of chicken thighs and a pint of frozen yogurt - but this simple strategy proposed by in.gredients will reduce waste tremendously! :))) There is a better way!!!:))) http://www.indiegogo.com/ingredients
