Headed to a landfill near you?It has taken millions of people's jobs and houses. Could the global recession now threaten our health?
This theoretical question is at the heart of a regulatory standoff between California toxics police and the automobile recycling industry.
State regulators want auto recyclers to cease dumping 700,000 tons of potentially toxic automobile recycling waste into municipal landfills, and instead cart it to special, highly-expensive, toxic-waste holding facilities. The
Not everything that goes in the trash can is trash. Ask someone who knows...Pulling into the home stretch of Recyclemania, the nationwide recycling competition for colleges and universities, our local institutions appear to be flagging a bit. Ranked 12th and 13th earlier this month, San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco have dropped back in the pack. With the competition scheduled to end later this month, CCSF is ranked 14th and SFSU is sitting in the No. 15 spot. As w
Thanks, Ma: Toxic waste from old cars is still hunky dory in California
The California Senate's Environmental Quality Committee today unanimously approved a bill that would block environmental officials from preventing 700,000 tons of toxic waste from being dumped into county landfills each year. As reported in SF Weekly, the state Department of Toxic Substances Control last fall proposed rules that would end a 20-year-old policy of allowing residue from automobile recycling plants to be dumped
It hasn't gotten quite to this point yet...There's no getting around it -- the notion of a government employee or contractor inspecting one's refuse and approving or disapproving its composition is creepy, regardless of how altruistic the goal of waste reduction. You cannot argue about this. That being said, Big Brother has not taken over the Departments of Sanitation in the several cities that preceded San Francisco in adopting mandatory recycling and composting (we're assuming this one is goin
But the cute bear wants me to buy disposable diapers...Like many of you, I was more than a bit amazed at an article yesterday on SFgate, in which a woman with the Marx Brothers-worthy name of Willow Lune explained her raison d'etre: Pushing a diaper-free lifestyle in which one's children can be trained, not unlike dogs, to indicate when they wish to be held over a toilet, trash can, or your boss' hat. I am not going to pass judgment on this, shall we say, alternative method of child-rearing -
Possibly heading to Nevada is one more thing to be grouchy aboutSan Francisco's current waste management service, Recology -- formerly known as NorCal -- wants to ship the 20,000 tons of garbage we produce per week (not including weekends) on a freight train to a proposed landfill near Winnemucca, Nevada. Apparently San Fran hasn't quite reached that zero-waste goal yet -- and until we do, we will face the problem of where to stash our trash so that we don't have to be anywhere near it. The c
Gare and Kitty/FlickrThe makings of a kickass pair of wedgies?If you want another option for your used champagne and wine corks -- beyond using them in bad art projects -- there are fashion-forward options in the works. Cork is one material that's migrating from the recycling bin to the shoe store.
A new "upcycling" program plans to utilize some of the billions of old, used natural cork wine and champagne closures to make shoes. This week, a company called ReCORK America announced a new
