Author: John Mueller

Tomorrow, Monday, April 17th, starts Earth Week. To start the week off on a positive note, here is an article about the Boulder-based, member-driven organization, Leave No Trace:

• Boulder’s Leave No Trace wants people to pick up trash (Daily Camera, by John Bear, April 14, 2017)

The organization is looking to motivate people to pick up trash in a public open space this week, and when doing so, photograph themselves with the piece of trash, tag @LeaveNoTrace on Twitter and/or Instagram and use the hashtag #LeaveNoTrash.

Trash in the ocean is an interesting problem. 8 million metric tons of plastic currently enter the oceans annually.  Based upon that rate, one estimate is that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050.

Here is an interesting article talking about that, and a link to the company that is making and selling $149 sunglasses out of recovered high-density-polyethylene (HDPE) ocean plastics:

• Article: How Entrepreneurs Can Turn Trash Into (Revenue) Profit (Literally)
• Company: Norton Point

Austin-based company, Dell is mentioned as well: “Dell recently announced that it’s using recycled plastics collected from waterways and beaches for use in the new packaging tray for its Dell XPS 13 2-in-1.”

Note: The author of this article Elizabeth Gore highlights that 500m plastic straws are a culprit to the plastic generation.

Last December, Upworthy published the following article:

• Sweden has a weird but awesome problem: They’re running out of trash (Published on Upworthy, written by James Gaines, December 14, 2016)

Can this really be the case? This article starts out with how much trash each American generates per day (4.3 pounds a day).  Evening though 66% of household trash can be composted, we don’t use close to that amount. The USA only composts 33%, whereas Sweden composts 50% of its trash.

Supposedly, Sweden wants that trash so they can compost more, and recycle more, to create energy.  This energy is used to provide heat and electricity to towns in Sweden. They have built 32 “waste-to-energy” plants which provide heat to 810,000 homes and electricity to 250,000.  To keep these “waste-to-energy” plants, Sweden is buying trash from other countries.

Note: The USA has 84 “waste-to-energy” plants (source: Energy Recovery Council), with Florida and New York having the most — 11 and 10 respectively.

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This article triggered me to think about several questions and to search for answers to these questions:

How much trash do people make a day? In the USA, it ranges from 4.3 pounds a day (source: Duke’s Center for Sustainability & Commerce)  to 7.1 pounds a day (source: Edward Humes, “Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash“.  Compare that to 1960, when Americans produced 2.7 pounds of trash per person per day (source: Duke’s Center for Sustainability & Commerce).  With a population of 319m, that is a lot of trash being generated per year, and over our individual lifetime (Humes calculates that is 102 tons of trash we individually generated over each of our lifetimes).

How many landfills are there in the USA, and what is their landmass? Currently, there are 3,500 active landfills in the USA.  That is 70 landfills per state on average.  However, some states are more populated than the other.  New York, Texas, and California have the most landfills.  With the USA population being 319m, that is ~91,000 persons per landfill.

The largest landfills are in California (Sunshine Canyon Landfill / Puente Hills Landfill), Indiana (Newton County Landfill), and Nevada (Apex Regional Waste Management Center).

And interesting history fact I found out when looking for answers to my questions: The city of Fresno was the first city with a municipal landfill: Fresno Municipal Sanitary Landfill.  The landfill opened in 1937, located 3 miles southwest of downtown Fresno, pioneering the use of trenching, compacting, and daily burial of trash.  In the Fresno case, it was to combat debris AND rodent problems.  The landfill was closed in 1987 (or 1989), after it had reached 145 acres. It became a National Historic Landmark in 2001 [ was debated to be included on the NHL list, the landfill is also a Superfund site, as it has leaked toxic materials ]

Do you have what it takes to end waste through technology?  The city of Phoenix is looking to find ways to improve their trash management.  One way is their business / startup competition:

• What’s the big idea? Calling on innovators to get rid of Phoenix trash

The winning idea idea will win $20,000 to go towards starting a business based around your idea.   As well, the winner will have the ability to pilot their idea in the City of Phoenix (i.e. a pilot opportunity).

It is interesting to see that the competition, the Cisco IoT Challenge, is sponsored by an information technology company (Cisco), a cable company (Cox Communications), and the Arizona Institute for Digital Progress.

Contestants submitted their ideas by February 4th, and pitches were given yesterday, Saturday, February 11th.   From now until March 23rd participants will “Hack at Home”, where they will develop their minimal viable products.  They will be supported by online mentoring.  Final pitches will be March 23rd.

This article from CNN highlights an invention by Lynn Mueller which captures heat from sewage (sewage heat reclamation):

CNN: Clean energy gets dirty: Turning sewage into heat
by Jackie Wattles, CNN Money, May 24, 2016

Based in Vancouver, Lynn and International Water Systems now have a backlog of projects from around the world for the “Sharc” technology.  The system uses energy to power a heat pump, however, every $1 used to power the Sharq heat pump system produces $4.50 worth of energy.

And no, Lynn Mueller — the inventor of the sewage-to-heat technology — is not related to Martin or I. 🙂

At Pick’n Run, we are looking to clean up the small pieces of trash that we find while we are running — “the last mile of trash”.  However, there is a much bigger issue that we as a population of this earth will need to encounter sometime in the future. Hopefully we do it sooner than later, and don’t kick the can down the road.  That problem is actually the amount of trash we generate.  As you will see in this article posted on Earth Day 2016 (April 22, 2016) and written Ann M. Simmons of the Los Angeles Times, we continue to increase the amount of trash we generate and thus put into land fills.  What are we going to do about that going forward?

Here is the link to the article:

• The World’s Trash Crisis, and Why Many Americans are Oblivious (by Ann M. Simmons, Los Angeles Times)