Category: Article

While researching articles on the app Nuzzel to share on Pick’n Run, I came found three articles on individuals and groups of volunteers who pick up trash on beaches, recreation areas, and even on a stretch of road. Each story is interesting in terms of why individuals pick up trash and the positive impacts they have on the environment and people around them from just picking up trash.

6,700+ Volunteers Pick Up 78+ tons of Trash from 146 Miles of Texas Beaches is about an annual event called Adopt-A-Beach Cleanup, which involves volunteers picking up trash at different locations. This year’s event involved 6,772 volunteers, who picked up a total of 156,699 pounds of trash from 28 locations along Texas’s coastline.

Volunteers pick up 4 tons of trash from Fall Creek Recreation Area is about a woman named Jennifer Moss, who led a clean-up crew of 50 volunteers at the Fall Creek Recreational Area, and picked up a total of 4 tons of illegally disposed trash.

This Guy Picks Up Trash on the Side of the Road Just Because is an article recognizing a young man who is picking up trash along a stretch of road in East Bridgewater for no intentional reason except contributing to a good cause that he wants to.

These stories are worth looking into, and possibly inspire you to pick up trash for your park, neighborhood, or beach. It is a simple act that can go on for a life time.

To get a person to take action, you usually need to set an example for them to follow. Elizabeth Gehrman sets an example for people by picking up litter off the streets in Boston wherever she goes. She refers in her article how she is following the footsteps of former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who has been a one-man cleaning crew during his years (and demonstrates to the public of taking action of picking up litter).

• Article: When it Comes to Litter, Let’s be More Like Mike (Dukakis), by Elizabeth Gehrman, of The Boston Globe

She then later discusses about the amount of roadside litter that has decreased since 1968 (61% was what the nonprofit Keep America Beautiful has calculated), but how there is still about 51.2 billion pieces of litter laying around in parks, walkways, and roads in America. It is up to the individuals to take action of picking up litter to make their location pleasant, or let litter lie around in the public eye.

Here is an example of combining a tour of an area with picking up trash.  It takes place in St. Paul, Minnesota:

• Article: Tour, pick up trash at a future Griggs Street park on Friday, by Frederick Melo, of the Twin Cities Pioneer Press

To make this happen, individuals from 3 different organizations worked together:

• Minnesota Environmental Fund
• Gordon Parks High School
• Community Action Partnership

The individuals to picked up litter along two streets:

• Syndicate street
• Griggs streets

While picking up trash along these two streets, the individuals learn about the future of a Griggs Street park via an hour long tour.  The park will be on 5 acres that the Trust for Public Land recently purchased in the city of St. Paul. The property is near the Skyline Tower housing development, which is home to 500 or more families.

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.

How many of you use styrofoam cups and packaging to keep your drink and food warm or cold? I know I use them whenever I get a hot drink. In fact, everyone uses them everyday by the millions.

The problem with styrofoam products, also know as expanded polystyrene foam is that billions of them are being sent to the landfill and into our oceans rather than being recycled (fact: the EPA calculated that “less than 2% of polystyrene [were] recycled in 2013”), even though it is a form of plastic. One of the reasons for that is that there isn’t enough recycling programs that would recycle them as they would do with other plastic items. So what is the solution to this problem?

There have been different approaches to recycling styrofoam:

Ashton Cofer discussed at a TEDtalk event a design that him and his  team made that converts foam into active carbon, like the filters that filter filthy water and air. It not only saves landfill space, but also reuses the resource of styrofoam. Watch his presentation to get more information about the design.

Chick-fil-A are up-cycling their used styrofoam cups in an environmentally helpful way. They partner up with IWS, Plastic Recycling of Iowa Falls, Inc, and a few other recycling locations that turns used polystyrene into usable products. You can read about this through this link.

Montana is taking a step further by proposing a bill to ban styrofoam food packaging and cups from restaurants and food packaging companies. Their aim is “to protect the health of people and wildlife in Montana” since the digested plastic poisons the body of animals and those who consumes them.

An organization called 5Gyres is spreading awareness about plastic in our oceans, especially styrofoam. They form events, programs, and guides to be #plasticfree. You can learn more about this organization by visiting their website.

You see, there are different ways that people, organizations, and companies are taking to change how foam is thrown away. You can be foam free by using your reusable cups or even don’t have the plastic covers of the styrofoam cups. There are so many ways, take action and be green.

Here are two photos of styrofoam robots that were made by artists: 

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 ]

Have you ever dedicate yourself to run an average of a marathon everyday to be an inspiration to a generation of children?

Jim “Gump” runs to inspire children and adults to exercise, even during a busy day. He runs through Colorado everyday on an average of 22 miles in order to carry the message across to schools, races, and homes. And to top it all, he is running 20,000 miles across America. It is not his first time doing something like this, for he started off in England when he had a full time job.

Interested for more of his story, click on this link.

Also, what he is doing is very very similar to what Daren Wendell, a runner from Kalamazoo, Michigan, is doing. He created a program called Run Daren Run in order to fundraise clean water to the people in Ethiopia, by running 100 marathons for 100 days. Check out more about him if you are also interested.