Category: Trash

Creating High Quality, Simple Houses by Using Discarded Plastic

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Since plastic is a big part of our daily lives, it is also a common material found on streets (trash). With the Pick’n Run initiative, we would pick up the plastic (trash). That plastic can be recycled and be used in a different form.  What if I told you the plastic that you pick up from the streets could be used for something to help decrease the homelessness.

A young man, Oscar Mendez, is proving that there is a way to create decent homes for homeless people while reducing waste plastic. He is creating building blocks to build houses for homeless people.  This link leads to a video that describes his workings: This Man is Building Homes for the Homeless Using Discarded Plastic 

Here is another link to an article more about him and his works: Oscar Mendez – Providing Decent housings for the Homeless while Reducing Waste Plastic

 

A Local Hero of Trash Picking

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About three months ago, a young man named Cliff Relph finished spending 100 days picking up trash in the Knight Street Neighborhood in Vancouver.  He would walk around picking up trash that he found laying around. Locals have called him a local hero, dedicating himself to spend time outside to pick up trash that people left on the ground in the neighborhood. He found banana peels, a frying pan, and even batteries laying around. Even though it was a tough activity for him, he said he was dedicated to make a difference in his neighborhood, doing what most people wouldn’t do.

If you want to read about his 100 day adventure, click on this link to get more details: Knight St man’s 100-day trashpicking project finally over

The way he takes pictures during his trash finding neighborhood escapades is something that we are trying to make easier for people like Cliff: while a runner (or walker) finds trash during his/her runs (or walks), he/she can pin it or picture it with the PnR Mobile App. Doing so will pin point the trash’s location.  The runner (or walker) can then pick up the trash (i.e. pick it up).  The application stores that information to provide a documentary of where trash is located, if the trash has been picked up, or if others can help pick it up. [ pin it, picture it, pick it up ]

More Trash Than Fish

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During my high school Environmental Science class, my teacher shared an article with us about trash in our oceans. I asked her for the link and she sent me this:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/01/24/oceans-more-plastic-than-fish/79267192/

I found it interesting that our thrown daily material could have such a big impact when not handled properly. Along with my research of this situation, I found similar articles from different sources that explain the situation.
In the abc 3340 article (my personal favorite), an elementary school teacher, who scuba-dives in the ocean, challenges her students to reduce the amount of daily trash they make after showing pictures that she took during her dives. The images are shocking to the kids to the point that they are switching from nonrenewable products to renewable products.

VOA News: http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/oceans-could-hold-more-plastics-than-fish-2050/3166848.html
BBC News: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35562253
abc 3340: http://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/more-plastic-than-fish-in-our-oceans

Situations like this is something that can be prevented if we pick up trash off our streets, beaches, neighborhoods, and parking lots. And dispose them properly. That is what Pick’n Run is aiming for.

Trash Cleaning

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The Michigan weather is changing from winter to spring. Birds would be chirping, flowers would be blooming, and people would be picking up piles of trash in about 650 areas. Old furniture, tire remnants, house parts, and anything else would be recycled or threw away.  Ada Takacs, the coordinator of the DNR’s “Clean Forests” program, is looking for volunteers to clean-up the wastes.

For more information: More than 600 trash piles found on public land across Michigan

Planting a Tree One Cup at a Time

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How can you give birth to a new generation of trees and plants with a coffee cup?

The answer, use Plantable Coffee Cups that contain seeds and biodegradable materials that biodegrade in 180 days. Alex Henige came up with the idea of using coffee cups as a product that grows trees from the fact that Americans throw away 140 billion cups annually. Since that it is “a daily consumption that was amounting to a massive pile of waste.” The company is heading to Boulder, CO and Marin Country to have their cups in coffee shops.

For more information about their cup idea, visit the link below:

California Entrepreneur Invents Coffee Cups that can Revive Forests

‘All my Trash Fits in a Single Mason Jar’

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How much trash do you make in a day? About 4.4 pounds of trash like Americans? Or how about in a 16-ounce Mason jar?

Lauren Singer is a 23-year-old woman who “is a practitioner of a light-footprint, minimal-plastic lifestyle” and a business owner of The Simply Co.. She avoids “purchasing or using anything that might end up in a landfill.” As you look at her trash on the website, she tells us that the amount of trash she made is actually two years of trash (you will be surprised on what and how much trash was saved from going to waste).

Read Article: ‘All My Trash Fits in a Single Mason Jar’

Also, she has information about her product (a detergent) on The Simply Co.  The detergent has 3 organic ingredients in it. To get the product developed, she ran a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign in which she was able to raise $42k.

Would you like to be able to product that little of trash each year?

Trash Music

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Have you ever seen or heard of instruments being made out of materials that we never thought of? There are instruments out there that are made out of vegetables /fruits and even trash (or recycled materials from the dump). That’s right, playable instruments made out of trash.

In the country of Paraguay, a man named Favio Chavez create a music group called the Orchestra of Recycled Instruments “to keep the children [of Paraguay] out of trouble” from all the violence, drug usage, drunk strangers, and child labor. There was one problem: Favio didn’t have enough money to buy instruments for the children. The answer: go to the dump and grab recycled materials to make incredible instruments.

Here is the video explaining how using trash to save a child’s life from all the negative problems around them is another way:

Children’s Orchestra Play Instruments Made from Trash

My personal favorite recycled instrument would the house gutter saxophone.

End Homelessness, Using Bottles

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Let me ask you question: How are we going to end homelessness without spending so much money to build houses and to clean up our trash for a cleaner world? The answer: use trash (like plastic water bottles) as construction materials.

“The United States uses 129.6 Million plastic bottles per day which is 47.3 Billion plastic bottles per year. About 80% of those plastic bottles end up in a landfill!”

There is more information in this article that a group, known as Spirit Science, posted this article on Facebook about using the bottles as materials to make simple houses for everybody.

America Could End Homelessness in One Year by Doing This

Such an inspiring article about using our trash to give homeless people homes to live in. Think of what you could do with just our trash: because there are many ways to use trash than just art.

Changing the Way of Trash (Including Dogs)

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New York City is changing their way on collection trash and recyclables. Since the 1800s, the people of New York didn’t care about where the trash would end up, such as the ocean. In 1934, Secretary of State places a law that no trash are allowed to be dumped into the ocean, so trash is now being places in landfills, which takes up space. This video explains how the trash system has changed to this day and how they want to make it better that saves money for their company, the environment/land, and the sanitation level for the people to be healthy. Also, below it is an article below the video that explains about how letting dogs pee on trash bags and recycling bins is not a great idea for the garbage people.

Why the Garbage Man Might Dislike Your Dog

That would really change the way of living for the people of New York City, but in a good way. Just think about what you could do in your state that is similar or the same as the people of New York City are doing.

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Cleaner Wins, Litter Losses

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Recently, we found a video that shows a woman in Russia, who gives litterbugs a taste of their own trash by doing an action that most of us would not even think about doing: throwing litterbug’s  trash in their face.

‘Girl vs. littering’: Motorcycle-riding vigilante takes sweet revenge on litterbugs 

What do you think about that? Would you have done that kind of action if you saw someone littering in front of you face? Or would you have done something else? You could do a similar action by cleaning up the mess that humans provide and share with people about what they can do to help you and other people out there to clean up the mess.