5 - Garbage and waste
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Tons of active pharmaceutical ingredients dumped into the environment by medical-supply companies since 1988: 421,500
– Harper's Index, August 2009Backlog, in years, of retired U.S. nuclear warheads waiting to be dismantled by the Federal Government: 13
– Harper's Index, August 2009Introduction
On the website “365 Days of Trash: One man's attempt to throw nothing “away” for a year … and beyond,” the creator of the site writes:
The idea for this project came about six months ago as I was throwing something away in the garbage. It occurred to me that I was doing nothing more than that. I was making it go away, not dealing with it, not accounting for it, simply removing it from my sight. When you think of it in simple terms like that, it's really quite insane. I came to the realization that if we were all accountable for our waste, if we couldn't simply make it disappear, we'd have to deal with some pretty ugly truths about the way we live. And in so doing, it would cause us to start making better decisions about what we buy, where we buy, and what's left over when we are done with that purchase. So starting tonight at midnight, I am not going to throw anything away for 365 days in order to see what my impact is …
(http://365daysoftrash.blogspot.com, accessed 17 June 2009)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Environmental PoliticsScale and Power, pp. 117 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010