Teru Talk Newsletter

Teru's Trash Talk

There’s nothing like moving to smaller quarters to let you know you have accumulated too much stuff. Teru Talk’s team is mid-move, an all-consuming exercise, especially when trying hard not to simply toss the excess into the back bin. Time to assess what to keep, what to part with – yet as careful as we can be, we are making more trash in a month than we’ve let loose in a year. Apparently, just storing odd items does not equate to Not Making Waste.

We’re pretty much obsessed with making as little trash as possible, but good grief! It seems every desk drawer, closet and cubby hole is full of stuff and very little of it has risen to the We Need That level in a long time. If we have really converted from paper files to digital records, why oh why do we still have so much paper? Binders from the distant past; manila folders holding letters for projects long since closed. And the mementos! How can we possibly get rid of that beee-uutiful Lucite whats-it we won for being so special, for something or another so long ago. A sturdy rollie-cart becomes rubbish since the behemoth work station it once carried is now Waste Electronics - whatever we did on that beast can all be accomplished on our cell phone. Useful in their day, still functional if the things were still needed - which they are not. Now what?

So far we’ve sent a couple truck loads to local charities, swapped perfectly useful but unneeded bookcases and such for fresh eggs and veggies (that was cool) and have been selling a continual stream of identifiable items online. We’ve barely made a dent. What sort of detritus ends up in the dumpster, when Zero Waste fanatics have to accept that we too are trashy? Broken chairs, mildewed boxes, out-of-date business cards, envelopes with the wrong address, and that easy-erase white board someone used a permanent marker on – tossed.

Where we are located, everything goes in one big bin, and ends up at the massive central Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). Yep, they’ll separate out white paper, cardboard and wire cables, anything else that fits one of the umpteen categories designated as Recyclable by the plant’s administration on that particular day. The decision to pull an item from the MRF conveyer belt line is a complex one, a balance of cost of the separation and cleaning versus the spot price for the particular recyclate. But those prices are down, and when the sorting is done, half or more of all that stuff that came in the front, goes out the back and on to the dump.

For almost six years now Teru Talk has yammered on about all the currently available clean tools and cool techniques we can use on the trashy residual left after recycling to convert it into useful solids, liquids and gases – into foundation materials, reclaimed resources. Meanwhile the Powers that Be have continued to rely on the market price of recycled bottles, glass, cardboard, and metal to dictate what does or does not end up in the dump. We are still paying to bury half of the discards we generate. Resource recovery can be more economical and far more environmentally sane than pillaging for virgin materials, but it takes work and doesn’t happen by accident.

Hey Rube!

With our all-consuming move, our newsletter schedule has become somewhat varied. The news continues however, and progress is evident globally on all fronts. Many cool tools and advanced techniques are surging forward for turning waste into non-waste. Pick a favorite or two, contact the blokes involved and let ‘em know that Humans actually are paying attention to their efforts.

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