Can You Slash Your Trash for a Week? Together, we need to rise up and advocate for a zero-waste future. You can start right now with CLF’s third annual Slash Trash Challenge! Follow along on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to join us in taking on a new zero-waste challenge each day! Not on social media? That’s okay! This page outlines… Continue reading CLF Slash Trash Challenge
Wrestling humanity away from single-use plastics will not be easy. But we can start by reducing our reliance on single-use plastic beverage containers.
Located in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, Uvida Shop is the city’s first-ever Zero Waste store – a retail destination that sells products with no single-use plastic packaging. Owner and CEO Maria began this venture while studying environmental science and sustainability at UMass Boston.
Plastic is everywhere – even in the places you’d least expect, like chewing gum, tea bags, wet wipes, receipts, and microwaveable popcorn bags. Yet, manufacturers continue to make more and more plastic each year – even though how plastic is made fuels a toxic cycle of production, consumption, and disposal.
When first built in 1976, New Hampshire’s Bethlehem Landfill was just a local dump – 400 x 400 feet in total. But thanks to large corporate waste companies with aggressive growth plans, the landfill has swelled in size. Today, it covers 50 acres and buries 175,000 tons of trash each year. The State of New… Continue reading Turning a Spotlight on New Hampshire’s Waste Crisis
Our waste disposal systems, like landfills and incinerators, simply can’t handle the volume of trash that is produced every day. What’s more, these waste disposal problems put us at risk. Burning and burying trash creates health threats and environmental hazards, including toxic emissions that amplify the climate crisis. In the U.S., only 30% of the 268 million pounds of trash generated each year gets recycled. The remaining 223 million pounds? That’s all sent to landfills, which produce toxic garbage juice that seeps into the groundwater, and incinerators, which release harmful emissions into the air. Sadly, these… Continue reading Problems With Waste Disposal in New England
“Building landfills just does not incentivize the actions you want to see. When you build this capacity, you’re not going to be recycling or composting or diverting as much as you should be,” Blair says.
“Burning waste of any kind threatens our environment and poses unacceptable toxic risks to neighboring communities,” said Kevin Budris, Zero Waste Attorney at CLF Rhode Island. “Medical waste contains large amounts of plastic, as well as sharps, pathological waste, cleanup materials, and other biological waste. When this waste is burned with high-heat technologies, it emits some of the most dangerous pollutants known to humankind. Today’s decision aligns with Rhode Island’s new law to protect our communities, homes, schools, and waters from dirty, climate-destroying medical waste-burning facilities.”
Today’s throw-away culture exists because plastic producers and manufacturers choose to make single-use products and packaging that cannot be recycled. But we can change that by passing legislation that will hold producers accountable for the waste they create.
“Maine’s current recycling system is broken,” said Peter Blair, Zero Waste Attorney at CLF Maine. “Cities and towns are paying exorbitant disposal rates for polluting products that are deliberately manufactured to be unrecyclable. It’s time plastic producers pay for polluting our air, land, and water with their products, and this law will finally hold them accountable.”
