Marc

hello world.

Foot Print

According to Redefining Progress, if everyone lived like me, we would need 4.6 planets. ouch. My total footprint is 20 acres, compared to an US average of 24 acres per person.

Shelter takes the largest amount at 7.2 acres, followed by good/services and then food (I eat meat).

Other

I am interested in trash. I want to charge people a tax based on how much trash they create.

I also want to limit noise pollution of taxi cabs. They honk their horns too much. A few ideas...

1. monitor their horn usage and tax them for excessive honking. they get 5 free honks per day, then are charged $5/honk.
2. make the horn audible from inside the car at the same level as outside -- when they honk, they hear it just as anyone outside does.

Book Review

I am going to read the book Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash Elizabeth Royte ©Little, Brown and Company, US, 2005. 320 pp.

Will add more later...

It is now later...

Elizabeth Royte's book, Garbge Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash , is probably unlike other Sustainability books, in fact I would not categorize it as such. Instead, Royte offers the reader a personal account of trash.

Royte lets her curiosity take her on an adventure of dump sites, trash collection routes and polluted wetlands. She ends up tracking down her trash and answering many questions trash along the way. History of landfills, how sewage and recycling plants works, and the politics behind the industry are just a few topics that get covered.

Sprinkled throughout her stories are endless details and fascinating facts about trash: what do 40 year old hot dogs look like, best practices for composting, what really happens to our poop. Because Royte investigates every aspect of her own waste stream, not just curbside pickup, the reader gets a fairly comprehensive perspective. We are dragged from sorting facilities in the New York Area to sites in Pennsylvania, where most of New York City's trash ends, to orange groves in Florida where "biosolids" (dried feces) ends up being spread as fertilizer for crops to Asia where most of our metals get shipped to.

Overall, the book is an engaging account of a process few of us care to personally investigate. In the end, I think Royte's point is that our trash is always with us. We may put it out on the curb, flush it down the toilet or donate it to charity, but it just changes formats and eventually comes back to us in other forms.