Archive for the ‘recycling’ tag
Green Showdown: Cans vs. Bottles #
Slate’s Green Lantern takes on the question of cans versus glass bottles and comes up with a typically nuanced answer:
If your chosen tipple is produced very close to home and your town has a robust recycling program, then glass bottles are probably the way to go. But if your preferred suds are brewed far away, by a company that’s even mildly eco-aware, aluminum cans are the wiser choice.
I should note that Salon’s Pablo Päster tackled a similar question over a month ago, deciding that plastic bottles are better than aluminum cans. Assuming both columnists’ logic is sound, that means: plastic bottles are better than cans, and cans are (generally) better than glass bottles.
The Afterlife of Cellphones #
Who knew electronic waste could be compelling? Jon Mooallem fascinating and wide-ranging piece about what happens after cellphones are thrown away, in this weeks New York Times Magazine, did it for me. I’ll call it compelling.
As with most environmental issues, then, no option for getting rid of a phone is free of trade-offs, and nothing is as simple as we’d wish. But the truth is, few of America’s phones are turned in for “recycling” in the first place. (It’s unclear how few. The figure of less than 1 percent, put forward in a groundbreaking report on phone recycling by the nonprofit Inform five years ago, is still repeated. ReCellular estimates that it’s more like 10 percent now.) While a phone’s small size may give even normally conscientious consumers a dispensation to slip it into the trash, there seems to be a more typical solution, what ABI Research estimates nearly half of Americans do: stick the thing in a desk drawer and leave it there.