Plastic bags. The most used way to take the products you buy home. Lightweight yet sturdy.
They are made in various shapes and sizes They are cheap and easily found in several shops and markets. In all, more than 5 trillion plastic bags per year are used worldwide. Only 1% of them are recycled.
The rest becomes waste, clogging sewers and drainage systems, causing floods and finally reaching the ocean, where they will last for hundreds of years. Still, on average each bag is used for only 12 minutes. It’s estimated that the amount of garbage produced in the world revolves around 2.
5 billion metric tons per year. 80% of the plastic found in the oceans comes from cities. And that's where the problem is.
Every city needs to find its best way to deal with such waste management. And we’ll know a city that’s getting closer to the goal of becoming Zero Waste: San Francisco. They’ve been investing in recycling and composting and today have high rates when we think of reuse of the materials used in the everyday life of the city.
EPISODE 3 CAN YOU LIVE A ZERO WASTE LIFE? Here in the San Francisco Bay area, local governments are working hard to soon get close to the zero-waste goal. This includes selective collection structure, recycling and composting.
It also includes the participation of commercial establishments with options for this zero-waste lifestyle. It includes the participation of governments, entrepreneurs and especially the community. The movement really started here in the late sixties.
People started to be concerned about the environment and it was mostly kind of, we say grassroots. It was people in their homes. They were hearing about the pollution and seeing it in other parts of the world and seeing it here.
And they started to advocate for programs, so when the recycling movement started in the seventies, they started with small recycling centers, based out of a church, or out of a school, and that sort of thing. So there was a group of people working on recycling who were community people, active people. At the same time, the government were influenced by those people to make programs that the government paid for, instead of just being voluntary.
And it's not just the collection and recycling that make a zero waste city. The daily lives of people and especially the commercial establishments must be prepared for it. You can see the involvement and participation of the whole city.
I'm here in front of Rainbow Grocery, this supermarket that has a lot of stuff in bulk. I brought my bags, I brought my bowls and let's go shopping! There are several common things, as we see in Brazil.
Beans, rice, but here behind me, we have, for example, something I've never seen there, which are the oils. It has oil, has shoyu, canola oil, sunflower oil. You take a glass and you put here and fills.
The other cool thing about this supermarket is that if you have not brought your own bowl you can buy several others made of glass here. So you really don’t make waste. If you bring your own jars and your own bags to the grocery store, then you're only paying for the food that you buy.
If you go to the farmer's market and you buy loose fruits and vegetables, there is no packaging so there's less cost in the overall experience. The real solutions are to take the problematic packaging and the problematic containers out of the equation. What about compostable bags and compostable cups, compostable forks and knives?
Make no mistake, it is not because a bag is made of corn, for example, that it will decompose. They behave just like the ones made of oil: it take centuries to decompose. But there are names that confuse the consumer, such as green plastic.
The bioplastic is made from sugar cane, soybeans, corn, rice starch and other materials. There’s also PLA and oxy-biodegradable and this one is forbidden in Europe. The name and composition vary, but ultimately they kill marine life in the same way Maybe they're green and they say biodegradable and they kind of are marketed as if they're very good environmental and then they go through the whole composting program and then they don't really compost.
People get their bread in a bag, they get the, you know, everything comes in a bag, it seems, now. And we have banned plastic bags here because we could not recycle them and because they were getting into everything, so we actually passed a ban in San Francisco, on what we call the t-shirt bags. Very, very thin plastic bag.
Finally, there’s the compostable plastic. It’s made from corn starch and is digestible by bacteria in the industrial composting process, at a temperature at which the homemade process usually cannot reach. In cases of cities like San Francisco, compostable plastic goes along with organic waste for industrial composting.
And in the end, it turns into an incredible fertilizer. These things are very recent. This is a new field or a new industry.
Some of these things compost well, some of these things don't compost at all. In San Francisco there's a standard and if they meet the criteria, the people who make them can print the word "compostable" in all capital letters. But I would encourage people to bring their own bags and to bring their own containers.
A clever person solves the problem. This is the compostable bag. A wise person avoids the problem altogether.
This is the glass jar. This is the reusable cloth bags. This is more simple.
This is more in harmony with nature than all this plastic, what I call the plastic of convenience, single use idea. San Francisco wants to become a zero-waste city, ie, not to send any waste to the landfill. For that, a city needs to create a structure that includes people, companies and collection and recycling systems.
And of course, new alternatives to old problems. And it takes a structure that supports it, do selective collection and recycle or composte whatever is discarded. But how to pay this bill?
We come once a week and we empty all three bins, we take all the material and we recycle most of it and we compost most of it. We're really into composting. It costs about 40 american dollars a month.
It's a tariff set by the city, so they look at all of our expenses and all of our revenues here at Recology, then determine what is a fair price for the residents. When we recycle the glass and recycle the metal and we recycle the paper, we are able to sell it to places that make new paper and new metal and new glass, which helps pay for the whole program. So by doing more recycling, we're able to bring more money back to the city.
This is something that is important for people to understand about zero waste and about recycling is that the economics are very good. The third thing, with primal importance, is the role of the citizen. After all, if there’s an infrastructure of collection, composting and recycling on a large scale and commercial establishments are prepared for it, it’s in the people’s houses that magic happens.
I'm here at Sarah's house, she lives in San Francisco and there are several small things from her everyday life that you can do there too, without depending on anyone which helps a lot in this battle to reduce our plastic consumption and our generation of waste. For her children to take the food to school, she uses these metal lunch boxes, with cloth napkins and a reusable bottle. And all the kids do that?
All the kids do it. The cleaning products are all natural and biodegradable. She leaves it concentrated in a bottle and then dilutes it with water, according to what she needs.
That story that you need a cleaning product for every thing in the house? No. We taught you how to make the detergent that also works for everything, link here, if you have not already seen it, in Fe Cortez’s Tips.
You can use it to wash clothes, to clean things in the house and you can use such as the coconut soap which works for all this too. This is how the industrial composting happens in San Francisco, this bag is a bag that will compost along with the food and then when you go to get the bag in the market, it’s already the bag that will compost together with it. So, this way you can put all your organic waste into these bags and all this will be composted in some giant places and will become into fertilizers that are used right here in California, closing the loop.
Just like nature does, you know? All the houses here in San Francisco pay a fee for such collection and treatment of waste. Then they get three bins: one green for everything that is compostable, one black that goes to the landfill and one blue for recyclables.
On top has everything that can go in each of the cans. This one here, if you take half of it, which is the landfill, you pay less. So this can only be filled halfway.
So here people pay for the waste they generate and this is a form adopted by many cities that can do a better solid waste management. Apparently a waste charge may sound like just another tax, but cities that do good waste management save a lot of their budget on city cleaning, drainage, and health. After all, when waste becomes trash the cost is for everyone.
Something that's pretty unique about Seattle is everyone does it. So first of all, there's a really strong environmental ethic there, but we also have regulations in place, so it requires that everyone separate the organics from the garbage and everyone separate the recycling from the garbage. And that's everyone: residents, commercial businesses, multifamily complexes.
So it's universal. This is the example of San Francisco, but each city has a different reality and challenge in the way of zero waste. For this, governments, industries and citizens have to find their solutions together.
What we cannot forget is that plastic is not only a problem for seabirds, marine life or for the environment as a whole, as if the environment were a very distant and magical place that people often visit. The environment is our city, it's our street, it's our home. And what we do in our home reflects on the food we eat and the water we drink.
You don’t have to live in a zero-waste city to adopt zero-waste practices. It's the little actions. Most cities, for example, have bulk markets and then the only thing that need to change is your attitude.
Instead of picking up those plastic bags, take your kit for bulk shopping. It can even be made with an old sheet. And if you want to engage in the Clean Seas campaign, the next two-week challenge is to shop in bulk.
Make your own bags or buy them ready, the important thing is to not use plastic. And don’t forget to post with the #mareslimpos so we can follow up here and so you’ll to be able to call your friends to do it as well. And if you enjoyed the video, give us a like, subscribe to the channel and activate the notifications, because next week there will be more!
