Comments on: Chute the messenger

By: Emerging Choices and Constraint « BackStage

Emerging Choices and Constraint « BackStage — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 08:06:24 +0000

[...] it is basically about how geographies and products within structure the way we behave. For example, this post discusses how the size of trash bins has an impact on how much we throw away. Lockton comments: [...]

By: Mitch Weisburgh

Mitch Weisburgh — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 20:42:07 +0000

I recently returned from Switzerland, and loved their system. You purchase red garbage bags at the market. Trash has to go into the red bags. Built into the price of the bag is the cost for picking up and disposing of your garbage. No other trash is picked up. Recycling is free, and there are bins for different types of materials.

Also, food markets (at least the ones we went to) do not provide bags for your merchandise. You can purchase bags that are reuasable. This is similar to Costco in the US. They also do not provide bags, but they do keep their used boxes close to the registers, so you can reuse their boxes, which also saves them on the disposal costs.

By: christianhauck

christianhauck — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:36:00 +0000

In Freiburg http://www.freiburg.de we have a system of identical trash containers (identical to automate emptying) with different insets to decrease the available volume. So if you have less volume for your trash you pay less.
The link below goes to a site in German, but with pictures of the devices and costs in Euros.
http://www.abfallwirtschaft-freiburg.de/alles_ueber_abfall/abfallgebuehren/abfallgebuehren.php

By: Octavia

Octavia — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 06:27:13 +0000

This may vary by location, but where I live (western US) smaller parking spaces have in no way deterred people from purchasing and driving large vehicles. They just park their behemoth Suburban or Hummer or whatever in the too-small parking slot, making it difficult or impossible for anyone to park next to them. And they’re not shy about parking with their tires on the painted stripe, either.

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:04:02 +0000

Richard Reynolds sends me this comment:

I was asking myself these questions this week. I have the very same chute pictured in my building and whilst I marvel at the elegance of plopping a bin bag through the hatch and hearing it tumble down ten storeys I also weary of emptying the bin so often. A 20 litre bag (from my Brabantia Pedal Bin + Bio Bucket) is the perfect size, but it fills within two days, but accept that regular trips down the corridor are better than occasional trips all the way downstairs. What I dream of is multiple chutes for recycling. You see I also have a 50 litre pedal bin for paper and card waste but this has to be carried downstairs and over the road to the street recycling centre. It fills within a fortnight. An alternative, which I tried recently whilst staying in an old mill, is to burn almost everything. Four of us over five days eating fine meals only generated 40 litres of waste for the bins, the rest went on top of the coal and into the fire, reducing the carbon cycle by thousands of years.

By: Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm » Blog Archive » Standard chute

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:02:39 +0000

[...] Here’s a thought provoking example of a exchange standard along with an short informed essay about the effects it has on the adjacent parts of the system. The example is the trash chute in an apartment building. In my experience, at least in NYC, much of the trash is broken up into units the size of a plastic shopping bag. That happens to fit nicely into many of these chutes, and size standardization flows back up the supply chain nicely. There are household trash bins that take a standard plastic grocery bag for a liner. Living in an inner ring suburb in Boston, as I now do, I was surprised how hard it was to find a source for those trash bins. In seemingly related news my wife recently made some cloth grocery bags, which are identical in topology to the plastic ones. [...]

By: Camerontw

Camerontw — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:48:17 +0000

Sustainability researchers, particularly European ones, have been arguing throughout the early 00s that servicization is the best way to leap to more sustainable economies: i.e., you don’t need a car, you need mobility (= car-share); you don’t want a washing machine, you want clean clothes (= laundromat). However, the common sense idea that the more productive use of pooled resources like shared cars and communal laundries is more sustainable has proved difficult to establish – there are invariably mitigating factors, like the transport involved in getting to and from the pooled resource (vs the one right outside or inside your house). Nevertheless, one of the major sustainability gains of the use of many services rather than owned products derives from their inconvenience (despite a lot of ’service design’ – i.e., unintended inconvenience). People who use car-share tend to travel less by cars overall, and people who use laundromats tend to do less frequent, larger load washes.

I was also reminded of the new urbanism slogan: small fridges make for livable cities [small fridge > more, smaller shops > local, walkable shops > vibrant cities].

By: Richard Jones

Richard Jones — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 20:56:10 +0000

Where I live (and increasingly across the UK, AIUI) the council will take exactly one “wheelie bin” worth of general mixed rubbish each week. It’s only about 2 or 3 large black bin bags if you can imagine that volume. They will take as much sorted recyclable material as you want.

I live with my wife and no kids and we probably fill the wheelie bin up about half full each week, so no problem for us normally. Disposing of larger items (furniture and so on) involves a trip to the local tip, which would be impossible or prohibitively expensive without a car.

Next door with 3 kids, their bin is regularly overflowing — in fact we usually take a bit of their rubbish.

Anyway to get to my point: One thing I do is a lot of food shopping at both the local supermarket and the local butchers / veg market. The difference in volume of packaging is very noticable indeed. After preparing food bought at the supermarket, you end up with heavy plastic wrappers, trays, etc. After shopping at the butchers and market however I would normally just have a few paper bags (composted) and one or two plastic bags (reused). The supermarkets need to do a lot more to reduce packaging waste.

Rich.

By: David Cain

David Cain — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:59:50 +0000

No. Not in our case.

We’re (the wife and I) all about reducing our carbon debt right now: fluorescent bulbs, planning for more fuel-efficient cars, insulating, putting computers to off instead of sleep, looking at what we can do to reduce energy use in the house.

But we buy what we have to buy, and the manufacturers pack it all in whatever they like.

We pay for our trash hauling and recycling (single family home in the US, trash hauled by private firm, single large bin that’s designed to have the truck lift it).

We’ve got small trash cans in the house – the kitchen can is annoyingly small for my tastes – and the packaging, where annoyingly large, goes right outside to sit by the bin. Not even a factor here.

We don’t like the amount of packaging used, but we feel powerless to do anything about it.

ThinkGeek just sent me a flat half-Letter-page sized package of stickers in a cardboard box about 8″ x 10″ x 2″ filled with crumpled paper for “padding”. What can we do about that? The same shipment of four tiny items came in four boxes around the same size. My brother received them in another city, then to send ‘em to me (birthday presents) took them to a pack-and-mail store which put all four in an even bigger box and dumped Styrofoam peanuts in there for extra padding. WTF? It’s a packaging AND a carbon disaster.

Would I buy a different product based only upon reduced packaging size? I think only for a commodity product like light bulbs where brand and quality aren’t big deals.

Our stereo (a home theater system) came in an enormous box about half the size of a full-height phone booth, with tons of extra cardboard and Styrofoam. It really sucked, but on the other hand, is the size of the cardboard box a concern at all for anyone purchasing a stereo? Probably last in a very long list.

We did take the stereo box to the recycling center on a trip out.

What might make a change? Weigh the recyclables and the trash and charge me for the difference. I could choose to cut down on the volume of both, or buy more recyclable than non-recyclable stuff (or better yet, buy in bulk or in packaging that gets reused – though hauling around reusable soda bottles for deposit as they did in my youth probably doesn’t help with the greenhouse gases at all…).