Skip to main content

Minutes (way too long) of the October 22, 2019 Meeting

The meeting of the Zero Waste Lancaster group on October 22nd began with eggplant parmesan, because that's what I happened to have a lot of at the time.

The topic for the meeting was "How to get things out of the house".    We talked about this in two parts:  first, sharing things that "could be useful someday" (and getting them to be useful now); and secondly, getting rid of things that nobody wants anymore (that is, trash).   We had a bit of a show on the computer, and added to it as we went along.  The notes are below.

Our next meetings will be 
  • November 19 (with luck, we'll get to talk about Lancaster's Climate Action plan and our city's water use)
  • December 17 (how to avoid bringing stuff into our home in the first place).
If you know someone who'd like to be on the Zero Waste Lancaster mailing list (getting two emails each month!), please have them send their email addresses my way!

- Annalisa

Notes:  
OVERVIEW:
1.  Storage/Duplication as Waste
(vs. storing things “in the cloud”)
·     Person-to-person
·     Person to organization
·     Via intermediaries

2. The 3 R’s (or the 7 R’s) of Zero Waste,
with special focus (today) on
·     Rot,
·     Reuse, and
·     Recycle

Terracycle, the video

Starting at 1.
Storage/Duplication as Waste

Re-framing “this could be useful someday” as
     “this could be useful to someone right now”

Recognizing (over) abundance in the world
and (excessive) ease of acquisition

Developing a willingness to consider shared ownership,
temporary ownership, and/or
“storing things in the cloud”

Person-to-Person donation

·    Freecycle
·    “FREE” signs at the curb
·    Craigslist
·    Ebay
·    Yard Sale
·    Church bulletin boards
·    Nextdoor.com

Person-to-organization donations

·    Church World Services (for recently arrived refugees)
·    Water Street Rescue Mission
·    Central PA food bank
·    Milagro House
·    Humane Society (uses towels and sheets)
·    F&M Animal labs (newspaper)
·    Off the Streets now
·    Lancaster food hub

  
Donations involving intermediaries
(helpful hint: keep an “unshopping” list with hours/addresses)

·    Goodwill, Salvation Army, Community Aid
·    Consignment shops
·    Library ReSort
·    Little Free Libraries
·    Habitat Restore
·    Lancaster Creative Reuse
·    Common Wheel
·    Purple Heart


But what about stuff that nobody can use?  Welcome to the R’s of Zero Waste philosophy:

1.                Refuse
2.                Reduce/ShaRe
3.                Reuse
4.                Repair
5.                Repurpose      (did you see my chandeliers???)
6.                Recycle
7.                Rot

Maybe “return”???
(Give trash back to the people who gave it to you?)
Terracycle video (13 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHqwd-LBp5c



Rot:  Compost tips (share your favorites!)
·    Using the freezer
·    F&M compost dumpsters
·    chicken-wire fencing w/ binder clips
·     

Curbside recycling
·    Corrugated cardboard
·    Unbroken glass bottles
·    Metal food cans
·    Plastic bottles with necks

City Recycling Drop-off Center
850 New Holland Ave.

– Mixed office paper
– Newspaper
– Magazines
– Corrugated cardboard  
– Chipboard (cardboard)
– Soft cover and hard cover books
– Shredded paper
– Plastic bottles and jugs with a neck
– Steel/tin/aluminum cans
– Glass bottles and jars

PLEASE SEPARATE PAPER, & everything should be clean

Hazardous Waste Facility (Harrisburg Pike)
  • Adhesives
  • Automotive fluids (max. 5 gallons per container)
  • Batteries, including automotive and household
  • Chemistry sets
  • Cooking and frying oils (max. 5 gallons per container)
  • Fire extinguishers
  • Floor and furniture polish
  • Fuel, including kerosene, gasoline and propane
  • Household cleaners
  • Lawn treatments, including herbicides and pesticides
  • Mercury containing items (max of 30 per month), including ballasts, fluorescent bulbs, thermostats and thermometers
  • Paint, rust inhibitors, stains, turpentine and thinners
  • Photographic and pool chemicals


Ideas for:
Scrap Metal:
·    Columbia metals (if you have a LOT)
·    Freecycle

Styrofoam:
·    Dart Container, 110 Pitney Road, Lancaster, PA

Plastic grocery bags:
·    Power packs can use them·     

Dirty cardboard (for example, pizza boxes, ice cream containers)
·     compost, if you can


Next meetings:
November 19,(tentative) the Lancaster City Municipal Operations Climate Action Plan
     With (maybe) Doug Smith, Senior Planner for the City of Lancaster
     "If you reduce your water use, you reduce waste water volume,
and you save energy in the process.  So you get a double return on it."

December 17

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Minutes of the September 17, 2019 Meeting

Here are the minutes of our first meeting. Participants noshed on fresh baked bread, baba ganoush, and sun-dried zucchini chips.  The conversation range widely, from the Backstreet Boys to bus routes. We shared our interest and experience -- and lack of experience -- with reducing waste.  Here two of the successful experiences people related (the ones I remember most): One participant described a dry well she's had installed in the front of her house in her front lawn to significantly reduce rain runoff.   She noted that it turned out to be harder to get contractors and she thought;  there were enough questions about this topic (both how to go about reducing rain run off, and about how to engage the city "Save It Lancaster" program, that we thought this would make a good topic for a future meeting.  Another participant shared a particularly clever technique for reducing mis-sorted trash in her six-child household....
Post a Comment
Read more

Zero Waste Gifts: Minutes of the November 19, 2019 Meeting

This meeting was dedicated to Zero Waste (or low waste) Gifts.   We swapped some of our favorite ideas.    Wrapping gifts: Some of us make our own reusable (and highly festive) gift bags from fabric; we had a sample from Sara G on display.   Others of us have followed easy origami patterns to make small gift boxes from calendar pages or holiday cards. My daughter reminded me of one of my favorite past gift-wrap techniques:  decorating the bare box to look like something else (a book box that became a dinner table; an oatmeal container, with some sun glasses and a small hat became a "dude").  I think I'm going to try that technique again this year. Giving gifts I myself tend to go for very practical gifts.  Two years ago, I gave all my adult kids "emergency preparedness kits" (with maps, radiation sickness pills, emergency contact numbers, first aid kits, etc).  What can I say? It's not for ev...
Post a Comment
Read more

Next Meetings, spring 2020

Gratitude and Generosity:   February 18, 2020 It's easy to think of a Zero Waste approach to life as one of intense effort combined with deprivation.  But people who start to move in the Zero Waste direction often find that -- in contrast to expectations --there's an incredible amount of joy involved. At February's meeting, we'll shift our focus from the mechanics of going Zero Waste toward the philosophy and psychology of doing so.  In particular, we'll share our experiences with the twins of gratitude and generosity, two virtues that not only make Zero Waste easier to achieve, but also become the rewards that flow out of using our resources more mindfully. Commercial and community-level composting:  March 17, 2020 Eve Bratman, Professor of Environmental Studies at F&M, will discuss a project she and her students did in 2018, in particular assessing the viability of commercial/community composting for Lancaster.
Post a Comment
Read more