#throwaway-society

#throwaway-society

In 2025, travel didn't just return to pre-pandemic levels, it surpassed them, highlighting the growing strain on the world's most visited destinations.

Anna Holmes defines 'hype aversion' as a reflex against being told what to like, suggesting that popularity can create pressure rather than signal quality. This feeling can lead to a deliberate choice to resist mainstream culture.

Bondi's official DOJ portrait was reportedly spotted in the trash mere minutes after Donald Trump gave her the boot. Just straight to the bin, like last week's takeout and this week's credibility.

In 2019, scientists found that balloons eaten by seabirds are more likely to kill them than other kinds of plastic yet they do not seem to have been earmarked in the same way as, for example, plastic straws.

The convenience of sourcing online is fraught with more pitfalls than most of us want to admit. Try finding adequate photos of a vintage piece's condition-close-ups of the fabric, video of damaged areas, any images of a piece's rear or underside!

When faced with a choice between a box with eyes painted on it and a plain box, the gulls were slower to approach the box with eyes and less likely to peck at it.

Shredded paper is especially difficult to recycle, so many programs will not accept it. Shredding accelerates fiber shortening and lowers the paper grade from high-grade to mixed-grade. Mixed-grade paper is still recyclable, but it ends up baled and processed into products like paper towels and packing paper.

In the nineteenth century, entire railway networks became obsolete almost overnight, not due to physical deterioration, but because of changes in the technical standards that supported them. The expansion of railroads across Europe and North America adopted different track gauges, and as a dominant standard gradually emerged, these infrastructures became incompatible with one another.

While you might assume that potato chip bags or other snack bags are recyclable, most are made from mixed materials. This means that the bags may contain plastic on the outside and an inner lining of plastic and aluminum film or foil. While the individual materials may be recyclable on their own, the only way they could be used is if the recycling facility has the means by which to separate the materials.

Growing up, the sound of aluminum foil being carefully smoothed flat against our kitchen counter was as familiar as my mother's voice. Each piece would be washed, dried, and folded into a neat square for the drawer where we kept our collection. The same drawer held plastic bags from the grocery store, rubber bands from vegetables, and glass jars that once held jam but now served as drinking glasses.

Never place batteries of any type in your curbside recycling bin. Batteries can damage recycling equipment and, if lithium batteries are mixed in, cause fires. Always use designated battery collection programs.

Even if you bring home as few bags as possible - using reusable bags, carrying purchases home with your own two hands - soft plastics sill accumulate. I certainly have a collection with one flimsy plastic sack filled with dozens or hundreds of others. I plan to do something with it... eventually. Unfortunately, there aren't a ton of options for what to do with those soft plastics, as most recycling facilities can't accept them.

We can make changes to reduce our waste by precycling when we shop, reducing what we purchase, reusing items to get the most use out of them, and recycling when possible. But when we have items to throw away, please dispose of trash responsibly and don't litter. Let's reduce our waste and clean up our planet. It's our only home.

Black plastic gets its color from carbon black pigment and is commonly used in food containers, such as meat or produce trays and take-out containers, as well as disposable coffee lids, plastic bags, and hard plastic items like DVD cases and planters. While plastic is one of the categories of things that we are encouraged to recycle - when we can't reuse or repurpose it - not all black plastic items can be recycled.

Just like that coffee cup, eyewear is a complex fusion of materials. Metal hinges are screwed into polymer frames, which hold chemically-coated lenses. This mix of metals, plastics, and coatings means standard sorting machines cannot process them. As a result, they are rejected as contamination and sent directly to landfills, where they contribute to non-biodegradable waste. Unlike a disposable paper cup, however, a pair of sunglasses is built for durability. Its high-quality components make it a perfect candidate for repair, reuse, or reinvention.

Europe's supermarket shelves are packed with brands billing their plastic packaging as sustainable, but often only a fraction of the materials are truly recovered from waste, with the rest made from petroleum. Brands using plastic packaging from Kraft's Heinz Beanz to Mondelez's Philadelphia use materials made by the plastic manufacturing arm of the oil company Saudi Aramco. The Saudi state-owned holding opposes production cuts under the UN plastic treaty and is the world's largest corporate greenhouse-gas emitter (over 70m tonnes up to 2023).

When you think about building a house, what materials come to mind? Brick, wood and metal all come to mind; there are also some very distinctive glass houses out there. (Even if their occupants should refrain from throwing stones - though honestly, that's a good tip for indoor living in general.) A group of MIT researchers have come up with a very different way of making buildings, and it's one that also addresses an ongoing waste issue."We've estimated that the world needs about 1 billion new homes by 2050. If we try to make that many homes using wood, we would need to clear-cut the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest three times over," explained AJ Perez, who conducts his research in the MIT Office of Innovation. The title of a paper written by Perez and his colleagues - "Design, Manufacture and Testing of Structural Trusses Using Additively Manufactured Polymer Composites" - gives a sense of the solution that they have in mind.

Toilet paper, a product that is used for a few seconds before being disposed of forever, is typically made with trees, energy-intensive manufacturing processes and chemicals that can pollute the environment. Experts say more consumers are seeking toilet paper made from recycled content or sustainable materials, but it can be hard to know what to look for. Sustainable toilet paper often costs more, but can have significant environmental benefits.