Containers marked Toxic, Flammable, Corrosive or Reactive don’t belong in your house or in the regular trash. They’re dangerous! Let the City dispose of them for you during this Saturday’s scheduled drop-off for Household Hazardous Waste (HHW). Bring those old cans of oil-based paint, solvents, pesticides, antifreeze, petroleum products, car batteries–even old computers—to the Transfer Station at Domino Lane and Umbria Street in Northwest Philadelphia between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM. We’ll take them off your hands at no charge. Spread the word to your friends and everyone on your Philly Spring Cleanup contact list as well.
For details on what is considered HHW and what isn’t, and for upcoming drop-off dates and locations, go to PhiladelphiaStreets.com/HHW.
This service of the Sanitation Division of the Philadelphia Streets Department is funded in part by the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
Here at TTF, we talk a lot about how recycling can help to protect our waterways. Our Ethical Electronics Recycling Events help keep dangerous chemicals from electronics from leaching into our creeks and rivers. But what about plastics? From all of our work doing stream cleanups, we’ve found that a huge percentage of the trash we pick up is plastic — usually in the form of food or beverage packaging materials and plastic bags. (The City of Philadelphia currently recycles plastics #1 and #2, but not #3-#7. Montgomery County has different regulations.)
This month’s Grid magazine has an article on where Philadelphia residents can recycle plastics #3-7:
Because No. 5 is the next most common plastic (after 1 and 2), Weaver’s Way Co-op (weaversway.coop) collects it—including Brita filters—as part of the “Gimme 5” campaign. Plastics must be clean, dry and clearly stamped with the number 5. Collections take place on the third Saturday of each month at the Co-op’s garage (524 Carpenter Lane), and all the plastics are then shipped to the Gimme 5 processing facility in New York State. The South Street Whole Foods (929 South Street) also collects No. 5 plastics.
The other numbers are trickier. The foam variety of No. 6–Polystyrene and the dreaded No. 7–Other categories are notoriously difficult to recycle. But Recycling Services, Inc. (365 Elm Street, Pottstown, 610-323-8545) takes all comers (numbers 1 through 7), and the facility is open for public collection on Tuesdays and Saturdays (9 a.m. to 1 p.m.). They charge an $8/car gate fee, so consider loading up with your neighbors’ No. 3 through 7s, too, before you head out there.
If you drink a lot of bottled beverages, you can recycle the caps at the Big Green Earth Store (934 South Street) and at Aveda stores throughout the Philadelphia region (the Shops at Liberty Place, Cherry Hill Mall, Willow Grove Park and Exton Square).
And, in addition to recycling plastic, we can just try to use it less — especially when it comes to unnecessary purchases like bottled water!
On Wednesday, I was pleased to attend the first annual progress report for Philadelphia’s Greenworks Plan, a six-year plan for making Philadelphia the greenest city in the country.
The event was inspiring. It was great to see so many environmental and community organizations working together to celebrate our city and help it become as sustainable as possible. Often times, in a big city with an old infrastructure like Philadelphia, it can seem like positive environmental change happens very, very slowly. We hear the complaints all the time: “Nothing is happening!” “Where are my tax dollars going?” “Why isn’t Philadelphia as ‘green’ as other cities?”
Well, change IS happening all around us. It will take some time, but Philadelphia has already made some really great strides in the realm of greening. Read the report here and check out all the amazing progress that’s been made citywide in just one year!
This article from the Philadelphia Daily News spells out some of the achievements:
Divert 70 percent of solid waste from landfills - In other words, increase the recycling rate. And it is ticking up. Over the past year, the diversion rate was 16 percent of waste, compared with 12 percent during the previous year. Officials expect it to go even higher now that the recycling-rewards program is set to go citywide.
Provide park and recreation space within 10 minutes of 75 percent of residents – The plan is to add 500 acres of public space. Gajewski said the city is working with neighborhoods to figure out what they want.
Plant 300,000 trees – This is one of the more ambitious goals. Since Greenworks started, 2,846 trees have been planted. In April, the Department of Parks and Recreation kicked off a tree-planting campaign called “Green Philly, Grow Philly.” It is seeking partnerships with private businesses, nonprofits and other organizations to increase the number of trees. But Nutter last week said he would cut $2.5 million the city budgeted to tree-planting, due to financial constraints, which will undoubtedly slow this effort.
Double the number of green jobs – Last year, the city said it wanted to increase the number of green jobs – loosely defined as jobs with an environmental benefit – from 14,379 to 28,800. So far, it has created at least 520 jobs, largely through stimulus funding for types of construction work.
Of course, here at TTF, we are most excited by all the great progress made in the arena of stormwater management, thanks in large part to the Philadelphia Water Department’s Green City, Clean Waters plan. We’re looking forward to the 2011 progress report. In the mean time, we’ll keep doing our part to help make Philadelphia the greenest city in the country!
As we’ve written about before, litter is one of the major problems facing our watershed. So of course we were thrilled to learn that the City of Philadelphia has just launched its UnLitter Us Initiative. The program includes an awesome PSA campaign featuring videos like these:
We’ve been thinking a lot about bottled water lately. Sometimes, when we talk about the major problem with pollution in our streams and rivers, people think that means we shouldn’t drink local tap water. Instead, they think we should be importing bottled water from some supposedly pristine far-away place. As Ashley recently pointed out, this couldn’t be further from the truth. We need to be supporting our local municipal water systems who do a great job cleaning our water while we work towards cleaner local waterways. And we need to be reducing the amount of plastic waste that ends up forming islands of trash in our oceans.
Here is a great, eight-minute video that explains all of the problems with bottled water. Watch The Story of Bottled Water with Annie Leonard!
Captain Charles Moore appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman earlier this week. Moore is the first person to document the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gigantic gyre of marine litter that made up of 90% plastic waste. As Moore says, “Plastic is overtaking the natural world.”
1) Commit to reduce our own plastic consumption as much as possible.
2) Talk to our family and friends about the problem and set an example that others can follow.
3) Support measures in our communities to ban plastic bags and other single-use packaging.
4) Support Extended Producer Responsibility legislation which would require manufacturers to provide for the entire life cycle of their products and remove the burden from communities and local governments. EPR laws in Europe have proven that when companies have to figure out how to recycle their stuff, they end up using fewer, less toxic materials in the first place.
This issue can seem depressing and overwhelming, but there are things we can do. What other steps can we take? We want to hear from you!
Last week, TTF staff took a tour of Tacony Creek Park and the creekside areas near the Juniata Golf Course. What we found is that, despite all of our hard work and the hard work of our partners, we still have a lot of work to do! Illegal dumping and litter are major problems in this area. For example, check out the pics below:
You can see all the photos from our tour on our Facebook album.
In Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Philadelphia Counties, 21.57 tons (43,149 pounds) of trash and litter was removed from local waterways and the Delaware Estuary in a coordinated effort by volunteers on International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) Day. The ICC, sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, is the world’s largest single-day, volunteer effort focused on cleaning the world’s waterways! TTF participated along with a group of dedicated volunteers, picking up 1402 pounds of trash and litter at Wall Park. See photos and our original post here.
Thanks to all of you who helped to improve the quality of our waterways and environment!
This New York Timesarticle shows how much damage we’ve done to our oceans.
From the article:
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.
Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.
But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world’s trash-filled gyres.
