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upworthy

recycling

Gordon Ramsay at play... work.


Gordon Ramsay is not exactly known for being nice.

Or patient.

Or nurturing.

On his competition show "Hell's Kitchen," he belittles cooks who can't keep up. If people come to him with their problems, he berates them. If someone is struggling to get something right in the kitchen, he curses them out.

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Science

Sustainably good news: Recycling is getting better and this family is showing us how

What if instead of focusing on what isn’t working, we looked at these stories as an invitation to do better?

Via Ridwell

Ryan Metzger and son Owen

There is no shortage of dire news about the state of modern recycling. Most recently, this NPR article shared the jaw-dropping statistic that about 5% of all plastics produced get recycled, meaning the rest of it ends up in landfills. While the underlying concerns here are sound, I worry that the public narrative around recycling has gotten so pessimistic that it will make people give up on it entirely instead of seeing the opportunities to improve it. What if instead of focusing on what isn’t working, we looked at these news stories as an invitation to do better?

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Science

Hawaiian eco-entrepreneur unites people to fix the Big Island’s massive cardboard problem

He found a clever way to make use of climate-destroying cardboard.

Evan Lam is working to fix Hawaii's big recycling problem.

True

The United States generates an incredible amount of paper and cardboard waste every year. The most recent EPA statistics from 2018 found that Americans throw away 67.4 million tons of paper and paperboard a year. Sixty-eight percent of it is recycled, with the remainder being dumped in landfills.

Cardboard will eventually deteriorate in a landfill but as it degrades it creates methane gas, one of the largest contributors to climate change. While carbon-trapping trees are one of the biggest ways to combat climate change, over a billion of them are chopped down every year to meet the country’s ever-growing cardboard demands.

In Hawaii, cardboard waste is an even greater contributor to climate change because the state lacks adequate recycling facilities. So, all of the country’s recycled cardboard is packaged and shipped five thousand miles to Thailand to be reprocessed.

Twenty-nine-year-old Evan Lam is improving the cardboard problem on Hawaii’s Big Island by upcycling the material into useful products that keep it on the island. He sees his work as part of a larger, global trend.

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Those of us who want a sustainable future for our grandkids try really hard to do the right things for our planet. We grew up internalizing the three R's–Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—but it appears that one of those Rs has not lived up to its promise.

We all know that plastic and excessive packaging of all kinds are problematic, but most of us don't worry about it too much because most of it can be recycled anyway, right? We cheerfully put our yogurt containers and pizza boxes and egg cartons into our curbside recycling bin, confident that we've done our part for the environment by not throwing them into a landfill.

We imagine our municipalities taking that recycling to some kind of local recycling plant, where our plastic and paper gets transformed into shiny new eco-friendly products. Right?

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