Chapter 10:

In Chapter ten he revisits the topic of plastic. Plastic is not going anywhere anytime soon because they are not biodegradable. I work at a grocery store and we use way too many plastic bags and some paper bags. However, now we have reusable bags some one dollar others a little more, but they last for quite a long time. By 2014, the use of plastic bags will cost ten cents each and that sucks for those who load their kitchen and are trying to save money. I think that it is a great step of getting rid of plastic and paper bags. The creator of reusable bags is Andy Keller who was at first a software trader and now working with landscaping. The name of his bag brand is Chicobag. It is a great product to stuff in your bag for later use. These bags are not made in the U.S., but China and Vietnam and are made out of recyclable material. This helps reduce the amount of fossil fuel we use for plastic bags. This is a great little but big Breakthrough for our trash epidemic. Just a creation of a bag has made a big difference... i wonder what will come next? Hopefully our younger generation will find a way to get rid of all of our trash or help get the word out.  

Chapter 9:

I really found this chapter very interesting because i would have never thought of people using trash as an art piece. It is amazing how something reused can mean so much. This is a great way to show people how much trash they throw away when looking at the art and how some trash cannot disappear. San Francisco is a city where they separate the garbage into a variety of piles. For the people to actually stick to recycling they have layer out a fine if the garbage is not separated and the fine is one thousand dollars. No one wants to pay that much for garbage and it is easy to do. Artists would dig out the material they need to create their master piece. I use to think that would be disgusting going and picking into the dirty trash. However, The Final piece of the art is outstanding. It is just so creative and amazing what people can do while using reusable material instead of new ones. Hume also mention something about recycling theft, which is when strangers retrieve items from others recycling bins and exchange it for money. This can affect the garbage and recycling companies negatively. Not going to lie, i bring my water bottles to those random recyclers around the corner in exchange for money. I know i should just have the city pick up the recycling but we use that money to buy more water. Which is also what i need to change and exchange 100 water bottle for 1 bottle that i can refill. Although trash is being used as art, doesn't art pieces get thrown out anyway after its been used or got tired of having it and need a newer piece?

 

Chapter 7:

Have you ever wondered how trash ends up where it does and how many days, our minutes, or seconds it does to reach its destination. Seattle is the greenest city I have ever heard of. They are the recycle Gods! Seattle has created a way to find out where trash travels by inserting a tracker on a piece of trash. Humes talks about a resident in Seattle, Tim Pritchard has become apart of the trash tracker research.  Why can't the people of California get on Seattle's level where they are recycling about 30 percent of their waste. I believe it is possible for us to get to where Seattle is if we put our minds to it. It amazes me how residents are being charged on the amount of trash they accumulate. We know where most of our trash goes, which is in either the ocean or landfills, but the other stuff ends up everywhere! Humes also mentions smart trash. Humes also mentions that the SENSEable City Lab is great for the future. They are trying to shorten down the distance of where garbage travels, a specific trash the e-waste. The Lab is in Massachusetts institute of technology and was inspired by novelist and futurist Bruce Sterling. I feel like we keep getting closer and closer to finding a solution to our trash epidemic.

Chapter 6:

I seriously love how passionate and dedicated scientist Miriam Goldstein is about the research of plastic pollution in the ocean. She amazed me by how she gathered information for the project Kaisei which was mentioned in the previous chapter. Nobody knows where and when plastic has end up where it is now. Humes continues to show how concerned he is with plastic. I was happy to read that funds were going towards the research of garbage patches in the sea to get to the bottom of the situation and how we can help it stop it. How crazy is it to believe that there is a garbage patch that is Twice the size of Texas!! My eyes got huge when I read about that. Plastic has spread out to 1,200 miles! That is scary! I love animals... and it is so sad to see how plastic bags are floating around the ocean and are being eaten by turtles because they mistaken them for jellyfishes. Like I mentioned in the previous chapter, plastic has entered in our food chains. I like how Humes mentions that plastic investigators are more hardworking and kicka** because they have to do twice the work than an archaeologists and a paleontologists because they have no way of telling the age of plastic. I like how Goldstein says "We made it. We own it." because it is true! It is our mess and it is now our responsibility to clean it up instead of ignoring it hoping a miracle will happen.

Chapter 5:

 

I go to the beach almost every weekend over the summer and you wouldn't believe how much trash I found as I walked around. In this chapter, Humes discusses how plastic is harming our oceans. From the start of the book, he introduces captain, Mary Crowley who sailed on a ship named Kaisei, which mean "ocean planet" in japanese. Because I thought the sea was the cleanest place on earth that is trash free, but I was wrong. The sea is actually worst than the land. As Crowley continued her sail along the coast of California and Hawaii she identifies this nasty gooey material that is believed to be plastic that has been broken down to little particles. How nasty is that!? Humans and animals and other creatures have been swimming in this gunk and not even notice it. The plastic in the ocean is being absorbed into the lanterns fish bodies. That is dangerous because fish is in our food chain. Lantern fish are being eaten by bigger fish, which is being into by other bigger fishes then sold at the stores for us to cook and then we consume it. Now we have harmful toxins in our body. I know that trash is everywhere but I could not believe that there are islands of trash in the seas called gyres. Not to mention that there more than 1, but 5. They are located in the South and North Atlantic and the North and South Pacific. Humes says that putting all the trash together in the sea makes up about 40 percent of the ocean. We might at we create another country with the trash. All we need to do is put dirt over it and call it home. I know it wont be easy but at least we would be using the trash as something rather than nothing. I feel like it is impossible for people to stop them from throwing trash into the ocean because they don't know anything about it. This has made me open my eyes to our serious trash problem and has made me want to go out and inform the rest of the world what is happening.

Chapter 4:

Humes continues to discuss about the landfill. In this chapter he talks more about the history of the landfill. I found it interesting how David Steiner, the CEO of material management Inc bought all his competition out. He is convinced that our trash will pile up and take up more room than it already has. However he also believes that there is a solution for companies to buy the trash. I was astonished about when WMI expanded was thought out to be a good thing. Nevertheless, WMI was being blamed for illegal waste dumping. I was stunned by how they did not care for the things they were harming at the areas they were dumping at. A human with no feelings... a robot being controlled. I see they want the trash to disappear, but there must be a better way.

Response:
Scripps Study Shows Plastic in Pacific Garbage Patch has Increased 100-Fold

Wow is what I can say in the first sentence. 100 times the amount that was found 40 years ago! It just amazes me how the garbage patch in the ocean is as big as Texas and growing. It disgusts me that insect eggs are in our food chain which is being consumed into our body. Knowing that the garbage keeps accumulating in the ocean I feel like its hopeless for us to clean it up because there is too much! It seems impossible to have the ocean free of plastic debris. Lets just make that pile of garbage into another island. Or more ocean clean up. But how can we inform the businesses to recycle. That is are job to figure our how to tell them. Seeing that picture of that handful of plastic in a hand was probably picked up as they were walking down the beach for maybe 10 minutes or less. Imagine if they were to walk down the beach for an hour? probably have trash bags full of plastic.

Response:
19-Year-Old Develops Ocean Cleanup Array That Could Remove 7,250,000 Tons Of Plastic From the World's Oceans

I cannot believe a 19 year old, same age as us! think of such a genius idea! If Boyan Slat a young 19 year old can think of this invention than i wonder what our younger generation will think of. However that will only work if our younger generation is aware of the garbage epidemic. It says it may take up to 5 years for the clean up process. That is the best idea i have heard so far other than having the garbage float in the ocean forever. However, where would all the ocean garbage go after collecting it all? Are we going to bring the ocean garbage to land and make our landfills even bigger? This is the best creation I have heard by far for our ocean garbage to reduce the amount of disease it will cause for us human and the animals that is entering in our food chain. I wonder if we can make more of these inventions to decrease the amount of time and make the clean up a little faster by a year or two. I agree that this will help aware the people to recycle. I wonder what else one of us will think of next?

The Joy of Garbage Response:

I always thought the little things count and will help because the little things we do will grow into something big. However, it seemed like Perkins didn't think so. She didn't think taking your reusable bag doesn't touch the larger economic and political structure. I think Anything we do helps! I wasn't sure whether to believe her or not because she had no credible evidence when she mentions how much each person throws away a year. She said 1600 pounds a year and Humes said 102 tons a year. I like how she did her own experiment and had her students go out and ask another generation but I feel like she needed to give more examples because she only gave us the older generation. She used a lot of pathos and logos in the video she uploaded. The video gave me an easy and better understanding of the whole picture. When she mentions the breast milk that made me gasp because the toxins are in the mother which then carries on to the newborns and that is just disgusting. I thought it was funny when she had the Government polish the cooperations shoes. It showed that they owned us because they're bigger than us. It's true we always by the new big thing to switch out our old stuff. That is due to the media they brain wash us; it accumulates to what we already have. I think the idea of spending is going down because now all everyone thinks about now is save save save! Jobs are tough to find and money is on a tight budget right now and people are either not spending much or going for the cheap stuff. So with our economic crisis I think we will start throwing less trash away than we use to.

Chapter 3:

I work at Ralphs grocery store, and what we use to bag our customers groceries are preferably plastic bags. I always wondered when I bagged which bag is better paper or plastic. I realized both were bad. By using paper we're cutting down trees and when plastic it lasts forever flying above our landfills. Can you believe that we can make our mountain trash into something beautiful? I mean I cannot see that gross trash and tons of it transform into a playground especially with the smell. I was amazed to what they find in the landfill...Dead Bodies seriously?!? Thats crazy? Smart... since the body is buried under piles of trash and is impossible to find things but that is just crazy! I thought it was interesting when Big Mike said something like what we see advertised ends up in the dump sooner than people thought Because its true. When you see something cool on t.v and you end up getting it because it was "in" at the time ends up in the trash sooner then many people would like just because its either out of style or there was no use for it anymore. I was kind of annoyed with the idea of "buy anything" just to help with the problem but look where we are at now!, even worst than before. I think we should go back to Lippincott's idea of trash. We should view the trash as if every piece of material is running low and save every bit of material we can get to reduce what goes to the landfill. It disgusts me how people thought it was okay to feed the pigs trash and then have that garbage eating pig for dinner. I think i just threw up a little bit. ew. Back to the plastic situation, we should have gotten rid of it once we knew it was hurting the planet. We can help... Bring your reusable bags when you go to the store every bit helps!

The Interview with Edward Humes Article response:

After reading the interview I got a better understanding  of the reading because he explains it more clearly in a way that I can understand. For example, when he speaks about the methane and how they put the gas to use for energy and how it can generate about 70,000 homes. He said it's not a good thing but it a better solution that making it go to waste. What I don't get is how we are sending out our material to Zhan Yin who is miles away wasting gas for shipment when we can try and figure out how we can do the same here in the U.S. where we don't have to travel the materials so far. Also, so that we are buying the reused material from ourselves and not from someone out of the country. What amazed me was when he mentions the trash out in the sea and how putting all the trash together come out to be forty percent of earths land. It's like making a whole other country made out of trash. I go to the beach almost every weekend and I've seen nurdles swim onto shore but have never really known what they were and now I know. It almost makes me not want to eat fish... but i love it so much! Every chance I get when I'm at the beach I try and pick up every piece of trash I see. I work at a grocery store and I am obligated to ask, "paper or plastic?" and surprisingly many of our costumers bring there own reusable bags. However, sad to say not everyone is concerned about the planet and ask for plastic only because the plastic lasts longer and many people reuse them for trash bags at home, doggy bags, or just saves them. Paper bags tend to rip faster. I like how the Patagonia company have their costumers send back their products to reuse them to make something else out of them. It's kind of like what I do with my clothes. I turn jeans to shorts, sweaters to bags, or even shirts into scarves. I mean it is better than throwing them out. The less you throw away helps so much because it reduces the size of the mountain trash.

Chapter 2:
Back then people threw trash out their window like its no big deal! Until they found out that it was causing diseases. I'm glad that today there is a fine to littering. It decreases the amount of trash on the streets and people definitely do not want to spend a penny just because they threw something on the floor when it can be avoided and be thrown where it's suppose to go. What I thought was interesting was Waring's attack on the garbage. His idea about recycling has made such a huge impact for us up until now. Reusing material to reduce the trash and it also provided people with jobs. It's a win win. I was surprised when they put a zoo, a park, tennis court, a lake, etc. over the ashes. It's crazy how they disguise the dirty from us making the dirty look pretty.

Chapter 1:
This is the first I've heard of the Puente Hills landfill in L.A. I'm not from California I moved here from Alaska and I looked it up on google image and the image below is the Landfill. I never realized how much trash one person can throw away. Some of us think that it's okay to throw a piece of gum wrapper away, thinking it wont do us any harm, however it is. It's adding to what is building into a mountain full of trash and polluting our air, we just don't realize it. What I thought was interesting was how people think that putting clean dirt makes the garbage sanitary. Wouldn't you think that all that does is add to the mess?All it does is bury the trash thinking it'll cover up the stench. Hello!? It's still there the garbage isn't going anywhere! It also amazed me how archeologists saw the trash as a master piece than a crises. I mean no matter what or who you are you're human and the trash is dangerous to us. While I read, I kept passing by the question "where do we put the trash now?". Reading it over and over in the book wasn't the annoying part, I was annoyed that until now we still haven't found a solution to where to put the trash. Throwing it over the canyons wont do any good for us thats just hurting the place we live in. It has gotten me more aware of trash and as I read I  think what should I do with my trash so that it doesn't pile with the rest? burn it? no...that pollutes the air and there is no where to put the ashes. Put it in water to dissolve?  but not everything can. These are just thoughts that can maybe one day help our Trash problem.