[HN Gopher] A woman who rifles through New York's garbage, expos...
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A woman who rifles through New York's garbage, exposing the city's
excesses
Author : laurex
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-08-07 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| AirMax98 wrote:
| Pretty unrelated, but reading this story reminded me of this one
| time I was traveling to Maine for a ski trip with a hippy
| girlfriend and some of her college friends. Her friends were
| pretty off beat people that were very into dumpster diving and
| really wanted to go dumpster diving at an industrial juice
| production facility along the way. Anyways, fast-forward to me in
| an actual dumpster pulling out crates of expired-ish juice. One
| of my girlfriend's friends was like, "wait, don't take this one
| -- it has aspartame in it." I just remember thinking like, I'm
| waist deep in a literal filthy dumpster right now, I am not sure
| I get to have any right to be choosy about what is/isn't healthy!
|
| The juice was pretty good though.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'd be really careful dumpster diving for processed food at a
| production facility. There's a chance they found a problem with
| it, and that's why they're dumping it.
| fractallyte wrote:
| The link showing _live animals_ tossed into garbage was
| absolutely shocking (https://www.instagram.com/p/CJzMqsXlYPb/)
|
| It's reprehensible actions like these - total disrespect for
| _life_ - that makes action against much vaster things, such as
| climate change, seem like Pyrrhic victories. _People_ need to
| fixed just as much as climate and ecosystems.
| don-code wrote:
| The article talks about, but seems to conflate, what I see as two
| different problems. One problem is that retail outlets destroy
| and throw out unsold inventory; the other is that individuals
| throw out unwanted, post-used goods. The latter of these problems
| seems like it could be much more manageable, but if we lump it
| together with the former, we risk minimizing some solutions.
|
| I've gotten the lion's share of my furniture either from
| individuals or from Craigslist. Right now, I'm sitting in my
| kitchen eating lunch, on chairs that I did buy new, and looking
| around: my "decor" are plants, empty espresso roast cans, mason
| jars salvaged from sauces, and empty craft beer cans from various
| local breweries (we're lucky to have three or four per town, and
| they all have super-creative labels). This is after just getting
| home in a used luxury car, earlier today having woken up to a 70s
| Realistic clock radio, typing this post on an off-lease (but rock
| solid) ThinkPad, and so on.
|
| The picture I'm trying to paint there will differ depending on
| your own attitudes towards the "waste" stream. Most people around
| me have commented positively on it - the furniture is "nice",
| from old-money brownstones in downtown; the beer can collection
| is a great conversation starter. But of course, there are still
| some (and luckily, seemingly, a minority) who can only see it as
| trash, a sign that I've "opted out" of basic economics, or at
| worst, that I just don't care enough about my appearance.
| sologoub wrote:
| Retail waste of unsold inventory could also be managed with
| proper incentives/tax benefits.
|
| We take great pains to make sure we donate whatever we don't
| need that isn't really trash. What shocked me is that a lot of
| time the typical places like Salvation Army and Goodwill won't
| even take stuff because they get too much! We had a perfectly
| good fridge to give away (everything working, clean,
| cosmetically near perfect - just didn't fit in the new place we
| moved to) and literally no one would take it. Finally was able
| to give it to a friend of a friend.
|
| EDIT: Also remembered that we tried to give away a commercial-
| grade dishwasher to Habitat for Humanity who build/rehab
| housing for low income folks. They politely explained that they
| couldn't take it because it didn't meet efficiency
| requirements. While I'm all for being efficient with power, it
| feels like a waste of resources in this case that could have
| gone towards more housing (it's an issue of laws in CA).
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Retail waste of unsold inventory could also be managed with
| proper incentives/tax benefits.
|
| I'm not convinced CVS throws away enough hair brushes and
| toothpaste (examples from the article) that they'd care about
| the incentives.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Reuse = replace when it comes to energy waste.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Appliance energy rules are incredibly dumb. We yield marginal
| downward demand curve for electricity, in exchange for shit
| appliances that have a 4-5 year expected life.
|
| I've probably bought more appliances in 15 years of home
| ownership than my parents did in 50.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't blame the shoddy construction on the energy rules.
| Should I?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| > While I'm all for being efficient with power, it feels like
| a waste of resources in this case that could have gone
| towards more housing (it's an issue of laws in CA).
|
| Keep in mind that homes for Habitat for Humanity go to low
| income people. Energy efficiency standards for appliances
| have made them drastically more efficient over the years, and
| it's probably not great to saddle low income people with
| higher energy bills.
|
| In fact, a big problem with continued improvements in this
| area is that low income people are the most likely to be
| living with less efficient appliances, homes with inefficient
| heating, cooling and insulation, etc. and they also do not
| have the money to actually upgrade any of that and lower
| their bills.
| joshuaheard wrote:
| Every time i take out the trash, I can't believe that our three-
| person household generates a whole trash can full of trash every
| week.
| theklub wrote:
| I've reached the age where a trash can isn't enough anymore. I
| need to actively donate and go to the dump often to keep from
| becoming overrun with items in my house.
| superkuh wrote:
| When you bag your trash and bring it out to the curb for pick-up
| and eternal storage in a landfill somewhere you normally think
| it's just that: eternal. But there's no reason to think that the
| landfills of today will be inviolate in the future. They're
| absolutely jam packed full of useful rare metals and materials. I
| think eventually garbage mining will be a common practice.
|
| In Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" they have this book scanning
| machine that just shreds the books then scans all the sheds super
| fast as they fly by and reassembled computationally the documents
| (like how DNA is read). Sometimes I worry about a future where
| this is possible with garbage and garbage mining is happening.
| Not only would a garbage mining company be able to sell the
| materials but the vast amounts of detailed very personal
| information stored discretely in each person or family's bag
| would also be invaluable. There would be economic motives to
| automate information retrevial from landfill garbage mining.
|
| Depending on how far in the future this happens it could either
| be a privacy nightmare or a cultural treasure.
| acwan93 wrote:
| It's like that Futurama episode where Fry had to teach the
| future how to generate trash in order to build a garbage ball
| to save the planet. In the future, _everything_ was recycled,
| including Bender. They thought Fry was the weird one of having
| the concept of "throwing things away."
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Oxyrhynchus could happen all over even today, with things we've
| lost as recent as the early 1900s I'm sure.
|
| It's incredible to try and search for, say engineering
| practices we've lost, that happened only one or two generations
| ago. I'm sure there are buried textbooks that would uncover
| such practices that someone in academia thought, "Well it's
| probably time to throw this out."
|
| There are buildings today constructed with materials processes
| that are exceptionally difficult to find information on.
| underseacables wrote:
| Reminds me of how the USPS scans the front and back of every
| piece of mail; I think they may do this with packages. If
| machine reading is anywhere near current levels it would be
| trivial to create a map of you, and every person, organization,
| etc that you get mail from.
| xyst wrote:
| I look at the waste we have produced as a society and I
| immediately think back to a monologue in Westworld by one of the
| antagonists:
|
| "I think humanity is a thin layer of bacteria on a ball of mud
| hurtling through the void. I think if there was a God, he
| would've given up on us long ago. He gave us a paradise and we
| used everything up. We dug up every ounce of energy and burned
| it. We consume and excrete, use and destroy. Then we sit here on
| a neat little pile of ashes, having squeezed anything of value
| out of this planet, and we ask ourselves, "Why are we here?" You
| want to know what I think your purpose is? It's obvious. You're
| here along with the rest of us to speed the entropic death of
| this planet. To service the chaos. We're maggots eating a corpse"
|
| I don't want to think of humanity as parasites on Earth, but we
| truly need to do better.
| savrajsingh wrote:
| There was an NYC trash collector that curated a small museum of
| all the stuff he found in the trash -- it's amazing, small
| documentary about it: https://viewing.nyc/a-garbage-story-short-
| film-about-a-new-y...
|
| wait there's multiple: https://gothamist.com/arts-
| entertainment/photos-visiting-the...
| [deleted]
| kaminar wrote:
| Another social justice loser complaining and judging others. How
| are we not all sick of this yet?
| purephase wrote:
| I've never understood why some of these corporations just trash
| so much of these materials that are just fine. Is it just that no
| one will buy them if they're re-packaged? I've seen a lot of re-
| packaged goods on shelves, it doesn't appear to be an issue for
| some retailers.
|
| The idea of taking in returns from customers and just throwing
| the product out seems absolutely insane to me.
|
| And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many
| hungry people in the world. I understand that distribution is a
| concern here, but this has to be a workable problem somewhere in
| here to reduce this waste.
| dehrmann wrote:
| You can be sure they do that if it's cost effective and doesn't
| dilute the brand. That's where a lot of dollar store inventory
| comes from; it just has to be in big enough volumes.
|
| > And the food waste is just depressing. When there's so many
| hungry people in the world
|
| You hit on it, yourself. It's not like food I don't throw away
| is going to feed a starving orphan in a developing country.
| Those orphans aren't starving because the world doesn't produce
| enough food.
| luckylion wrote:
| You can get it from the corporations, they'll even pay you to
| take it away. They just don't want to be liable when somebody
| get sick or dies after they've gifted them some product that
| regulations rule has to be disposed of. If you're willing to
| take that risk and you can convince the government to license
| you, you can feed a lot of people.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I've also seen a rise in services that sell end-of-day-but-
| still-good leftovers from restaurants and cafes (bagels, taco
| meat, rice balls, etc) as cheap 'mystery bag' bundles direct
| to consumer.
| akudha wrote:
| I was once in Dunkin Donuts quite late (10 pm, I think).
| They gave any perishable food item left, for free. I got
| some doughnuts. I guess they could just give away the
| leftover food at the end of the day. Though the logistics
| of it wouldn't be easy
| gswdh wrote:
| I've often thought it would be a good idea to charge people a tax
| when they buy something to pay for the disposal in the future. If
| they re sell it or somehow dispose of it in a responsible manner,
| the tax is passed on or reimbursed. I'm not sure how this would
| be implemented though. I think it would be awesome to make people
| think about how they are going to deal with the item once they've
| used it. I think just burying something is just not acceptable
| and will be looked back upon as abhorrent and wasteful.
| pxc wrote:
| > the city's excesses
|
| and yet none of these problems are unique to New York or about
| New York. These are transparently excesses of _capitalism_, not
| this city or that
|
| > Because Sacks's videos pull back the veneer of corporate
| pledges to commit to sustainability, they are often shared by
| followers who say capitalism is the root problem. But Sacks says
| she finds that argument "polarizing" and that it "immediately
| alienates" those who equate critiques of capitalism as
| endorsement of socialism or communism.
|
| amazing. The name of the system we live under is unspeakable
| vnchr wrote:
| Care to share about other social systems you have lived under
| and what the trash was like?
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| To the extent a different social system provides less
| material abundance, to the extent it becomes worth lots of
| people's time to sift through the trash or re-sell a 20-year-
| old toaster, I'd expect those other systems would have a ton
| less trash per capita.
| vnchr wrote:
| The trash solution is more poor people? Can't argue with
| that basis. Just seems like it has some drawbacks.
| code_duck wrote:
| I enjoy walking in alleys and see a lot of perfectly good items
| thrown away, of course. As I am nearly a sentimental hoarder,
| citing to myself practical, environmental and thrift reasons, it
| boggles my mind what some people toss out. In residential trash
| I've seen near-mint suitcases, umbrellas, notebooks, school
| books, art supplies, boots, shirts, jackets, large toys, entire
| potted plants, hats, work uniforms, and much more. Commercial
| trash can be even more impressively wasteful with things like 60
| pounds of ground beef behind a certain bar every other week.
|
| As far as food, I have known people who regularly go to drive-
| they'd, get 6 tacos, eat one or two and throw the other 4 away.
| I've accompanied some friends to dinner who routinely order large
| meals, eat a fraction and leave it at the table. This casual
| waste at the consumer level is even worse when you consider the
| proportion of food that didn't even make it to a plate.
|
| What I perceive is a common lack of appreciation of the total
| cost, in every sense, of creating any food item or consumer
| product. Any sort of production involves suffering for someone,
| whether it's the lowest paid workers, local people and animals
| suffering the effects of pollution, or even the problem of roads
| and air congested by trucks carrying products that will
| eventually be 2/3s wasted.
|
| It boggles my mind that with more organization and efficiency in
| distribution and usage, we could grow less food, but feed more
| people and eat more, yet most people don't see any need to even
| try to change the system.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Regarding this point:
|
| > Sacks repeatedly comes back to the idea that retailers could
| give away unsold or lightly used, returned (but still good) items
| to their low-wage employees, instead of tossing them, or jumping
| through bureaucratic hurdles to donate them. This could be an
| "added perk", she says, or an additional form of compensation, to
| bolster employees' wages.
|
| This perversely incentivizes the employees. I had an acquaintance
| who worked in retail in college. This was a large Midwestern
| store that sold everything from groceries to car parts to home
| stereos and TVs. They had a policy that if something was damaged
| it couldn't be sold and the employees could take it for a
| significant discount. It wasn't long before lots of items started
| having just enough damage to not be sold, but always on a part of
| the item where it wouldn't be noticed when installed in your
| home. He was eventually fired for intentionally damaging stock.
| kleer001 wrote:
| > "It's so gross that this is what they like to do, as a
| corporation, rather than help people."
|
| It's not the corporation, it's laws, it's sanitation and
| accountability, it's logistics. It's far more complex than she's
| either researched or would like to admit.
| qzw wrote:
| The article specifically states that she's starting an
| initiative to advocate for legislative changes. I don't think
| you're giving her enough credit (or didn't get that far in the
| article).
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| I worked retail for a year as a kid and dealt with this issue.
| Another reason stuff is destroyed is to prevent insider issues.
| You will naturally have merchandise that gets damaged in day to
| day operations or becomes no longer viable to sell and needs to
| be taken off the books. This presents an obvious avenue for
| theft by insiders (employee says functional item X is actually
| broken or they intentionally partially damage it, they record
| it as broken so it isn't being tracked anymore in inventory,
| and they walk out the door with it or throw it in the trash out
| back for their buddy to pick up). Requiring destruction of all
| decommissioned assets is the only reliable way to stop this
| from happening.
| purephase wrote:
| She used to be a consultant for a zero-waste company. I imagine
| she's very aware of these complexities.
|
| It doesn't make it any less embarrassing for these
| organizations though. We should be expecting them to do better
| than this.
| luckylion wrote:
| How is it "embarrassing" to comply with the law?
| lostlogin wrote:
| I've seen companies destroy their stock rather than let it
| be sold at a lower value or given away. It's protect their
| 'brand'. It's not all about the law.
| [deleted]
| happytoexplain wrote:
| You're right that it's complex, and maybe she doesn't
| appreciate it all (I don't know either way), but why is the
| corporation conspicuously omitted from this list? Their
| accountability is surely included in "accountability" in
| general.
| code_duck wrote:
| For consumers, most of the time it's convenience and
| practicality. People throw away things they could donate or
| sell because it's faster or they don't know how to easily
| connect with someone who might want it. Often they don't feel
| they would personally would benefit from someone else using the
| item.
| orange_joe wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that a lot of smaller restaurants and
| grocery stores are signing up for an app called "too good to
| go", where people can sign up to buy highly discounted food at
| the end of the day (in NYC and a few other cities). These
| companies could chose to offer a portion of their leftovers on
| this app, or offer a similar program.
| [deleted]
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