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Up to now, nappies, adult incontinence and feminine hygiene products (AHPS) have been one of the few remaining household items that got straight to landfill or incineration facilitites. AHPs do not belong in landfills. They take 500 years to decompose, they contain human waste and we can salvage the raw materials.
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Every year, an estimated 400 million units of obsolete electronics are scrapped. By 2010, this figure will rise to three billion units. While advances in technology continue to improve and enrich our lives, product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. And that means an increasing stockpile of end-of-life equipment that needs to be managed. When discarded, much of this equipment ends up in landfills in the US, or is exported to third world countries.
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Clothes rental services have been around for some time now, often focusing on the short-term needs of those preparing for special occasions. Now, a new Singapore company is setting its sights squarely on fashionistas and others who would rather not wear the same outfit twice. You can save tons of money, curb spending on clothes while maintaining a glamorous lifestyle with an infinite amount of clothes to wear. Avoid consumerism and the millions of excess clothes dumped in landfills.
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One item touches every article of clothing and is touched by every customer. It’s the ubiquitous, invisible clothing hanger. It’s so prevalent, so insignificant that no one sees it, no one thinks about it, no one cares about what happens to it when it gets thrown into the box under the counter after a sale.
Where do all those thousands upon thousands of hangers go at the end of the day? Alarmingly the vast majority end up in landfills via the store’s dumpster. How many hangers are we talking about? The landfilled waste they create world-wide would fill 4.6 Empire State Buildings each and every year. The annually trashed 8 billion invisible plastic and metal hangers entering out municipal waste stream are now becoming a very dire issue.
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After being thoroughly used in the deep fryer, waste vegetable oil (WVO) has traditionally been disposed of in landfills or wastewater treatment plants. Microbes then digest the oils and release methane and CO2. In diverting this fuel source from the landfill and making use of used cooking oil to produce electricity, the same amount of CO2 is created. However, it is possible to harvest a significant amount of useful energy instead of throwing it away!
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Every year, affluent Americans buy 22 million new bicycles and discard millions of old ones, abandoning many more unused in basements, sheds, and garages. Most of these end up in already overburdened landfills. Meanwhile, poor people overseas need cheap, non-polluting transportation to get to jobs, markets, customers, and schools. Some people will take adult bikes and frames, refurbish or converting them into wheelchairs for people in developing countries
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Millions of disposable diapers are dumped into landfills, and they making up around 4% of all solid waste and the third largest consumer item. While most people want to be as environmentally responsible as possible, the prospect of spending hours laundering mountains of cloth diapers is incredibly unappealing to exhausted new mothers, even eco-friendly ones.
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Selling billions of gallons of water in everlasting plastic bottles to people that already have access to clean water is turning our planet into a gigantic garbage dump. 60 million plastic bottles are thrown away each day in the USA alone. Only 14% actually get recycled, meaning 86% become garbage roaming our planet or cluttering landfills. It will take 700 years to begin composting, 24 million gallons of oil are needed to produce a billion plastic bottles, bottling and shipping water is the least energy efficient method ever used to supply the liquid, and it is the second most popular beverage in the United States.
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Most foods are still packed in plastic, which not only fills landfills and pollutes oceans, but also perpetuates petroleum consumption. Now we are beginning to see more prominent use of biodegradable disposable food packaging, particularly at green-oriented festivals and natural groceries. These "Bioplastics" are becoming a burgeoning industry as the cost of oil climbs and the disastrous nature of petroleum-based plastics is revealed in full effect.
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The plastic card industry is growing very strong and won't be going anywhere anytime soon. These ubiquitous items are used every day from credit and debit cards to gift cards and hotel keycards. In an effort to reduce the number of plastic cards that will end up in landfills, Sustainable Cards LLC, a Colorado based business, has created wooden hotel keycards. These have been used in Europe for years and are now being introduced in the US.
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