Author: Gwendolyn Niles

Utopian Clothing Practices

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

In a utopian world with little to no waste associated with clothing, there would need to be a significant de-emphasizing of production and a focus instead on repairs, alterations, and upcycling or downcycling. Clothing is one place where this could be done with perhaps less innovation than other items. Decreasing the production of new garments would be the most significant change to the current way of doing things, and also one of the most impactful. If there is less new stuff being produced, choosing to alter, mend, and pass down or acquire second-hand clothing would be much easier. The best way to encourage all of these practices is to make them the easiest option for individuals. 

Corporations are another situation. In our current capitalist system, corporations would likely be unwilling to produce significantly less, even if they could sell it for more. If the goal of businesses was instead to produce valuable and useful items rather than just make a profit, there would likely be a lot less resistance to a high-quality low quantity production approach. 

Cardboard

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

Cardboard, when not made of recycled materials, is typically made of Kraft paper, which is the same brown paper that many paper bags are made of. Kraft paper is made of wood that has been pulped. It is pulped mechanically (ground and crushed), then chemically using sulfates or sulfites. 

Once the cardboard has been put in the recycling, brought to a sorting facility, and baled, it goes to a processing plant. At those plants, the cardboard is soaked to break it down, mixed with new wood fibers to strengthen it, and made into more cardboard. Cardboard can go through this process 5-7 times before it is no longer able to be recycled because the fibers it is made of break down enough that they cannot be remade into cardboard or other things. In 2018, about 96.5 percent of corrugated cardboard in the US was recycled. It is unclear whether this means 96.5 percent of cardboard made its way to recycling facilities or if it was remade into other things. Either way, that’s really impressive.

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/how-a-cardboard-box-is-made/

https://recyclenation.com/2021/05/a-step-by-step-guide-to-what-happens-to-the-cardboard-and-paper-you-recycle/

https://stlcityrecycles.com/how-many-times-can-this-be-recycled/

https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/paper-and-paperboard-material-specific-data

Cardboard Tampon Applicators

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

Most tampon applicators are made of two or three pieces of plastic, but some are made of cardboard. Cardboard tampon applicators are generally said to be a greener alternative to plastic applicators because they can biodegrade. I had a hard time finding any information on the production of cardboard tampon applicators and how it affects the environment, almost everything I found was talking about the benefits. I wonder if the difficulty is, at least in some part, due to the lack of research and writing about the topic. One thing I was able to find was a paper about the impacts of various menstrual products, which mentions that chromium is something that is “emitted through energy use during the manufacture of raw materials such as cardboard, paper, and wood pulp via the combustion of fossil fuels”, and negatively affects plants.

There was more readily available information about the end of the cycle (pun intended). Cardboard applicators generally can biodegrade, if in the right conditions, however, the applicator is often put back in the (usually plastic) wrapper before being put in the trash, which would make biodegradation more unlikely. They cannot be recycled because they are “contaminated with menstrual blood”, so they end up wherever the trash for the specific building is taken. Even if they were able to be recycled, I think the likelihood of someone putting them in the recycling is low. I don’t often see recycling containers in bathrooms, and it doesn’t seem likely that someone would take just the applicator with them from the bathroom in order to put it in the recycling.

Plastic Periods

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

I regularly interact with single-use period products. They are, along with other disposable period products, considered single-use because the majority of them are no longer effective after one use. Single-use period disks are an exception to this, because they are made of plastic and collect menstrual fluid rather than absorb it, and could probably be washed and reused a few times, although it is not suggested on the packaging. Pads and tampons absorb menstrual fluid and cannot be reused. Pads are made of absorbent material with a sticky plastic backing and are individually wrapped in plastic. Tampons are also made of absorbent material and most come with two-part applicators, typically made of plastic, although there are also cardboard ones, and are also wrapped in plastic. All of these are sold wrapped in plastic, in boxes, or in bags with multiple individually wrapped products.

Periods have been stigmatized for a long time, and that is reflected in period products. Things are individually wrapped for both sanitary reasons and ‘privacy’ reasons. The individual wrapping allows the used item to be wrapped before being thrown away.

Used pads and tampons are thrown in the trash and end up where the trash is taken. Although plastic applicators may be recyclable, it seems unlikely that they would actually be recycled for sanitary reasons.

Litter Disposal

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my family has several pets, and two of those pets, a guinea pig and a rabbit, have a litter box and a cage that need to be emptied on a regular basis. Because of the volume of material (primarily wood shavings) that needs to be disposed of, we do not put it in the trash, instead, we dump it in a kind of compost pile that has formed behind our barn. Our house and barn are surrounded by forest, and behind the barn, at the edge of the treeline, is a steep hill. The compost/litter pile is at that edge. 

Some of the aspects that make it ‘appropriate’ for this purpose are its distance from our house and the fact that it cannot be seen from the house or the road. A non-human aspect of the space is that it is on the edge of the steep drop and the woods. I think if that edge weren’t there, we would not use that spot because it would be like leaving a pile of stuff in the middle of a space. Somehow having the pile at the edge (the margins) of a space feels less disruptive and wrong than having it in the middle of the space. Perhaps this is because having material waste collect somewhere that is not an edge or a margin could be thought of as a waste of space.

Prescott Laundry Room

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

In the Prescott laundry room, there are both formal and informal places where waste collects. The formal ones are a trash can and two small recycling bins by the door to the room. There is also a stack of compost buckets, but it looks like those are meant to be taken to individual mods, not used in the laundry room. The informal waste collection place is a cardboard box and a pile of miscellaneous clothing. The cardboard box has a sign on it that says “DON’T LEAVE STUFF BEHIND. THIS AREA IS NOT A FREE PILE!”. I don’t know why the box is there if people aren’t supposed to put stuff in it but it looks like the box and that corner is being used for unwanted things anyways.

The pile of clothes next to the box is a good example of the broken window theory that was brought up during class last week. Because there is a box and a few things in that corner, there might be less hesitation to add unwanted items to the pile. Clearly, the presence of clothes next to the box is more influential than the sign on the box.

With the informal waste collection place, I think the assumption is that other students will be the ones to take the stuff. If people expected it to be taken care of with the rest of the trash, they would just put it there.

Fabric Scraps Part Two

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

The form of waste I am choosing is fabric waste, which I wrote my first blog post about. I consider it my responsibility to try to use as much of the fabric as I possibly can. It becomes someone else’s responsibility when I am unable or unwilling to try to use it anymore and it moves from my scrap container to the trash. Based on the way our waste systems are set up, this is the logical division, but I think with a change in what I’m doing, this division could potentially be deemed unnecessary. I could either keep all fabric scraps until I am able to do something with them, or I could stop doing things that create fabric scraps. This could look like a couple of things; I could stop sewing and doing projects with fabric, or I could ensure that none of the projects I do create any scraps. 

I don’t know the details of who deals with the waste after the people that collect it or how it’s dealt with. I would guess that if it’s specifically textile waste, as described in the reading by Gregson et al. it would be sorted into various categories. On the occasions that I do throw out fabric, it just goes into the general garbage. I do not know if that gets sorted or what exactly happens to it after it’s picked up.

Plastic Lid

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

This is the lid to a pack of wipes that I used up. I got it from the small paper bag that I use as a trash bag in my room. The experience wasn’t too gross since most of the stuff I throw out in my room is not sticky or smelly. The lid was pretty far down and I haven’t emptied this trash in a couple of weeks since it doesn’t fill up very quickly so it was a bit of a look into some of my activities in the last couple of weeks. There was something from my last period, which gave me a bit of a timeline for the trash which was kind of cool.

This lid was thrown out because its original purpose was to be part of the container holding wipes and when the wipes were gone, it no longer needed to serve that purpose. When I first threw it out I was not thinking about the potential uses for it. By taking it out of the trash and adding it to my collection of things to be used, I am doing what people of the past were described to be doing in the reading by Strasser. Even if I don’t use it immediately, it will eventually be given another purpose. 

I could have saved the piece before ever throwing it away, rather than going back to find it. I have been trying to keep that in mind when throwing out other things. I have remembered to consider other uses for glass jars and some paper scraps, but those are the only two things I ever really think of before throwing them out. For the most part, I don’t often consider the possible uses for things I would otherwise consider trash.

Poopy Pets

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

My family has had pets my whole life. We’ve had rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, ducks, hamsters, rats, and a cat, and with that comes an awful lot of shit. When you have pets, especially ones living in your house, their waste needs to be dealt with. I find the difference between the way we deal with animal waste and human waste interesting. When dealing with animal poop, we usually have to be relatively hands-on, it can’t really be avoided due to the systems and routines that have been established, whereas, with human waste, it’s immediately removed from sight, requiring very little interaction on our part. 

I have a couple of thoughts as to why it’s like this. My first thought is that animal poop (some kinds more than others), is less offensive to our senses. It’s usually smaller, less smelly, and in the case of some animals, visually different. I know I personally have a smaller reaction to changing a rabbit litter box than a cat litter box, perhaps because rabbit poop looks and smells so different from our own, while cat poop looks and smells more similar. I think this could also be somewhat related to the shame associated with our own shit. When we have to deal with animal poop, it’s distanced from us, and we aren’t the ones responsible for its existence, so there isn’t that feeling of shame and discomfort.

Another potential reason for the difference in how we handle animal waste is that it is an established thing, much like the shame associated with our own waste, so it feels normal to be grossed out by handling our own shit, but when it comes to scooping the cat litter or cleaning a guinea pig cage, it’s relatively tolerable.

Too Many Tabs

Posted on by Gwendolyn Niles

One thing I have a rather significant amount of is open tabs, specifically on my phone. At the time of writing this, I have 191 tabs open on my phone, plus a separate group of 11 tabs. I tend to use Safari on my phone as a way to keep track of things I want to look at later. I will often search for something that I want to do or read or watch at a later time with the intention of going back to the tab to do whatever it was. The issue is that I don’t go back to look at my tabs very often, so I keep adding new tabs without closing old ones, causing them to pile up.

I don’t know if this would be considered hoarding. I could argue that this isn’t a form of hoarding because they aren’t necessarily in a place they shouldn’t be, and they aren’t really causing any problems. An argument that this is a form of hoarding is that there is some amount of distress associated with getting rid of tabs. I hesitate to just close them all because they are things that, at one point, I deemed important or relevant, and they may still be useful to me, if not immediately, at least at some point in the future. And I do find myself going back to things often enough that I can’t justify closing them all. 

The existence of this collection is at least somewhat due to a lack of a cleaning routine because I rarely take the time to go through all of them. I keep telling myself that I will go through and decide which tabs are relevant and which ones are not, but it has yet to happen on a large scale, although I have made several attempts to do this on a small scale. The existence of this collection could also be said to be the result of a cleaning routine, a cleaning of thoughts from my brain. As I said before, I will quickly search for something that I want to look for when I get a chance, as a way to get the thought out of my head and somewhere else. 

Perhaps this will be the motivation I need to finally do it.