Dear Reader,
In the pantheon of actions people take to combat waste, recycling is likely among the most common. Recycling has a long history in America, dating back far before the environmental movement of the 1970s, back through World War II, when Americans saved scrap metal and cooking fat for the war effort, back to 19th century peddlers who, while selling door-to-door, would buy up reusable goods such as rags to make paper, back even to the colonial era, when, according to one environmental historian, Paul Revere's horse likely had shoes from recycled metal. Now, the act of recycling is, in many ways, disconnected from whatever happens to those products down the road. Which, in a nutshell, is one reason China balked, and stopped taking our trash.
As Mark Murray, director of Californians Against Waste, tells us in this week's story, "Brokers in China were telling curbside programs in the United States, 'Throw whatever you can into that bin, and we're going to find ways to recycle it.'" Except they weren't recycling it; it was going into waste streams and the Chinese government called a halt. Murray has some great ideas for how we can be more knowledgeable about the long-term life cycle of packaging and other products, and in doing that, do a better job of actually combatting waste.
We'd love your feedback about this week's stories. Let me know how we're doing by emailing me here.
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Kat Snow
Senior Editor, Science
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| | | For most Californians, it's a no brainer. Toss all your recyclables into a big blue bin, a truck comes to take it away, and it all somehow gets recycled. But it turns out this easy-as-1-2-3 scenario is at least part fantasy. | | |
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| | | An Alameda County jury has awarded a Livermore couple more than $2 billion in damages after they claimed that a weed killer sold by agribusiness giant Monsanto caused them to get cancer. | | |
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| | | The Potentially Hazardous Asteroid called Apophis will narrowly miss Earth in 2029 -- so narrowly you'll be able to see it with your own eyes. | | |
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| | | Inside the Capitol's corridors and pro-development quarters around the state, CEQA is increasingly disparaged as a villain in the state's housing crisis. But the act's environmentalist defenders are pushing back. | | |
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| | | The governor's May budget revision includes $250 million in extra funding for climate-related programs and $75 million to fund an assessment of wildfire protection plans. | | |
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| San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is recommending that the city consider publicly owning and running its own electric grid in a new report. | | |
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