Waste Facts

• Almost 1/3 of the waste generated the U.S. is packaging. (http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html)

• Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and every year, Americans make enough plastic film to shrink-wrap the state of Texas.

• Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times.

• More than half of the world's municipal waste is generated in developed countries. In the United States, for example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average American produces well over .75 tons of trash each year. (http://www.gdrc.org/uem/waste/key-facts.html)
  

• At least 60 per cent of the countries that submitted national reports to the United Nations in advance of the 1992 Earth Summit said that solid waste disposal was among their biggest environmental concerns.

• Household waste arisings for 2004/05 were 846,048 tonnes per annum, which is an increase of just over 14,000 tonnes on 2003/04. (http://www.integra.org.uk/about/stats200405.html)

• Only about one-tenth of all solid garbage in the United States gets recycled. (http://www.cleanair.org/Waste/wasteFacts.html)

• Every year we fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth, halfway to the moon, Each day the United States throws away enough trash to fill 63,000 garbage truck.

• Americans throw away 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour.

• As of 1992, 14 billion pounds of trash were dumped into ocean annually around the world.

• In 1979, there were an estimated 18,500 landfills in the nation. In 1990 there were only about 6,300, and by 1995 it was estimated that only about 3,000 would still be open. In just 16 years the number of landfills dropped by 84%. During that same time there was an 80% increase in the amount of trash generated.

Hey, we are not going to save the world or rid America's Landfills of all plastics, but we can do something. I believe that taking a closer look at what we use and throw out everyday will help us make some small changes. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Hi There!

You probably have received a plastic container holding a baby plant and have been directed to this site. First I would like to thank you for visiting, I hope the plant will bring you much joy this summer. I really enjoyed preparing it for you!! If you are new to gardening and caring for plants I really want you to not be discouraged if it does not survive, caring or rather reading plants patterns and their needs are not easy, but you can always start again and plant another seed and see how it goes. Another thing that I would like to tell you is that I use acrylic paints to paint on these containers, that means that they are water soluble, if you wash these containers the paint will peel off. I try to paint above the plastic lid (or water tray if in use) so that when the water is drained and held in the tray it wont affect the paint. You can always use some compost to refertilize the soil and plant another one. Do not over-water your plants, water every 2-3 days, an espresso cup (or equal) of water should suffice. It is usually better to under-water then over-water them.

It is important for us to start thinking about the impact we have on this earth, our environment, our surroundings. Most of us have seen An Inconvenient Truth the Al Gore documentary about global warming. If not we are all definitely seeing and feeling the impact that our consumerism and our systems are having on us. The weather patterns are just one aspect, I am looking at our waste and this project is aimed at making other people aware of what our products are designed for and their impact and might just brighten up someones day and home. Please free to make your own containers and give them to your friends and family and defiantly feel free, or rather please use this blog and mark your containers and use flowerintitiative.wikispaces.com to comment on your thoughts of this project or of other uses, and maybe even solutions to plastic waste.

The Inspiration

Recently I read a book called Cradle to Cradle from William McDonough and Michael Braungart which really moved me to start think about life-cycles of the products we consume and of the waste these products leave behind. So I started to take a closer look at trash that I was producing from my home and found that most of it was plastics from food containers. These plastics are not recyclable meaning that after the few minutes that the food took to consume the plastics were obsolete and would soon start on their way to a landfill somewhere. Mcdonough and Braungart have a great passage from their book addressing this issue, they speak of styrofoam but plastics are in the same category.

"....Imagine designing such packaging to safely biodegrade after use. It could be made from the empty rice stalks that are left in the fields after harvest, which are now usually burned. They are readily available and cheap. The packaging could be enriched with a small amount of nitrogen (potentially retrieved from automotive systems). Instead of feeling guilty and burdened when they are finished eating, people could enjoy throwing their safe, nutripackage out the train window onto the ground, where it would quickly decompose and provide nitrogen to the soil. It could even contain seeds of indigenous plants that would take root as the packaging decomposes....We could even plant signs that say "Please litter." (Cradle to Cradle,pg 140)

To me that sounds like really smart design, it makes no sense in using such a durable material for something (especially for fruit cups) that is consumed and rendered useless after such a short period of time.

How The Plants Are Grown

I use take-out containers, the flat ones and use peat-pots to start germination. These work well since the top cover are transparent and make a little green house keeping the moisture in and the cold air out (since they sit on the window sill).