PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN:
The Untold Stories Behind Our Everyday Products
Fish out any one item from your typical American trash can (or even recycling bin) and almost inevitably, behind any product you choose, there lies a story of destruction that includes habitat and natural resource devastation, greenhouse gas emissions, social injustices, and even bloody resource wars—all for the sake of making a product that you may only use for a few minutes. Recovering that product through recycling or composting gives the story a happy ending by putting that material back into the production cycle. But it doesn’t change the destruction that happened before you purchased it. That’s why the global movement of Zero Waste is so important. Zero Waste goes well beyond simply diverting materials from the landfill or incinerator. It takes a full-system approach—from design to discard—to the products of our lives and redesigns that system so our choices don’t come at a horrifying expense to our environment or to other peoples. Check out how just four basic products in our culture impact our global society. Then read part 2 to see how using a Zero Waste system drastically changes the story, and you’ll understand why we often refer to the Zero Waste movement as “the new peace movement.”
Read part 2 of this story for the Zero Waste counterparts of these untold tales...
 BOTTLED WATER
Water is crucial to human survival, and, at the dawn of the 21st century, we started paying for it—by the billions—in one of the biggest marketing shams ever. Marketing experts have convinced many of us that bottled water tastes better, that it’s cleaner and healthier, and that you can no longer trust good ol’ tap water. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, multinational companies are tapping public water supplies, the freshwater aquifers that took thousands of years to form and once supported local agriculture and inhabitants, for their water-bottling plants. Now, citizens from the U.S. to India are being denied access to their wells and watch helplessly as their aquifers are being privatized and drained faster than they’re being replenished because corporations outbid them for water rights.
Halfway across the planet, oil is being tapped in war-torn countries to make #1 PET plastic water bottles—requiring more than 17 million barrels of oil every year. Every week Americans buy more than half a BILLION bottles of water, and only 20% are recycled, creating a constant demand for more oil.
Sold with less testing than tap water and at 100 to 10,000 times the price, sales for bottled water are finally slowing. But the continued onslaught of plastic bottle waste tells us this story is anything but common knowledge.
 ON-THE-GO DISPOSABLES
Every day, millions of Americans head over to their favorite coffee shop for a cup o’ joe, and millions of to-go cups are trashed within an hour. Millions more have takeout for lunch or dinner in foam/polystyrene (commonly referred to as Styrofoam®) containers and chuck those within a day. Between these on-the-go staples and individually-packaged, convenience foods such as single-serving yogurt and instant oatmeal, it’s possible for each one of us to buy, consume and discard up to 20 different disposables each day. Multiply that times 365, and that number times a population of 300 million, and we’ve got a whole LOT of waste in the name of convenience. The problem is, we’re not used to thinking, “What is this made of and how was it made?” or “What’s going to happen to this after I use it?”
Unfortunately, the answers to these questions can be quite grim, especially when it comes to paper cups and foam, neither of which is recyclable. The former are generally made of virgin paper and are bleached white, a process that releases dioxin, one of the most toxic chemicals on the planet and a known cancer-causing agent. When this paper reaches a landfill, it breaks down without oxygen and releases methane, a greenhouse gas with 72 times the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide over the short term. Then there’s foam: Its basic chemical compound is styrene, which can leach into food and drinks and has been classified as a possible human carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Worse yet, in millions of years, discarded foam will likely still be here, just broken down into smaller pieces—clogging the environment and harming the animals that mistake it for food. All that for a little convenience.
 ALUMINUM CAN
To you, it may just be a can to hold your beer or soda for the 10 minutes you need to drink it. But for many indigenous peoples and communities around the world—Jamaica, Australia, Vietnam and India to name a few— that aluminum can represents land they’ve lived on for generations that was literally stripped out from under them. Much of the bauxite ore—an essential material used to make aluminum cans—is mined in the tropics. To excavate the ore just under the surface of the soil, the incredible biodiversity of tropical forests is slashed and burned. Wide swaths of habitat are destroyed, as is the ability of the forest to moderate local weather patterns, moisture and CO2 levels. The now bare earth pours mud into the rivers with each rainstorm, water supplies are no longer usable and local communities are often devastated.
Once removed, the ore is often shipped to Iceland where massive hydroelectric plants provide “cheap” power for huge aluminum smelters. The aluminum sheets are then shipped to bottling plants around the world where they are formed into cans and filled for sale. After their tops are popped, the cans are emptied within minutes and half are thoughtlessly tossed into the trash can. Headed for the landfill is all the former function and beauty of ecosystems that we’ll need to pillage again to meet demand for more aluminum cans.
 MOBILE PHONE
These days, many people feel they can’t live without their cell phones. Every 18 months, we’ll ditch what we have and get a new one, maybe even for free! The trouble is someone far away is paying a significant price for our cheap and free mobile phones. All these devices use coltan, a slang term for the metal ore containing columbium (niobium) and tantalum. An insatiable appetite for small consumer electronics is driving up the market price of coltan, and the higher the price, the more coltan comes from the rebel-held sections of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Here a resource war to obtain these metals is challenging the ability of some African peoples to simply live. Human rights atrocities are daily occurrences, the rate of rape and sexual abuse is the worst in the world, national parks protections are disregarded and endangered species like gorillas are slaughtered for meat. The money from the sale of coltan just reinforces the rebel leaders’ exploitative control, and the higher the price, the more willing the rebels are to smuggle coltan to the international market. The more we just use and toss, the more pressure we put upon our limited global supply of this non-renewable resource and the more likely it is our newest gadget contains the blood of the Congo.
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