* Zero waste is an ambitious goal to eliminate garbage (or darn close) through strategies including reduction, reuse, recycling and composting.

* Zero waste is about sustainable resource management, because it preserves materials and resources, saves energy and reduces global warming.

* Zero waste employs creative and comprehensive approaches to maximize waste reduction. Integral to zero waste are product stewardship requirements that give corporations the responsibility for taking back or eliminating the wasteful products they produce (examples include toxicity, excessive packaging and a short life span).

* Zero waste is an engine for green economic development and job creation. It saves more resources and energy and does more to address global warming than any other approach to waste management. It needs a cooperative effort between the community and industry (if our communities can’t reuse, recycle, or compost it, industry shouldn’t make it).

Citizens’ Environmental Coalition is sponsoring the New York State Zero Waste Campaign:

Join a statewide coalition of concerned citizens and groups to press the state to incorporate 21st century “Zero Waste” principles into its solid waste policies. NY lags behind many states in recycling and composting and remains heavily dependent on polluting garbage incinerators and landfills. In many municipalities, recycling and waste diversion rates have been declining, and existing NYS policy has done little to turn this dismal situation around. We have an opportunity to move toward Zero Waste in New York, but we need your involvement.

I answered their questionaire, but couldn’t find any further information on their website. I’ll post updates here as they become available…

Green Jobs for America

You know, as opposed to the Fake Economy that is now falling down around us like a house of cards.

Found in my email box today, from the Working Families Party:

… The reason investors poured so much money into real estate speculation and opaque financial instruments is the lack of investment opportunities elsewhere. In the long run, the only way we can have a vibrant economy without financial bubbles and crises is if the government takes the lead in creating major new opportunities for investment. In the 19th century that meant railroads and canals, in the 1930s it meant the public works programs of the New Deal, in the 1950s it meant the federal highway system. Today it means a crash program to respond to the challenge of climate change with massive public and private investment in green jobs and alternative energy. Without a commitment to to rebuilding the real economy, this bailout is just addressing the symptoms and not the underlying disease.

This line of thinking about where our economic future lies has been expressed by voices ranging from Thomas Friedman to Lester Brown to the AFL-CIO. Perhaps it’s simple-minded of me to say so, but I’d like to see our financial system based on products that actually exist, and see people get paid for working instead of for getting fired (after destroying other people’s lives and livelihoods). Is that too much to ask?