Your Future is Rubbish

Adam Minter has a gift for talking rubbish.

He's been doing it all over the world. Spreading the word that trash, waste, junk—whatever you want to call it—isn't just a by-product of our consumer-oriented society, but an essential part of its economic future. And he has the stats to prove it.

'The global recycling industry employs more people on this planet than any other industry but agriculture,' he says. 'On average it turns over as much money as is generated within the Norwegian economy. We're not talking about a niche industry that makes some cute sustainable greeting cards made from yesterday's newspapers, we are talking about an industry that turns over roughly US$500 billion per year.'

By some estimates, that figure is likely to reach US$1 trillion by 2020.

The son of a scrapyard owner from Minneapolis, Minter grew up surrounded by junk: it funded his schooling and put food on the family table. His father made money out of the things other people discarded, and it was that first-hand experience of the economic value of rubbish that led Minter on a mission to document the size and scale of the global recycling market. Now a foreign correspondent based in China, his observations are detailed in a newly published book called Junkyard Planet: travels in the billion dollar trash trade.

'On balance it touches almost everything that you buy, not just the products that say “recycled” or “post-consumer waste included”, but everything from your automobile engine to the bumper on the back of your automobile. It's a staggeringly large industry,' Minter says.

'The statistic I like to give people in the United States and Europe is that, by volume, the largest volume export from the US and from the EU to China is none other than scrap—meaning waste paper, plastic, rubber, textiles, and metals of course. It's gigantic.' (...)

'The OECD estimates that more than four trillion kilograms of waste is produced in OECD nations every single year. And that waste becomes the opportunity that can solve the problem of increasing demand and reducing supply.'

Minter agrees, stressing that recycling is now clearly a global economic issue, not simply an environmental one.

'Nobody is going to pick through somebody's trash, which in many cases is what recycling is, without an economic incentive to do so. It's very nice that there are environmental benefits to this industry, I think that's fantastic, but ultimately it's an industry that competes with the primary raw materials industry; which is to say, your old recycled beer can, when it goes into a scrapyard, is directly competing with aluminium mined out of a bauxite mine. I mean, that's ultimately what makes this industry work.'

by Antony Funell, ABC |  Read more:

Image: ohannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images

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Mary Fedden, Chest of Drawers (2006)
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The iPod of Prison

In early 2005, Josh Demmitt arrived at a federal prison camp, in Sheridan, Oregon, to serve a thirty-month sentence for starting a fire outside an animal-testing facility at Brigham Young University. The nineteen-year-old received a warm welcome from his fellow inmates, who greeted him with coffee and cigarettes, advice on procuring vegan meals, and a pocket AM/FM radio.

The radio provided hours of welcome distraction for Demmitt, who had come from Sheridan’s adjoining detention center, where, he says, he spent weeks without a radio while confined to a small cell for at least twenty-three hours a day. The radio was unlike any Demmitt had seen outside prison, with a transparent plastic body that revealed the landscape within: a single AA battery rested at the bottom of its circuit board, while its antenna—one and three quarter inches of copper wire coiled around a small ferrite bar—peeked through a white Sony logo, just above the AM/FM dial.

The pocket analog radio, known by the bland model number SRF-39FP, is a Sony “ultralight” model manufactured for prisons. Its clear housing is meant to prevent inmates from using it to smuggle contraband, and, at under thirty dollars, it is the most affordable Sony radio on the prison market.

That market consists of commissaries, which were established by the Department of Justice in 1930 to provide prisoners with items not supplied by their institutions; by offering a selection of shampoos and soaps, they shifted personal hygiene costs to inmates, while distractions like playing cards eased tensions among the nation’s growing prison population. More than half a million inmates each week shop at commissaries stocked by the Keefe Group, a privately held company that sells items to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and twelve out of fourteen privately managed state departments of corrections. A sample commissary order form lists items like an I.B.M. typewriter ribbon, hair dye, RC Cola, Sensodyne toothpaste, chili-garlic sauce, Koss CL-20 headphones, and a “Sony Radio.”

Commissaries often carry other, bargain-brand radios, but according to former inmates and employees of the Bureau of Prisons and the Keefe Group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, America’s federal prisoners are most likely to own a Sony. Melissa Dolan, a Sony spokesperson, confirmed in an e-mail that selling portable radios in American prisons has long been a “stable business” that represents “sizable” sales for the company. Of the models available, the SRF-39FP remains an undisputed classic, still found on commissary lists an impressive fifteen years after its initial release, making it nearly as common behind prison walls as Apple’s iPod once was outside of them, despite competition from newer devices like digital radios and MP3 players.

But sheer availability doesn’t explain its ubiquity. The SRF-39FP is the gold standard among prison radios in part because it runs on a single AA battery, and offers forty hours of listening time—longer than an iPod Classic. Digital models can require twice as many batteries, like the Sony SRF-M35FP, which runs on two AAAs. Federal inmates are particularly attuned to battery life because they are allowed to spend just three hundred and twenty dollars each month on commissary goods; more cash spent on batteries means less for snacks, stationery, clothing, and toiletries.

The importance of radio battery life in prison communities cannot be overstated; the devices are relied on for more than listening to music, hearing about local news and weather, and watching television (TV sets in common areas often use transmitters to broadcast sound on a dedicated frequency). A study conducted at San Vittore prison in Milan, Italy, found that “in a place where privacy is constantly denied, radio becomes a vital tool for building and maintaining one’s private self.” Some inmates even had a term for using their radio to create a bubble of personal space: “I headphone myself,” one said.

There is also a bit of prison culture itself at work in the story of the SRF-39FP. Radios like the one that was loaned to Demmitt are usually left behind by inmates who have reëntered the free world. Some prisoners believe that it is bad luck for radios to leave prison with their owners, while others believe that taking them simply violates the “convict code,” according to former inmates like Demmitt and Steven Grayson, author of “The Unauthorized Federal Prison Manual.” Whether radios are abandoned as a matter of solidarity, convenience, or good karma, they pass from inmate to inmate, serving one sentence after another. The durable, analog SRF-39FPs have been changing hands in this manner for a decade and a half, which adds up to a lot of radios in circulation.

This practice helps explain the relative rarity of the SRF-39FP outside prisons. A unit in good condition can fetch up to double or triple its retail value among enthusiasts and collectors like Gary DeBock, a co-founder of the Ultralight Radio Group. According to DeBock, the outside supply depends upon stock siphoned from the California prison system and sold on auction sites like eBay.

by Joshua Hunt, New Yorker |  Read more:

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The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics

Each night at dinnertime, a familiar ritual played out in Michael Green's home: He'd slide a stainless steel sippy cup across the table to his two-year-old daughter, Juliette, and she'd howl for the pink plastic one. Often, Green gave in. But he had a nagging feeling. As an environmental-health advocate, he had fought to rid sippy cups and baby bottles of the common plastic additive bisphenol A (BPA), which mimics the hormone estrogen and has been linked to a long list of serious health problems. Juliette's sippy cup was made from a new generation of BPA-free plastics, but Green, who runs the Oakland, California-based Center for Environmental Health, had come across research suggesting some of these contained synthetic estrogens, too.

He pondered these findings as the center prepared for its anniversary celebration in October 2011. That evening, Green, a slight man with scruffy blond hair and pale-blue eyes, took the stage and set Juliette's sippy cups on the podium. He recounted their nightly standoffs. "When she wins…every time I worry about what are the health impacts of the chemicals leaching out of that sippy cup," he said, before listing some of the problems linked to those chemicals—cancer, diabetes, obesity. To help solve the riddle, he said, his organization planned to test BPA-free sippy cups for estrogenlike chemicals.

The center shipped Juliette's plastic cup, along with 17 others purchased from Target, Walmart, and Babies R Us, to CertiChem, a lab in Austin, Texas. More than a quarter—including Juliette's—came back positive for estrogenic activity. These results mirrored the lab's findings in its broader National Institutes of Health-funded research on BPA-free plastics. CertiChem and its founder, George Bittner, who is also a professor of neurobiology at the University of Texas-Austin, had recently coauthored a paper in the NIH journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It reported that "almost all" commercially available plastics that were tested leached synthetic estrogens—even when they weren't exposed to conditions known to unlock potentially harmful chemicals, such as the heat of a microwave, the steam of a dishwasher, or the sun's ultraviolet rays. According to Bittner's research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA.

Estrogen plays a key role in everything from bone growth to ovulation to heart function. Too much or too little, particularly in utero or during early childhood, can alter brain and organ development, leading to disease later in life. Elevated estrogen levels generally increase a woman's risk of breast cancer.

Estrogenic chemicals found in many common products have been linked to a litany of problems in humans and animals. According to one study, the pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs female. DES, which was once prescribed to prevent miscarriages, caused obesity, rare vaginal tumors, infertility, and testicular growths among those exposed in utero. Scientists have tied BPA to ailments including asthma, cancer, infertility, low sperm count, genital deformity, heart disease, liver problems, and ADHD. "Pick a disease, literally pick a disease," says Frederick vom Saal, a biology professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who studies BPA.

BPA exploded into the headlines in 2008, when stories about "toxic baby bottles" and "poison" packaging became ubiquitous. Good Morning America issued a "consumer alert." The New York Times urged Congress to ban BPA in baby products. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) warned in the Huffington Post that "millions of infants are exposed to dangerous chemicals hiding in plain view." Concerned parents purged their pantries of plastic containers, and retailers such as Walmart and Babies R Us started pulling bottles and sippy cups from shelves. Bills banning BPA in infant care items began to crop up in states around the country.

Today many plastic products, from sippy cups and blenders to Tupperware containers, are marketed as BPA-free. But Bittner's findings—some of which have been confirmed by other scientists—suggest that many of these alternatives share the qualities that make BPA so potentially harmful.

by Mariah Blake, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: Evan Kafka 

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

by Roz Chast, New Yorker |  Read more:
Images: Roz Chast

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Polynesian Seafarers Discovered America Long Before Europeans, says DNA Study

The prevailing theory about the "rediscovery" of the American continents used to be such a simple tale. Most people are familiar with it: In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Then that theory was complicated when, in 1960, archaeologists discovered a site in Canada's Newfoundland, called L'Anse aux Meadows, which proved that Norse explorers likely beat Columbus to the punch by about 500 years.

Now startling new DNA evidence promises to complicate the story even more. It turns out that it was not Columbus or the Norse — or any Europeans at all — who first rediscovered the Americas. It was actually the Polynesians.

All modern Polynesian peoples can trace their origins back to a sea-migrating Austronesian people who were the first humans to discover and populate most of the Pacific islands, including lands as far-reaching as Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. Despite the Polynesians' incredible sea-faring ability, however, few theorists have been willing to say that Polynesians could have made it as far east as the Americas. That is, until now.

Clues about the migration patterns of the early Polynesians have been revealed thanks to a new DNA analysis performed on a prolific Polynesian crop: the sweet potato, according to Nature. The origin of the sweet potato in Polynesia has long been a mystery, since the crop was first domesticated in the Andes of South America about 8,000 years ago, and it couldn't have spread to other parts of the world until contact was made. In other words, if Europeans were indeed the first to make contact with the Americas between 500 and 1,000 years ago, then the sweet potato shouldn't be found anywhere else in the world until then.

The extensive DNA study looked at genetic samples taken from modern sweet potatoes from around the world and historical specimens kept in herbarium collections. Remarkably, the herbarium specimens included plants collected during Capt. James Cook’s 1769 visits to New Zealand and the Society Islands. The findings confirmed that sweet potatoes in Polynesia were part of a distinct lineage that were already present in the area when European voyagers introduced different lines elsewhere. In other words, sweet potatoes made it out of America before European contact.

The question remains: How else could Polynesians have gotten their hands on sweet potatoes prior to European contact, if not by traveling to America themselves?

by Bryan Nelson, MNN |  Read more:

Image: Wiki Commons

Nicoletta Branco
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Everybody's Doing It

There used to be order. Not being cool in a certain way meant rejection by the pack. The flock. No one took a shot at the popular kids. When someone did try to mock teenage royalty, everyone else laughed at them. “Peer pressure no longer exists because peers no longer exist” a 15-year-old girl told me recently. She wasn’t trying to make some pithy adolescent statement about how there isn’t any “meaning” in “anything”—no nihilistic or solipsistic or ironic tendencies intended—she meant it literally. 

Peers are now just media filters, she said. Collectors. Separated from their physical forms. Social pressure no longer comes from groups made up of singular individuals confined to the unforgiving collective architecture of a specific school. Instead, the adoption of aesthetics, identities, and behaviors are filtered through countless nodes on various networks, digital manifestations of humans and nonhumans alike.

Advertising executives are your older siblings. Aging hipsters twice your age are your friends. The affectations of generations past are yours. Your music can be their music and their music can be your music. You have access to any set of tastes or styles and the theoretical ability to acquire and adopt them, to dress, listen, fuck, and/or ingest whatever you want. You no longer need a patient zero in your classroom. You don’t need the older kids to show you how to roll a joint. You can be the first and only to stop eating or the first to smoke up, or a few years later the first to decide not to smoke up and write black X’s on your hands and listen to hardcore. You can now discover straight edge on your browser and start a tumblr full of pictures of Ian Mackaye and bemoan how you didn’t grow up in the late ’80s. And you wouldn’t be alone. And yes, your “peers” trolling the hallways and cell towers might make fun of you for this or that. But they’ll go after you either way.

Now, unlike in the ’90s, being the dreamiest basketball player or having the right halter top from the mall pays no dividends; everyone is a target. Fair game for hatred in the schoolyard and ridicule on the wireless networks. No one is safe. The hierarchies still exist, and status still exists, but it’s almost taken the life of a game. An ingrained biological response to the harsh conditions of scholastic pseudo-imprisonment.

by Maxwell Neely-Cohen , TNI |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Dila Kaplan
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Christian Neuenscwhander
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The Ting Tings

This Bud's for You

[ed. Extraordinary look at a new commodity industry being born.]

Amiko Li
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Casa das Canoas, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - Oscar Niemeyer (1952)
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Normcore

Sometime last summer I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”

Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing. Brad’s source for the term was the trend forecasting collective (and fellow artists) K-Hole. They had been using it in a slightly different sense, not to describe a particular look but a general attitude: embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for “difference” or “authenticity.” In fashion, though, this manifests itself in ardently ordinary clothes. Mall clothes. Blank clothes. The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses. (...)

Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore “one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment.” His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) “exhaustingly plain”—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his “look of nothing” is about absolving oneself from fashion, “lest it mark you as a mindless sheep.”

“Fashion has become very overwhelming and popular,” Lewis explains. “Right now a lot of people use fashion as a means to buy rather than discover an identity and they end up obscured and defeated. I'm getting cues from people like Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfeld. It's a very flat look, conspicuously unpretentious, maybe even endearingly awkward. It's a lot of cliché style taboos, but it's not the irony I love, it's rather practical and no-nonsense, which to me, right now, seems sexy. I like the idea that one doesn't need their clothes to make a statement.”

by Fiona Duncan, The Cut |  Read more:

Image: Novembre magazine

The Problem With Easy Technology

In the history of marketing, there’s a classic tale that centers on the humble cake mix. During the nineteen-fifties, there were differences of opinion over how “instant” powdered cake mixes should be, and, in particular, over whether adding an egg ought to be part of the process. The first cake mixes, invented in the nineteen-thirties, merely required water, and some people argued that this approach, the easiest, was best. But others thought bakers would want to do more. Urged on by marketing psychologists, Betty Crocker herself began to instruct housewives to “add water, and two of your own fresh eggs.”

The cake-mix debate may be dated, but its central question remains: Just how demanding do we want our technologies to be? It is a question faced by the designers of nearly every tool, from tablet computers to kitchen appliances. A dominant if often unexamined logic favors making everything as easy as possible. Innovators like Alan Kay and Steve Jobs are celebrated for making previously daunting technologies usable by anyone. It may be hard to argue with easy, yet, as the add-an-egg saga suggests, there’s something deeper going on here.

The choice between demanding and easy technologies may be crucial to what we have called technological evolution. We are, as I argued in my most recent piece in this series, self-evolving. We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.

Just what is a demanding technology? Three elements are defining: it is technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure. By this measure, a piano is a demanding technology, as is a frying pan, a programming language, or a paintbrush. So-called convenience technologies, in contrast—like instant mashed potatoes or automatic transmissions—usually require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.

There is much to be said for the convenience technologies that have remade human society over the past century. They often open up life’s pleasures to a wider range of people (downhill skiing, for example, can be exhausting without lifts). They also distribute technological power more widely: consider that, nowadays, you don’t need special skills to take pretty good photos, or to capture a video of police brutality. Nor should we neglect that promise first made to all Americans in the nineteen-thirties: freedom from a life of drudgery to focus on what we really care about. Life is hard enough; do we need to be churning our own butter? Convenience technologies promised more space in our lives for other things, like thought, reflection, and leisure.

That, at least, is the idea. But, even on its own terms, convenience technology has failed us.

by Tim Wu, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Hannah K. Lee

Here's What We Just Learned About Farting

Each and every day, Americans collectively fart between 2.5 and 6.3 billion times, unloading up to 466.7 million liters of gas into the atmosphere. Approximately 99% of an "anal gas evacuation" is composed of odorless gases, mostly hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and methane, along with smaller amounts of nitrogen and oxygen. The remaining 1% of compounds grant the fart its notorious scent. Hydrogen sulfide is the chief culprit.

A fart's life begins with food. After entering your mouth and traveling down the esophagus, a meal makes its way to the stomach to be digested and, soon after, the small intestine, where nutrients are absorbed. Some dregs, however, survive the acidic gauntlet and continue to the next leg of the journey: the large intestine. There, what began as a meal for you becomes a feast for resident bacteria. They ferment the leftover food, releasing gas in the process, gas which must be expelled.

Flatulence's omnipresence, smell, sound, and social stigma make it a frequently explored topic in popular culture. Men gathered around restaurant feasts of beer, buffalo wings, and nachos perform much of the experimentation and discussion. Scientists' contributions, while noteworthy, pale in comparison. Sure, they've calculated the average volume of a fart (between 5 and 375 millileters), identified two strains of bacteria to make beans "flatulence-free," and documented the causes of extreme flatulence, but they haven't characterized the magnificence and grandeur of a fart's flammability with anywhere near the precision of the common man equipped with a camera and a YouTube account.

With two new papers, one published in the journal Gut in June 2013, and the other just published to Neurogastroenterology and Motility, Spanish researcher Fernando Azpiroz takes the attention off of fart jokes (at least temporarily) and bolsters our scientific knowledge on passing gas.

Most recently, he tested how two different diets affected flatulence. For the longest time, experts have been recommending foods to reduce gassiness, but surprisingly, there actually hasn't been a study conducted that gauges how eating those foods affects the frequency of farting.

Until now, that is.

by Ross Pomeroy, RealClearScience |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock