Direct Action

Another Way to Deal with Butts

- Adam Clare

Cigarette butts are usually aren’t disposed of properly (why do smokers think it’s OK to litter?) and this is a problem for many cities. Earlier this year we looked at the Pick Up Your Butts campaign and now a new strategy of dealing with butts has taken hold.

A restaurant in Toronto has put up special bins in their neighbourhood to collect cigarette butts. This waste will then be converted into something useful: pallets.

Café staff will be in charge of emptying the boxes and shipping the butts to a TerraCycle plant in north Toronto, where they’ll be shredded and separated into organic and inorganic waste. The organic material will be turned into non-agricultural compost. The rest will be made into plastic lumber and shipping pallets, which could then be sold to home renovation stores and builders.

Layton said that’s a much better solution than letting tons of cigarette butts end up in a landfill or wash away into sewers and empty into Lake Ontario.

The cigarette stubs “are made of plastic and they’re not breaking down — and what does break down is toxic,” he told the Star. “It’s poisoning our own water supply, which is pretty crazy.”

Read more.

Boycott Bottled Water for a Better World

- Adam Clare

Bottle water is a sham and you all know this. The problem is that a lot of people don’t and that our society permits these individuals to continue their unwarranted consumption.

Water is the oil of the 21st century in terms of politics and conflict. It’s best not to make the situation worse by engaging in a system which denies people access to their local water while massive corporations make huge profits from water.

What’s more is that the water from your taps (in the developed world at least) is cleaner and safer than bottled water.

The reason you should boycott bottled water is because it enables a bullshit, backwards vision for society.

Boycotting bottled water means you support the idea that public access to clean, safe water is not only a basic human right, but that it’s a goddamn technological triumph worth protecting. It means you believe that ensuring public access to this resource is the only way to guarantee it will be around in a few more years.

Clean, safe drinking water that flows freely out of our faucets is a feat of engineering that humans have been been perfecting for two millennia. It is a cornerstone of civilization. It is what our cities are built upon. And over the years the scientists and hydrologists and technicians who help get water to our houses have also become our environmental stewards, our infrastructural watchdogs, our urban visionaries. Drinking the water these people supply to our homes is the best possible way to protect future access to water worldwide.

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The Humanitarian Douchery That is Voluntourism

- Adam Clare

“Voluntourism” is the growing trend of rich people using their vacations to go to poor places where they think they can help. A good chunk of the time these voluntourists are actually causing harm. This may seem counterintuitive but we’ve seen this before in the past with programs of the ‘adopt a child’ sort (you know, a nickel a day will save one kid).

The campaign to End Humanitarian Douchery wants to change that. If you’re not careful you’ll be engaging in modern neocolonial offensiveness.

Guan and MacNeill have even compiled a list of “The Seven Sins of Humanitarian Douchery” to help people recognize douchebags in action. Signs include:

  • Research slothery: A lack of research could lead to supporting unethical organizations or performing work a host community doesn’t even need.
  • Lusting for likes: When people flaunt their experiences on social media as “heroes” who are “saving” the third world.
  • Fishing for envy: When volunteers go on trips to make themselves look good and others jealous.

“You can tell that this is a trend that’s growing,” Guan says. “I’ve seen so many of my peers jet off to developing countries and try to save the world — and it’s great — but the thing is, even when you go in with best intentions, you can do more harm than good.”

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Pick Up Your Butts

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

In Canada, like elsewhere with snow, when the spring thaw comes it reveals plants and it also reveals something gross: discarded cigarette butts. Everyone already knows that smoking kills, but some people may not know the damage done by butts.

Butt Blitz has set out to do two things: raise awareness of the harm butts case and clean them up. They are asking you to help out this weekend!

Cigarette butt litter is a growing problem everywhere. We need to raise awareness about the implications this has for the health of our ecosystems, wildlife, and our own health. The first step to reversing this problem is picking up the butts that are already on the ground, from there we can spread awareness and come up with solutions that will stop cigarette butts from being littered in the future. Did you know ONE cigarette butt PER LITRE of water can KILL the fish in a stream? (Slaughter et al). When did we get so careless? It’s time to make a change.

Check it out!

Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center create Anti-Environmental Archives

- Adam Clare

Some nifty news out of Greenpeace’s PolluterWatch program and the Climate Investigations Centre. They have release an archive of documents that show the deceitful tactics used by climate change deniers and their ilk. A new tool to fight against people who deny the future.

In the spirit of the Tobacco Archives and Chemical Industry Archives, the new Anti-Environmental Archives provide historic reference material on organizations and people who have worked to counter the environmental movement and stop government action to protect the environment on issues from endangered species to property rights, and from pesticides to global warming.

 

This document archive provides researchers and journalists with thousands of documents posted for the first time on the web.  In total, there are over 3,500 documents, comprising some 27,000 pages, covering over 300 organizations and people.

 

The front page of the Anti-Environmental Archives features the entire list of organizations and people covered. Subpages contain search features and call out important individuals, issues, anti-environmental organizations, trade associations, and front groups.

 

These files were curated by the Greenpeace Research Department over the past 15 years. Most of the material was collected in the 1990s by CLEAR (Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy Research) which was part of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) at the time.

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