Recycling 📍
📽️ Videos
Star Wipers Makes the Rags That Clean Up All Your Messes
The two-story cutting room at Star Wipers fills with a soft, mechanical hum. About 20 middle-aged women and a handful of men stand at workstations encircled by 6-foot-tall plastic bins full of used clothes and sheets. In the middle, Amity Bounds, one of the last professional American rag cutters, grabs a pink hoodie with a sparkly print across the front that reads justice love justice. Like her co-workers, she stands 6 inches from a tea-saucer-size blade that spins at chest level inside a metal guard with three small gaps. With a butcher’s precision, Bounds slips the hoodie into one of the gaps, cuts off the hood, then slices the garment twice so it lies flat. Next she cuts off the zipper and tosses it into a waste bin. Then she cuts off and tosses the sparkly print. (“It’s abrasive and no good for wiping anything.”) The remaining sweatshirt offers little resistance; she slices once, twice, three times, transforming it from a garment to rags.
Recycle !
I was listening to the NPR story about what is recyclable and what isn’t at the grocery store. 🍱Honestly I think it’s too much work for the consumer – waste disposal needs to be convenient if you want people to dispose of waste responsibly. ♻ Disposable materials need to be non toxic and recyclable or compostable. I don’t think people should have to spend tons of time scrubbing out containers or figuring out which bin 🚮 to put things in. It should be easy and sustainable.
There really should be more national leadership on waste management, it shouldn’t fall on the consumer. One good thing is that toxic, smelly burning PVC has fallen out of use for disposable packaging, as has glass, which can’t be burned, often breaks as litter, and is difficult to recycle ♻ even if it in theory it’s fully closed loop. ➰
