Good Recycling Quotes

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Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them when they're gone. Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's. Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument you'll ever own. Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. Read the directions, even if you don't follow them. Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out. Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth. But trust me on the sunscreen.
Mary Schmich (Wear Sunscreen: A Primer for Real Life)
I'm a good citizen. I'm a good father. I recycle and I masturbate.
Louis C.K.
The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation)
In the permaculture economy, recycling isn't good enough. It's more about upcycling - because as resources cycle through the system, they should continue to add greater value to the system.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
These are the attributes of Bullshit people; they will...blur your imagination, take your endowments for a piece of debris, make you ridiculous, and most importantly, you got to send them to the recycle bin.
Michael Bassey Johnson
Good brands reflect the histories of the time and the group of people that made them. They can not be copied. They can not be recycled.
Richard Branson (Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur)
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)
Perhaps the most chaotic of Divisions Ke Hui Feng 第一 Ψ visited was Recycling. First, it was mammoth, so big most of her tour was spent aboard a drone. Thousands of Dazhong used the 401 thoroughfares from both east and west, the 427 from the south and the 400 from the north to bring their loads of recyclables from the MASS to the enormous MEG Recycling Centre. The roadways might be in ruins outside the MEG boundaries, jagged fragments of pavement between cavernous potholes and trails made by traders, but within the MEG the wide lanes had been cleared and covered with recycled rubber. They were smooth and divided, one lane in—one lane out, between hundred-metre high foamstone walls on either side. No one from the MASS would ever get into the MEG illegally; at least, that was how it seemed. Only those with proper credentials could enter the massive gates: MASS traders, or trading companies, who specialized as middlemen between the gatherers and the Recycling Centre. Not far outside the gates the MASS traders had rebuilt ancient warehouses in which they received goods, stored, and sorted them, then brought them, usually by land freighters, down the ingress roads to meet MEG approved Di sān overseers and, of course, decontaminated Dazhong who further sorted the goods.
Brian Van Norman (Against the Machine: Evolution)
Plastic should be a high value material... [It] should be in products that last a long time, and at the end of the life, you recycle it. To take oil or natural gas that took millions of years to produce and then to make a disposable product that last minutes or seconds, and then to just discard it--I think that's not a good way of using this resource. (Robert Haley)
Susan Freinkel (Plastic: A Toxic Love Story)
Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn't been discarded. The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he's heading to in June.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
Hours are long. Wages are pitiful. But sweatshops are the symptom, not the cause, of shocking global poverty. Workers go there voluntarily, which means—hard as it is to believe—that whatever their alternatives are, they are worse. They stay there, too; turnover rates of multinational-owned factories are low, because conditions and pay, while bad, are better than those in factories run by local firms. And even a local company is likely to pay better than trying to earn money without a job: running an illegal street stall, working as a prostitute, or combing reeking landfills in cities like Manila to find recyclable goods.
Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist)
No one, good or evil, ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled.
Patricia Daniels Cornwell
But it’s tempting to be Cool Girl. For someone like me, who likes to win, it’s tempting to want to be the girl every guy wants. When I met Nick, I knew immediately that was what he wanted, and for him, I guess I was willing to try. I will accept my portion of blame. The thing is, I was crazy about him at first. I found him perversely exotic, a good ole Missouri boy. He was so damn nice to be around. He teased things out in me that I didn’t know existed: a lightness, a humor, an ease. It was as if he hollowed me out and filled me with feathers. He helped me be Cool Girl – I couldn’t have been Cool Girl with anyone else. I wouldn’t have wanted to. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy some of it: I ate a MoonPie, I walked barefoot, I stopped worrying. I watched dumb movies and ate chemically laced foods. I didn’t think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn’t worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn’t worry about the offensive sexism or the lack of minorities in meaningful roles. I didn’t even worry whether the movie made sense. I didn’t worry about anything that came next. Nothing had consequence, I was living in the moment, and I could feel myself getting shallower and dumber. But also happy.
Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value. And that includes those of us who have been left behind. Maybe they did go to some Christian heaven. But what I’m saying is, we’re good people too. We’re worthwhile people. I’d vouch for every last one of you.
Katie Coyle (Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Vivian Apple, #1))
The experience of childhood sexual abuse leaves some survivors with a high tolerance for pain. Dysfunctional environments require endurance and thick skin. Child survivors sometimes have to commit to sticking things out in order to survive. This pattern of tolerance follows you into adulthood. Instead of using pain as a signal to evaluate and change direction, you may use pain as a signal to try harder. Try harder to please someone. Try harder to control your children. Try harder to be a good friend. Try harder to be successful at a job that you hate. You remain in survival mode that you picked up as a child. Your high tolerance for pain keeps you committed to dysfunctional experiences and relationships that recycle pain from the past. Sometimes, the only way out of this cycle is time in isolation to learn what peace feels like. Sometimes you have to be willing to let go of everything in order to learn how to hold onto anything.
Rosenna Bakari
Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. "You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that!
Mark Cantrell (Citizen Zero)
All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste.
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rainforests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion.
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)
Recycling [10w] Recycling's good for the planet and turning shit into lawyers.
Beryl Dov
It’s just how it is. Not everybody was born to be inherently ‘good’. The world is going to be filled with different characters, different flavours, different levels of respectability and whatnot, and Louis just so happens to be on the lower ranks. He’s not good, he’s not brave, and he’s not out to save anyone except himself. Even fairytales have their villains — it’s a part of life. And it’s always been that way. Louis’ always been a bit harsher around the edges. He certainly isn’t going to be winning any “Humanitarian of the Year” awards, that’s for sure. And he doesn’t mind it so much, being thoroughly unaffected by anything and everything and totally removed from his peers and their very trivial lives. Because he’s not like the rest of them. That’s the thing. They’re all the fucking same. With their money and their uppity attitudes and twattiness and their preconceived notions and recycled sentences that disappear as quickly as they come. The same.
Velvetoscar
for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
Okay, just so we're clear," Piper said, "I'll show you where Jason and I entered the maze, but I'm not doing the stereotypical Native American tracker thing. I don't know tracking. I'm not your guide." We all readily agreed, as one does when delivered an ultimatum by a friend with strong opinions and poison darts. "Also," she continued, "if any of you find the need for spiritual guidance on this quest, I am not here to provide that service. I'm not going to dispense bits of ancient Cherokee wisdom." "Very well," I aid. "Though as a former prophecy god, I enjoy bits of spiritual wisdom." "Then you'll have to ask the satyr," Piper said. Grover cleared his throat. "Um, recycling is good karma?" "There you go," Piper said.
Rick Riordan (The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo, #3))
Recycling is better--I won't write "good"--for the environment. But without economics--without supply and demand of raw materials--recycling is nothing more than a meaningless exercise in glorifying garbage. No doubt it's better than throwing something into an incinerator, and worse than fixing something that can be refurbished. It's what you do if you can't bear to see something landfilled. Placing a box or a can or a bottle in a recycling bin doesn't mean you've recycled anything, and it doesn't make you a better, greener person: it just means you've outsourced your problem. Sometimes that outsourcing is near home; and sometimes it's overseas. But wherever it goes, the global market and demand for raw materials is the ultimate arbiter. Fortunately, if that realization leaves you feeling bad, there's always the alternative: stop buying so much crap in the first place. (269)
Adam Minter (Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade)
For a hoarder, staying clean isn't really about bins and labels; it's about processing items that come into the house. A good organizer can help a hoarder develop methods for sorting mail, for staying on top of recycling, and for making sure donated items get to their destinations... The repetition of bad cleaning skills is usually what got the hoarder into trouble in the first place, so an organizer works on repetition of new, positive cleaning skills.
Matt Paxton (The Secret Lives of Hoarders: True Stories of Tackling Extreme Clutter)
God is the ultimate recycler. We have a good planet here. It has its troubles, yes. We have overpopulation, we have pollution, we have global warming, we have the Thursday night television lineup,” more laughter, “and, of course, we have the infected. We have a lot of problems on Earth, and it might seem like a great idea to hold the Rapture now—why wait? Let’s move on to Heaven, and leave the trials and tribulations of our earthly existence behind us. Let’s get while the getting’s good, and beat the rush. “It might seem like a great idea, but I don’t think it is, for the same reason I don’t think it’s a great idea for a first grader to stand up and say that he’s learned enough, he’s done with school, thanks a lot but he’s got it from here. Compared to God, we’re barely out of kindergarten, and like any good teacher, I don’t believe He intends to let us out of class just because we’re finding the lessons a little difficult. I don’t know whether I believe in the Rapture or not. I believe that if God wants to do it, He will… but I don’t believe that it’s coming in our lifetime. We have too much work left to do right here.
Mira Grant (Feed (Newsflesh, #1))
Every time I think about it, it makes me happy. Do you think I’m a monster?
Rebecca Rowland (White Trash and Recycled Nightmares)
Why do we need so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they good for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are. Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses were necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped back at them at a handsome profit. Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead white. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing. ... The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let's get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all these methods through the millennia, and they're never a permanent solution. No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet -- and evict them. We're buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We're turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?
David Marusek (Mind Over Ship)
Train them to pay attention to their choices. ("Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are good ideas," he would lecture, "but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R- Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You can.")
Elizabeth Gilbert (The Last American Man)
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they recycled their newspapers!
Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)
No one good or evil ceases to exist; life is energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed; it is recycled. Therefore, it is possible that the pure of heart and the purely evil have been here before and will be here again.
Patricia Cornwell (Blow Fly (Kay Scarpetta, #12))
Her moral obligation to keep our hearts entwined. Her preeminent love, smelling like life, in a good way, familiar like an ancient woodcut, a private postcard in the midst of a crowd, in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories, committed to recycling life. repairing the nucleus.
Brian D'Ambrosio (Fresh Oil and Loose Gravel: Road Poetry by Brian D'Ambrosio 1998-2008)
The driver bumped his way through the door and plopped down Caitlyn’s “luggage.” Caitlyn watched Madame Snowe’s eyes go to it, widening as she took it in. Caitlyn’s cheeks heated. Her “luggage” was a Vietnam War-era army green duffel bag, bought for a dollar at a garage sale. Cloud-shaped moisture stains mottled its faded surface, and jagged stitches of black carpet thread sealed a rip on one end, Caitlyn’s clumsy needlework giving the mended hole the look of one of Frankenstein’s scars. “Is that all you brought?” Greta asked. Caitlyn nodded, wishing the floor would swallow her. “Very good. You will have no trouble unpacking, and then you can burn your bag, heh?” “Reduce, reuse, recycle!” Caitlyn said with false cheer. “We’re very big on living green in Oregon. Why buy a new suitcase when someone else’s old duffel bag will do?” “We’ll see that it gets … disposed of properly,
Lisa Cach (Wake Unto Me)
a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
By the latter part of 1861 the War Department had taken over from the states the responsibility for feeding, clothing, and arming Union soldiers. But this process was marred by inefficiency, profiteering, and corruption. To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed the fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called “shoddy.” This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general on items necessary to equip an army of half a million men and to create its support services within a few short months.
James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era)
You can have it all, Luxury and wealth, A lot of friends and a good health, And own everything on earth. However, if you have greed, Jealousy, bitter and want not to see anyone get ahead in life. A dumping site is better than you because not everything found on a dumping site has no value. Plastics can be recycled, And some goods are not too bad to be used again.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
The ancient Epicureans observed that, since we are all made of particles and we observe no sentience after death, fear-based religion is unnecessary and people should focus on living well. After we die, the particles in our bodies return to nature and are recycled into other bodies. There are important ethical repercussions once we accept that we get only one life.
Massimo Pigliucci (How to Live a Good Life: Choosing the Right Philosophy of Life for You)
Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island. She didn’t compartmentalize her beliefs. They were welded into one enormous, seamless belief, compared with which that held by Joan of Arc seemed a mere idle notion.
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
One of the reasons that the area would never be renovated, however, was the council’s insistence that each house had three large plastic trash-bins on wheels, each a bright color: green for the bottles left over from last night’s drunken orgy, red for stolen goods now surplus to requirements, purple for dead bodies and used syringes, all in fact that a modern British urban household needs to disembarrass itself of.
Theodore Dalrymple (Farewell Fear)
The only way to predict the future is to create it. You don't let it happen. You make it happen. How? Stop regretting the past and start learning from it. Let go of guilt by leaning into God's grace. Quit beating yourself up and let the Spirit of God heal your heart. You cannot divorce yourself from the past. You are married to it forever. But God wants to reconcile your past by redeeming it. God is in the recycling business; He makes recycled goods out of wasted lives.
Mark Batterson (All In: You Are One Decision Away From a Totally Different Life)
Time is expensive ! Then why it is free for many ?? Time is a gift ! Then why precious moments are uncherished ?? Time has value ! Then why we wait for the right time until slipps off ?? Time is same to All ! Then why complaint ?? I have no time !!! Time never returns !! Time cannot be recycled !! Time flies !! Use it as a Gift to someone !!!! It brings joy...! It heals...! Handle your Time Today ! It will handle you Tomorrow...!!! GOOD MORNING ALL ! Time makes you healthy & wealthy!!
Asha Bhojani
I’m drunk,” she mutters. “I can already feel the hangover.” “Thraxa’s good at making it feel like a moral obligation to keep pace.” “Ten credits says we have to scrape Sevro off the patio tomorrow.” “Poor Goblin. All spirit, no body mass.” She laughs. “I put him and Victra in the west wing so we can actually get some sleep. Last time, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking a coyote was caught in the air recycler. I swear, at the pace they’re going they’ll be able to single-handedly populate Pluto in a few years.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
In this age of consumer activism, pinpoint marketing, and unlimited and immediate information, we want the impossible: products and producers that will assure us that we are fashionable, and that don’t pollute, harm animals, or contain weird chemicals, that run on alternative energy, pay their workers good salaries, recycle their scraps, use natural ingredients, buy from local suppliers, donate generously to charity, donate in particular to their neighborhoods, and don’t throw their weight around by lobbying. (Or maybe they should lobby for the right causes?)
Fran Hawthorne (Ethical Chic: The Inside Story of the Companies We Think We Love)
You know there are no rules,” and Reggie said, “Really?” because she could think of a lot of rules, like cutting grapes in half and wearing a cap when you went swimming, not to mention separating all the rubbish for the recycling bins. Unlike with Ms. MacDonald, recycling was something that Dr. Hunter was very keen on. She said, “No, not those kinds of things, I mean the way we live our lives. There isn’t a template, a pattern that we’re supposed to follow. There’s no one watching us to see if we’re doing it properly, there is no properly, we just make it up as we go along.
Kate Atkinson (When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3))
I’ve found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight-hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard boxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from the BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the “Single Ladies” dance. I know. Isn’t that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Enjoy it accordingly.
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
Walking to the door, I stare into Johnny Depp’s eyes and my gut sinks. “I’m sorry. You’ve been a good imaginary boyfriend, but I’m a grown-up now. There’s no room in my life for a boyfriend. Not even an imaginary one.” But he just stares at me. “Don’t look at me like that.” But he does. He’s torturing me. I sigh tiredly and rub at my forehead. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be. Please, Johnny. It’s over.” I’m getting a headache. I take my time pulling him down with the utmost care, rolling him up and putting a rubber band around him. I hold him in my hands and walk him over to the recycling bin. I lift the lid and put him in. I slowly close the lid and turn around.
Belle Aurora (Sugar Rush (Friend-Zoned, #3))
I’m sure they won’t,” Cyrus agreed. “But the fate of the free world is at stake here. We can’t put it on hold so you can spend the week with your mommy. Your spring break is now officially Operation Tiger Shark.” “Tiger Shark?” Erica asked, impressed. “I thought the CIA had run out of cool names like that.” This was true. The CIA had been naming operations for several decades, and the good options were running low. Our last mission had been dubbed Pungent Muskrat. “I made an executive decision,” Cyrus replied. “I’m not initiating ops with names like Mangy Weasel or Scrawny Chicken anymore. It’s bad for morale. So I recycled an old mission name. Now go get packing. I want you moving out at oh-two-hundred.” “That’s two in the morning!” I exclaimed. “I know when oh-two-hundred is,” Cyrus snapped.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Goes South)
If I’d had a good week—a real “Christian” week”—I felt close to God. When Sunday came around, I would feel like lifting my head and hands in worship, almost as if to say, “God, here I am . . . I know You’re excited about seeing me this week.” If I’d had a stellar week, I loved being in God’s presence and was sure God was pretty stoked about having me there too. But the opposite was also true. If I hadn’t done a good job at being a real Christian, I felt pretty distant from God. If I’d fallen to some temptations, been a jerk to my wife, dodged some easy opportunities to share Christ, was stingy with my money, forgotten to recycle, kicked the dog, etc. . . . well, on those weeks I felt like God wanted nothing to do with me. When I came to church, I had no desire to lift my soul up to God. I was pretty sure He didn’t want to see me either. I could feel His displeasure—His lack of approval. That’s because I didn’t really understand the gospel. Or, at least I had forgotten it.
J.D. Greear (Gospel: Recovering the Power that Made Christianity Revolutionary)
Two days later, I started my job. My job involved typing friendly letters full of happy lies to dying children. I wasn't allowed to touch my computer keyboard. I had to press the keys with a pair of Q-tips held by tweezers -- one pair of tweezers in each hand. I’m sorry -- that was a metaphor. My job involved using one of those photo booths to take strips of four photographs of myself. The idea was to take one picture good enough to put on a driver’s license, and to be completely satisfied with it, knowing I had infinite retries and all the time in the world, and that I was getting paid for it. I’d take the photos and show them to the boss, and he would help me think of reasons the photos weren't good enough. I’d fill out detailed reports between retakes. We weren't permitted to recycle the outtakes, so I had to scan them, put them on eBay, arrange a sale, and then ship them out to the buyer via FedEx. FedEx came once every three days, at either ten minutes till noon or five minutes after six. I’m sorry -- that was a metaphor, too. My job involved blowing ping-pong balls across long, narrow tables using three-foot-long bendy straws. At the far end of the table was a little wastebasket. My job was to get the ping-pong ball into that wastebasket, using only the bendy straw and my lungs. Touching the straw to the ping-pong ball was grounds for a talking-to. If the ping-pong ball fell off the side of the table, or if it missed the wastebasket, I had to get on my computer and send a formal request to commit suicide to Buddha himself. I would then wait patiently for his reply, which was invariably typed while very stoned, and incredibly forgiving. Every Friday, an hour before Quitting Time, I'd put on a radiation suit. I'd lift the wastebaskets full of ping-pong balls, one at a time, and deposit them into drawstring garbage bags. I'd tie the bags up, stack them all on a pallet, take them down to the incinerator in the basement, and watch them all burn. Then I'd fill out, by hand, a one-page form re: how the flames made me feel. "Sad" was an acceptable response; "Very Sad" was not.
Tim Rogers
Under capitalism, goods can go across borders but human beings cannot. It’s not a weird coincidence, it's a violent political strategy to bar people and privilege some over others. We need to envision a borderless world. Imagining a borderless world is one of the ultimate acts of decolonization because colonialism told us arbitrability there are lines here for you to cross, it is connected to capitalism, exploitation and racism, so challenging capitalism and colonization fundamentally challenges borders. If we are trying to challenge capitalistic structures that are destroying this planet, that means challenging the structures that are continuing to dehumanize human beings and designating people as legal bodies. No one is illegal on stolen lands. If we reject colonization and put ourselves in solidarity with indigenous sovereignty, then we reject that someone can be illegal and discarded. Getting involved in climate justice work involves everything, it’s not as simple as recycling, or buying local. It's everything from deciding not to be a border enforcer in your community, to being in solidarity with complex indigenous movements all over the world. Capitalism individualizes our suffering. It’s an empowering act to move away from individualizing hardship and instead collectivizing our struggles. Go out into your communities and join collectives, collective movements are the way we fight individualism and capitalism--that we are in this together as opposed to doing this on our own.
Lucy Diavolo (No Planet B: The Teen Vogue Guide to the Climate Crisis)
Hey, you’re the one who came here talking about ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘let’s be friends.’ You don’t get to force me into accepting your half-assed apology.” “Well, I wish you a happy new year anyway.” Now I’m the one being sarcastic, and it sure is satisfying. “Have a nice life. Auld lang syne and all that.” “Fine. Bye.” I turn to go. I was so hopeful this morning. I had such stars in my eyes imagining how this was all going to go. God, what a jerk Peter is. Good riddance to him! “Wait a minute.” Hope leaps into my heart like Jamie Fox-Pickle leaps into my bed--swift and unbidden. But I turn back around, like Ugh, what do you want now, so he doesn’t see it. “What’s that you’ve got crumpled up in your pocket?” My hand flies down to my pocket. “That? Oh, it’s nothing. It’s junk mail. It was on the ground by your mailbox. No worries, I’ll recycle it for you.” “Give it to me and I’ll recycle it right now,” he says, holding out his hand. “No, I said I’ll do it.” I reach down to stuff the letter deeper into my coat pocket, and Peter tries to snatch it out of my hand. I twist away from him wildly and hold on tight. He shrugs, and I relax and let out a small sigh of relief, and then he lunges forward and plucks it away from me. I pant, “Give it back, Peter!” Blithely he says, “Tampering with US mail is a federal offense.” Then he looks down at the envelope. “This is to me. From you.” I make a desperate grab for the envelope, and it takes him by surprise. We wrestle for it; I’ve got the corner of it in my grip, but he’s not letting go. “Stop, you’re going to rip it!” he yells, prying it out of my grasp. I try to grab harder, but it’s too late. He has it.
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)” Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of '99: Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh never mind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4:00 pm on some idle Tuesday. Do one thing everyday that scares you. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts; don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss. Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead; sometimes you’re behind; the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself. Remember compliments you receive; forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters; throw away your old bank statements. Stretch. Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you wanna do with your life; the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives; some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees; you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children -- maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40 -- maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either -- your choices are half chance; so are everybody else’s. Enjoy your body; use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own. Dance. even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents; you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they're your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography, in lifestyle, because the older you get the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths: prices will rise; politicians will philander; you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund; maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you're 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia: dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen. Baz Luhrmannk, William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet (1996)
Baz Luhrmann (Romeo & Juliet: The Contemporary Film, The Classic Play)
I am dreaming of happy Pandas. A whole field full of happy Pandas. I am beside myself. I am entirely myself. I am going to set myself on fire. Just you wait and see. I will destroy. You will obey. That's the way it has to be. You'll make the lemonade and I'll ensure that no other lemonade stand stands in our way. We will wear terrific Panda suits. We will have a secret hand shake. We'll stick to the plan. I will destroy. You will obey. That's the way it's going to have to be. Pouting about it won't change anything. Pouting about it will only make you look like an unhappy Panda and we can't be having that. So you should think before you speak. You should consider your options before you decide to become an unhappy Panda. Because you don't want to know what happens to Pandas that aren't happy. So you'd best be careful. Don't worry though. This is just us talking. This is just us coming together at the head. Like Siamese twins, like two happy peas in a pod. You would not like it if we were to do the other routine. There are no happy Pandas to be had in that one. Not at all. No mention of Pandas whatsoever. Just unpleasantness that I would rather avoid. So keep smiling. Always remember to keep smiling. Whatever will be, will be. There is nothing more pathetic than a sore loser. So keep smiling. Everything will take care of itself. Thank goodness. I'm tired now. I am going to go to bed. I don't much feel like being your friend anymore. The good old days are gone. Best to get on board with the depravity of the here and now. The world consumes, the world revolves, the world will someday come to and end. If not by us, then pulverized by the sun. The mysteries of the universe revealed with no time to study the data and reach an outcome, the sun will go out and all creatures great and small will be helpless against the unknowns of life. So why are you so worried? Why don't you go have some drinks, get laid, get back, get something. After everything has been done, been bought, sold, produced, consumed, recycled, re-packaged, and re-sold, you will have gained nothing by floundering about trying to change things that cannot be changed. The little things exist only so that the important ones never get touched upon. That's why you can wear leather shoes and, at the same time, refuse to eat beef. Because we are all, every one of us, ridiculous. And we've elected you our leader. I am going to go lay in bed and wait for the hands of impossibility to come strangle me. I am going to smile at my ceiling and sing the song of our undoing. I will wear my Panda pajamas. I will think of you often when I get to where it is that I'm going. Everything will be fine. Just you wait and see. Just you wait and see.
Matthew Good
If you pretend to hold a political opinion contrary to your real views, what happens inside you? Denying your true self feels bad. But sometimes we feel we have to do it, usually when our survival is in some way threatened. Has this ever happened to you? Bill Mason went to lunch with other folks from the office. They all were adamantly against the new recycling law. Bill thought the law a good one. He kept quiet because he wanted to belong to the group. His economic survival felt tied to the acceptance of the group. Here are some other ways you can deny your true self and weaken your emotional boundaries:
Anne Katherine (Boundaries Where You End And I Begin: How To Recognize And Set Healthy Boundaries)
Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.
Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)
For although like you I could be a spokesman denying rumours from below that predefer to be stifled till the return of the repressed prodigal, I could also be a streetsweeper cleaning up the unmanuring dung dropped from above, which will have to be collected up and sorted out and recycled maybe into serviceable goods, as in psychoanalysis, a genie from a plastic bottle. When the magic cycle of genuine shit will have been replaced by the chemicycle of pure electronic thought ever expanding, more and more unbiodegradable, the heart of the earth will stop, shrivel to a curled up foetus to be ejected lifeless and wither to a moon without even the attracting planet to encircle except the distant sungod dead because unseen unfelt by anyone.
Christine Brooke-Rose (Amalgamemnon)
Charlie Lovett quotes “A good book is like a good friend. It will stay with you for the rest of your life. When you first get to know it, it will give you excitement and adventure, and years later it will provide you with comfort and familiarity. And best of all, you can share it with your children or your grandchildren or anyone you love enough to let into its secrets.” “If you mail a rare stamp it becomes worthless. If you drink a rare bottle of wine, you're left with some recycling. But if you read a rare book it's still there, it's still valuable, and it's achieved the full measure of it's being. A book is to read, whether it's worth five pounds or five thousand pounds” “What he wanted was to find that world-within-the-world where he could be himself by himself.” “The best way to learn about books, ... is to spend time with them, talk about them, defend them.
Charlie Lovett
Sorting Laundry" Folding clothes, I think of folding you into my life. Our king-sized sheets like tablecloths for the banquets of giants, pillowcases, despite so many washings, seems still holding our dreams. Towels patterned orange and green, flowered pink and lavender, gaudy, bought on sale, reserved, we said, for the beach, refusing, even after years, to bleach into respectability. So many shirts and skirts and pants recycling week after week, head over heels recapitulating themselves. All those wrinkles To be smoothed, or else ignored; they're in style. Myriad uncoupled socks which went paired into the foam like those creatures in the ark. And what's shrunk is tough to discard even for Goodwill. In pockets, surprises: forgotten matches, lost screws clinking the drain; well-washed dollars, legal tender for all debts public and private, intact despite agitation; and, gleaming in the maelstrom, one bright dime, broken necklace of good gold you brought from Kuwait, the strangely tailored shirt left by a former lover… If you were to leave me, if I were to fold only my own clothes, the convexes and concaves of my blouses, panties, stockings, bras turned upon themselves, a mountain of unsorted wash could not fill the empty side of the bed.
Elisavietta Ritchie
But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.
Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
Then I get to work hacking the dead guy to pieces. Nice, easily digestible pieces to ship off to a contact who enjoys using them as bait in his arctic fishing expeditions. Weird guy but he pays good green and the cops aren't exactly trolling the arctic nets for missing perps. It's basically recycling. I'm a fucking humanitarian, an eco fucking warrior.
J. Bree (The Butcher of the Bay: Part I (Mounts Bay Saga #1))
Gut health is so vital to our health because the microbiome has many functions: •​Makes and regulates hormones and neurotransmitters •​Absorbs nutrients •​Supports immune function •​Regulates estrogen levels in the body •​Fends off pathogens and parasites, and keeps healthy bacterial balance in check Estrogen and progesterone fuel the good bacteria in our guts. Without adequate levels, we can develop dysbiosis and its wide range of digestive disturbance symptoms, including diarrhea, cramping, constipation, bloating, and indigestion. When the gut microbiome is healthy, the estrobolome produces optimal levels of an enzyme called beta glucuronidase. As the liver metabolizes estrogen, it delivers this conjugated estrogen to the bile for excretion into the gut. A healthy estrobolome minimizes reabsorption of estrogen from the gut, and instead helps you poop it out. However, if you’re constipated and not pooping daily, or have an excess of bacteria producing beta glucuronidase, you can keep recycling estrogen in the gut and become estrogen dominant.
Esther Blum (See ya later, Ovulator!: Mastering Menopause with Nutrition, Hormones, and Self-Advocacy)
The devil’s formula has never changed. HOW TO BE DECEIVED IN 5 EASY STEPS Question what God actually said. Twist what God said. Paint God like the mean bully in the sky who uses fear tactics to keep you from having any fun. Persuade you to trust yourself more than you trust God and his Word. Catapult your life into darkness and chaos. Convince you that darkness and chaos are actually good things. Rinse, recycle, repeat. It’s literally the oldest lie in the book.
Alisa Childers (Live Your Truth and Other Lies: Exposing Popular Deceptions That Make Us Anxious, Exhausted, and Self-Obsessed)
There was rationing of rubber, sugar, gasoline, heating oil, milk, coffee, soap, nylon stockings, and even used cars. The merrily dancing worker/spender bees were gone; thrift, not the “spreading of money,” became the desired norm. The “Consumer’s Pledge,” sung to the tune of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” urged Americans to eschew canned goods in favor of “fresh fruits and vegetables [to] save tons of tin” and to “take the best care of your wearables, and mend them when they tear.” Waste was reviled, and recycling elevated to a patriotic duty.
Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
The 400% Kindness Return: A True Story I firmly believe that every act of kindness ripples out into the world, returning to you multiplied. Here's a story that forever changed how I see generosity. A Mother's Sacrifice: Sarah, a single mother of two young children, knew every penny counted. Collecting aluminum cans with her kids was a small but essential way they scraped by. Trips to the recycling center were hard-earned rewards.
Cecilia Payne Kat Kaelin
I’ve found environmentalism isn’t popular with many Boomers unless it gives them good social value; a round of applause for recycling or for purchasing themselves the latest state-of-the-art electric car. They were born amid one of the largest eras of value-by-resource-extraction, and they’re just not wired to understand scarcity.
I.M. Millennial (A Year in Boomertown: A Memoir)
For recycling,” his dad says, about the plastic bottle Gabe just banked into the white trash can by the back door. “Oh yeah,” Gabe says, casing the interior of the fridge some more, “Indians use every part of the V8, don’t we?
Stephen Graham Jones (The Only Good Indians)
Her moral obligation to keep our hearts entwined. Her preeminent love, smelling like life, in a good way, familiar like an ancient woodcut, a private postcard in the midst of a crowd, in an old T-shirt to soak up the memories, committed to recycling life, repairing the nucleus.
Brian D'Ambrosio
Dharma Master Cheng Yen is a Buddhist nun living in Hualien County, a mountainous region on the east coast of Taiwan. Because the mountains formed barriers to travel, the area has a high proportion of indigenous people, and in the 1960s many people in the area, especially indigenous people, were living in poverty. Although Buddhism is sometimes regarded as promoting a retreat from the world to focus on the inner life, Cheng Yen took the opposite path. In 1966, when Cheng Yen was twenty-nine, she saw an indigenous woman with labor complications whose family had carried her for eight hours from their mountain village to Hualien City. On arriving they were told they would have to pay for the medical treatment she needed. Unable to afford the cost of treatment they had no alternative but to carry her back again. In response, Cheng Yen organized a group of thirty housewives, each of whom put aside a few cents each day to establish a charity fund for needy families. It was called Tzu Chi, which means “Compassionate Relief.” Gradually word spread, and more people joined.6 Cheng Yen began to raise funds for a hospital in Hualien City. The hospital opened in 1986. Since then, Tzu Chi has established six more hospitals. To train some of the local people to work in the hospital, Tzu Chi founded medical and nursing schools. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its medical schools is the attitude shown to corpses that are used for medical purposes, such as teaching anatomy or simulation surgery, or for research. Obtaining corpses for this purpose is normally a problem in Chinese cultures because of a Confucian tradition that the body of a deceased person should be cremated with the body intact. Cheng Yen asked her volunteers to help by willing their bodies to the medical school after their death. In contrast to most medical schools, here the bodies are treated with the utmost respect for the person whose body it was. The students visit the family of the deceased and learn about his or her life. They refer to the deceased as “silent mentors,” place photographs of the living person on the walls of the medical school, and have a shrine to each donor. After the course has concluded and the body has served its purpose, all parts are replaced and the body is sewn up. The medical school then arranges a cremation ceremony in which students and the family take part. Tzu Chi is now a huge organization, with seven million members in Taiwan alone—almost 30 percent of the population—and another three million members associated with chapters in 51 countries. This gives it a vast capacity to help. After a major earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, Tzu Chi rebuilt 51 schools. Since then it has done the same after disasters in other countries, rebuilding 182 schools in 16 countries. Tzu Chi promotes sustainability in everything it does. It has become a major recycler, using its volunteers to gather plastic bottles and other recyclables that are turned into carpets and clothing. In order to promote sustainable living as well as compassion for sentient beings all meals served in Tzu Chi hospitals, schools, universities, and other institutions are vegetarian.
Peter Singer (The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically)
So I lean over carefully, and there, piled a foot high against the sides of the metal bin, are beat-up U.S. quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. Next to the filling bin is another bin, a full bin of coins that fell from the pockets of Americans who had more pressing matters than loose change. According to Jack, an average junked U.S. automobile contains $1.65 in loose change when it’s shredded. If that’s right—and from what I see, I believe that it must be—then the 14 million cars scrapped in good years (good for automobile recyclers, at least) in the United States contain within them more than $20 million in cash just waiting to be recovered. Understandably, Huron Valley isn’t interested in revealing just how much money they recover from U.S. automobiles (they have a deal whereby they return the currency to the U.S. Treasury for a percentage of the original value), but David is willing to note that the coin recovery system has “paid for itself.” It occurs to me that Huron Valley has happened upon the most brilliant of businesses: one whose product is money itself! That is, rather than make something that needs to be marketed for money, Huron Valley just makes money.
Adam Minter (Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade)
I've found my productive-writing-to-screwing-around ratio to be one to seven. So, for every eight hour day of writing, there is only one good productive hour of work being done. The other seven hours are preparing for writing: pacing around the house, collapsing cardboard bxes for recycling, reading the DVD extras pamphlet from BBC Pride & Prejudice, getting snacks lined up for writing, and YouTubing toddlers who learned the 'Single Ladies' dance. I know. Isn't that horrible? So, basically, writing this piece took me the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
¾ cup extra-virgin olive oil (the best you can afford) ½ cup white balsamic vinegar 1 tsp. good-quality mustard ½ tsp. Truvia Salt and pepper to taste Put all the ingredients in a recycled glass jar and shake until blended. You can vary this endlessly by adding minced garlic, fresh or dried herbs, paprika, or whatever rings your bell. The secret is the fine fragrant oil, the white balsamic, and the ratio between them (3:2). Remember that ratio for a perfect vinaigrette every time.
Joan Borysenko (The PlantPlus Diet Solution: Personalized Nutrition for Life)
The problem with trying to be relevant is it makes us copy what culture is already doing. To be relevant, you have to copy what is cool. So we put our mouths on the tailpipe of secular culture in hopes we can recycle some of it and use it for ourselves. The problem with this is that it automatically puts us ten to fifteen years behind culture because rather than setting the precedent, we are copying their systems. This is where we get a huge section of Christian apparel and coffee mugs that simply copy secular logos. My favorite is the shirt with the words “Holy Spirit” printed in the same font and logo as Sprite. Or the one with “A bread crumb and a fish” instead of Abercrombie and Fitch. We call it redeeming, but it’s actually stealing. Making bad art is bad in and of itself, but if we are Christians, this takes on a whole other level of weight. Because we are called to mirror and reflect God, everything we do should give people a proper picture of who he is.
Jefferson Bethke (Jesus > Religion: Why He Is So Much Better Than Trying Harder, Doing More, and Being Good Enough)
As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...] The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint.
Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
Benefits of Going Green The benefits of going green are sometimes not similar to obvious right away. For some people, because of this that going green can be so difficult. They have to see immediate or near immediate results of their green efforts. Unfortunately, some benefits take a while and dedication. Now and dedication can be a good thing about going green in itself. When we become more commited to an environmentally friendly lifestyle we study that lifestyle, the aspects of the life-style that is effective on our behalf and then we study new tips that make the lifestyle much better to create. Other merits of going green can be found especially zones of green lifestyles. Benefits of Going Green at Home Going green at your home is among the few places that green lifestyle benefits are shown quickly or in the next short space of time. The first home benefit that many individuals who go green see, is a drop in utility bills and spending. As people commence to make subtle and full blown changes in the volume of energy they use and the manner they make use of it, the utility bills will drop. This benefit shows itself within the first three billing cycles no matter the effective changes. Spending also reduces. The spending pattern of green lifestyles shows a spending reduction because of switching from disposable items to reusable items, pricey chemical items for DIY natural options and swapping out appliances for higher energy levels effiencent models. Simply not only are the advantages observed in healthier lifestyle options, but on top of that they are seen in healthier financial options. Benefits to Going Green at Work Going green at work is problematic to implement and hard to see immediate results from. However, the avantages of going green in the workplace might be incredibly financially beneficial regarding the business. A clear benefit for businesses going green that is the alleviates clutter and increased organization. By utilizing green techniques in your business such as cloud storage, going paperless and energy usage techniques a business will save many dollars each month. This is a clear benefit, but the additional advantage is increased business. Consumers, businesses and sales professionals love aligning themselves with green businesses. It shows an ecological awareness and connection and it has verified that the green business cares about the approach to life of their total clients. The green business logo and concept means the advantage of a higher customer base and increased sales. Advantages and benefits of Going Green within the Community Community advantages and benefits of going green are the explanation as to why many individuals begin contribution in the green movement. Community efforts do take time and effort to develop. Recycling centers, landscaping endeavors and urban gardening projects take community efforts and dedication. These projects can build wonderful benefits regarding the community. Initially the advantages will show in areas similar to a decrease in waste, increased organic gardening options and recycling endeavors to diminish waste in landfills. Eventually the avantages of going green locally can present a residential district bonding, closer knit communities and environmental benefits which will reach to reduced air pollution. There can also be an increase in local food production and local companies booming which helps the regional economy. There are numerous other benefits of going green. These benefits might be comprehensive and might change the thought of how communities, states and personal lifestyles are changed.
Green Living
Rapamycin works at a fundamental level of cell biology. In the early 1990s, scientists at Novartis’s predecessor, Sandoz, discovered that a rapamycin molecule inhibits a key cellular pathway regulating growth and metabolism. This pathway was eventually dubbed “target of rapamycin,” or TOR, and it’s found in everything from yeast to humans (it’s known as mTOR in mammals). MTOR is like the circuit breaker in a factory: When it’s activated, the cell grows and divides, consuming nutrients and producing proteins. When mTOR is turned down, the “factory” switches into more of a conservation mode, as the cell cleans house and recycles old proteins via a process called autophagy. One reason caloric restriction extends life span in animals, researchers believe, is because it slows down this mTOR pathway and cranks up autophagy. Rapamycin does the same thing, only without the gnawing hunger. “Really what rapamycin is doing is tapping into the body’s systems for dealing with reduced nutrition,” says Brian Kennedy, chief executive officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, Calif. “We’ve evolved over billions of years to be really good at that. When things are good, we’re going to grow and make babies. And when things are not so good, we go into a more stress-resistant mode, so we survive until the next hunt. And it just so happens that stress resistance is good for aging.
Anonymous
If we direct our intention toward doing (when possible) that which seems meaningful right now and noticing that any outcome is enough, we might discover a terribly obvious yet effective strategy for perpetual contentment. Of course to do this—to open ourselves up to changing and living according to the meaning of the present month or moment—is a frightening proposition. If we do, we will surely witness our tastes and whims recycle and transform. We will watch as our personalities modify in subtle ways. And although a small number of passions might stay with us throughout our lives, many more will certainly fall away or be replaced. In other words, to admit that in this second I am not a static being is to admit that I will be something different tomorrow, something unknown a year from now, and possibly something unrecognizable to myself in a decade. This notion is uncomfortable because it forces us to countenance the passing of time, the fading of past selves, our eventual physical death. To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to the end of our story. It’s no wonder that we bury our proverbial talons in the interests, attributes, memories, and tendencies of our past selves and insist that “who we are” has long been established. But what might we become if we accept that, in the grammar of the universe, our nature is verb-like, transitory, ever-moving? We might become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting. It seems natural to hold tightly onto the past. We tend to feel that if don’t have the past, we don’t have anything. Our pasts provide all of the context with which we are equipped to navigate the present. Without our memories and stories, we would indeed be directionless and alone. But it seems that we often overcompensate, desperately clinging to the “good old days”, trying to relive them in our minds, and simultaneously attempting to freeze the present moment, to capture the past before it becomes the past. This latter point can be plainly observed in our modern tendency to photograph even the most mundane of moments and to record hours of video that we’ll never revisit. But if we spend significant amounts of time trying to immortalize and live vicariously through the past, we may relinquish a measure of ability to see the possibilities of the present and future. We may cease to fully capitalize on the surrounding opportunities for novel experience, reflection, and appreciation. We may eschew the potential to become a marvelously different-yet-somehow-still-the-same version of ourselves.
Jordan Bates
I’ve been a passionate adventurer in the solar industry and the sustainability movement my whole life. I try hard to walk my talk. My wife, Nantzy, and I live in an off-the-grid home (see page 70) built of recycled and green materials, powered by solar (passive and active) and hydroelectric energy, with gorgeous biodynamic gardens and fruit orchards that provide most of our food, a 15-acre biodynamic olive orchard, an 8-acre biodynamic vineyard, and a dozen beehives. I’m fortunate to benefit from the fruits of all our collective labors. As the solar industry continues to grow and mature, and as our cultural consciousness evolves, I remain hopeful that, once and for all, we will get things right in
John Schaeffer (Real Goods Solar Living Sourcebook (Mother Earth News Books for Wiser Living))
No. I don’t see it. They can sit and watch dead human bodies on TV screens and feel nothing at all.” “That’s how I saw it at first, but—” “They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier
Matt Haig (The Humans)
(Bookseller puts book that the customer has bought into a paper bag) CUSTOMER: Don’t you have a plastic bag? I’m sick of all this recycling nonsense. It’s not doing any of us any good.
Jen Campbell (Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops)
The Wombles was a hugely popular, animated children's TV series, about a family of diminutive creatures living on Wimbledon Common .... "making good use of the things that [they] find, things that the everyday folks leave behind. " it was essentially a show about recycling ... It became so popular that Merton council, which presides over the borough of Wimbledon, had to deal with a sharp increase in littering, after children desperate to catch a glimpse of these little eco-warriors began willfully discarding rubbish across the common.
Simon Pegg (Nerd Do Well)
Also,” she continued, “if any of you find the need for spiritual guidance on this quest, I am not here to provide that service. I’m not going to dispense bits of ancient Cherokee wisdom.” “Very well,” I said. “Though as a former prophecy god, I enjoy bits of spiritual wisdom.” “Then you’ll have to ask the satyr,” Piper said. Grover cleared his throat. “Um, recycling is good karma?” “There you go,” Piper said. “Everybody good? All aboard.
Rick Riordan (The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo, #3))
I desire to write, be wildly in love, support my son to be who he is, keep my hair thick and shiny, get more tattoos, recite mantras, speak onstage, sleep in linen sheets, drive alone in the wide open spaces of New Mexico for hours, be flexible and productive, be alone at parties, be alone at home, be alone, be liked-loved-respected, keep a temple-tidy house, drive a reliable car, make millions of dollars and give lots away, meditate, get caught in thunderstorms, dance long and hard, wear cashmere, make things that make people want to make things of their own, sleep in, recycle, be One, seek approval, go to weddings (and funerals), order in, worship Rothko paintings, call my grandmother, free spiders, go back to India, stay up too late, get just the right font spacing, listen to Tibetan singing bowls on repeat for hours, watch three documentaries in a row, give all I have to give at any given moment to pretty much anybody, wear perfume every day of the week, shave my head, burn everything I’ve ever written, give insight, give money, give time, find my True Nature, and touch the face of God … Why do I desire what I desire? The answer is fast, clear, and simple: to feel good, of course.
Danielle LaPorte (The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul)
3. ECONYL Currently making a splash in the swimwear world, ECONYL is going to great lengths to help solve the problem of ocean pollution. The regenerated nylon is made from fishing nets and industrial plastic waste dredged up from oceans and landfill around the world, and its inventors claim it can be infinitely recycled without losing quality or purity.
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
In 2013, journalist Lucy Siegle worked out that it would take H&M 12 years to recycle 1,000 tonnes of clothing. That’s about the same volume it churns out in 48 hours.
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
TENCEL™ The brand name for lyocell or modal fibres, TENCEL™ is made from wood pulp, like viscose, and shares the same smooth, slippy properties. But unlike most viscose, it uses trees from sustainably managed plantations and a closed-loop method in which solvents are recycled again and again with as little as 1 per cent wasted. TENCEL™ uses less water to produce than cotton, and is 50 per cent more absorbent too, making it ideal for sportswear or any other potentially sweaty situations.
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
Cupro A vegan alternative to silk with the same luxury feel, Cupro is made from linter, a by-product of cotton that would normally be wasted. Manufactured in a closed-loop system, which means the chemicals and wastewater used in its production are reused again and again, it’s also biodegradable, easily recycled and machine-washable. ‘Dry clean only’ can do one.
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
PS Remember single-fibre fabrics are far easier to recycle than mixed fibres, so it’s better to choose 100 per cent silk, 100 per cent cotton or even 100 per cent polyester over fabric blends. But if you fall in love with a mongrel, that’s okay – just be prepared to love it, keep it, or pass it on in one piece.
Lauren Bravo (How To Break Up With Fast Fashion: A guilt-free guide to changing the way you shop – for good)
I know that you believe in something called Conservation of Matter. That you believe every atom in existence has been present in the universe since the beginning of, well, of everything. That each time something new is made — a new person, a new plant or animal — the atomic structure will contain atoms reused, recycled if you like, and that past life memories and so on may be a result of this. I know that you believe in the messages of your dreams and that you share the dream experiences. That you believe the Earth might have been seeded from elsewhere, either deliberately or by accident, but I don’t know why you think that.’ ‘Panspermia,’ Amy said. It was the first time she had spoken since Ray had sat down. ‘It’s becoming almost respectable now. People like Sir Geoffrey Hoyle are talking about it as a possibility. Did you know, for instance, that about 70 per cent of the Earth’s water had an extraterrestrial origin and there’s evidence of bacteria at least arriving with it?’ Ray shook his head. ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘But how does it fit with Lee?’ ‘Lee was a would-be alchemist,’ Amy said. ‘He believed in transmutation. We all do, it’s part of our religion: that the soul, the essence of life, can be transmuted and purified through meditation and living a good life. Through experience. Lee thought you could push the process faster. Like base metals into gold. Humankind into something else.’ ‘And this transmutation,’ Ray asked. ‘I mean, as part of your belief system, what are you hoping to achieve by it?
Jane A. Adams (The Unwilling Son (Ray Flowers, #2))
Right Mindfulness: Practice keeping to basic requisites of food, clothing, accommodation and medicine. Make things last. Refuse to live with excess. When you go to the shops carry shopping bags from home and do not accept plastic bags. Keep packaging to the minimum. Give to charity shops and buy from them. Be mindful of what you wear in terms of the ethics of shops and clothing factories. Avoid companies that are known to sell goods made in ‘sweat-shops’ in developing countries. Be mindful and informed about all points in this Charter. Right Renunciation: Let go of desire for a bigger or better home. Have a spring clean in your home and see what you can give away or recycle. Support and develop love of minimalism and enjoy the outdoors in all weathers. Avoid shopping malls. Buy only necessities. Avoid impulse shopping. Keep out of debt. Offer dana (in the form of donations, time, and energy) to worthwhile projects and individuals. Right Sustainability: Be well informed about recycling; compost waste food and recycle paper,
Christopher Titmuss (The Political Buddha)
Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are effective for sticking to our goals, whether it’s writing down the exact time and date of when you will get a flu shot or recording the time of your colonoscopy appointment. They increase the odds that people will stick with habits like recycling, studying, going to sleep early, and stopping smoking.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
The theory is that senile cells hang around in bodies, increasing in numbers and effects as we age, and cause a whole lot of destruction. (They actually are formed even when we are infants but are recycled by our bodies and do not start accumulating until we are near age 30.) They contribute to inflammation, and, in what is even more destructive, they secrete substances that turn neighboring healthy cells senescent.4 You know the saying that you’re only as good as the friends you hang around with? These senescent cells are the bad influences.
Michael F. Roizen (The Great Age Reboot: Cracking the Longevity Code for a Younger Tomorrow)
Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.
Stephanie E. Smallwood (Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora)
I just don't get it. How does it happen, that good people let worthless ones into their lives? Why can't we just leave those people who are nothing but trash? We are not a recycling company for God's sake. I wish we had “human quality” scanners on our eyes set by default. Scanners which would reflect all the essence of people standing in front of us. Can you imagine how much easier our lives would be?
Ash Gabrieli (Petrichor)
They can drive a car thirty miles every day and feel good about themselves for recycling a couple of empty jam jars. They can talk about peace being a good thing yet glorify war. They can despise the man who kills his wife in rage but worship the indifferent soldier who drops a bomb killing a hundred children.
Matt Haig (The Humans)
So now what happens?" I asked, snuggling closer into Steele's warmth. Archer shrugged, leaning against the side of the car. "We wait until the pigs do their thing so we can see with our own eyes that it's all gone. Then we dispose of the plastic wrapping at a recycling facility a few miles from here and head home again." I couldn't fight my grin. "You guys recycle the plastic you use to transport bodies?" Archer gave me a serious look. "If we don't take active steps toward a greener planet, we'll fuck it right up." "Worse than it already is," Kody added, peering over the fence to check the pigs’ progress. "I think we're good to go." He pulled out his phone, using the flashlight app to check the pen more thoroughly. "Yep, all done." "That was fast," I murmured, following as they all piled back into the car. Archer shot me a smirk. "Hungry pigs today.
Tate James (Fake (Madison Kate, #3))
as a former prophecy god, I enjoy bits of spiritual wisdom.” “Then you’ll have to ask the satyr,” Piper said. Grover cleared his throat. “Um, recycling is good karma?” “There you go,
Rick Riordan (The Burning Maze (The Trials of Apollo, #3))
Autophagy is essential to life. If it shuts down completely, the organism dies. Imagine if you stopped taking out the garbage (or the recycling); your house would soon become uninhabitable. Except instead of trash bags, this cellular cleanup is carried out by specialized organelles called lysosomes, which package up the old proteins and other detritus, including pathogens, and grind them down (via enzymes) for reuse. In addition, the lysosomes also break up and destroy things called aggregates, which are clumps of damaged proteins that accumulate over time. Protein aggregates have been implicated in diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, so getting rid of them is good; impaired autophagy has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease–related pathology and also to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
While Germany applied wage restraint, fiscal austerity and saving, southern Europe embarked on an aggressive expansion, largely financed through the recycling of the German external current account surplus by German banks. When the tide turned in 2008 and German financing was abruptly withdrawn, the debtor countries of the periphery went into recession and fiscal difficulty. By this time, Germany had already consolidated its position in emerging markets as an exporter of high-tech goods, allowing her to ride the Global Financial Crisis with barely a scratch.
Miguel I. Purroy (Germany and the Euro Crisis: A Failed Hegemony)
Some special companies see trust as a public good (like clean air and water), and customers return the trust. One company in which I personally have a lot of faith is Timberland, the maker of outdoor clothing. I once attended a talk by Jeff Swartz, the CEO, in which he detailed many of the ways that Timberland is trying to reduce CO2 emissions, recycle, use sustainable materials, and treat its employees fairly. At the end of Jeff’s talk, another CEO asked him, “What are the returns on these investments?” Jeff answered that he has been trying to find an economic return for these actions but that he had not yet found it in the data. He further added that it would be nice if being environmentally and socially responsible was also financially rewarding but that he didn’t really feel it was necessary. He simply wanted to make sure that his company followed the moral principles he wanted his kids to live by. After hearing this, I went and bought my first pair of Timberland shoes.
Dan Ariely (A Taste of Irrationality: Sample chapters from Predictably Irrational and Upside of Irrationality)
Evidence for climate change has been available for some time, so why has this 'urgent global response' (in Stern's words) not occurred? The IPCC (2015) have argued that we could limit the effects of climate change by changing our individual and collective behaviour. We could fly less, eat less meat, use public transport, cycle or walk, recycle, choose more low carbon products, have shorter showers, waste less food or reduce home energy use. There has been some significant change but nothing like the 'global response' required to ameliorate the further deleterious effects of climate change. We are reminded here of a somewhat depressing statistic reported by a leading multinational, Unilever, in their 'sustainable Living Plan.' In 2013, they outlined how they were going to halve the greenhouse gas impact of their products across the life cycle by 2020. To achieve this goal, they reduced greenhouse gas emissions from their manufacturing chain. They opted for more environmentally friendly sourcing of raw materials, doubled their use of renewable energy and produced concentrated liquids and powders. They reduced greenhouse gas emissions from transport and greenhouse gas emissions from refrigeration. They also restricted employee travel. The result of all these initiatives was that their 'greenhouse gas footprint impact per consumer... increased by around 5% since 2010.' They concluded, 'We have made good progress in those areas under our control but ... the big challenges are those areas not under direct control like... consumer behaviour ' (2013:16; emphasis added). It seems that consumers are not 'getting the message.' They are not opting for the low carbon alternatives in the way envisaged; they are not changing the length of their showers (to reduce energy and water consumption); they are not breaking their high-carbon habits. The question is why?
Geoffrey Beattie (The Psychology of Climate Change (The Psychology of Everything))
When I ask consumers (as I frequently do) what they do with their ‘old’ clothes – I use the term ‘old’ with caution – their answers are upbeat and cheerily green: ‘I recycle them,’ or ‘I donate them to a charity.’ We have a tendency to overvalue or talk up the items that we give away: people will remark on how they’ve given up a ‘very good skirt’ or a ‘top quality piece’. They appear to expect to be walking down the street the following Thursday and to see their skirt or jacket occupying pride of place on the central mannequin in the window of their local charity shop. This is highly unlikely: only around 10 per cent412 of UK donations, the ‘cream’, will actually be retailed through the shops (these make up the most valuable donations to the charities). Most are likely to be found somewhere on a 10,000-mile journey. We are back to salaula.
Lucy Siegle (To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World?)