Zero Waste Quotes

Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.

refuse what you do not need; reduce what you do need; reuse what you consume; recycle what you cannot refuse, reduce, or reuse; and rot (compost) the rest.

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste... [Gravity's Rainbow, p. 590]

If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.

What a waste, using her talents this way. Like a brain surgeon clubbing seals for a living.

ready to waste a lifetime waiting to be carried by the same winds again

While farmers contribute to our survival, let us also do our part by showing them respect in form of not wasting food.

What are you doing here?" He takes a deep breath. "I came for you." "And how on EARTH did you know I was up here?" "I saw you." He pauses. "I came to make another wish,and I was standing on Point Zero when I saw you enter the tower. I called your name,and you looked around,but you didn't see me." "So you decided to just...come up?" I'm doubtful,despite the evidence in front of me.It must have taken superhuman strength for him to make it past the first flight of stairs alone. "I had to.I couldn't wait for you to come down,I couldn't wait any longer. I had to see you now.I have to know-" He breaks off,and my pulse races. What what what? "Why did you lie to me?" The question startles me.Not what I was expecting.Nor hoping.He's still on the ground,but he stares up at me.His brown eyes are huge and heartbroken. I'm confused. "I'm sorry, I don't know what-" "November.At the creperie. I asked you if we'd talked about anything strange that night I was drunk in your room.If I had said anything about our relationship,or my relationship with Ellie.And you said no." Oh my God. "How did you know?" "Josh told me." "When?" "November." I'm stunned. "I...I..." My throat is dry. "If you'd seen the look on your face that day.In the restaurant. How could I possibly tell you? With your mother-" "But if you had,I wouldn't have wasted all of these months.I thought you were turning me down.I thought you weren't interested." "But you were drunk! You had a girlfriend! What was I supposed to do? God,St. Clair,I didn't even know if you meant it." "Of course I meant it." He stands,and his legs falter. "Careful!" Step.Step.Step. He toddles toward me,and I reach for his hand to guide him.We're so close to the edge. He sits next to me and grips my hand harder. "I meant it,Anna.I mean it." "I don't under-" He's exasperated. "I'm saying I'm in love with you! I've been in love with you this whole bleeding year!" My mind spins. "But Ellie-" "I cheated on her every day.In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn't have,again and again. She was nothing compared to you.I've never felt this way about anybody before-" "But-" "The first day of school." He scoots closer. "We weren't physics partners by accident.I saw Professeur Wakefield assigning lab partners based on where people were sitting,so I leaned forward to borrow a pencil from you at just the right moment so he'd think we were next to each other.Anna,I wanted to be your partner the first day." "But..." I can't think straight. "I doubt you love poetry! 'I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly,between the shadow and the soul.'" I blink at him. "Neruda.I starred the passage.God," he moans. "Why didn't you open it?" "Because you said it was for school." "I said you were beautiful.I slept in your bed!" "You never mave a move! You had a girlfriend!" "No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was,I wouldn't actually cheat on her. But I thought you'd know.With me being there,I thought you'd know." We're going in circles. "How could I know if you never said anything?" "How could I know if you never said anyting?" "You had Ellie!" "You had Toph! And Dave!

what these men do respect are women who have a zero tolerance policy for time wasting and being manipulated.

We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly.

We can't achieve zero waste without reuse.

Pen: Today, the most reusable pen is a fountain model fitted with a piston or converter and refilled with bottled ink. The most sustainable pen is the one that already exists. Search eBay for secondhand pieces.

People have been on earth in our present form for only about 100,000 years, and in so many ways we’re still ironing out our kinks. These turtles we’ve been traveling with, they outrank us in longevity, having earned three more zeros than we. They’ve got one hundred million years of success on their resume, and they’ve learned something about how to survive in the world. And this, I think, is part of it: they have settled upon peaceful career paths, with a stable rhythm. If humans could survive another one hundred million years, I expect we would no longer find ourselves riding bulls. It’s not so much that I think animals have rights; it’s more that I believe humans have hearts and minds- though I’ve yet to see consistent, convincing proof of either. Turtles may seem to lack sense, but they don’t do senseless things. They’re not terribly energetic, yet they do not waste energy… turtles cannot consider what might happen yet nothing turtles do threatens anyone’s future. Turtles don’t think about the next generation, but they risk and provide all they can to ensure that there will be one. Meanwhile, we profess to love our own offspring above all else, yet above all else it is they from whom we daily steal. We cannot learn to be more like turtles, but from turtles we could learn to be more human. That is the wisdom carried within one hundred million years of survival. What turtles could learn from us, I can’t quite imagine.

Diamonds Are Not This Girl's Best Friend Diamonds are not my best friend but they used to be. It wasn't just jewelry but all the things I bought to lift me up, prove my worth, and demonstrate my love. As I became more and more me and started experiencing the world from this new stuff-less place, I realized that diamonds are not this girl's best friend. My best friend is a magical rooftop sunrise. My best friend is the ocean. My best friend is a hike in the mountains. My best friend is a peaceful afternoon. My best friend is a really good book. My best friend is laughter. My best friend is seeing the world. My best friend is time with people I love. Diamonds have nothing on my best friends.

People summon divine energy through love and trust but waste it immediately in hate and doubt. A devotee is someone who slowly cuts this wastage to zero.

Your biggest fear ought to be wasting your life and time, not "Am I going to have x number of dollars when I'm 80?

War -- is a last ditch moral nightmare. People begin worshiping a mysterious slouching beast, following after, bowing down, offering gifts, making much of zero; and worse. Love of death, idolatry, fear of life; that roughshod trek of war and warmakers throughout the world, hand in hand with death. Long live death! They wouldn't worship it if they weren't in love. Or if they weren't in fear. The second being a state of devouring, at least, as the first. I think the clue is the second masquerading as the first -- just as the beast is the ape of god; to do some thing successfully, you have to, above all, hide what your up to. In this way fear can ape love. Death can demand a tribute owed to life, the ape can play God. Such reflections are of course ill at ease by some: those to whom the state is a given, the church is a given, Western culture a given, war a given, consumerism a given, paying taxes a given. All the neat slots of existence into which one fits, birth to death and every point in between. Nothing to be created, no one to be responsible to, nothing to risk, no objections to lodge. Life is a mechanical horizontal sidewalk, of the kind you sometimes ride at airports between buildings. One is carried along, a zonked spectator... Every nation-state tends towards the imperial -- that is the point. Through banks, armies, secret police propaganda courts and jails, treaties, taxes, laws and orders, myths of civil obedience, assumptions of civic virtue at the top. Still it should be said of the political left, we expect something better. And correctly. We put more trust in those who show a measure of compassion, who denounce the hideous social arrangements that make war inevitable and human desire omnipresent; which fosters corporate selfishness, panders to appetites and disorder, waste the earth.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad—a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros,

Tatsächlich besteht eine direkte Abhängigkeit zwischen Wohlstand und Müllaufkommen. Je reicher eine Gesellschaft, desto mehr Müll produziert sie – und desto besser lernt sie, ihn zu verstecken.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack.

What do you think you know about me!? This is all I am! I have high hopes even though I'm powerless; I have all these dreams even though I'm dumb; I keep trying even though I can't do anything! I hate myself! I'm always nothing but talk! I'm worse than useless, but I'm still a world-class complainer! Who the hell do I think I am?! How dare I live such a shameful life this long?! I'm empty. I've got nothing inside me. Until I came here, until I met all of you, do you know what I was doing?! I wasn't doing anything. I didn't do anything... I didn't do one little thing! With all that time to do it! With all that freedom! I should have done lots of stuff, but I didn't do any of it! And this is the result! The man I am now is the result! I'm powerless, talentless, and all of it, all of it, is because of my rotten personality! I want to achieve something when I haven't done anything before--conceited doesn't even begin to describe it... I was lazy and imposed on other people; I wasted my whole life away; I killed you. I thought I could live here, but not a single thing's changed about me. That old man saw right through me, didn't he? During those days of training, the old man had spoken of those who wield the sword, but he had shaken his head and said, 'There is little point lecturing someone about what it takes to become stronger when he has already abandoned the choice to do so.' It's not like I really thought I'd get stronger or I'd be able to do anything... I just went through the motions. I was just a poser trying to justify myself. I wanted to say, I couldn't help it! I wanted other people to say it couldn't be helped! That's all it was! That's the only reason I pretended to put myself on the line like that! Even when you were helping me study, I was just putting on a show to cover up the embarrassment! I'm a small, underhanded, filthy guy down to the bone, always worrying about what other people think of me, and none of that's ever changed!

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. —Aldo Leopold, in his book A Sand County Almanac

First, focus on foods that offer nutrition. If a particular food offers no nutrition, refrain from including it in your meals. An example is white rice. It has zero nutritional value. So avoid wasting time preparing it.

Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.

Once everyone can enrich their souls for free, government subsidies for enrichment forfeit their rationale. To object, 'But most people don't use the Internet for spiritual enrichment' is actually a damaging admission that eager students are few and far between. Subsidized education's real aim isn't to make ideas and culture accessible to anyone who's interested, but to make them mandatory for everyone who *isn't* interested . . . The rise of the Internet has two unsettling lessons . . . First: the humanist case for education subsidies is flimsy today because the Internet makes enlightenment practically free. Second: the humanist case for education subsidies was flimsy all along because the Internet proves low consumption of ideas and culture stems from apathy, not poverty or inconvenience. Behold: when the price of enlightenment drops to zero, remains embarrassingly scarce.

It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.

Be a woman of substance. That’s what you are and should always strive to be. You are neither a second rate citizen, nor a toy for the vultures. You are a representative of the whole human race. You have zero deficiency and should never waste your time trying to be equal, even, with men. There is a reason a country or continent is referred to as her and not him.

A smartphone allows you to choose your own adventure. So be a hero, not a villain. Don’t be your own worst enemy. No wasting time… No training your brain not to remember things, losing the skills necessary to read a fucking map… No trolling. Don’t make snarky remarks on comment threads or internet forums or social media. Just do good. Help others. If you’re out in the world and bored, which you shouldn’t be anyway, but still, if you feel like you need to get on your phone, be useful. Answer questions, offer advice. Look only for question marks when you scroll through your Facebook news feed. Log on to Reddit and comment on something you have firsthand knowledge of and real insight about. Give far more than you take. Never text and walk. And stop googling things as you think of them. Instead, write it down and look it up later. If you can’t remember to do this, then you didn’t deserve to know the answer. This will keep your mind active, agile; clear to really think. It will keep you sharp. Using the internet for information or socialization should be an activity, something you sit down for—it should not be used while out and about. You should not refuse the beauty of what’s in front of you for mere pixels of red, green, blue on a 3.5-inch screen. Otherwise, you’ll lose yourself. An abyss of ones and zeros will swallow you whole. Don’t be a dumb motherfucker with a smartass phone.

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference...

Commerce is considered by classical economists to be a positive-sum game. The act of selling and buying always benefits both the seller and the buyer. It is unfortunate that popular culture has propagated the Marxist myth that one person gains in business at the expense of another, that capitalism is evil because it is a zero-sum game—somebody wins while someone else loses. When liberals make the argument that capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are either speaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous to protect their interests. We have not had true free-market capitalism in this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economic successes in this nation’s history, it has been those times when people have done something outside of the government’s involvement. Every time the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos, waste, and corruption.

THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE EVOLUTIONa It seems that eight heavyweight Evolutionistsb—linguists, biologists, anthropologists, and computer scientists—had published an article announcing they were giving up, throwing in the towel, folding, crapping out when it came to the question of where speech—language—comes from and how it works. “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever,” they concluded. Not only that, they sounded ready to abandon all hope of ever finding the answer. Oh, we’ll keep trying, they said gamely…but we’ll have to start from zero again. One of the eight was the biggest name in the history of linguistics, Noam Chomsky. “In the last 40 years,” he and the other seven were saying, “there has been an explosion of research on this problem,” and all it had produced was a colossal waste of time by some of the greatest minds in academia. Now, that was odd…I had never heard of a group of experts coming together to announce what abject failures they were…

One night, we somehow ended up discussing Wile E. Coyote as a paradigm for obsession. She argued that Wile E., with all the resources he wasted on gadgets, could have been living high on the hog. “He was so skinny,” she complained after she had Googled him and watched a few skits on YouTube. “Poor thing, he looks like a size-zero model.” “But, Love, no other food would have satisfied him. He only wanted the Road Runner. He was obsessed with her. Obsession does not allow for satisfaction. You can never really eat your cake and have it too, which is the only way you can satisfy your obsession by devouring and yet having the object of your fascination,” I said from experience. “But he really didn't want to catch it,” she argued. “What do you mean?” “It was the chase he wanted. To eat the Road Runner would have ended that, ended his only reason for living. He isn't really that inept. He really didn't want to catch it.” “I guess not,” I said, thoughtfully. “It's the journey not the resolution that matters. If he caught her, he would lie down next to her and die too.

The reason [James Clerk] Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that it does take resources to perform an act of discrimination. We imagine computation is free, but it never is. The very act of choosing which particle is cold or hot itself becomes an energy drain and a source of waste heat. The principle is also known as "no free lunch." We do our best to implement Maxwell's Demon whenever we manipulate reality with our technologies, but we can never do so perfectly; we certainly can't get ahead of the game, which is known as entropy. All the air conditioners in a city emit heat that makes the city hotter overall. While you can implement what seems to be a Maxwell's Demon if you don't look too far or too closely, in the big picture you always lose more than you gain. Every bit in a computer is a wannabe Maxwell's Demon, separating the state of "one" from the state of "zero" for a while, at a cost. A computer on a network can also act like a wannabe demon if it tries to sort data from networked people into one or the other side of some imaginary door, while pretending there is no cost or risk involved.

OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

A common problem plagues people who try to design institutions without accounting for hidden motives. First they identify the key goals that the institution “should” achieve. Then they search for a design that best achieves these goals, given all the constraints that the institution must deal with. This task can be challenging enough, but even when the designers apparently succeed, they’re frequently puzzled and frustrated when others show little interest in adopting their solution. Often this is because they mistook professed motives for real motives, and thus solved the wrong problems. Savvy institution designers must therefore identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve. Designers can then search for arrangements that actually achieve the deeper goals while also serving the surface goals—or at least giving the appearance of doing so. Unsurprisingly, this is a much harder design problem. But if we can learn to do it well, our solutions will less often meet the fate of puzzling disinterest. We should take a similar approach when reforming a preexisting institution by first asking ourselves, “What are this institution’s hidden functions, and how important are they?” Take education, for example. We may wish for schools that focus more on teaching than on testing. And yet, some amount of testing is vital to the economy, since employers need to know which workers to hire. So if we tried to cut too much from school’s testing function, we could be blindsided by resistance we don’t understand—because those who resist may not tell us the real reasons for their opposition. It’s only by understanding where the resistance is coming from that we have any hope of overcoming it. Not all hidden institutional functions are worth facilitating, however. Some involve quite wasteful signaling expenditures, and we might be better off if these institutions performed only their official, stated functions. Take medicine, for example. To the extent that we use medical spending to show how much we care (and are cared for), there are very few positive externalities. The caring function is mostly competitive and zero-sum, and—perhaps surprisingly—we could therefore improve collective welfare by taxing extraneous medical spending, or at least refusing to subsidize it. Don’t expect any politician to start pushing for healthcare taxes or cutbacks, of course, because for lawmakers, as for laypeople, the caring signals are what makes medicine so attractive. These kinds of hidden incentives, alongside traditional vested interests, are what often make large institutions so hard to reform. Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8

Many and various are the New York tales that are told of professor Sidney Morgenbesser. During a conference of linguistic philosophers at Columbia University, he interrupted the pompous J. L. Austin, who was saying that while many double negatives express a positive—as in “not unattractive”—there is no example in English of a double positive expressing a negative. Morgenbesser’s interjection took the form of the two words “Yeah, yeah.” Or it could have been “Yeah, right.” On another occasion, he put his pipe in his mouth as he was ascending the subway steps. A policeman approached and told him that there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser explained—pointed out might be a better term—that he was leaving the subway, not entering it, and had not yet lit up. The cop repeated his injunction. Morgenbesser reiterated his observation. After a few such exchanges, the cop saw he was beaten and fell back on the oldest standby of enfeebled authority: “If I let you do it, I’d have to let everyone do it.” To this the old philosopher replied, “Who do you think you are—Kant?” His last word was misconstrued, and the whole question of the categorical imperative had to be hashed out down at the precinct house. Morgenbesser walked. That, in my opinion, is the way that New York is supposed to be. Irony and a bit of sass, combined with a pugnacious independence, should always stand a chance against bovine officials who have barely learned to memorize such demanding mantras as “zero tolerance” and “no exceptions.” Today, the professor would be stopped, insulted, ticketed, and told that if he didn’t like it he could waste a day in court, or several days dealing with the bureaucracy, or both.

He reached a finger toward the Seiko, which now proclaimed the time to be ninety-one minutes past seven--A.M. and P.M.--and pulled it back just before touching the glass above the liquid crystal display. "Tell me, dear boy--is this 'watch' of yours boobyrigged?" "Huh? Oh! No. No, it's not boobyrigged." Jake touched his own finger to the face of the watch. "That means nothing, if it's set to the frequency of your own body," the Tick-Tock Man said. He spoke in the sharp, scornful tone Jake's father used when he didn't want people to figure out that he didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Tick-Tock glanced briefly at Brandon, and Jake saw him weigh the pros and cons of making the bowlegged man his designated toucher. Then he dismissed the notion and looked back into Jake's eyes. "If this thing gives me a shock, my little friend, you're going to be choking to death on your own sweetmeats in thirty seconds." Jake swallowed hard but said nothing. The Tick-Tock Man reached out his finger again, and this time allowed it to settle on the face of the Seiko. The moment that it did, all the numbers went to zeros and then began to count upward again. Tick-Tock's eyes had narrowed in a grimace of potential pain as he touched the face of the watch. Now their corners crinkled in the first genuine smile Jake had seen from him. He thought it was partly pleasure at his own courage but mostly simple wonder and interest. "May I have it?" he asked Jake silkily. "As a gesture of your goodwill, shall we say? I am something of a clock fancier, my dear young cully--so I am." "Be my guest." Jake stripped the watch off his arm at once and dropped in onto the Tick-Tock Man's large waiting palm.

The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. The perennial conservative concern about high taxes supporting a nonworking “underclass” has entirely legitimate roots in our evolutionary past and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Early hominids lived a precarious existence where freeloaders were a direct threat to survival, and so they developed an exceedingly acute sense of whether they were being taken advantage of by members of their own group. But by the same token, one of the hallmarks of early human society was the emergence of a culture of compassion that cared for the ill, the elderly, the wounded, and the unlucky. In today’s terms, that is a common liberal concern that also has to be taken into account. Those two driving forces have coexisted for hundreds of thousands of years in human society and have been duly codified in this country as a two-party political system. The eternal argument over so-called entitlement programs—and, more broadly, over liberal and conservative thought—will never be resolved because each side represents an ancient and absolutely essential component of our evolutionary past. So how do you unify a secure, wealthy country that has sunk into a zero-sum political game with itself? How do you make veterans feel that they are returning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place? I put that question to Rachel Yehuda of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Yehuda has seen, up close, the effect of such antisocial divisions on traumatized vets. “If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different—you underscore your shared humanity,” she told me. “I’m appalled by how much people focus on differences. Why are you focusing on how different you are from one another, and not on the things that unite us?” The United States is so powerful that the only country capable of destroying her might be the United States herself, which means that the ultimate terrorist strategy would be to just leave the country alone. That way, America’s ugliest partisan tendencies could emerge unimpeded by the unifying effects of war. The ultimate betrayal of tribe isn’t acting competitively—that should be encouraged—but predicating your power on the excommunication of others from the group. That is exactly what politicians of both parties try to do when they spew venomous rhetoric about their rivals. That is exactly what media figures do when they go beyond criticism of their fellow citizens and openly revile them. Reviling people you share a combat outpost with is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and public figures who imagine their nation isn’t, potentially, one huge combat outpost are deluding themselves.

Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers. The tiny hairs on my arm stand up on end. I swiftly render her words into English: “He’s going to kill me.” Not missing a beat, the dispatcher asks, “Where is he now?” “Outside. I saw him through the window,” I state, after listening to the Spanish version. I’m trying to stay calm and focused, but the fear in the caller’s voice is not only contagious, but essential to the meaning I have to convey. For what seems like an eternity (but is probably just a few seconds), I hear only the beeps of the recorded line and the dispatcher clicking away at his keyboard. I feel impatient. He’s most likely looking to see how far the nearest police officer is from the scene. “Interpreter, find out where she is.

Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers.

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world -- hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world." "Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe." The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow?" "Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist." "How droll," the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. "Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however." "How's that? I was just kidding, really." "Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing -- this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing -- is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths." Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things. "Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation." "How about 'sword'?" "From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is 'to cut or pierce.' One of them is 'post' or 'rod.' And the other is, simply, 'to speak.'" "Let's stay on track," Hiro says. "Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire." "I don't want to get all forked up at this point.

Il n'y a pas si longtemps, la procrastination était ma pire ennemie, mais, depuis que je m'efforce de simplifier ma vie, elle a fait place à l'efficacité.

being that all of my intelligence is wasted in the classroom, my common sense is at exactly level zero.

(Lu en traduction française: Zéro déchet.) La nourriture de qualité se paie, c'est certain, mais, à long terme, elle est meilleure pour nous et pour l'environnement: c'est un investissement que je suis prête à faire pour la santé de ma famille et celle de la planète. Plus nous achetons de produits bio, plus il y a de chances que leur prix baisse. Chaque fois que je fais les courses, je vote résolument "Oui aux aliments en vrac!" et "Oui aux produits biologiques!" Pour mes enfants, je rêve d'un avenir plus sain et sans déchet: je suis heureuse d'y investir mon argent chaque semaine.

I wasn’t a class clown, because my parents were very strict and because nuns in general have no sense of humor. I mean zero, zip, nada. I wasted some of my best stuff on those old hags! Look at these knuckles - those are ruler marks, and they’re still visible all these years later. But I could usually get out of trouble at home if I could get my mom laughing. That’s a huge ace up your sleeve as a kid.

As Americans were debating bailouts, individual mandates, and Michelle Obama’s finely toned arms, progressives knew they had a golden opportunity to sneak Common Core through the back door. And that’s just what they did. Remember what Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Common Core was that political philosophy in action. The controllists’ plan was almost perfect. They knew they didn’t have to sell Common Core to lawmakers in individual state legislatures, where citizens would find out about it and demand it be stopped. Instead, they could just go to the individual state boards of education—entities that most Americans don’t even know exist—for permission. In Wisconsin, for example, all it took was one individual, the state superintendent of public instruction, to adopt the standards. It was a devious and brilliant plan, but that didn’t make it foolproof. It wasn’t a given that state school board members would agree to Common Core. Some might sense that it was a ploy to slowly nationalize their state’s education system. To counter that possibility, progressives wrote special funding for the Common Core “initiative” into President Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan via the “Race to the Top” program. This gave the administration the ability to bribe cash-starved states into adopting Common Core by making it a prerequisite for states to compete for seven-figure education grants. In addition, they delayed the testing component of the standards for several years, thereby giving state bureaucrats several years of zero accountability. Many of these bureaucrats no doubt knew they’d be retired or in a different position by the time the real pain came around.

Yep, you heard me. A gigantic, kid-eating Tyrannosaurus rex is stomping through Keystone City, and he’s penciled me in for his next meal!

The cost of disposable packaging is hidden in the price tag. You’re paying for much more that you realize. When you buy a jar of Nutella, you’re paying for Nestle’s marketing department, advertising, corporate salaries, and engineers who built the factory. You’re paying for the silica that was mined and melted to make the glass jar. If you were to make your own Nutella (which is pretty easy and fun), all you are paying for are the raw ingredients.

A great hoodwinking of the 20th century is how corporations got us to believe that ingredients mixed together by corporations and sold in branded disposable packaging are superior to the raw ingredients gathered and mixed ourselves.

If crime is concentrated on a few percent of the city streets,” Weisburd asked, “why the hell are you wasting resources everywhere? If it’s coupled to those places and doesn’t move easily, even more so.” The coupling theorists believed they had solved the problem that had so confounded the earlier days of preventive patrol. How do you effectively patrol a vast urban area with a few hundred police officers? Not by hiring more police officers, or by turning the entire city into a surveillance state. You do it by zeroing in on those few specific places where all the crime is.

Meteorite

INTERVIEW

milling

RUMBLES

He also mentioned that I (or anyone else) could never really go zero waste because of shoes. He asked me the pointed question, ‘What was I going to do about shoes?’ I explained that looking at waste data as if it were a pie chart, I was interested in focusing on solving the largest slices of the pie first, or the ‘low hanging fruit’. There are big problems to solve like plastic bottles, textile recycling and food waste that make up about 60 percent of the pie. Once these issues were solved, we can then turn to the next biggest slice of the waste pie. But he wasn’t convinced by my answer and kept drilling me about the shoes.

issue. Glass has four times the environmental footprint of plastic.8 So swapping out a single disposable plastic drink bottle for a disposable glass drink bottle will only serve to increase your environmental impact. Glass recycling still faces many hurdles and is not as simple as the ‘infinitely recyclable’ tag line it comes with.  Glass breaks easily in garbage trucks and is frequently dumped in landfill because broken glass is not sorted for recycling.

Though the question of global warming had not yet emerged to public perception, natural gas—methane—is about thirty times more effective than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. No one has calculated how much the vast waste of natural gas across the decades of the twentieth century—in the United States and throughout the world—contributed to global warming. The percentage was certainly more than zero.

Corporate interest in forging ‘circular advantage’ is growing fast, and companies leading the pack have adopted a niche set of circular economy techniques such as: aiming for zero-waste manufacturing; selling services instead of products (such as computer printing services instead of printers); and recovering their own-brand goods—ranging from tractors to laptops—for refurbishment and resale.

airships approaching the Cirdian wastes.

Remember if it was easy you'd already have done it.

the United States allows about 1,000 chemical ingredients that were banned by the European Union (Isaacs-Thomas 2019).

fragrance” can be a combination of 3,100-plus chemicals (Frack and Sutton 2010).

Right now, the only sunscreen ingredients that the FDA has legally given “generally recognized as safe” (GRAS) status are zinc oxide and titanium oxide (Bedosky 2019; Environmental Working Group 2020).

It's not enough to just know the goal. We have to do the work!

The end goal is not a tidy home. The end goal is a fundamental shift in one's relationship with possessions.

Switching from task to task is a large mental burden because you are essentially stopping and starting from zero numerous times throughout the day. It takes a lot of energy to switch from task to task, and there are usually a few wasted minutes just regaining your bearings and figuring out the status of the task you were working on. Of course, these kinds of interruptions only lead to achieving just a portion of what you can and want to.

Wer glaubt, es sei gesund, sein Stück Kuchen von einer bunten Papierserviette zu essen, der irrt. Rohstoff- und Energieverbrauch, Transport, Lagerung, Entsorgung, Chemikalieneinsatz und Kosten stehen in keinem Verhältnis zu dem gewonnenen Nutzen.

Wir kaufen biologische Lebensmittel nicht, weil sie besser schmecken. Das ist oft der Fall, aber bei Weitem nicht immer. Und wir kaufen sie auch nicht, weil sie gesünder für uns sind, denn der gesundheitliche Zustand unserer Körper ist meist ohnehin desolat und lässt sich leicht ignorieren. Wir kaufen sie einerseits, um ein gewisses Maß an Tierleid zu vermeiden, und andererseits, um unseren Planeten zu erhalten. Denn die konventionelle Landwirtschaft verschlechtert und vergiftet unsere Böden sukzessive, sodass die Fruchtbarkeit stetig abnimmt und die Düngermenge stetig steigen muss. Mit dieser Überdüngung und dazu noch den Pflanzenschutzmitteln rotten wir alles andere Leben auf dem Feld aus, zerstören die Biodiversität und fördern das Bienensterben; wir lassen diese Stoffe in unser Grundwasser und unsere Flüsse sickern und gefährden damit weitere Lebensräume.

Und was hilft es dem Veganer, wenn er dem Kalb seine Milch lässt, aber dazu beiträgt, dass sein auf Palmöl basierender Brotaufstrich den Lebensraum von Orang-Utans und Tigern zerstört? Was hilft es dem Vegetarier, wenn er das Huhn vor der Schlachtung bewahrt, der Transport seiner Cashewkerne, Avocados und Kososnussmilch aber Erdölkatastrophen fördert, die ganze Vogelschwärme töten?

Google’s trucks would pull up to libraries and quietly walk away with boxes of books to be quickly scanned and returned. “If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?” Larry Page would argue, when confronted with pleas to publicly announce the existence of its program. The company’s lead lawyer on this described bluntly the roughshod attitude of his colleagues: “Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law.” In this case precedent was the centuries-old protections of intellectual property, and the consequences were a potential devastation of the publishing industry and all the writers who depend on it. In other words, Google had plotted an intellectual heist of historic proportions. What motivated Google in its pursuit? On one level, the answer is clear: To maintain dominance, Google’s search engine must be definitive. Here was a massive store of human knowledge waiting to be stockpiled and searched. On the other hand, there are less obvious motives: When the historian of technology George Dyson visited the Googleplex to give a talk, an engineer casually admitted, “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” If that’s true, then it’s easier to understand Google’s secrecy. The world’s greatest collection of knowledge was mere grist to train machines, a sacrifice for the singularity. Google is a company without clear boundaries, or rather, a company with ever-expanding boundaries. That’s why it’s chilling to hear Larry Page denounce competition as a wasteful concept and to hear him celebrate cooperation as the way forward. “Being negative is not how we make progress and most important things are not zero sum,” he says. “How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?” And it’s even more chilling to hear him contemplate how Google will someday employ more than one million people, a company twenty times larger than it is now. That’s not just a boast about dominating an industry where he faces no true rivals, it’s a boast about dominating something far vaster, a statement of Google’s intent to impose its values and theological convictions on the world.

Simplicity Women and men alike often have reservations about paring down their wardrobes for fear of losing options or outfit combinations. Ironically, the same individuals often simultaneously complain of having a closet full of nothing to wear. I have come to learn that decluttering unexpectedly makes options clear and easy.

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad - a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievement brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, of that which had not happened, a sum of perverted catastrophes - not a task in the service of life, but only a race against death.

As a result, the most important recommendation for organizations of all shapes and sizes moving forward is to anticipate worst case scenarios at a minimum. Even in cases where organizations cannot or will not make some of the operational changes recommended below, the exercise of focusing on nonsoftware areas of a given business can help identify under-realized or -appreciated assets within an organization. Particularly ones for whom the sale of software has been low effort, brainstorming about other potential revenue opportunities is unlikely to be time wasted. One vendor in the business intelligence and analytics space has privately acknowledged doing just this; based on current research and projecting current trends forward, it is in the process of building out a 10-year plan over which it assumes that the upfront licensing model will gradually approach zero revenue. In its place, the vendor plans to build out subscription and data-based revenue streams. Even if the plan ultimately proves to be unnecessary, the exercise has been enormously useful internally for the insight gained into its business.

These microbeads get swept down the drain, eventually released into our waterways, and mistaken for food by marine animals, who eat them. Bad news all around. But when microbeads left the headlines, it was easy to assume that personal-care manufacturers stopped using them. Unfortunately, that’s not the case

According to the NRDC, 40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten, and food waste is the largest component of the solid waste in landfills.1

Zero waste is itself, a waste.

Pollution is big business in the hands of man.

Earth911.com

It seems that if you have little in life, you have little to worry about. If you have much, it seems you have much to lose.

Find satisfaction with what you already have.

Freecycle.org

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. —Ancient proverb

I can always take a joke, I don’t waste time worrying about things I can’t control and I have zero anxiety about what strangers think of me. Sure,

Say what you want, and I will take care of, you.

Zero Waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use. Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources and not burn or bury them.

We have all heard of the bottom line, but have you heard of the triple bottom line? Abbreviated 3BL, it’s also known as the three pillars or the three Ps: profit, people, and the planet. More companies are adopting the Zero Waste Business Principles developed by ZWIA, principles that encourage looking at resources in new ways.

Initially, CERs did spur some forest projects in the tropics. But they also increased activity in an unexpected quarter. A small number of companies in China and India produced a chemical used in refrigerators. Their manufacturing process created a by-product called HFC-23. This chemical has an unusual property: it is a super greenhouse gas. Just one HFC-23 molecule causes as much global warming as 11,700 molecules of carbon dioxide. The manufacturers spotted an opportunity with CERs. Five years into the trading program, it emerged that these companies had doubled their output and had earned roughly half the world’s total CERs. The market for refrigerants had not grown, though, so why had they ramped up production? These companies had changed their business model. Their profit no longer came from producing and selling refrigerant. What they now cared about was producing and destroying the HFC-23 by-product. They duly incinerated every pound of HFC-23 they created. And for every pound of super greenhouse gas they destroyed, the companies were awarded CERs—which they then sold to polluting countries and companies in Europe and Japan. As Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, a Dutch member of the European Parliament, explained, “It’s perverse. You have companies which make a lot of money by making more of this gas, and then getting paid to destroy it.” Creating and then destroying HFC-23 generated a lot of profit—but it provided zero environmental benefit. Even worse, it was cheaper for companies to buy credits from HFC-23 destroyers than from forest builders. So very little money flowed to rainforests. By the time this scam was recognized and stopped, Chinese and Indian HFC-23 makers had earned a fortune. Billions of dollars had been wasted; the world’s climate got nothing in return.

A scaled-down version of the clash between the real and the virtual and its fantastic consequences at the planetary level: the dissociation between a very high-frequency virtual space and a zero-frequency real space. The two no longer have anything in common, nor is there any communication between them: the unconditional extension of the virtual (which includes not just the new images or remote simulation, but the whole cyberspace of geo-finance, the space of multimedia and the information superhighways) brings with it an unprecedented desertification of real space and of all that surrounds us. The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyperspace is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. The two worlds, though literally cut off from each other, are equally exponential. But the discrepancy between them does not create any new political situation or genuine crisis, for memory fades at the same time as does the real. The discrepancy is only virtually catastrophic.

Here’s the truth once and for all: High-quality men DO NOT pursue women who feign disinterest, act flaky, or play games just to keep them interested. However, what these men do respect are women who have a zero tolerance policy for time wasting and being manipulated.

Ms. Zhou? Everything your parents were taking had traces of human bone and flesh.” I gag, remembering a cold hand on my plump cheek. A long red hair in congealing yolk. Whatever the birds pick clean, we find a use for. Zero-waste and all. You saw the pits, didn’t you? Suddenly, I register what he said. “I’m sorry, what do you mean, ‘were’? Why are you saying ‘were’?

When you buy local, your money stays local. Instead of heading to a big-name chain, consider purchasing items within your community. The practice supports your neighbors, encourages job creation, curbs carbon emissions associated with product shipment over long distances, and in the case of food, reduces packaging waste.33 Perhaps the biggest benefit to supporting your local economy is that it strengthens community resilience, a necessity for combatting future challenges associated with climate change.

When it's absolutely necessary, recycling is a better option than sending an item to the landfill. It does save energy, conserve natural resources, divert materials from landfills, and create a demand for recovered materials. Although it is a form of disposal, it provides a guide for making better purchases, based on the knowledge of what recycles best. When buying new, we should choose products that not only support reuse but also are made of materials that have a high postconsumer content, are compatible with our community's recycling program, and are likely to get recycled over and over (e.g., steel, aluminum, glass, or paper) versus downcycled (e.g., plastics).

Recycling currently depends on too many variables to make it a dependable solution to our waste problems.

We consumers can greatly allay the concerns associated with recycling by applying the 5 Rs in order. By the time we have refused what we do not need, reduced what we do need, and reused what we consume, little needs to be recycled -also simplifying the guesswork around recycling (no need to find out whether a disposable cup is recyclable or not) and decreasing the trips to the hard-to-recycle collection sites.

Many people confuse the terms reuse and recycle, but they differ greatly in terms of conservation. Recycling is best defined as reprocessing a product to give it a new form. Reusing, on the other hand, is utilizing the product in its original manufactured form several times to maximize its usage and increase its useful life, therefore saving the resources otherwise lost through the process of recycling.

Waste management starts outside the home by curbing consumption.

Your hand starts at zero and accelerates to maximum speed. To maintain maximum speed, your hand must not stop at contact. If it did stop, that means you slowed down a second before on the way to a complete stop. This means that you were not at full speed upon contact. To facilitate maximum speed when striking, we must not immediately stop when we reach the target since it could change positions an inch forward or an inch backward. We therefore estimate where the target is, and want to ensure we strike at maximum speed an inch before and an inch after. To maintain the speed when our body is completely stretched forward, and the hand is fully extended, we use a whip motion where the hand passes the target and returns to its initial position. The body must not attempt to shift its weight for a neutral position move before the hand completes the return. If it does, the first strike is a waste, since the weight has shifted to another direction before the strike was completed.