zerofuckingwaste
A Tumblr Devoted to Zero Fucking Waste
My personal journey to produce less waste, and maybe leave the world a little better than I found it.
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Women's Not So Distant History
This #WomensHistoryMonth, let's not forget how many of our rights were only won in recent decades, and weren’t acquired by asking nicely and waiting. We need to fight for our rights. Here's are a few examples:
📍 Before 1974's Fair Credit Opportunity Act made it illegal for financial institutions to discriminate against applicants' gender, banks could refuse women a credit card. Women won the right to open a bank account in the 1960s, but many banks still refused without a husband’s signature. This allowed men to continue to have control over women’s bank accounts. Unmarried women were often refused service by financial institutions entirely.
📍 Before 1977, sexual harassment was not considered a legal offense. That changed when a woman brought her boss to court after she refused his sexual advances and was fired. The court stated that her termination violated the 1974 Civil Rights Act, which made employment discrimination illegal.⚖️
📍 In 1969, California became the first state to pass legislation to allow no-fault divorce. Before then, divorce could only be obtained if a woman could prove that her husband had committed serious faults such as adultery. 💍By 1977, nine states had adopted no-fault divorce laws, and by late 1983, every state had but two. The last, New York, adopted a law in 2010.
📍In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, entered the Boston Marathon under the name "K.V. Switzer." At the time, the Amateur Athletics Union didn't allow women. Once discovered, staff tried to remove Switzer from the race, but she finished. AAU did not formally accept women until fall 1971.
📍 In 1972, Lillian Garland, a receptionist at a California bank, went on unpaid leave to have a baby and when she returned, her position was filled. Her lawsuit led to 1978's Pregnancy Discrimination Act, which found that discriminating against pregnant people is unlawful
📍 It wasn’t until 2016 that gay marriage was legal in all 50 states. Previously, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard. In 2008, California was the first state to achieve marriage equality, only to reverse that right following a ballot initiative later that year.
📍In 2018, Utah and Idaho were the last two states that lacked clear legislation protecting chest or breast feeding parents from obscenity laws. At the time, an Idaho congressman complained women would, "whip it out and do it anywhere,"
📍 In 1973, the Supreme Court affirmed the right to safe legal abortion in Roe v. Wade. At the time of the decision, nearly all states outlawed abortion with few exceptions. In 1965, illegal abortions made up one-sixth of all pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths. Unfortunately after years of abortion restrictions and bans, the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022. Since then, 14 states have fully banned care, and another 7 severely restrict it – leaving most of the south and midwest without access.
📍 Before 1973, women were not able to serve on a jury in all 50 states. However, this varied by state: Utah was the first state to allow women to serve jury duty in 1898. Though, by 1927, only 19 states allowed women to serve jury duty. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 gave women the right to serve on federal juries, though it wasn't until 1973 that all 50 states passed similar legislation
📍 Before 1988, women were unable to get a business loan on their own. The Women's Business Ownership Act of 1988 allowed women to get loans without a male co-signer and removed other barriers to women in business. The number of women-owned businesses increased by 31 times in the last four decades.
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📍 Before 1965, married women had no right to birth control. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Supreme Court ruled that banning the use of contraceptives violated the right to marital privacy.
📍 Before 1967, interracial couples didn’t have the right to marry. In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court found that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional. In 2000, Alabama was the last State to remove its anti-miscegenation laws from the books.
📍 Before 1972, unmarried women didn’t have the right to birth control. While married couples gained the right in 1967, it wasn’t until Eisenstadt v. Baird seven years later, that the Supreme Court affirmed the right to contraception for unmarried people.
📍 In 1974, the last “Ugly Laws” were repealed in Chicago. “Ugly Laws” allowed the police to arrest and jail people with visible disabilities for being seen in public. People charged with ugly laws were either charged a fine or held in jail. ‘Ugly Laws’ were a part of the late 19th century Victorian Era poor laws.
📍 In 1976, Hawaii was the last state to lift requirements that a woman take her husband’s last name. If a woman didn’t take her husband’s last name, employers could refuse to issue her payroll and she could be barred from voting.
📍 It wasn’t until 1993 that marital assault became a crime in all 50 states. Historically, intercourse within marriage was regarded as a “right” of spouses. Before 1974, in all fifty U.S. states, men had legal immunity for assaults their wives. Oklahoma and North Carolina were the last to change the law in 1993.
📍 In 1990, the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) – most comprehensive disability rights legislation in U.S. history – was passed. The ADA protected disabled people from employment discrimination. Previously, an employer could refuse to hire someone just because of their disability.
📍 Before 1993, women weren’t allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor. That changed when Sen. Moseley Braun (D-IL), & Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) wore trousers - shocking the male-dominated Senate. Their fashion statement ultimately led to the dress code being clarified to allow women to wear pants.
📍 Emergency contraception (Plan B) wasn't approved by the FDA until 1998. While many can get emergency contraception at their local drugstore, back then it required a prescription. In 2013, the FDA removed age limits & allowed retailers to stock it directly on the shelf (although many don’t).
📍 In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court ruled that anti-cohabitation laws were unconstitutional. Sometimes referred to as the ‘'Living in Sin' statute, anti-cohabitation laws criminalize living with a partner if the couple is unmarried. Today, Mississippi still has laws on its books against cohabitation.
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@aboutchicken298, use this spotify to mp3 converter to convert all your playlists to mp3 files, you can't do the zip button its broken but if you download the songs individually it will work and this Android app which let's you make custom playlists to play the music
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.musicolet
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Golf courses and parking lots are kissing, unlovable hand in unlovable hand as they ruin our cities and slowly kill us all
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The women yearn for high capacity accessibility metro systems with screen platform doors
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Friends, Romans, Countrymen, it is early spring. This is your reminder to start planting shit NOW.
If you have a grass lawn that takes a lot of water to care for (and a shit ton of mowing), go mow it as low as possible, rake the soil loose, and scatter some clover seed. Keep it watered for 2 weeks, and boom, you'll have clover sprouts. A clover lawn is drought resistant and nitrogen fixing, so this is the first step to creating a healthier, more environmentally friendly yard- with better soil, you can eventually convert it to native species only. No, you don't need to get rid of the grass completely- having the combination of clover and grass is actually beneficial.
If you have a garden, including raised beds, now is the time to put seeds in the ground. If you want to start small and easy, I suggest lettuce, kale, and radishes. They grow fairly quickly and easily, and you can plant more as soon as you pick the old ones, and have a rotating crop. If you want a juicy reward, try some tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, or eggplants, though these will require staking/cages. If you want something low maintenance with a high reward, try out some carrots, or perhaps a bush variety of green beans.
If you want flowers, do some research into some native species in your area. The more native coverage you have, the better it'll grow- and you'll get very few weeds, and many more birds and bees!
Trees- especially citrus- can be put in the ground as soon as risk of frost is past. In general, dig a hole twice as wide as the original pot, so you have plenty of wiggle room when placing the tree. Research what your tree needs before planting it, many are surprisingly low maintenance if you start them off right.
If you want a grass lawn with non native shrubs cut to the bone, go fuck yourself with the hose you use daily to maintain a nonsensical ode to 50's era classism.
#gardening#garden#zero waste#sustainability#sustainable#eco friendly#environment#plants#yard#lawn#outside#outdoors#grass#fuck lawns
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As relentless rains pounded LA, the city’s “sponge” infrastructure helped gather 8.6 billion gallons of water—enough to sustain over 100,000 households for a year.
Earlier this month, the future fell on Los Angeles. A long band of moisture in the sky, known as an atmospheric river, dumped 9 inches of rain on the city over three days—over half of what the city typically gets in a year. It’s the kind of extreme rainfall that’ll get ever more extreme as the planet warms.
The city’s water managers, though, were ready and waiting. Like other urban areas around the world, in recent years LA has been transforming into a “sponge city,” replacing impermeable surfaces, like concrete, with permeable ones, like dirt and plants. It has also built out “spreading grounds,” where water accumulates and soaks into the earth.
With traditional dams and all that newfangled spongy infrastructure, between February 4 and 7 the metropolis captured 8.6 billion gallons of stormwater, enough to provide water to 106,000 households for a year. For the rainy season in total, LA has accumulated 14.7 billion gallons.
Long reliant on snowmelt and river water piped in from afar, LA is on a quest to produce as much water as it can locally. “There's going to be a lot more rain and a lot less snow, which is going to alter the way we capture snowmelt and the aqueduct water,” says Art Castro, manager of watershed management at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. “Dams and spreading grounds are the workhorses of local stormwater capture for either flood protection or water supply.”
Centuries of urban-planning dogma dictates using gutters, sewers, and other infrastructure to funnel rainwater out of a metropolis as quickly as possible to prevent flooding. Given the increasingly catastrophic urban flooding seen around the world, though, that clearly isn’t working anymore, so now planners are finding clever ways to capture stormwater, treating it as an asset instead of a liability. “The problem of urban hydrology is caused by a thousand small cuts,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley. “No one driveway or roof in and of itself causes massive alteration of the hydrologic cycle. But combine millions of them in one area and it does. Maybe we can solve that problem with a thousand Band-Aids.”
Or in this case, sponges. The trick to making a city more absorbent is to add more gardens and other green spaces that allow water to percolate into underlying aquifers—porous subterranean materials that can hold water—which a city can then draw from in times of need. Engineers are also greening up medians and roadside areas to soak up the water that’d normally rush off streets, into sewers, and eventually out to sea...
To exploit all that free water falling from the sky, the LADWP has carved out big patches of brown in the concrete jungle. Stormwater is piped into these spreading grounds and accumulates in dirt basins. That allows it to slowly soak into the underlying aquifer, which acts as a sort of natural underground tank that can hold 28 billion gallons of water.
During a storm, the city is also gathering water in dams, some of which it diverts into the spreading grounds. “After the storm comes by, and it's a bright sunny day, you’ll still see water being released into a channel and diverted into the spreading grounds,” says Castro. That way, water moves from a reservoir where it’s exposed to sunlight and evaporation, into an aquifer where it’s banked safely underground.
On a smaller scale, LADWP has been experimenting with turning parks into mini spreading grounds, diverting stormwater there to soak into subterranean cisterns or chambers. It’s also deploying green spaces along roadways, which have the additional benefit of mitigating flooding in a neighborhood: The less concrete and the more dirt and plants, the more the built environment can soak up stormwater like the actual environment naturally does.
As an added benefit, deploying more of these green spaces, along with urban gardens, improves the mental health of residents. Plants here also “sweat,” cooling the area and beating back the urban heat island effect—the tendency for concrete to absorb solar energy and slowly release it at night. By reducing summer temperatures, you improve the physical health of residents. “The more trees, the more shade, the less heat island effect,” says Castro. “Sometimes when it’s 90 degrees in the middle of summer, it could get up to 110 underneath a bus stop.”
LA’s far from alone in going spongy. Pittsburgh is also deploying more rain gardens, and where they absolutely must have a hard surface—sidewalks, parking lots, etc.—they’re using special concrete bricks that allow water to seep through. And a growing number of municipalities are scrutinizing properties and charging owners fees if they have excessive impermeable surfaces like pavement, thus incentivizing the switch to permeable surfaces like plots of native plants or urban gardens for producing more food locally.
So the old way of stormwater management isn’t just increasingly dangerous and ineffective as the planet warms and storms get more intense—it stands in the way of a more beautiful, less sweltering, more sustainable urban landscape. LA, of all places, is showing the world there’s a better way.
-via Wired, February 19, 2024
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If you don't have a yard, it's important to either use a freezer or a sealed container for your compost while you wait to take it elsewhere, in order to lessen the presence of fruit flies and other such bugs. I recommend using pizza boxes and storing them in the freezer until they're full; they're compact and easy to use, and compostable in and of themselves, so there's no cleaning involved.
Easy zero waste tip no. 3: Know your R's
Refuse: If you don't acquire the thing that will become waste in the first place, it won't produce further waste. Simple enough. Refuse that which you do not need. Example: All that cute stuff on that Buzzfeed article? You don't need it. Don't even click the link.
Reduce: If you need something, get the minimum. Note that this doesn't mean the cheapest option- it means the most effective and environmentally friendly option. Example: Instead of buying disposable razors, or a razor with changeable heads, try out a safety razor. Instead of using plastic toothbrushes, try out bamboo, and instead of toothpaste in disposable tubes, try out some toothpaste bits. Instead of buying chicken breasts for one thing and chicken broth for another, get a whole chicken and learn to butcher its meat, and make broth from the skin and bones.
Reuse: This means both being mindful of purchases, so you're only buying things that are reusable whenever possible (Example: use beeswax wrap instead of saran wrap), and repurposing things you've already bought (Example: use those little Oui yogurt containers to start seeds for your garden).
Recycle: Find out what your local recycling program actually recycles, and be mindful. Aluminum is a safe bet most of the time, as is paper/cardboard; but plastics, most of the time, are a dud, so try to refuse, reduce, and reuse plastic whenever possible so you don't even need to worry about recycling it. This also refers to donation- that's another valid way to recycle things!
Rot: If you have a yard, start a compost pile! Just try to get a 50/50 balance of food scraps to brown matter (paper, dry leaves, etc). If you have a freezer, you can stick a container in there to act as a compost thing until you can bring it to a compost facility, such as a local garden, or farm. If you don't have the ability to do either of these things, then you can see if there's a subscription compost service in your area (I used CompostNow for ages, they're great).
Understanding these five principles, and looking at them in this order, can make things easier. Next time you're buying something, or about to throw something away, consider which of these might allow you to reduce your waste output in the future.
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(to the tune of working on the railroad) iiive been working on the railrooad
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fantasy story: but we grew complacent, indulgent, arrogant, spoiled by this era of prosperity and splendour, and in our short-sighted greed and vanity, we ended it.
me at 15: I hate this stupid trope. People aren't going to just turn stupid and ruin everything just because things have been "too good" for "too long". Why does this author think that people are inherently stupid and evil?
people on social media in 2024: I'm not going to vaccinate my dogs or my children because polio, measels and rabies are so rare they're not a real threat anyway uwu
me at 30: Ah. I see.
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https://x.com/hankgreen/status/1750973895824572763?s=46&t=WLunzndd86TYqPF2E217iQ
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So do people realize that we aren't building new train tracks when we expand the amteak network, I have multiple times seen people say that we shouldn't expand the network because it would destroy protected lands, which would be a fair criticism but Amtrak doesn't build new tracks, we use existing tracks. We are not destroying protected lands, we are using land that has already been clear for a century
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