Recycle, Birmingham!

Rarely do I get incensed about anything at 7 a.m. But the wedding dress trashing story on CNN yesterday had me screaming in disbelief and ethical angst. Go read this blog, then come back here for my rationale. http://trashthedress.wordpress.com/why-trash-the-dress/

Okay, two points: 1) You have only two choices about the fate of this ridiculously expensive purchase? In whose world? Oh right, the same world in which the good furniture, classic books and outgrown BigWheel are waiting on the street for the landfill. 2) Would you really want to pay money to a photographer who believed trashing a perfectly useful and expensive garment for kicks was a decent way to earn a living?

1) The choice issue: additional ideas

• You could take the dress to a consignment/thrift/2nd hand shop so that another bride of more modest means could enjoy having a beautiful wedding dress. And she could then recycle it again after her wedding, etc, etc, etc. Sharing its beauty with others repeatedly. You could also donate it to any number of women’s charity clothes closets.
  http://shopcollage.com/  
  http://www.buyselldress.com/news/apple_red_accented_wedding_dress_brand_new_wedding
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itnd_eXBb4g
• You could have a cut-it-up party, giving everybody a pair of sewing scissors to cut it into neat squares of varying sizes. These could be used to later make (or have made) into little patchwork or smaller items like a ringbearer’s pillow, or bridal sachets, or keepsake bridesmaid gifts, or pillow cases for Aunt Fanny who still sleeps on a satin case to keep her beehive hairdo intact between salon trips. ( This option would also satisfy that urge to trash something.)

2) The photographer issue:
This of course is a deeply personal ethical issue for me. Like boycotting businesses which employ destructive practices or philosophies. Or who simply don’t care one way or the other. There have to be plenty of ethical photographers out there who would be disgusted by this practice. I would like to hear from some of them.

Nothing makes me crazier than to see huge piles of perfectly good, plenty of life-left-in-it STUFF sitting on the street in a neighborhood, waiting for the big trash trucks to come haul it away, out of sight of the perfectly manicured, tastefully decorated households from which it came.

This stuff is screaming to be useful to someone out there somewhere with limited resources and desperate need. There are plenty of other households and entities which do not have the luxury of redecorating every couple of years. There are households in which people eat standing up, or on trays…clothes are stored in plastic garbage bags…the only reading material may be the back of a ceral box.

The old kitchen table with one wobbly leg, the discarded chest of drawers in the wrong color, the old cloth-bound classic books from Aunt Nellie’s book-of-the-month club…I have seen these and more on the street, destined for an already overflowing landfill. Because their owners didn’t know about or (mostly) were too busy to deal with the donation process.

This blog was started to provide the local community in Birmingham, Alabama with useful info and interesting stories about more than the known, well publicized recycling options in the area. Sure I’ll list those, as links to more detailed sites are always valuable.

But I continue to discover resources that were not available until recently, some in unlikely places, or in new places that seem really obvious once I think about it. And then I get very excited once I find out that these entities (retail and not-so-retail) have finally gotten it.  So naturally I want to share.

Discovery of the week:  Home Depot accepts those pesky compact flourescent bulbs!
The most obvious type of retailer finally got on the bandwagon for one of the most difficult items to recycle. These are wonderfully energy efficient, and last for years BUT they contain mercury, and if tossed into the trash where they are sure to break, the landfill becomes contaminated and the thing you think you are doing to save the planet becomes an environmental nightmare. Up until this week, all I could find was a light bulb wholesaler that would sell you a special shipping box to collect in for years into the future, then you could ship it to them for recycling. Recharable batteries and cell phones can also be recycled at Home Depot collection centers.