Scrapbooks from the Early Years of GRRN/Zero Waste USA

[Chris Sparnicht]

Greetings GreenYes!

While I don't often edit the GRRN archive pages, it made sense to add one page with information about the early years before GRRN became known as Zero Waste USA. All of this can be found at this address:
https://archive.grrn.org/scrapbooks/

Bill Sheehan, GRRN's first executive director has collected together a set of PDF's that explore the content produced by us, our interns and collaborative organizations. There are also a few examples of local activism from about the same era. 

Keep in mind, this was before social media, before the ease of YouTube, and before everyone had a website they could edit from the office... before smart phones. There were press-releases and full-page ads in the New York Times (when it was paper, and about three inches thick on Sunday). We used fax machines and overnight mail. We had phone books. We were one of the first environmental non-profits to use one-click activism methods on a website. We literally clipped articles out of paper magazines and pasted them onto letter-sized sheets of paper. We even occasionally used press-on letter titling. We then xerox-color-copied them as a record of what we'd done for grant writing purposes and for annual reports. That was standard practice for a small environmental profit back them. 

If you were born in the nineties or the naughties, you may find our old-fashioned methods anthropologically interesting. Truly, these are the days of miracle and wonder. I hope you'll take some time to check them out!

Chris Sparnicht
Zero Waste Associate
coolnow.org | zerowasteusa.org
Join me at the *Virtual* National Zero Waste Conference
November 30 - December 1, 2022
Hosted by Zero Waste USA
Register Now

[Bill Sheehan]

Thanks, Chris, for posting the link to the scrapbook I put together on the early days of the GrassRoots Recycling Network, from 1995 to 2003. The scrapbook is long (1,100 pages) but it’s indexed and searchable.

What a wild ride it was. The scrapbook covers the founding in 1995 by Rick Anthony, Neil Seldman and me; the launch of GreenYes; the first presentations as GRRN in Pittsburgh in 1996; the 1997 Rock Eagle conference and Coke demonstration in Georgia; attempts to get the National Recycling Coalition to support the goal of zero waste (failed); the 1999 New York Times ad on Coke’s Broken Promise – and much, much more! The reports are there, too: ILSR’s Welfare for Waste (1999) and Wasting and Recycling 2000; the BEAR report (2002); and numerous campaign documents.

A quarter century on, have we moved the ball towards zero waste? Recycling increased - especially for food and organics - from 25.6% to 32.1% of generation, according to the venerable annual US EPA reports. But so has wasting. Landfilling increased from 126 million tons in 1995 to 146 million tons in 2018 (the most recent data). “Municipal solid waste” generation increased from 4.53 lb/person/day in 1995 to 4.90 in 2018. And of course MSW is dwarfed by industrial waste.

It’s striking how climate change and equity issues have risen in prominence and urgency (though Neil Seldman never wavered in his focus on equity). Climate change was not top of my mind in the late 1990s, like it is today, even though Bill McKibben’s 1989 The End of Nature was on my bookshelf. Peter Anderson rang the alarm bell early and often about the danger of the greenhouse gas methane escaping from landfills. Meanwhile, concentrations in the atmosphere of another form of waste, carbon dioxide, have risen from 360 parts per million in 1995 to 414 ppm today. And the world population has grown 40% since GRRN was launched, from 5.7 billion in 1995 to 8 billion on November 15, 2022. 

In 2003 I shifted my focus from MSW to producer responsibility and founded, with Helen Spiegelman, the Product Policy Institute, now Upstream (I retired in 2016). I am grateful to have worked with so many passionate discard thinkers and heroes – and humbled to see how many are still active today. 

/Bill Sheehan   

[Neil Seldman]

Thanks to both Chris and Bill for starting this dialogue and filling in our history. It is hard to recall how 'primitive' our communications systems were years ago. Bill is correct--- we made progress but so did wasting. Still, if we had not been around things would have been worse. What we did was to help our own times and set guidelines for future generations on how to fight wasting and the political economy that propels it to the detriment of people and nature. 

We may lose and the earth as we know it will disappear. But if there is history of the world that survives, at least people will know that we tried and that we tried hard to stop the destruction.

Be well all. Neil

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GreenYes" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to greenyes+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/greenyes/8f47ad01-147e-4859-a6aa-34fcdd22b9ddn%40googlegroups.com.