The End Of Garbage? How To Live A Greener Life Now

With guest host John Donvan. 

How to live a more environmentally friendly life.  A look at the best ways to be green.

We all want make to our mark. And all of us are doing that.  In trash.  Even the best of us – even the recycling-est of us — leave a path of trash wherever we go. The paper coffee cups we crumple up and toss in the can. The tubes of toothpaste we squeeze dry but then send down the garbage chute. The wrappers and the straws and the plastic containers that get used once, and then are refuse.  And what about wrapping paper?  We’re weeks away from creating a collective mountain of fresh new wrapping paper rubbish. There’s a way out of the trash path, but it takes some thinking, and then it takes some doing. And some people are proving it can be done. This hour, On Point: trashing the trash can.
-- John Donvan

Lauren Singer, blogger at Trash is for Tossers and co-founder of environmental laundry detergent company The Simply Co. (@trashis4tossers)

Andrew Revkin, senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University's Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies. Runs the New York Times' "Dot Earth" blog. (@revkin)

John Rogers, senior energy analyst and manager  of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Energy and Water in a Warming World Initiative. Co-author of "Cooler Smarter: Practical Steps for Low-Carbon Living."

Mind Body Green: I Haven't Made Any Trash In 2 Years. Here's What My Life Is Like — "My name is Lauren. I'm a 23-year-old girl living in NYC and I don't make trash. For real. No garbage bin, no landfill. Nada. I know what you are thinking. This girl must be a total hippie. Or a liar. Or she's not real. But I assure you, I am none of those things. Well, except for real."

Audubon Magazine: How We Ran Out of Air Time — "Too often we’ve heard calls to 'seal the deal' (on a binding treaty) and “solve the climate crisis” in ways that imply this is the task of a single president or generation. A more realistic view is that we need a new relationship with energy to go with our evolving new relationship with climate. Addressing both sources of emissions and sources of societal and ecological risk is something to do as routinely, and passionately, as we work on poverty reduction and health care. It took a century to get deep into the fossil era; it will take decades to get out."

New York Times: With Compromises, a Global Accord to Fight Climate Change Is in Sight -- "The draft puts forward lower, more achievable, policy goals. Under the terms of the draft, every country will publicly commit to enacting its own plans to reduce emissions — with governments choosing their own targets, guided by their domestic politics, rather than by the amounts that scientists say are necessary. The idea is to reach a global deal to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year, incorporating 196 separate emissions pledges."