2025 Ending I am very lucky to be an American who has been descended from hardship.

Having a holiday themed Starbucks on my way back to Europe for my wife now lives 10 months a year. I tried to go about every 6 weeks. I don't talk about my family much in this blog. 

How many hundreds of these little plastic sticks have I generated from drinking coffee? And what exactly is their purpose? I could look it up but I assume that it is illegal office trying to avoid someone saying their hand got burned by hot coffee coming out of the little mouth spout atop the cup.

Is it Ethical Recycling to place the plastic sticks and corrugated cup holders back in the rack at Starbucks?  I only touched them with my hands.

Ethical Reuse?  Or experimenting on unwitting / unwilling participants (like the MIT Sensable City Lab GPS tracking experiment accusing consumers of used electronics of dumping based on racial and geographic profiling, ten years ago?). MIT never did respond to our 10 page letter asking their Ombudsman to review their participation with BAN.org, which involved a student bringing a laser printer worth $150 on eBay to the office - via elevator - of a Somerville MA non-profit which was not open to public drop-offs... and tracked to Hong Kong's Eco Industrial Park vendors, who were legally outsourcing printer scrap - but not displays etc - to outdoor scrapyards).

Meanwhile...

For the fifth year, Fair Trade Recycling was recognized by Europe's Recycling International as one of the "TOP 100"...

This dates back to my invitation - gracias a Jaco Huisman at STEP ("Solving the E-Waste Problem) invitation to present on a panel with two Big Shred EU processors, and Jim Puckett of BAN.org on a session titled something about the Circular Economy.

The two EU shredders talked about the "lost" copper etc. being landfilled in Africa after re-use. Jim Puckett alleged that much of it was not reused at all, and simply wound up burned in African city dumps.

Hold. My. Beer.

I am very lucky to be an American who has been descended from hardship.

I am very lucky to be an American who has been descended from hardship.

Freeland, Ingenthron, Youngblood, Fisher.  All in the mirror.

So for the holidays I'm just making the connection that it's thanks to my family who have passed, and my young family who have yet to give grandchildren, that I am in this space. Happy holidays. 

2026 will be the 20th year of the blog. I'm guessing that less than 10% of the blogs made any difference but that the difference the 10% made is the reason we made the top 100.