– Mission –
- Highlight the people, companies, and movements that are challenging the Linear Consumption Economy, and intervening at points along a wasteful and unjust system to build a better model.
- Empower young people to realize their individual skills and passions as essential parts of a collective solution.
- Spread the message that “Nobody Can Do Everything, But Everybody Can Do Something”. Together, we can fix a broken system.
– Speakers –
Each of our panel speakers has been chosen for their work that is not only chipping away at the Linear Consumption Economy model, but doing so in a way that activates their unique skills, passions, and lived experiences. Their innovative ideas are permeating into a vareity of spaces, from the factory to frontline communities, where the implications of climate change, waste, and social inequity are manifesting themselves in acute ways.
Intervention before Extraction
Intervention before Consumption
Photo by Rikshaw Films, Courtesy of Earth Island Institute
Junior Walk
Junior Walk has been working with various anti-surface mining organizations in the Appalachian region for the past six years. He has done everything from lobbying on federal and state levels, gathering data for lawsuits against coal companies, and even getting arrested doing direct action on surface mines and corporate offices. Junior now serves as the outreach coordinator for Coal River Mountain Watch, a role in which he spends his time helping educate people about the effects coal extraction has had on his community. He has also been monitoring for permit violations and documenting ongoing surface mining operations on Coal River Mountain, the last intact mountain in the Coal River watershed.
Benefit Corporation Speakers
For this tour, we are partnering with B Lab, the nonprofit that certifies B Corporations (companies meeting the highest standards of social & environmental performance, transparency, and accountability) to work with each campus to identify a speaker in their area. With B Lab’s support, and our on-going partnership with over two dozen Certified B Corporations including Patagonia, Klean Kanteen, Preserve, and more, we will work with each campus to select a speaker to represent the role that corporations can play in developing durable products, eliminating disposable packaging, and moving towards a circular economy.
Amira Odeh-Quiñones
Amira’s work in a campaign titled “No Más Botellas” at the University of Puerto Rico was successful in making one of their campuses the first Latin American University to ban the sale of bottled water. She has represented her country at the UN Climate talks and been a part of the Sierra Student Coalition training program, facilitating leadership workshops to youth in Puerto Rico and the United States.
Intervention before Disposal
Pashon Murray
Working to reduce the carbon footprint of Detroit by revitalizing neighborhoods, Pashon Murray is finding solutions to re-use or recycle everyday organic waste. In fact, to Pashon, there is no such thing as waste, and she is on a mission to eliminate landfill use. Murray co-founded Detroit Dirt in 2010, a local composting company that is focused on creating a circular economy in Detroit. By diverting organic waste from landfills and turning it into compost, she can help make Detroit a leader in this area, and create a scalable model for other cities. She is passionate about integrating closed-loop systems for corporations, cities, and states across the nation. Pashon is a MIT Media Lab Fellow, a proud Detroiter, and continues to be recognized as a leader in the zero-waste movement.
Intervention at the Site of Disposal
Ahmina Maxey
Ahmina Maxey is the US & Canada Regional Coordinator with the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA). She works to support communities that are fighting back against polluting industry, and advocating for zero waste alternatives. Her background is in environmental justice organizing, having worked for nearly a decade in her hometown of Detroit, Michigan to protect the health and environment of the community. Through her work with the Zero Waste Detroit coalition she helped achieve citywide curbside recycling, and watch-dogged the Detroit incinerator (the largest in the country) resulting in millions of dollars in fines levied against the facility. As Associate Director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, Ahmina worked at the city and state-level to improve Detroit’s air quality, leading to the passage of numerous laws protecting the environment and health of Detroiters. She is a 2007 graduate of the University of Michigan, 2014 recipient of the Sierra Club’s Bunyan Bryant Environmental Justice Award, and was apart of 2017’s Grist 50.
– Bring Us to Your Campus –
Every stop on this tour will be unique, as we work with each campus to organize a convergence of all types of local passions, skills, and expertise among the student body. A typical tour stop will have a Reuse and Repair Fair during the day, and a speaking event with the 5 panelists featured above in the evening. These full-day activations will invite students together in a fun and engaging way to showcase what real solutions can look like.
Interest Form
Campus Funding Information
This panel is intended to appeal to as many students with as many diverse backgrounds and interests as possible. As such, we encourage campuses to cast a wide net while searching for funding on campus – broadening the support base beforehand will broaden the audience at the event itself! Here is a short list of groups and departments we encourage you to reach out to and partner with for the tour stop on your campus:
- Funds for large speaking events (presidential speaker series, student union speakers series, etc)
- Sustainability office/department
- Student activity fee funds
- Green fee funds
- Student organizations of varying interests, including but certainly not limited to:
- Sustainability and zero waste groups, Net Impact chapters and social business groups, diversity support coalitions, LGBTQIA+ groups, black student unions, mosaico and latinx groups, outdoor adventure clubs, sustainable food and agriculture, student run farms, etc.
- Deans of major colleges on campus, particularly colleges of:
- Business, economics, environmental and physical sciences, agriculture, marketing, social innovation and entrepreneurship, outdoor leadership, nonprofit management, etc.
- Campus Departments that support student leadership and job training:
- Office of Community Service and Learning, Fellowships, Jobs and Internships, Leadership, etc.
- Offices of diversity and inclusion
- Academic departments/specific courses with professors that would encourage students to attend the talk from their classes – this is a great experiential learning opportunity!
- Off-campus groups with similar missions and goals.
Engaging your Campus Community at the Repair and Reuse Fair
Company participation in the tour:
Over the next few months, we will be working with dozens of prospective partner companies to coordinate their participation in this tour. Doing so is a bit of a challenge, as the companies want to know which campuses we are visiting, and the campuses want to know which companies are tagging along. We promise to keep you informed and involved every step of the way and we will make sure that every company on the tour has permission and permits from your campus to participate.
Here are a few examples of companies that might join us, and have worked with us in the past:
- Patagonia, iFixit, and other companies offering tools and kits to do DIY repairs
- ReFleece and other companies teaching students how to upcycle non-repairable items
- Guayaki, Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Yogurt giving out free samples of their products
- Preserve, Klean Kanteen, U Konserve showcasing re-usable alternatives
Local Companies:
- Seek out local companies that represent the local repair and reuse economy. Invite them to host a workshop, offer repairs, or showcase cool and unique products!
- Local Food Trucks, Farmers Markets, or Cooperatives
Invite Student Groups and Campus Departments to table
Share with the campus community what opportunities there are to get involved.
Make it Fun with an Activity!
Make it real! Share a relevant project or activity with students. Whether a trivia-inspired raffle, meaningful craft, or product giveaway, move beyond conversation and into action.
- DIY workshops:
- Homemade personal hygiene products
- Home composting
- Tie-dye
- Screen printing
- Button making
- Upcycling
- Workshops and crafts
- Upcycled jewelry
- Make old t-shirts into reusable shopping bags
- Art installation/competition
- Trashion show with upcycled and recycled garments
- Games and campus trivia with sustainable product raffle prizes
- Zero Waste Dining / on-campus food recovery efforts
- Come up with a creative way to engage students in a statistic, like making a t-shirt yarn ball that weighs 80 pounds (the average amount of textile waste disposed per person per year)
- Obstacle course made from recycled materials
Showcase an on-campus facility or service
Do you have a makerspace or fixerspace on campus, a reuse or repair center, a compost or on-campus recycling facility, or other cool initiatives that you can showcase at this event? Share a demonstration, workshop, tour or discussion! What’s the best way for students to engage the issue? Get as hands-on as you like.
On-site repairs / swap shop
Empower students to mend, stitch, and prolong the life of their stuff! Facilitate a simple repair workshop or catalyze an on-site swap shop or thrift store for students and their gear. Ultimately, inspire students to become owners, rather than consumers, of their possessions.
- Clothing and outdoor gear (sewing, patching, waterproofing, etc)
- Bike Repairs
- Smartphone/electronics Repairs
- Swap shops
- Pop-up thrift store
Questions? Email Nim@postlandfill.org.
Here are some testimonials from our last tour with the Patagonia Worn Wear Team:
– What are the “Points of Intervention”? –
With 60 percent of global greenhouse gas output coming directly from the stuff we consume, it is clear that climate change, waste, and the social inequities that result are not issues in isolation from one another. Rather, these global woes are symptoms of a collectively flawed system: the Linear Consumption Economy. The hand-me-down of current affairs can leave our generation feeling overwhelmed and powerless. Fortunately, there are many points along this economic model at which we can intervene.
Challenging the Consumption Economy: The Points of Intervention Tour will travel to college and university campuses across the country, sharing the stories of individuals who are peeling back the pieces of this broken system in their own way for a just transition to a circular economy. From local food production to harnessing renewable energy, this tour will show students that activating their unique experiences and passions is a part of this fight, and that while nobody can do everything, everyone can do something.
We refer to these actions along the Linear Consumption trajectory as Points of Intervention: specific places in a system where a targeted action can effectively interrupt the functioning of a system as a whole and open the way to change. Whether they are physical (i.e. an expanding landfill) or ideological (i.e. planned obsolescence of consumer products), these points serve as avenues to better understand, and ultimately reconstruct, the Linear Consumption Economy.
There are countless ways to intervene, so we will be highlighting a few that encompass issues of waste, climate change, and environmental justice:
Resistance:
Halting dirty resource extraction operations that are jeopardizing the health of surrounding habitats and communities, while reinforcing a reliance on fossil fuels.
Redesign:
What we buy doesn’t have to be made to break. Planned obsolescence is being replaced with extended producer responsibility and modular products that are repairable and built to last.
Regulation:
Passing legislation that prohibits landfills and incinerator expansion, particularly in areas of low income and communities of color.
Redistribution:
Creating markets that ensure equitable distribution of goods and services, so that folks growing, stitching, and building consumer products also reap the benefits of their labor.
Reuse/Repair:
Empowering our generation to mend, stitch, and prolong the life of their stuff, so that we own that stuff, and don’t just mindlessly consume it.
– Our Partners –
We are excited to involve companies whose missions align with the ethos of this project to help build fun and engaging activations at each tour stop and contribute to the events in a meaningful way. Check out our Partners Page to see some of the companies we have worked with on similar projects, such as Patagonia, Klean Kanteen, iFixit, Guayaki, Preserve Products, World Centric, and more.
Interested in getting involved as a partner? Email Audrey@postlandfill.org
– Endorsements –
We’re looking for movements, organizations, companies and individuals to sign on with their written support of the tour, and possibly get involved on a deeper level.