#recycled soda bottles

[sophialushambience]

This beautiful large area rug for living room is passionately handwoven by our skilled artisans. It is an arduous and time-consuming process that results in a unique texture to the product. This washable indoor rug not only creates a relaxed environment and brings you to brighten and delightful feeling. While blending effortlessly with any decor style.

[resource-fm]

gifs for big fans of trash

[fragglez]

I've been thinking about going to the grocery store for like 5 hours now stop this madness why cant i just get myself to actually go

[scholarhect]

i don’t even really listen to this playlist, it’s not really for listening to. it’s just for sorting a group of songs together under the heading of a playlist, conceptually, to have them sorted together. and to go and look at the songs next to each other and think, yeah, all of those are the songs that i wanted to put here. this is also why, even though i don’t really listen to this playlist, i changed the name to this when i realized it would be a good name for the playlist. it’s like a museum exhibition

[thinkingnot]

trying something new baking soda (overdate) & baby powder (there is no baby) mixed into the ultimate smell vanquisher 🤺🤺🤺🤺 (wrapped and tied in an old medical mask) <- experimenting cuz i think the 3 layers mask was too thick maybe for the mixture to work to its full potential

[dragons-and-yellow-roses]

Delighted to say that I spent two hours and went absolutely tunnel-vision insane and cleaned so much of my room and also packed.

[two-calicos-in-a-trenchcoat]

Finally got around to cleaning some glass bottles ive been setting aside for crafts for months

I kept putting it off cuz for some reason I was thinking there would be a lot more steps involved when all I had to do was fill them with hot water and shake vigorously

Why did I expect that to be more complicated

[heartsmourne]

"i dunno if i'd really benefit from medication for my clinically severe adhd," i say, before downing two cans of monster and then immediately cleaning my room for the first time in over a year and then folding all my laundry, which has sat unfolded in my laundry baskets for two weeks now

[ursacanid]

I generally encourage everyone to recycle and therians are no exception.

It is a beautiful experience to make something new out of what you already have. Cardboard, cans, soda tabs, plastic, boring and/or damaged clothes.

General tip: You can mix laundry softener and acrylic paint to make fabric paint. It may fade over several washes, but the paint keeps very well if placed in a container in the fridge.

I am starting a youtube channel called UrsaCanid where I will be giving tutorials on some of this list as well as video essays about therianthropy and hopefully therian interviews down the line.

Here are some ideas for ways to create joy out of junk:

1. Masks. Thin cadboard like from cereal boxes are perfect for masks and BirdyDogs has youtube tutorial on both feline and canine cardboard masks.

2. T-shirt yarn tails. Look up how to make t-shirt yarn and keep the strad thin. Then follow the typical yarn tail instructions minus brushing it out.

3. Claws. This can be made of either just cardboard or cardboard and metal from a soda can. Either method uses a good bit of hot glue. It is difficult to explain over text, but generally you make a ring out of cardboard for each of your fingers (marking which one is which) then you form the claw with your chosen other material. You then apply it and build it up with hotglue. Fingernail polish works really well for coloring them afterward. I will have a tutorial for this up soon.

4. Make your own kin plush out of t-shirt material and put something important or meaningful inside like at build a bear. You can then paint it or sew on buttons or random trinkets.

5. Paint. Your. Clothes.

6. Collect tiny junk like soda tabs, bread clasps, bottle caps, etc and make jewlery or a sensory jar. This is a particularly scavenger aimed activity.

7. Put packaging that has your theriotype on it up as wall decorations. If it's plastic, sew it onto stuff like a patch.

8. Be resourceful. Nothing, and i mean NOTHING, has only one purpose.

Sploot wide, kick hide, take pride

-UrsaCanid

[sophialushambience]

This beautiful large area rug for living room is passionately handwoven by our skilled artisans. It is an arduous and time-consuming process that results in a unique texture to the product. This indoor outdoor throw rug not only creates a relaxed environment and brings you to brighten and delightful feeling. While blending effortlessly with any decor style.

[karasukarei]

Daily questions 8 - Togame Jo

For all other translations, see this post!

Togame's answers:

If you have 500 yen, how would you use it? - I'll probably put it in my piggy bank.

If you could travel to somewhere in Japan for a holiday, where would you go? - Somewhere with famous onsen will be nice.

What's your favourite condiment? - Vinegar with pepper. I like having it with gyoza. (t/n: Nii sensei drew an illustration for this!!!)

What do you think about before you sleep? - Counting sheep helps you sleep faster. (t/n: he specifically said "count numbers" but counting sheep gets the point across better imo)

What would you eat for your last meal? - I wanna try eating shark's fin

Recently, was there something that made you a little happy? - I found a place that sells new ramune bottles. They don't really sell it anymore. (t/n: Ramune is this soda that's usually sold in a bottle sealed by a marble (if you've read the manga you should've seen that super sweet scene between Togame and Sakura ;-;), and you return the bottle to the shop you bought the ramune from to recycle.)

If someone of the opposite gender asks you for your contact number, what would you do? - Ehh? What're you gonna do with it? I can give it to you, but don't use it for anything bad ok

And I'm all caught up! Apologies for all the spam, and thanks for all the patience 🙇‍♂️

[new-revenant]

Related to the candy shop au

Danny decided to try his hand at making different flavors of soda on a whim while making a new batch of candy. He ends up making an ecto infused batch and a normal batch. He keeps them in recycled bottles in the respective areas of the shop in coolers. He refused to pay an actual branded drink company and that would ruin the homemade vibe with his store. Danny takes notice when Bruce Wayne comes into the store and buys a big bag of regular and ecto infused candies and a dozen little bottles of soda, half normal, half ecto for his kids and himself. Danny rings him out and Bruce just gets a weird vibe from Danny. Jason is not happy that Bruce is investigating his favorite candy store

Link to the first post

Danny is kinda intimidated by Bruce, because one, he’s rich, two, he definitely knows about the ecto candies and drinks, and three he just acted like a normal guy which scared Danny more. Danny is very obviously terrified as well, because if something bad happens to Bruce or anyone he gives the ecto candy/soda to, Danny could get sued. But Bruce does seems a bit ghostly, just ever so slightly, so it should be fine. He also gets a large tip, which is sweet.

Then Jason and Bruce come to the store and Danny connects the pieces. Danny is suddenly a lot more calm now, he’s even recommending stuff to them, and is explicitly saying that “people like us” shouldn’t have anything containing blood blossoms, but they do taste very good to “normal” people.

Jason straight up asks what the fuck Danny is and Danny just says “Hell if I know. Dead adjacent probably. Like you guys but worse. Which is very concerning, but they don’t push the question further.

So Danny has a new, rich family of customers! Which is great. But in the closing hours, he definitely didn’t expect Gotham’s vigilantes to come visit. Wild.

[travelingthief]

Dionysus Offerings/Devotional Acts

There'll be NSFW themes as he is the god of wine and ecstasy!

Offerings

Wine/Intoxication

Alcohol, specifically wine

Grapes

Wine corks

Wine glasses

Shot glasses

Goblets

Corkscrews

Sparkling cider

Grape flavored things

Cheese

Weed/hallucenigens

Nips (small alcohol bottles)

Bottle opener

Beer/soda tabs

Alcohol bottles with cool labels

Fruit/fruit seeds

Theater/Plays

Play/theater scripts

Play/movie tickets

Masks

Costumes

Nature

Pine cones

Fennel 

Wildflowers

Fig/fig newtons

Ivy

Leopard/cheetah print

Honey

Bull imagery

Donkey imagery

Bones

Antlers

Dead/preserved animals

Hiking gear

Seeds

Dolphins

Depictions of big cats

Wheat

Barley

Ecstasy

Concert/festival tickets

Various drugs (use safely!)

Sex toys

Your favorite music

Misc.

Locks of hair

Shaven beard hair 

Pride swag

Extravagant clothes/clothes that make you feel good

Devotional Acts

Wine/Intoxication

Drink alcohol/get drunk

Go to a wine tasting

Make wine

Eat grapes

Trip intentionally/spiritually

Learn about substance abuse/recovery

Destigamtize drug users

Learn about harm reduction

Use drugs safely 

Theater

Attend a play

Write a play/film/musical

Make home videos

Write poetry

Act

Dress up

Go to the movie theater

Nature

Go to the woods

Dance/sing in the woods

Meditate in the woods

Learn wilderness safety and first aid

Learn what to do when encountering a wild animal

Go off the beaten path

Explore new areas

Pick up litter

Forage

Recycle bottles

Grow fruit

Try new fruits

Ecstasy 

Attend concerts/festivals

Attend/throw parties/celebrations

Have sex

Masturbate

Have threesomes/swing/whatever your in to

Finally give into that one kink you’ve been repressing (you know the one)

Do drugs (responsibly)

Learn about consent/establish boundaries with partners

Death/Rebirth

Dionysus is a god of rebirth and resurrection. This association comes from his birth stories and has resulted in epithets like “twice-born.”

Learn how to preserve dead animals

Learn about different life cycles (plants, animals, etc)

Learn about your ancestry 

Foreigners

Dionysus is also seen as a foreign god with unknown origins. He also traveled through and invaded India.

Learn about immigration in your area

Learn about different cultures

Try foreign foods

Learn a new language

Learn about your ancestry 

Help immigrants in your area

Misc.

Grow your hair out

Manifest/Keep a manifestation journal. Sexual/creative energy is linked and can be used to manifest

Shed your old self

Self-reflection/self-exploration

Identify areas where you may overindulge (food, substances, spending, etc.)

[neurotypical-sonic]

amy, finishing her soda and putting the empty bottle into her bag:

vector: there's a bin just there, you know

amy: oh, I know! but you can recycle this bottle for 10 cents, see how it says on the label? so I keep all my empty bottles and cans so I can take them to the recycling depo ^_^

vector: and they give you money for it?

amy: yeah

vector: .... I gotta go and raid espio and charmy's rooms

[homunculus-argument]

The first night when me and my boyfriend moved into our current apartment, we didn't have any kind of furniture here yet, just a mattress on the floor and his computer propped up on a cardboard box. He thought it would be funny to take a photo of the arrangement and share it on discord like "hey guys check out my gaming rig", after meticulously arranging the scene to look as bleak as possible.

Finland has a beverage bottle/can recycling system where you get a small deposit when you return them to the recycling system at the store. While 10-40 cents apiece may not seem like much, it adds up pretty quickly, and six trash bags full of cans can easily be 30 euros which is significant grocery money. We like to hoard up our soda cans over the course of months and return them all at once, to the point where the bags need a shopping cart to haul, and this one time he wanted to take a picture of our haul to show it off to people unfamiliar with the finnish beverage recycling system.

For the time being, due to not having access to a proper fridge or microwave at his workplace, his work lunches consist of a single can of canned fruit and a protein bar. He took a picture of his week's worth of lunches - five cans of peaches and five bars - to show off his meal prep, once again prompting comments along the lines of "dude what the shit, why do you live like this".

As our hobbies and interests have very little overlap, and we're still working out how to come up with a living arrangement that we would both be happy in, I've had people wonder how we're even together since we seem to have nothing truly in common. But looking at the big picture, the one thing we both truly, genuinely delight in is the joy of doing sensible, pragmatic things in unconventional-looking ways, and showing it off to baffle people like

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dow promised to turn sneakers into playground surfaces, then dumped them in Indonesia

Dow Chemicals plastered Singapore with ads for its sneaker recycling program, promising to turn old shoes into playground tracks. But the shoes it collected in its “recycling” bins were illegally dumped in Indonesia. This isn’t an aberration: it’s how nearly all plastic recycling has always worked.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/career-criminals/#fool-me-twice-three-times-four-times-a-hundred-times

Plastic recycling’s origin story starts in 1973, when Exxon’s scientists concluded that plastic recycling would never, ever be cost-effective (#ExxonKnew about this, too). Exxon sprang into action: they popularized the recycling circular arrow logo and backed “anti-littering” campaigns that blamed the rising tide of immortal, toxic garbage on peoples’ laziness.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

Remember the campaign where an Italian guy dressed like a Native American shed a single tear as he contemplated plastic litter? Funded by the plastic industry, as a way of shifting blame for plastic waste from the wealthy, powerful corporations who lied about plastics recycling to the individuals who believed their lies:

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-indian-crying-environment-ads-pollution-1123-20171113-story.html

When I was a kid in Ontario, we had centralized, regulated, reusable bottle depots — beer and soda bottles came in standard sizes, differentiated by paper labels that could be pressure-washed off. When you were done with your bottle, you returned it for a deposit and it got washed and returned to bottlers to be refilled again and again and again.

After intense lobbying from soda companies, brewers and the plastic industry, that program was replaced with curbside “blue boxes” that promised to recycle our plastic waste. 90% of the plastics created has never been — and will never be — recycled. Today, the plastic industry plans on tripling the amount of single-use plastic in use worldwide:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

You know those ads from companies like Bluetriton (formerly “Nestle Waters”) that promise that your single-use plastic bottles are “100% recyclable…and can be used for new bottles and all sorts of new, reusable things?”

Bluetriton is a private equity-backed rollup that has absorbed most of the bottled water companies you’re familiar with, including Poland Spring, Pure Life, Splash, Ozarka, and Arrowhead. When they were sued in DC for making false claims about their “recyclable” water-bottles, their defense was that these were “non-actionable puffery.” According to Bluetriton, when it described itself as “a guardian of sustainable resources” and “a company who, at its core, cares about water,” it was being “vague and hyperbolic.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/26/plastic-fatalistic/#recycled-lies

With this high standard for plastic recycling, Dow’s Singapore scam shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it seems to have surprised the government of Singapore. Writing for Reuters, Joe Brock, Yuddy Cahya Budiman and Joseph Campbell describe how they caught Dow red-handed:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/global-plastic-dow-shoes/

The method is actually pretty straightforward: Reuters hid tracking devices in cavities in the soles of sneakers, dropped them in one of Dow’s collection bins, and then followed them. The shoes were passed onto Dow’s subcontractor, Yok Impex Pte Ltd, who sent them hopping from island to island throughout Indonesia, until they ended up in junk-markets.

Not all the shoes, though — one pair was simply moved from Dow’s collection bin to a donation bin at a Singaporean community center. Of the 11 pairs that Reuters tracked, not one ended up at a recycling facility. So much for Dow’s slogan: “Others see an old shoe. We see the future.”

Dow blamed all this on Yok Impex, but didn’t explain why its “recycling” program involved a company whose sole trade is exporting used clothing. Dow promised to cancel its deal with Yok Impex, but Yok Impex’s accountant told Reuters that the deal would be remain in place until the end of the contract. Yok Impex, meanwhile, shifted the blame to the low-waged women who sort through the clothing donations it takes in from across Singapore.

Indonesia bans bulk imports of used clothes, on the grounds that used clothes are unhygenic, displace the local textiles industry, and shipments contain high volumes of waste that ends up in Indonesian incinerators, landfills and rivers.

In other words, Singaporeans thought they were saving the planet by putting their shoes in Dow bins, but they were really sending those shoes on a long journey to an unlicensed dump. Dow enlisted schoolchildren in used-shoe collection drives, making upbeat videos that featured students like Zhang Youjia boasting that they “contributed 15 pairs of shoes.”

Dow does this all the time. In 2021, Dow’s “breakthrough technology to turn plastic waste into clean fuel” in Idaho was revealed to be a plain old incinerator:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/environment-plastic-oil-recycling/

Also in 2021, in India, a Dow program to “use high-tech machinery to transform the [plastic from the Ganges] into clean fuel” was revealed to have ceased operations — but was still collecting plastic and promising that it was all being turned into fuel:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-plastic-insight-idUSKBN29N024

Dow operates a nearly identical “shoe recycling” program in neighboring Malaysia, and did not return Reuters’ requests for comment as to whether the shoes collected for “recycling” in the far more populous nation were also being illegally dumped offshore.

The global business lobby loves the idea of “personal responsibility” and its evil twin, “caveat emptor.” Its pet economists worship the idea of “revealed preferences,” claiming that when we use plastic, we may claim that we don’t want to have our bodies poisoned with immortal, toxic microplastics, that we don’t want our land and waters despoiled — but we actually love it, because otherwise we’d “vote with our wallets” for something else.

The obvious advantage of telling people to vote with their wallets is that the less money you have in your wallet, the fewer votes you get. Companies like Dow have used their access to the capital markets (a fancy phrase for “rich people”) to gobble up their competitors, eliminating “wasteful competition” and piling up massive profits. Those profits are laundered into policy — like replacing Ontario’s zero-waste refillable bottle system with a “recycling” system that sent plastics to the ends of the Earth to be set on fire or buried or dumped in the sea.

The ruling class’s pet economists have a name for this policy laundering: they call it “regulatory capture.” Now, when you hear “regulatory capture,” you might think about companies that get so big that they are able to boss governments around, with the obvious answer that companies need to be regulated before they get too big to jail:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

But that’s not how elite economists talk about regulatory capture: for them, capture starts with the very existence of regulators. For them, any government agency that proposes to protect the public from corporate fraud and murder inevitably becomes an agent of the corporations it is supposed to rein in, so the only answer is to eliminate regulators altogether:

https://doctorow.medium.com/regulatory-capture-59b2013e2526

This nihilism lets rich people blame the rest of us for their sins: “if you didn’t want your children to roast or freeze to death in the climate emergency, you should have sold your car and used the subway (that we bribed your city not to build).”

Nihilism is contagious. Think of the music industry: before Napster, 80% of the music ever recorded was not for sale, banished to the scrapheap of history and the vaults of record companies who paid farcically low sums to their artists.

During the File Sharing Wars, listeners were excoriated for failing to pay for music — much of which wasn’t for sale in the first place. But today, fans overwhelmingly pay for Spotify, a streaming service that notoriously pays musicians infinitesimal sums for their work.

Spotify is a creature of the Big Three labels — Sony, Universal and Warner — who own 70% of all the world’s recorded music copyrights and 65% of all the world’s music publishing. The rock-bottom per-stream prices that Spotify pays were set by the Big Three. Why would the labels want less money from Spotify?

Simple: as co-owners of Spotify, they make more money when Spotify pays less for music. Musicians have a claim on the money they take out of Spotify as royalties — but dividends, buybacks and capital gains from Spotify are the labels’ to use as they see fit. They can share that bounty with some artists, all artists, or no artists.

Not only that, but the Big Three’s deal with Spotify includes a “most favored nation” clause, which means that the independent artists who aren’t under Sony/UMG/Warner’s thumb have to take the rock-bottom rate the Big Three insisted on — likewise the small labels who compete with the Big Three. The difference is that none of these artists and small labels have massive portfolios of Spotify stock, nor do they get free advertising on Spotify, or free inclusion on hot Spotify playlists, or monthly minimum payouts from Spotify.

The idea that we shop at the wrong kind of monopolist in the wrong way is a recipe for absolute despair. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to music with the Big Tech-owned monopoly service (Youtube) or the Big Content-owned monopoly service (Spotify). The money you hand over to these giant companies goes to artists the same way that the sneakers you put in a Dow collection bin goes to a recycling plant.

Think of the billions of human labor hours we all spent washing and sorting our plastics for a recycling program that didn’t exist and will never exist — imagine if we’d spent that time and energy demanding that our politicians hold petrochemical companies to account instead.

At the end of Break ’Em Up, Zephyr Teachout’s outstanding 2020 book on monopolies, Teachout has some choice words for “consumerism” as a theory of change. She writes that if you’re on your way to a protest against a new Amazon warehouse but you never make it because you waste too much time looking for a mom-and-pop stationers to sell you a marker to write your protest sign, Amazon wins:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

The problem isn’t that you shop the wrong way. Yes, by all means, support the creators and producers you care about in the way that they prefer, but keep your eye on the prize. Structural problems don’t have individual solutions. The problem isn’t that you have chosen single-use plastics — it’s that in our world everything for sale is packaged in single-use plastics. The problem isn’t that you’ve bought a subscription to the wrong music streaming service — it’s that labels have been allowed to buy all their competitors, creators’ unions have been smashed and degraded, and giant accounting scams by big companies generate minuscule fines.

The good news is that after 40 years of despair inducing regulatory nihilism and “vote with your wallet” talk, we’re finally paying attention to systemic problems, with a new generation of trustbusting radicals working around the world to end corporate impunity.

Dow is a repeat offender. A repeat, repeat offender. Chrissakes, they’re the linear descendants of Union Carbide, the company that poisoned Bhopal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

They shouldn’t be trusted to run a lemonade stand, let alone a “recycling” program. The same goes for Big Tech and Big Content company and the markets for creative labor. These companies have repeatedly demonstrated their unfitness, their habitual deception and immorality. These companies have captured their regulators, repeatedly, so we need better regulators — and weaker companies.

The thing I love about Teachout’s book is that it talks about what we should be demanding from our governments — it’s a manifesto for a movement against corporate power, not a movement for “responsible consumerism.” That was the template that Rebecca Giblin and I followed when we wrote Chokepoint Capitalism, our book about the brutal, corrupt creative labor market:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

We have a chapter on Spotify (multiple chapters, in fact!). For our audiobook, we made that chapter a “Spotify Exclusive” — it’s the only part of the book you can get on Spotify, and it’s free:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Next Thu (Mar 2) I’ll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who’s-who of European and US trustbusters. It’s livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free. On Fri (Mar 3), I’ll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival.

[Image ID: A woman kneeling to tie her running shoe. She stands on a background of plastic waste. In the top right corner is the logo for Dow chemicals. Below it is the Dow slogan, 'Others see an old shoe. We see the future.']