Landfill Harmonic film teaser from Landfill Harmonic on Vimeo.

Landfill Harmonic is an upcoming feature-length documentary about a remarkable musical orchestra in Paraguay, where young musicians play instruments made from trash.

Cateura, Paraguay is a town essentially built on top of a landfill. Garbage collectors browse the trash for items they can sell, and the children are often at risk of getting involved with drugs and gangs.

When orchestra director Szaran and music teacher Fabio set up a music program for the kids of Cateura, they soon had more students than instruments. That changed when Szaran and Fabio were shown something they had never seen before: a violin made out of garbage. Today, there’s an entire orchestra of instruments made from items found in the landfill, now called The Recycled Orchestra.

The film shows how trash and recycled materials can be transformed into beautiful sounding musical instruments, but more importantly, it brings witness to the transformation of precious human beings.

Food waste is a big deal in America. As grocery stores stock their shelves with holiday goodies, preparing for the rush of feasting consumers, much of what retailers sell won’t end up in people’s stomachs -- it’ll end up in the trash.

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted around the world, much of it in rich countries where grocery stores throw out imperfect products and consumers toss uneaten food. Since the 1970′s, America has seen a 50 percent jump in the amount of food wasted, according to the National Resources Defense Council. Consumers play a major role, tossing away roughly 250 pounds of food per person every year. But supermarkets play an even bigger role, discarding 10 percent of America’s total food supply at the retail level.

All that uneaten food accounts for nearly one quarter of U.S. methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than CO2.

This problem has spawned a range of reports and education programs designed to get Americans and retailers to waste less. But there’s another option that often gets overlooked: why don’t we just eat more of the food that grocery stores are throwing in the dumpster? That cuts back on both consumer and retailer waste.

There are already plenty of people, often called “freegans,” who do this.The term freegan, which blends together “free” and “vegan,” is finally becoming more widely known in mainstream culture -- even if it is a practice that has been around for as long as food itself.

Part money-saving opportunity, part political-statement, and part environmentalism, the modern freeganism movement -- also known simply as dumpster diving -- has spawned a culture of its own.

A new short documentary film, called “Spoils: Extraordinary Harvest,” intimately explores this culture. The film follows groups of dumpster divers in New York City and paints a portrait of the people who dig for wasted food.

The film because doesn’t try to pretentiously puff up the importance of dumpster diving, it simply provides a raw look at how it’s done. Freegans are in a way, the urban equivalent to our romanticized notion of indigenous cultures that “live off the land” and take only what they need.

Something to think about as you sit down for your Thanksgiving feast.

Anonymous is bringing an alleged injustice to light in the Philadephia area:

Hello Citizens of the world, We are Anonymous. Dear brothers and sisters: Now is the time to open your eyes and expose the truth!

Recently it has come to the attention of Anonymous that Ori Feibush, a business developer, in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Point Breeze, is facing legal action after voluntarily cleaning up more than forty tons of trash from a vacant lot neighboring his local business. Mr. Feibush spent more than twenty thousand dollars of his own money to not only remove the trash but also to level the soil; add cherry trees, fencing and park benches; and repave the sidewalk.

As a result of this man's benevolent contribution, the city agencies demanding that Mr. Feibush return the vacant lot to its previous condition have said they are considering legal action against him. City officials are currently calling him a "trespasser."

Ori Feibush tried to purchase the lot and even visited the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to present his plan. But the city told him to stop, warning he was "endangering the public."

If the city did the same project it would have cost about one million five hundred thousand dollars. Another intensive might have been to dive down property value then develop it for a profit.

Continue reading »

Protesters gathered at an vacant and neglected bank-owned home in southeast San Diego on Tuesday to collect debris and transport it to a local bank, where they had hoped to make a "deposit."

They hoped that their efforts would send a message to Bank of America, the reported owner of the property: "Clean up your mess."

The protesters, members of Alliance Of Californians For Community Empowerment, a homeowner advocate group, organized the protest to underscore the filth and possible unwanted behavior that could infiltrate communities as a result from a bank's failure to maintain a vacant foreclosed property.

Members of the group also used the event to push for a city ordinance that would require banks to enter every home in the foreclosure process into a registry. The proposed measure would also fine lenders if they do not properly maintain those homes.

More on this here.