DES MOINES, Iowa – Winter may be the next season on the horizon in Iowa, but now is the time for action for those already looking ahead to having a healthier and greener lawn next spring and summer.

Rhonda O'Connor, project/strategy manager with the Metro Waste Authority, says fall is a great time to add compost to one's gardens, flowerbeds and topsoil.

"It improves the soil's ability to absorb water,” she explains. “It's basically feeding it nutrients and it kind of creates this great habitat for grass and plants to thrive."

O'Conner says compost also helps retain water, making lawns more resilient to dry spells, and helps keep nutrients around the root zone, helping to control weeds.

O'Connor notes that using compost to naturally improve your lawn is a better option in many ways over turning to the use of chemical fertilizers.

"The thing about fertilizer is that it requires multiple applications in one season and it's really just a temporary solution,” she points out. “It's not adding nutrients to that soil like compost is.

“And also fertilizer does pollute storm water. Every time it rains, all the fertilizer that you put on your lawn runs off and into the storm drain."

While there are some in Iowa who do their own backyard composting, O'Connor says for those who don't, there are many places to find compost, including local landfills and area stores.

More details on locations with compost are available online at the websites of Metro Waste Authority and the U.S. Composting Council.




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This Fourth of July, ocean conservation groups want Americans to declare their independence from single-use plastics.

A new report, "Charting a Course to Plastic-Free Beaches," names the five biggest culprits polluting beaches and waterways: cigarette butts, plus plastic foam food ware, bags, straws and stirrers, and utensils.

Anja Brandon, associate director of U.S. plastics policy for the Ocean Conservancy, said non-recyclable plastic items break down in the water and do great harm to wildlife.

"We're calling for bans to eliminate or significantly reduce these five items," Brandon explained. "Eliminating these five items, in the U.S. alone, would cut 1.4 million tons of plastics each year."

The report advised people to bring reusable water bottles, plates, cups and cutlery to their barbecues, and to consider joining a nearby cleanup event. One year ago, California lawmakers passed Senate Bill 54, which requires all packaging in the state to be recyclable or compostable by 2032.

Brandon pointed out the landmark California law jumpstarts the move toward a "circular" economy, where items are designed to be reused or recycled, so they do not end up in a landfill.

"SB 54 also requires that producers of all single-use materials help take responsibility for their items, and help pay for the recycling or composting of those items," Brandon outlined. "Also, the bill requires that plastics meet an incredibly high recycling rate of 65%."

You can find more ways to avoid single-use plastics on the website plasticfreeJuly.org.


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The U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund is urging Google to allow Chromebook owners a right to repair the devices and extend their life span, reducing e-waste and saving money for schools in Georgia and across the country.

With 31.8 million Chromebooks sold in 2020, many of which were distributed to schools during the pandemic, many of the devices are approaching expiration and will soon stop receiving updates.

Lucas Gutterman, Designed to Last campaign director for the group, said to prevent the loss of working devices, they are calling on Google to double the life expectancy of Chromebooks, an effort which could save Georgia schools millions of dollars.

"Our report actually found that doubling the life of Chromebook from four to eight years could save schools in Georgia $63 million and cut carbon emission equivalent to taking 32,000 cars off the road a year," Gutterman explained.

Gutterman warned as operating system expiration dates approach, Chromebooks will become a dangerous form of e-waste. Studies have shown e-waste accounts for more than 70% of toxic material in our waste stream, causing cancer, fertility problems, developmental delays and other health risks.

According to a survey conducted last year by the National Consortium for School Networking in 2022, many schools have implemented a one-to-one program, providing each student with their own device.

However, Gutterman highlighted the potential loss of security access for the laptops could result in schools losing access to critical sites.

"Chromebooks have an expiration date after that date has passed," Gutterman pointed out. "Even though the laptop might be working perfectly fine, you can't access state testing websites, other secure websites and, for a lot of schools, that laptop is not really going to meet their needs."

In addition to saving schools money, the report estimated across the 48.1 million K-12 public school students in the U.S., doubling the life span of Chromebooks could result in $1.8 billion dollars in savings for taxpayers, assuming no additional maintenance costs.


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By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Chanalisa Sera navigates a forklift around hundreds of boxes of clothes in a Commerce warehouse. Some are tattered and worn out, others haven’t been used at all. Her job: to keep them from going to a landfill.

Sera works for Homeboy Threads, a new for-profit arm of the mission-driven organization that rehabilitates and trains formerly gang-affiliated and incarcerated people.

“I learned the forklift, I learned how to input weights and data entry into the computers,” Sera says of her job. “I learned how to sell things online, on e-com. I never, never in my life thought I would know how to do any of that stuff.”

Sera started as a trainee with Homeboy Industries a year and a half ago and became the first full-time employee at Homeboy Threads. Now she supervises the next cohort of trainees and teaches them what she’s learned.

The trucks bringing in loads of clothes for Sera to sort are filled with company inventory that didn’t sell, rolls of fabric that didn’t get used, or worn materials that customers returned to the store.

Homeboy can profit in a few ways: They can just sort the clothes for a company and hand them back; fix or sew new clothes and sell them; sell the raw materials to be recycled into a new medium, such as insulation. 

Homeboy Threads CEO Chris Zwicke explains it’s a labor-intensive process: “Sorting out all the different pieces: what's used, what could be resold, what needs to be repaired, or what's completely beyond salvage and needs to be recycled.”

Some of the clothes in the warehouse belong to the clothing company GUESS. It worked with Homeboy for more than a year in a pilot project before it publicly announced its launch last week. 

“Initially we started the pilot with store returns, damages, irregular product,” explains Director of Brand Partnerships Nicolai Marciano. “Since the launch of our pilot program in December 2021, Homeboy’s received over 200,000 pounds of garments to avoid ending up in landfill.”

Textiles are California’s fastest growing landfill waste. U.S. consumers toss about 81 pounds of clothes every year, and buy a new piece of clothing every five or six days. That’s about five times as much as we were buying 40 years ago. 

But Zwicke says he’s seeing more consumers and companies who want to know where their unsellable clothes are ending up. “Corporations are more sensitive to the idea now that there is no ‘away’ when you throw something away. It's actually going somewhere.”

Homeboy Threads is coming online just in time. California politicians introduced a bill this year called the Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2023, which would require producers to figure out how to collect and recycle reusable clothes and textiles. That means there could be a spike in demand for authorized collectors to do all that sorting and repair for companies.

“It's a gap in the market that we've seen, and that we're filling kind of with our workforce development mission,” says Zwicke. “We're here to create jobs, and there's a lot of kind of manual work that goes into what we do.”



Caleigh Wells wrote this article for KCRW.


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