Hello yello dello 🐥

This issue of Soft Signal is specific to those of us living Down Under, except for the links at the end — you can enjoy those from anywhere. Promise to resume more general transmissions next time 💌

GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE. That wasn't a sensationalist subject line you saw. Soft plastic recycling really is alive and well in Australia — just not easily accessed the way it was before last year's REDcycle collapse.

Since then, stuff's been going on behind the scenes to pick up where the failed program left off. For the sake of keeping this email short(er), you can find links to some of that "stuff" on my website, but tl;dr — it's all optimistic, just may take a while to get going.

In the meantime, if you're sick of staring at the soft plastics stockpiling in your laundry room (we keep ours under the stairs), TerraCycle's Zero Waste Box is currently the most legit way to recycle. Not gonna lie — the boxes are pricey for households. The small and medium sizes are $163 and $196 respectively at the time of this email.

HOWEVER, an expense like this may be less of a issue for small-to-medium-sized businesses and — especially — employers who care about things like people, planet and community.

Imagine if your workplace would serve its local community by acting as a collection point for soft plastics. Or even just running a collection program for employees and their families could make more of a difference than, say, doing nothing at all.

If you're game to approach your manager about this, I've drafted a short and sweet email you can copypaste. Unfortunately, in a lot of small businesses, internal programs like this tend to either be volunteer-run or fall upon an office manager to oversee. But don't let that stop you from starting the conversation.

The first step is to get the ball rolling — where it goes from there can be approached as a collaborative effort.

Now, I'm asking you: What's the cleverest way you've ever recycled something? Recycling, upcycling, repurposing, re-using — whatever it is, I want to hear about your creativity. I'm in need of inspiration.

Hit reply and tell me.

Sandy.
sanlive.com

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On Teenage Luddites. When people try to tell me anything outside of social media "is dead" to anyone younger than 35, I recall the teenage predisposition to counterculture, independent thinking, and curiosity not yet beaten into submission by the weight of responsibility. Articles like this give me hope that we're not just beelining towards a digital monoculture where ideas interbreed amongst themselves. Perhaps in the future, other ways to live will continue to exist.

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive is a long love-letter to the 90s. Geriatric Millennials be warned: this article might give you nostalgia. (Thank you, niaal, for this find!)

Monocraft is a monospaced programming font inspired by the Minecraft typeface. I don't think I'll be using this anytime soon, but I love that someone created it and shared it with the world.

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Finally, here's what I'm up to now.