After reporting in March about the horrific trash management that accompanied University of Georgia tailgating festivities, it pains me as a UGA alum to admit that in-state rival Georgia Tech seems to have devised a vastly superior approach to collegiate waste collection. Launched in 2008, the school’s Game Day Recycling program recruits student volunteers to help collect recyclables from thousands of football fans as they are tailgating, walking through the campus or inside the stadium during the game. Last season, the program netted 19.3 tons of recyclables in just six games.

“Tailgaters” distribute large blue bags to tailgating fans across campus. Once filled with recyclables, the bags can simply be left on the ground for collection. “Gate keepers” stationed at Bobby Dodd Stadium’s 10 entrance gates encourage arriving fans to recycle outside food and beverage containers (which are not allowed inside). Finally, “stadium attendants” instruct fans inside the stadium to use strategically placed recycling bins and clarify what can and can’t be recycled. Most of the volunteers complete their work before kickoff.

Waste Management has been recruited to assist with this season’s effort. And as an added incentive, a roving video crew films fans who demonstrate exceptionally green behavior for broadcast on the stadium’s JumboTron during the game.

My bulldogs clearly need to learn some new tricks.

Source: www.recycle.gatech.edu

Tired of receiving pointless Farmville and Mafia Wars updates from your Facebook friends? Want to play a game that actually benefits the world? Oceanopolis, a new Facebook app from Greenopolis, the social media subsidiary of Waste Management, may fit the bill. The game recruits players to collect recyclables on a virtual island that can be redeemed for in-game rewards as well as retail coupons or charitable donations in the real world. More points can be earned by doing real recycling using Greenopolis kiosks.

Oceanopolis is still in beta but Facebook users can sign up and play now. And you don’t even have to feel bad about letting your Farmville plot go to seed.

When it comes to mysterious islands in the Pacific Ocean, anything’s possible. Just ask Ricardo Montalbán and the castaways of “LOST.” Perhaps it’s that brand of fantastical thinking that led Netherlands-based architectural firm WHIM to devise Recycled Island, a floating man-made island constructed of plastic recycled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I’ll give you a moment to wrap your head around that.

The idea, in a clam shell, is to turn a nuisance into a resource. Plastic from the Patch would be collected, sorted and recycled, on site, into the building blocks of a synthetic, seaworthy landmass and the structures atop it. Based on the 4 million tons of available material, WHIM estimates that Recycled Island could ultimately reach the size of Hawaii’s main island (roughly 10,000 square kilometers).

WHIM envisions Recycled Island, still only a research project in its earliest stages, as entirely sustainable and self-sufficient. Farmed seaweed and the composted excretions of the island’s settlers would produce soil to grow crops. Electricity would be generated through solar, wave and wind power. And the island could provide refuge for those displaced by global climate change.

All they need now is a way to clone Hervé Villechaize.

Source: recycledisland.com

Last week, the New York Times featured “Answers From a Garbologist,” a three-day Q&A column by Dr. Robin Nagle, the anthropologist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation. You might remember Nagle as the author of a terrific column for Waste Age last July about the anthropological value of landfills or from other pieces we have written about her.

The questions and responses in the Times column cover a broad swath of waste science and lore, from the pedestrian to the profound. All three segments are well worth your time:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating raft of plastic trash the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, seems an insurmountable problem. But appliance manufacturer Electrolux has decided that when life hands you plastic, make vacuum cleaners.

Under a program called “Vac From the Sea,” the company will harvest plastic from the patch and other marine environments and use it to manufacture vacuum cleaners and other devices. It is largely a symbolic gesture, since plastic of so many disparate types is expensive and impractical to separate, clean and recycle. But Electrolux says it hopes the program will raise awareness of the threat plastic waste poses to the ecosystem.

Sadly, the company can’t manufacture a vacuum big enough to clean the world’s oceans of human waste once and for all.

Source: Treehugger

We’ve reported on freegansism before. Haling from all walks of life, freegans are united by their shunning of money and consumptive lifestyles in favor of bartering and scavenging what they need from nature and especially trash. So it was fascinating to read this week’s New York Times feature about a group of freegans in Buffalo, N.Y., who have gone so far as to “recycle” a few of that economically hard-hit city’s abandoned houses. Some might see this as glorified squatting, and it is, but the scene described in the piece differs greatly from the images of flop houses and drug dens squatting usually elicits. The freegans have elaborate rules for who can live in the house, for how long, and what they must contribute in terms of fixing up the property. Many use the houses as a way to learn valuable skills and get back on their feet. And it’s hard not to root for them given the alternative: homes — many of them historic — sitting empty until they decay into ruins.

But rarely do you see new homeowners most excited about a property due to its proximity to a well-stocked Dumpster.

Millions of people in the United States and around the world cannot afford the barest of necessities, including shoes and clothes. So it is more than a little infuriating to read stories like this one in the New York Times about corporations intentionally sending unworn clothing, shoes, and other textiles they cannot sell to landfills. It’s especially inexcusable given the slew of organizations that will accept these items and get them to the folks that need them. Waste Age has reported on a few.

At a time when landfill space is at a premium, it is in the waste industry’s interest to help curb this wasteful, shortsighted practice.

In about two weeks, the eyes of the globe will turn toward South Africa as the 2010 FIFA World Cup commences. As the players from many nations enter the pitch, they will be scoring points not only for their teams but for the viability of recycling. According to Greenopolis (reporting on a story from Ecoterre) all national teams outfitted by Nike will sport jerseys made from recycled plastic bottles culled from landfills in Taiwan and Japan.

From Ecoterre:

Each shirt comprises up to eight recycled plastic bottles, a move that reduces energy consumption by up to 30 percent compared with manufacturing virgin polyester. Besides saving raw materials, Nike also diverted nearly 13 million plastic bottles (or nearly 560,000 pounds of polyester waste) from the landfill—enough to cover more than 29 football pitches.

Waste Age has reported on recycled athletic wear before. Given the importance of new markets for recycled material to the success of recycling, do you feel athletic wear made from recycled plastic is a compelling new sector or just a gimmick?

It is a well-known fact that you can make anything more endearing by endowing it with the ability to sing. It’s true for frogs. It’s true for raisins. And it’s apparently true for waste receptacles.

In a public service campaign adopted by municipalities around the country (most recently by Jackson Township, N.J.), young recycling bin Mikey is mentored by his older, wiser cohort, Herb, a trash bin. The spots, developed by Artisan Media Studios, a San Diego-based marketing and media firm, often result in one or both of the containers breaking out into song, such as a rendition of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” with recycling-centered lyrics.

The spots work on two levels: Either you find them delightful and are compelled to recycle, or you want to shove recyclables into the bins’ mouths to shut them up.

Source: Artisian Media Studios

As the BP oil spill continues to spread across the Gulf of Mexico, many frustrated onlookers are looking for some way — any way — to help. Much ink has been spilled over the donation of pet hair and human hair to sop up the mess. I received a similar proposal from New York-based consultant Albert Wilking via e-mail last week, wondering if old newsprint and other recycled paper might be repurposed to absorb the oncoming oil:

To Whom it May Concern:

In shallow water the paper will be easier to collect than in deep water.

He makes some compelling points. Do you think this could be effective or would it just make a bigger mess?