Workers at a waste facility in New Bern, N.C., no doubt snapped to attention when they came across not one but two unexploded landmines. Police and a bomb squad were called in to have a look. The devices turned out to be S-mines, incendiary devices that date to World War II, colorfully referred to in military circles as “Bouncing Bettys.” Neither device had a fuse, rendering them relatively harmless. One mine had already been crushed by a landfill compactor (to no ill effect, obviously). The origin of the devices was unknown, but city and landfill officials suspect the ordinance was destined for disposal elsewhere and simply was misdelivered.

So much for the new Pentagon recycling initiative.

Source: New Bern Sun Journal

It is a common sight to see prisoners on work detail picking up trash along the side of the road. With any luck, they won’t run into the latest group to take on roadside cleanup: the Minnesota Carry Permit Holders.

In October, about a dozen gun enthusiasts deployed along a two-mile stretch of highway in Mendota Heights, Minn., for the group’s inaugural trash cleanup. All members displayed loaded (and legally registered) firearms. The MCPH had the blessing of the Minnesota Department of Transportation, and said they wanted to do a good deed. The relative usefulness of a loaded gun in picking up litter is subject to debate, but it is safe to assume that passing motorists took the courtesy of using an interior lane.

Source: Associated Press

We all remember the pictures of massive pieces of steelwork being removed from the site of the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks. Greenopolis highlights the fate of 24 tons of that material, recycled for use in the USS New York, the Navy’s newest amphibious assault ship. Rarely have I heard the process of recycling (admittedly, on a grand scale) described in such deeply felt terms.

“It was a spiritual moment for everybody there,” Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said. He remembered that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the “hair on my neck stood up. It had a big meaning to it for all of us. They knocked us down. They can’t keep us down. We’re going to be back,” said Chavers.

Retail chain Target and drugstore giant CVS announced this week that both would be taking action to promote the use of reusable shopping bags in their stores. According to USA Today, Target will refund shoppers five cents for each reusable bag used to pack the customer’s purchases, while CVS will give customers a $1 cash bonus on their CVS cards every four times they buy something but don’t request plastic bags.

The moves are further evidence of a genuine movement among retailers to get customers to adopt reusable shopping bags. While green trendsetters like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s have long rewarded customers for bag conscientiousness, even Wal-Mart now features an iconic blue reusable bag in its television ads (though does not reward its customers for using it).

Do you think it’s possible to completely wean Americans off plastic (and occasionally paper) shopping bags?

As an obsessive recycler, I am often confounded by the delivery/take out pizza box. It’s a pretty substantial piece of cardboard of limited utility. Many recyclers won’t accept it since it’s usually contaminated by contact with food. Moreover, most pizza boxes are manufactured using relatively little recycled content.

Enter the GreenBox, which aims to make the lowly pizza box both greener and more functional. Made of 100 percent recycled material, the GreenBox can hold a full-sized pizza, but is perforated so that one half can be broken down into four “plates.” The other half forms a refrigerator-scale box for leftover slices. According to Pizza Marketplace, the GreenBox is the brainchild of entrepreneur William Walsh, CEO and founder of ECO Inc.

“(The industry is) mowing down tree after tree for boxes that are used for 45 minutes and then thrown away,” Walsh told Pizza Marketplace. “So I thought, there’s a lot of material to work with (on a pizza box); I wanted to make something intuitive, easy to use, and that had some value. … We made it multifunctional so it was more than just a delivery device, and came up with this design.”

Walsh says 2.4 billion pizza boxes are circulated every year and that most of the “recycled” ones are still include 70 percent virgin wood.

It seems as though some folks upgrade their cell phone every six months. For them, and for people who want to do the right thing with their genuinely worn out phone but don’t have a lot of time, CNET reports there is now the EcoATM.

Just deposit your device in the free-standing machine and it will use cameras and other metrics to examine its condition. It then offers the customer a gift card or in-store credit toward a new phone. If the phone is broken or just hopelessly obsolete, it will offer customers the option of recycling it responsibly. They may even be rewarded for their eco-responsibility with a free cell phone case and the promise that EcoATM will plant a tree in that person’s name.

Suppose you wanted to build a house made of plastic. You could go showy and build the structure out of Legos as a stunt, or you could do something practical and develop a method to repurpose granulated plastic as an aggregate in cement.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Masters of Architecture graduate Henry Miller chose the latter. As reported by inhabitat.com, the resulting material is as strong as concrete made with mined aggregate. Moreover, it creates a compelling new market for used plastic as the material simply needs to be ground up, circumventing the expensive and energy-intensive recycling process. For his efforts, Miller was awarded first place in the Component Category of the second annual Concrete Thinking for a Sustainable World competition.

The PBS program “Curious George” featured a segment in which children were given a tour of Casella Waste Systems‘ recently renovated Zero-Sort recycling center in Charlestown, Mass. The clip highlights a now well-established waste industry fact: Kids are fascinated by single-stream sorting technology.

Hey ladies: Perhaps you consider yourself environmentally savvy. You use canteens and reusable shopping bags. You’ve been recycling since the ’70s. You compost every scrap in your kitchen. But if you live in Japan, you could be doing more!

Earlier this year, Wacoal, Japan’s largest undergarment manufacturer, began collecting used bras for recycling. The company distributed recycling bags, asking customers to fill them with worn out lingerie and send them back. So far, the company has collected 350 bags containing about 36,000 old bras. Ultimately, the 3.59 tons of busted brassieres will be processed and used as solid fuel.

Dolly Parton, eager to do her part, has requested several freight shipping containers from the company.

Source: greenopolis.com

In case you hadn’t heard, it snows in Colorado — A LOT. And according to meteorologists, with an El Nino weather pattern in effect, Colorado is due to get even more snow than usual this winter. So how to convey the potential destructive force of all that snow when it accumulates on the roof of an average home? Why, throw a garbage truck up there, of course!

The Do It Yourself Network show “Disaster House” demonstrates the effects of various natural and manmade disasters that might befall a home and, subsequently, what it takes to repair that damage. To simulate how a heavy snowfall can collapse a pitched roof, the show’s producers used a crane to lower a 19-foot rear-loader onto an (presumably unoccupied) Englewood, Colo. home, with predictably spectacular results.

Good luck finding the clause in your homeowner’s policy that covers this particular eventuality.

Source: cbs4denver.com