The Glass Packaging Institute (GPI) will kick off Recycle Glass Week, Sept. 21 – 27, 2009. To raise recycling awareness and help launch the event, the organization has released a public service announcement featuring “Little Bottle,” the event’s mascot. Little Bottle is one of the stars of Saint-Gobain Containers’ 15-minute animated feature, “The Adventures of Captain Cullet and The Little Gob o’ Glass: A Story of Hope and Recycling,” (I swear I did not make that title up) created last year for use in schools with third and fourth grade school-age children.
Throughout Recycle Glass Week, GPI and its member companies will hold over 50 events and activities to promote recycling awareness in 22 states across the country. Visit www.gpi.org to locate a nearby event. Activities will be added daily as Recycle Glass Week approaches.
A very engaging story in the New York Times profiles Dan Phillips of Huntsville, Texas, who builds whimsical homes using reclaimed construction and demolition debris, discarded wine corks, bottle butts, cow skeletons, and anything else that comes to hand. The results are cheap, energy efficient homes of considerable charm that stand as monuments to the power of recycling.
Phillips’ construction company, Phoenix Commotion, develops the projects as low-income housing, often requiring the potential homeowner to participate in the build, ala Habitat for Humanity. “I think mobile homes are a blight on the planet,” Phillips tells the Times. “Attractive, affordable housing is possible and I’m out to prove it.”
What ever would we do without our favorite cultural provocateurs, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)? The organization has received a great deal of press for its recent spate of advertisements (and rejected advertisements) that overtly use sex to promote a vegetarian lifestyle. Now, they want to slap that steamy message on a garbage truck. Because, if I’m being honest, the two things that usually spring to mind when I gaze upon a trash-filled rear-loader is 1) “H-O-T!” and 2) “I should really give up meat.”
According to the Topeka Capital-Journal, the group petitioned Topeka, Kan. Mayor Bill Bunten with a $6,000 offer to adorn one of the city’s recycling collection trucks with an image of a pert blonde in a lettuce-leaf bikini and the admonition “Vegetarians Do It to Save the Planet!” The move came after the city accepted $3,000 from KFC to fill potholes in the city’s roads and topped them with advertisements for the fast food establishment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bunten declined PETA’s offer.
So you gave into peer pressure and nabbed yourself that ubiquitous geek totem, an iPhone. Well now you can cleanse your sin of conspicuous consumption by cladding that sleek device in a dowdy or bizarre but very environmentally friendly case made of recycled or repurposed material. I give you not one but TWO lists of eco-friendly iPhone cases as provided by Greenlist and elephantjournal.com.
The owners of Central Landfill in Johnston, R.I., had a problem: Local all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and dirt bike enthusiasts were illegally trespassing on the 1,200-acre property and using the landfill and surrounding woods for off-road riding.
The solution? Fight four-wheelers with four-wheelers. Using $17,000 in federal Homeland Security funding, two Johnston police officers were furnished with ATVs of their own (complete with shotgun holsters) and put on patrol to take down those no-good, dump-jumping motorheads.
The plan has helped curb the municipal waste motocross. Since instituting the patrols, half as many illegal off-roading incidents have been reported. One suspects those riders are too busy applying for jobs with the Johnston Police Department.
Cats may be many things, but they are not joiners. So it is little surprise that one finicky feline effectively sabotaged her owners’ attempt to set an environmental example. Oregon residents Amy and Adam Korst had the best of intentions: Live for a year sending no more than five pounds of waste to the landfill. They found ways to recycle everything from toothbrushes to home electronics and sacrificed foods that came in packaging that could not be recycled or reused (their efforts are documented at www.greengarbageproject.com). The endeavor was going swimmingly — until the Korsts’ eight-year-old cat Lexy decided her part of the arrangement simply would not fly.
Lexy had grown accustomed to her environmentally-unfriendly kitty litter and simply refused to use the biodegradable substitute. Eventually, the Korsts excused Lexy from having to participate in the project, conceding to The Guardian newspaper that they “do not have a green cat.”
Waste industry folks will recognize something in these impressive photos by Chris Jordan that may not be immediately apparent to the layman (as evidenced by the subsequent comments): While, the images of so much waste are disturbing, the fact that these materials have clearly been separated means they are destined to be recycled, not landfilled. Still, it’s an effective commentary on consumption and disposal. Plus the photos themselves are beautifully shot.
I think the more interesting question here is why we so rarely are allowed to see these kinds of pictures. As Jordan admits, many of his photographs were taken clandestinely, since the processing facilities would not give him permission to shoot the material. Why? Certainly there are safety and legal issues to be considered, but those can be easily accommodated (they do it for Mike Rowe, after all). What is the inherent reticence in allowing Americans see the end product of our current consumption habits?
There’s a great op-ed in the New York Times this week by Bharati Chaturvedi that looks at how the collapse in recylables markets has impacted those at the far end of the recycling food chain. Trash pickers, or as the author defines them, “sorters, traders and reprocessors who extricate paper, cardboard and plastics from garbage heaps and prepare them for reuse,” live essentially hand-to-mouth and have been devastated by the wallop to their livelihood. While many waste-handling companies and recycling processors are feeling an impact on their bottom line, these people lose their only source of income and support.
This is not a crisis limited to third-world countries and slums. Every urban area supports (and is supported by) trash pickers. Chaturvedi suggests government subsidies to keep recycling going in lean times along with some sort of federal registration so that these people don’t fall through the cracks. But both ideas strike me as wishful thinking. What can be done?
Last year, my wife and I did a partial renovation of our kitchen that involved buying a new refrigerator. The existing refrigerator was a relatively new, energy efficient model, but it was small and did not fit the reconfigured space. But rather than get rid of it, we did what a lot of people do: We moved it into the basement for extra cold storage.
Unfortunately, a lot of these back-up fridges and freezers are much older models that may use three times as much electricity as current models, padding electric bills and placing a strain on the power grid. In addition, they’re more likely to release chlorofluorocarbons — potent greenhouse gases. Even if you want to get rid of that old fridge, it’s hard to know how to dispose of it responsibly. So what to do?
The New York Times’ Green Inc. blog reports on refrigerator recycling programs instituted around the country that offer cash incentives for people to turn in their old iceboxes. An added benefit is that the programs make environmentally conscious mincemeat of the appliances they collect:
As part of the Vermont program, Jaco Environmental will reuse about 95 percent of the appliances’ contents, including foam insulation (which is burned, and its heat used to generate electricity), according to Mr. Sirkin. Steel and plastic may end up in new products like cars or refrigerators, and the tempered glass shelving may wind up in asphalt or helping to aerate some potting soils.
