waste

Compost On Every Corner

scleaver — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

If you were wondering whether or not to be concerned about food waste, consider this: the city of Vancouver alone collects 1.5 million tons of trash, including 180,000 pounds of organic waste, at a cost of $2.7 million each year. That’s a lot of organic waste (food rinds, etc) that could be going back into the soil instead of rotting in landfills.

In our global food market we’re shipping food into our cities, eating it (or not), and producing tons of organic food waste that we then truck back out again. Composting that waste would improve the soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by sparing it from rotting in a landfill, but for some of us (apartment-dwellers like me especially) that’s not a realistic solution most of the time.

But, Ruben Anderson has a plan to make composting readily available to us urban dwellers (as reported on Alternet.org) by making a composting system that was on a “walkable scale,” accessible for everyone and easy to use. Already, some cities have backyard composters or balcony worm bins, but to take it to the next level, each apartment complex could provide composting for residents, either through an outside compost heap or an industrial composter.

Anderson’s wildest dream is the neighborhood bio-digester that would sit at four-way intersections around the city. Residents could throw compost into the chute on their way to work or the bus. And this new way of composting would create new jobs for compost helpers who would ride through the city, on bikes of course, adding nutrients and other necessities to help the food become soil and bring that new soil to gardens around the city.

Learn more about composting at the UK company Accelerated Compost Ltd the home of the Rocket Composter, the industrial Vermico Composter, or the verstaile Biodigester.

Are you down for some urban composting on every corner? And, if not, where do you think our food waste should be going?

Photo from The Gestalt Gardener: Extreme Composting post.

Five Green-Tech Ways to Use Less Paper

jplatt — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Are you using too much paper in your job? According to reduce.org, the average office worker uses a shocking 10,000 pages of per ever year. Averaged out to 200 work days, that's 50 sheets of paper every single day!

But don't worry, there are several easy things you can do -- both as an individual and on a company level -- to reduce that pile of paper, which will improve your environmental footprint and save money.

1. Work digitally -- You don't always need to print things out. Share documents electronically and try using collaborative software like Google Docs.

2. Print to PDF -- Think before you print. Do you really need a paper copy of that web page? Or will a saved digital file work better? I use a free program called PDF Creator that uses the "print" feature in any of my programs to generate a PDF of any document.

3. Go Green -- Have your company install the enterprise version of GreenPrint World. This program (which costs $70 per user on your site, with volume discounts available) examines every print job and lets you decide what elements to print and which ones to skip (say, photographs, or the legal disclaimers at the bottom of a web page). It keeps track of how many pages you don't print, allowing you to "track your impact" (how much paper you have used, or how much ink you have saved) and monitor your overall printing habits.

(By the way, individuals can download a free version of GreenPrint World, so you don't necessarily have to wait for your company to do this for you.)

4. Print on both sides -- Many printers can automatically handle duplex printing, and you should be able to change your print defaults (either individually or system-wide) to always print documents on both sides of a piece of paper.

5. Kill the fax -- Why is this technology still in use? Electronic documents are more flexible, easier to send and easier to read than faxes. If you absolutely have to send or receive faxes, use an online service to get rid of your fax machine. You'll use less paper and less energy in the process.

Give these tips a try and see how quickly you cut your paper use. Even a 50% reduction saves 5,000 sheets a year, so what do you have to lose?

The World's Greenest Garbage Can

jplatt — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Did you know that the average garbage truck gets just 2.8 miles to the gallon of diesel fuel? It's true. In fact, garbage trucks get the worst fuel economy of any type of commercial vehicle.

Why such bad gas mileage? Well, garbage trucks are big, fleets tend to be pretty old, and their drivers have to make stops every few hundred feet while keeping engines running the whole time.

With this in mind, and with fuel prices soaring, it makes sense for municipalities, universities and businesses with large campuses to find ways to cut their garbage collection costs. The BigBelly Solar Compactor can help.

No bigger than any other outdoor garbage receptacle, the BigBelly uses the sun's rays to power an internal compactor which crushes its content, allowing it to hold five times as much as your average garbage can. This means it doesn't need to be emptied as often, which saves fuel costs, cuts labor costs, and reduces a whole lot of greenhouses gases in the process.

The BigBelly Solar Compactor costs $4,000 -- but BigBelly says the device can pay for itself in just a year and a half. And that's not trash-talk.

Recycling Your Garbage: Where Does All that Trash Go?

jchatraw — Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

My dad and I talk about recycling more than two people probably should. There's the "Hey, dad. How are you?" part of the conversation. Then at least once a week, we talk about recycling. I'm quite certain my dad thinks recycling in his city is a vast cover-up plot to make people feel good about doing something for the environment.

Regardless of his suspicions, my dad religiously recycles, just like any good preacher should. But he's seen one too many episodes of Alias and has suggested on more than one occasion that he would like to stakeout the recycling bins near his house and trail the truck to see if all the trash is actually recycled.

Fortunately, my dad doesn't have to waste hours of his life on such an expedition, although any kind of stakeout appeals to the investigative journalist in me, even if it is just trash. Elizabeth Royte has already done the dirty work for us, giving us not only the scoop but good ideas in her book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash. Apparently, where garbage ends up is a secret -- and Royte unravels the mystery for conspiracy theorists like my dad.

She also gives us some great practical tips from her journey of discovery, In this green nugget from her book, Royte expresses the importance of composting and why using your garbage disposal is not the best tact to take if you're desiring an eco-friendly lifestyle:

The ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, which promotes the use of composting toilets and offers a multipoint plan for protecting clean water (it includes unhooking toilets from municipal sewers in favor of composting models), has campaigned to abolish garbage grinders. "It is as irrational to use water to transport food wastes as it is to use water to transport human excreta or industrial wastes," the foundation believes. "Water should be used only for drinking and for washing." ...

Mulling over the waste streams that left my house, I saw that sometimes they intersected—as food and sewage did at the wastewater treatment plant—and sometimes they came apart—at a recycling facility, for example. The line between compost and the majority of material at a landfill is all too thin.

Want to find out more about recycling?

Recycling Tips: Did You Know You Cannot Recycle Messy Pizza Boxes?

The Benefits of Recycling: Let’s Talk Trash

Recycling the Looking Glass: When Garbage and Art Collide

Top 10 Recycling Resources

Recycled Record Snack Tray

The Benefits of Recycling Cardboard

The Art of Garbage

Reduce, Reuse… FREECYCLE

Recycle Those Electronics!

Back to Basics—RRR

Picking Up Garbage TVs and Recycling as Art

Students Recycle and Reduce Garbage: Take It Or Leave It

Knight Rider Recycled—Reborn With Green Twist!

The Benefits of Recycling Cardboard

RiverWired.com — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

So as you probably know, cardboard, like all other types of paper products, is recyclable. At the same time, though, you’re probably saying to yourself, but cardboard is just so cumbersome to dispose of! Can’t I just put it in the dumpster behind my building and be done with it? The answer, my friends, is no, you cannot. Despite the fact that cardboard often comes in large, box-shaped forms that are not the most conveniently recycled refuse you’re likely to encounter, it’s still just as important to recycle it as it is anything else. That said, the following is a list of the benefits of recycling cardboard, in the hopes that you’ll think twice the next time you’re contemplating leaving your cardboard boxes on the curb in the middle of the night.

Economic Benefits: Since cardboard is bulky and takes up a lot of dumpster space, businesses and apartment complexes that generate large volumes of cardboard may rack up costly disposal fees for the extra volume the cardboard refuse creates. Recycling will not only eliminate those fees, it’ll also potentially generate a profit for businesses able to sell large amounts of collected cardboard.

Social Benefits: Corrugated cardboard boxes can be donated to charities for resuse, or to schools for creative/educational purposes.

Environmental Benefits: Recycling cardboard (like any other type of paper) reduces the demand for new paper from virgin pulp, thereby saving trees and decreasing the amount of pollution generated in new paper production. Finally, because cardboard is such bulky waste, recycling it saves significant amounts of space in landfills and reduces pollution in areas where trash is incinerated.

Want to find out more about recycling?

Recycling Tips: Did You Know You Cannot Recycle Messy Pizza Boxes?

The Benefits of Recycling: Let’s Talk Trash

Recycling the Looking Glass: When Garbage and Art Collide

Top 10 Recycling Resources

Recycled Record Snack Tray

The Art of Garbage

Reduce, Reuse… FREECYCLE

Recycle Those Electronics!

Back to Basics—RRR

Picking Up Garbage TVs and Recycling as Art

Students Recycle and Reduce Garbage: Take It Or Leave It

Knight Rider Recycled—Reborn With Green Twist!

Recycling Your Garbage: Where Does it All Go?

Zero- Waste Effort

mschrier — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 08:47:51 -0400

Homecoming is a time of celebration! Every year, Rowan University has a float with a lifespan of 12 hours. As an effort to save on waste, we could just not have a float. It doesn’t matter that it is tradition. It doesn’t matter that it encourages moral. How many people really cannot make it through their college life without a Homecoming parade float?

Fortunately, we don’t have to face that dim reality. The float is fully disassembled. All of the paper, wood, wire and paint are recycled. Not having the parade or the float may be better for the environment, but we cannot give up everything.

Save Paper, Ink with Free Software

jplatt — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:00:00 -0400

How many times have you gone to print a document or web page and ended up with one or more useless pages at the end of your print job? What a waste of paper and ink! Well, there is a solution, and it's not only easy -- it's free.

GreenPrint World is a free program you can download and use to help put a stop to those unwanted printed pages. The program analyzes your print job, then lets you decide what elements to print and which ones to skip (say, photographs, or the legal disclaimers at the bottom of a web page). It keeps track of how many pages you don't print, allowing you to "track your impact" (how much paper you have used, or how much ink you have saved) and monitor your overall printing habits.

You can also use GreenPrint World to generate PDFs of any document, allowing you to keep a digital copy of a web page instead of printing it at all.

Available since 2006, this new version of GreenPrint is now free for the first time, although it includes less features than the $35 Premium edition, and is supported by advertising, which appears fairly unobtrusively on the program's interface while your print job is being analyzed to see how much paper you can save.

By releasing this free version of its program, GreenPrint Technologies has announced that they hope to save "100 million trees and reduce greenhouse gases by 300 million tons globally." Pretty lofty goals -- and ones worth applauding.

Recycle Those Electronics!

jplatt — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:11:08 -0400

Recycling electronics is quickly becoming big business, which means more options are finally opening to consumers looking to trade in their old computers, monitors, cell phones, printer cartridges and the like.

The U.S. Post Office this week announced it is starting a trial program (initially available in 10 cities), where you can pick up a pre-paid envelope and mail in your electronics for free recycling. Their partner in this program, Clover Technologies Group, has a "zero landfill" policy and unlike other companies doesn't outsource its work oversees, where recycling of high-tech devices has a tendency to create terrible pollution.

The Post Office isn't alone. For example, Staples stores collect all kinds of electronics for recycling. The stores charge a $10 fee to recycle larger devices (like monitors, which aren't eligible for the Post Office's program), but smaller peripherals are recycled at no charge.

Of course, you could always embrace the old mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle" and donate your old electronics. Cell phones are particularly good fundraisers for many organizations. The old phones are refurbished and given to people who need them, often in the developing world, where they can help create economic opportunities.

No matter what you do, try to avoid just throwing your old electronics out. The long-term damage far outweighs the convenience of your garbage can.

Want to find out more about recycling?

Recycling Tips: Did You Know You Cannot Recycle Messy Pizza Boxes?

The Benefits of Recycling: Let’s Talk Trash

Recycling the Looking Glass: When Garbage and Art Collide

Top 10 Recycling Resources

Recycled Record Snack Tray

The Benefits of Recycling Cardboard

The Art of Garbage

Reduce, Reuse… FREECYCLE

Back to Basics—RRR

Picking Up Garbage TVs and Recycling as Art

Students Recycle and Reduce Garbage: Take It Or Leave It

Knight Rider Recycled—Reborn With Green Twist!

Recycling Your Garbage: Where Does it All Go?

Airline wastes 22K gallons of fuel to fly 5 passengers

C2 — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:19:43 -0500

A major airline is under fire from environmentalists for flying an aircraft across the Atlantic with only five passengers on board.

The flight from Chicago to London meant that the plane, a Boeing 777, used 22,000 gallons of fuel.

Friends of the Earth said it was 'obscene' to waste so much fuel flying an almost empty plane

It led to American Airlines being accused of reckless behaviour by green lobby groups.

The latest "eco- scandal" flight took place on February 9 after American was forced to cancel one of its four daily services from Chicago to London.

While it was able to find places for nearly all the passengers on the fully-booked flight, five still had to be accommodated. Those who did fly were upgraded to the business class cabin.

But while they enjoyed lavish hospitality, the airline was accused of an "obscene waste of fuel" by Friends of the Earth.