Tag: recycling

This Treehouse Is More Than Just an Outdoor Clubhouse

Posted on by robbie

Metal sculptures, installations made of reclaimed materials and sprawling animal art murals adorn the grounds at the Lincoln Street Art Park in Detroit.
The park, located in a vacant lot behind local nonprofit recycling center Recycle Here! was not only meant to turn clutter into a community resource, but to create a space for local artists and children to appreciate the concept of green art.

“The act of recycling is for the generation behind you,” said Recycle Here! founder Matthew Naimi. “For kids, recycling is an answer for cleaning up their city. They see the litter and dumping all around them, and they don’t like it.”

And now, the recycling center is teaming up with educational nonprofit Green Living Science (GLS) to attract even more city kids to the local art park by turning a shipping container into a giant treehouse and learning lab. “Activi-Tree,” a large treehouse with the shipping container at the base, would be a year-round classroom for field trips and programs at the Lincoln Street Art Park, according to MLive.com.

The groups are aiming to raise $8,000 for the project, commissioning artists, welders, and designers to help create the outdoor classroom that will teach STEM-focused courses and environmental science while promoting the “three R’s” of recycling: reduce, reuse and recycle. The giant treehouse will use solar-powered LED lights, which will also light up the park, according to GLS.

Both organizations have extensively worked with city schools to teach children recycling through school assemblies, professional development programs, and in-class presentations. This year alone, the two organizations have implemented programs in 25 schools. With the addition of a treehouse learning lab, Lincoln Street Art Park could be the perfect backdrop to inspire the next generation of urban planners.

Want to donate? Check out Green Living Science’s donation page here.

MORE: From Trash to Transit: Detroit’s Innovative Uses for Demolished Homes

Coca-Cola Shows There’s Nothing Like a Fun Incentive to Encourage Recycling

Posted on by robbie

Most of us here in America are familiar with recycling and believe it’s the right thing to do. But in some places around the world, there’s no concept of the earth-friendly action whatsoever. And whether this is due to an absence of recycling equipment, a lack of efficient government regulation, or even lower education, the end result is the same: Our planet and the environment suffers.
Take the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, for example: Its population of 15 million has no concern about recycling at all. So how does one educate an entire urban community about the importance of recycling?
Global soda giant Coca-Cola decided to take a page from the old parenting handbook of tricking kids into doing otherwise boring chores by turning it into a game. As Fast Company notes, Coke created a Pong-like arcade game where it only accepts empty bottles instead of coins.
MORE: Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)
You’ll see in the video below that the game was met with wild success. The machine, called the Coca-Cola Happiness Arcade, traveled to six different locations in six days and collected thousands of bottles that will be turned into plastic pellets for re-use.
Grey Dhaka, the ad agency behind the campaign, acknowledged that their Happiness Arcade will be “difficult to value in real ROR (return on recycling!) terms,” but it was more about “awareness raising.”
Granted, this concept isn’t practical on a global scale (and just think of the crazy long lines!), but we think that creative innovations like these surely help to educate the world about our impact on the planet and encourages us all to live more sustainably.
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You Won’t Believe the Surprising New Uses for Old Shipping Containers

Posted on by robbie

Excess shipping containers are a big problem — literally. According to Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, there are 34.5 million of them in the world. Shipping companies use each one for a decade or two, then the hulking steel boxes are destined to spend eternity in a landfill.
But more people are starting to rethink what these containers could be used for, including Rhino Cubed, founded by businesswoman Jan Burton and Sam Austin, an architect who specializes in using reclaimed materials. Launched on Earth Day in Louisville, Colorado, Rhino Cubed builds small, artful homes out of discarded shipping containers.
The company offers three models of 160-square foot shipping container homes, including a $60,000 deluxe version that contains art and metalwork and two less expensive styles with added flooring, doors, and walls. Environmentally-friendly aspects of the tiny houses include solar panels that generate energy for a refrigerator and a water tank to catch rainwater.
“We really wanted to create something that would work off-the-grid,” Burton told the Denver Post. “I like to think we can preserve Mother Nature while still living in the middle of it.”
Another Colorado project making use of old shipping containers is the 25th & Larimer building, which opened in Denver last November. The development was created out of 29 repurposed steel shipping containers, and its first tenant was Topo Designs, a company known for its rugged rucksacks and backpacks that are manufactured in the Rocky Mountain state to ensure factory worker safety. Jedd Rose of Topo Designs told Ricardo Baca of the Denver Post, “It fits within our ethos, because it’s simple. Shipping containers are already out there. You can reuse them. They’re modular. It’s such a great idea.”
With shipping container projects recently built everywhere from London to Las Vegas, it sounds like the global backlog of these steel boxes is starting to ease.
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Brewers Fight Proposed Regulation That Would End Grain Recycling Initiatives

Posted on by robbie

If you’re a lover of the brewsky, then Denver is the city for you.
The Mile High city brews more beer than any other American city, and the state of Colorado boasts over 140 microbreweries. So it probably won’t surprise beer lovers here in the “Napa of beer” that many brewers are using their drinks as forces for environmental and economic good, donating their spent grains — barley, hops, wheat and other grains that have been soaked in water during the beer-brewing process — to farmers who can use them to feed their livestock, instead of throwing them away.
Oskar Blues, a Longmont-based brewery, runs the Hops and Heifers program. In a process it calls “Farm to Cup,” the brewery grows hops on its own farm, uses the hops for brewing, feeds its cattle with the spent grains, and then uses the meat from these cows in burgers sold at its restaurant.
But newly proposed FDA rules threaten to disrupt innovative recycling programs such as this, forcing microbreweries to send the spent grains to landfills or else engage in a costly process of drying out the grains and packaging them to prevent anyone from touching them before they reach the farmers. For many small brewers, the cost of this would be too great and they’d be forced to choose the landfill option.
According to John Fryar of the Longmont Times-Call, Paul Gatza, who directs the Boulder-based 20,000-member strong Brewers Association, spoke with FDA officials who say they’ll change the rule before issuing new draft of the regulations this summer. “The wording in the original proposed rules was pretty bad,” Gatza said. He estimates that the new rule would cost breweries $5 more per barrel to process the grains before donating or selling them to farmers, potentially putting many small brewers out of the recycling business. That would have been a shame, as a recent Brewers Association survey found that members reuse 90 percent of their spent grains.
FDA spokeswoman Juli Putnam told Fryar that they’ve gone back to the drawing board, rewriting some of the language in the regulation in a way that will hopefully allow this beer positivity cycle to continue. Now that’s good news worth lifting a beer over.
MORE: His Family Lost its Farm. Now He’s Making Sure No One Else in His Community Suffers the Same Fate.

Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)

Posted on by robbie

If you’re anything like us, you’re constantly trying to figure out, Can I recycle this or not? We wish the rules were simple and consistent, but what you can recycle (takeout containers? shipping boxes? junk mail?) and where (curbside? recycling center?) largely depends on what your local municipality can — or will — handle.

The good news is that with a little effort, you can achieve zero waste. If you can’t leave a particular item curbside or in your apartment building’s recycling bins, for example, you can probably take it to a recycling center or donate it to a specialized recycling company like TerraCycle, an international firm that collects hard-to-recycle items and repurposes them into resalable products.
In 2012 alone, Americans recycled and composted 87 million tons of municipal solid waste, eliminating more than 168 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, and saving 1.1 quadrillion British thermal units of energy — enough to power about 10 million households in the United States for a year. Decent numbers, but given that U.S. households create more than 251 million tons of trash a year, half of which ends up in landfills, we still have a long way to go. So, we asked Albe Zakes, global vice president of communications at TerraCycle, to help us get there. Here’s his simple guide of recycling do’s and don’ts. We hope you’ll pick up some key pointers. We sure did.
MORE: How One County Makes Sure Their Trash Doesn’t Go to Waste

5 Items You Can’t Recycle

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ALSO: You’ll Never Guess What NYC Is Turning Its Biggest Trash Heap Into

5 Items You Should Always Recycle

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These 10 tips are just a starting point. The ultimate goal is to rethink your lifestyle and reduce the amount of waste you produce to begin with. As the mantra goes: Reduce, reuse and recycle. “They’re in that order for a reason,” Zakes says. If you can’t reduce your consumption, reuse what you can; if you can’t reuse it, then recycle — even if it takes additional effort. “In reality, almost everything can be recycled,” Zakes says. “The only reason that something is considered ‘nonrecyclable’ is the economics behind it. So the cost of collecting and processing the material is too high versus the revenue that the end material creates.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that all aerosol cans cannot be recycled. NationSwell apologies for the error.
ALSO: One Company’s Quest to Reduce eWaste in Landfills
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Watch What Happens When a Famous Musician Joins Forces With an Eco-Friendly Yarn Maker

Posted on by robbie

Singer, songwriter, and music producer Pharrell Williams has been in the public eye a lot lately, from dancing alongside scantily-clad women in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” video to lighting up social media with chatter about the unusual hats he wore to the Grammys and the Academy Awards. But now, he’s making fashion news for a completely different reason: Williams is collaborating with clothing maker G-Star RAW and Bionic Yarn, (a company that makes yarn from recycled plastic), to make jeans from ocean debris.
In an interview with Brian Clark Howard of National Geographic, Williams said of his environmental collaboration, “I am not a fanatic or a hard-core activist. I’m not the guy with the picket sign or the guy who lays down on tracks, but I commend them for their conviction. I have a lot to be thankful for, all of the cool things that have happened in my life. We have to give back in some shape and form and that’s giving back to the Earth. I’ve been lucky enough to be given this collaboration and my message to people is you don’t have to do anything. But if you don’t want to let it go, then what Bionic is doing with the oceans is right for you.”
Bionic Yarn works with marine debris organizations to acquire plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (or PET) collected from coastlines. If the plastic has broken down after bobbing in the ocean for a long time, they blend it with land-based recycled bottles to ensure the material for their fabric is consistent.
The collection will be available at G-Star Raw stores and online starting August 15. By then, there will probably be a new Pharrell Williams hit saturating the airwaves, reminding everyone to check out these ocean-cleaning threads. 
MORE: This Ambitious Project Could Change What We Know About Oceans
 
Happy Oceans! Happy Life! G-Star Raw and Bionic Yarn partner up with Parley for the Oceans. from parleyfortheoceans on Vimeo.

The Eco-Friendly Action That Improves the Economy

Posted on by robbie

Recycling has tons of benefits, from reducing the amount of trash sent to landfills to decreasing pollution. But if you need another reason to keep on recycling those cans, bottles and newspapers, here’s another incentive: You’re creating jobs.
As the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reports, California is a shining example of how recycling is actually doing its part in stimulating the economy. The state is currently trying to reach a recycling goal of 75 percent by 2020, and if it does, 110,000 jobs could be created, according to a study from the Tellus Institute, a non-profit research company. (If you think 75 percent recycling sounds unrealistic, California was already at 50 percent way back in 2011, which puts the state comfortably on track to hit its goal.)
MORE: The Eco-Friendly Plan to Quench Central California’s Thirst
So why would recycling create more jobs? According to the NRDC report, “meeting the 75 percent recycling goal would create more than 34,000 jobs in materials collection, 26,000 jobs in materials processing, and 56,000 jobs in manufacturing using the recovered materials.” Additionally, the report states that these 110,000 jobs would create another 38,600 jobs indirectly — such as recycling-related businesses. The purchasing power of all these new green workers is also certainly going to boost the economy and spur job growth even more.
Just imagine what would happen if the whole country took a page from California and increased recycling on a national scale. A different Tellus report from 2011 actually crunched those numbers, and their findings are just as encouraging. Apparently, if the entire country recycled at a rate of 75 percent by the year 2030, we could reduce greenhouse gases by 515 million metric tons, which is the same as “shutting down about 72 coal-fired power plants or taking 50 million cars off the road,” the NRDC writes. Now that’s a huge incentive to go reduce, reuse and yes, recycle.

One Company’s Quest to Reduce Electronic Waste in Landfills

Posted on by robbie

Every time you or your company gets rid of old phones, laptops or printers more and more electronic waste piles up. Case in point: According to the EPA, 2.37 million tons of discarded televisions, fax machines, keyboards, cell phones and other tech gear was trashed in 2009. With the proliferation of smartphones alone, one can only imagine how much that number has increased since then.
When this e-waste isn’t properly recycled, it just ends up in landfills, which is exactly why we need companies like the California-based GreenMouse Recycling, which makes sure that old and unwanted gadgets are safely processed and responsibly disposed.
But more than just looking out for the environment, GreenMouse Recylcing CEO Evelyn O’Donnell has another agenda — to give “unhireables” a chance at employment, as Good News Network reports. Since 2011, the CEO has partnered with the San Jose, California’s work2future program to provide training and employment opportunities for at-risk young adults. The e-waste company’s internship program trains these kids skills that will give them a leg up in the real world — such as social media marketing, computer refurbishing, and data management.
MORE: This Sandwich Shop’s Ridiculously Small Amount of Waste Will Shock You
And it doesn’t end there. According to the report, GreenMouse’s commitment for social equality also extends to their fundraising efforts, donating more than a quarter of a million dollars to schools, churches, and non-profits such as the YMCA and Alzheimer’s Association.
“From their employees to their interns, and from customers to non profits, GreenMouse is paving a new path for corporate-social responsibility,” said O’Donnell’s daughter Briana, who also works for the company. “Not everyone can say that they are not only excited but proud of what they do and I count my blessings that I get to wake up and say it every day.”
 

This Sandwich Shop’s Ridiculously Small Amount of Waste Will Shock You

Posted on by robbie

The amount of garbage produced by a Chicago restauranteur might surprise you. No, there aren’t mounds and mounds of black plastic trash bags heaped in back of Lake View’s Sandwich Me In. Rather, all the garbage that has been collected in the two years the shop has been open sits in just one eight-gallon trash bin, Truth Atlas reports. And most of that waste didn’t come from the restaurant; it was created by customers tossing their disposable coffee cups.
Clearly, the owner Justin Vrany is serious about the environment. Because he only buys fresh, seasonal food from local farmers markets, he avoids processed foods and the packaging that comes along with it. He also uses as much of the food as possible—smoked skins for his salads, bones for broth, vegetable leftovers for burger patties. Any leftover waste is all composted or recycled. In fact, he personally takes his trash to a Whole Foods so he knows that it’s being recycled. He also sends his compost to a local farm so it goes back to feed the livestock or fertilize the land. (In case you’re wondering how the rest of us stack up in comparison, EPA estimates from 2011 found that the average American generates 4.40 pounds of trash a day.)
MORE: How Used Cooking Oil Can Have an Extraordinary Second Life
And it’s not just sustainable food that the shop can boast about. According to Sandwich Me In’s site, 90 percent of the restaurant was built out of reused materials from the existing store, and all of their equipment and furniture was refurbished. They recycle their oil to maintain bio-diesel engines and use wind to generate all the power for the restaurant. Sandwich Me In says on its site, “Our goal is to help the community become aware of sustainable options available to them and to grow together in knowledge to create a healthier city.” Sounds like a noble model we can all follow.

This Nonprofit Figured Out What to Do with NYC’s Abandoned Bikes

Posted on by robbie

We all know that bikes are great for our cities and our health. But what’s not so great about them is how some people abandon their bikes once they are no longer useful. In the Big Apple and similar urban environments, it’s not uncommon to see old bikes and rusted parts scattered throughout the city. And it’s not just those roaming city streets who find this problematic.
“The department of sanitation had listed bicycles as one of the top ten nuisance items that the workers hated to throw in the trucks,” said Karen Overton, founder of Recycle-a-Bicycle (RAB) in the video above. “Bikes on average can be about 30 pounds so having to heave those into trucks can be a problem.”
MORE: Here’s a Simple Way to Get Your Community Interested in Better Bike Lanes
Overton’s organization is trying to solve this dilemma by making sure that these old bikes are recycled or put to good use. RAB will take any unused, damaged or rusted bike and salvage the parts. As Truth Atlas reports, anything that can’t be reused is recycled. Just in 2013 alone, their recycling program reportedly salvaged more than 1,800 bikes and refurbished more than 500 of them. Impressively, they were able to divert 45,000 pounds of metal waste from landfills. Overton told the site, “Don’t throw your bike out! RAB will take it, no matter what condition it’s in.” And given their success so far, we say: Keep the old bikes coming!