Green Options

Quebec has taken a long hard look at itself, and decided it doesn’t like what it sees.

Its policies simply aren’t working.  Overall waste generated has nearly doubled in the past 10 years, with waste going to landfill rising by over 10% in the same period.

One of its key targets was to get 60% of the province’s waste food into composting by 2012 has had to be abandoned: the current figure is only 12% and the target just cannot be met.

However, rather than just trying to fiddle with green taxes, the government has gone straight for the jugular and announced plans to make it illegal to dump rubbish and food waste.

For some people the act of walking in to a shopping mall during a huge sale makes them sort of shake like they are on crack and for me and my friend Mouse, walking into Scrap for the first time, it caused a similar reaction. How could I not have known about this place? True, the location could not be less in the middle of nowhere and in San Francisco that is quite a trick. But still, I have no excuse.

Scrap, which their pamphlet calls “a creative reuse center and workshop space” came about in 1976, way before recycling and Green became trendy, as a resource for artists and teachers. Scrap also set out to promote environmental awareness and creative reuse.

This week’s environmental protests are all focused around a key theme that leads to public protest: political failure. Discover the deeply rooted political antipathy that’s putting the ocean at risk, the place whree local people want to preserve an ancient resource against potential, rather than actual, harm while political powers want jobs and income for the immediate future and what happens when competing interests can’t solve their problems in discussion.

Would you be so cavalier in throwing out a disposable razor if you knew how much it actually impacted your local environments? Would you think twice about purchasing a bottle of water if you knew how much it cost you to dispose of? That’s the question asked by the MIT SENSEable City lab these days. And they plan to see what effects one man’s trash actually has on the environment.

Inspired by the Green NYC Initiative which aims to increase the rate of waste recycling in New York to almost 100 percent by 2030 (currently, only about 30 percent of the city’s waste is diverted from landfills for recycling!), a group of MIT researchers have developed a program that uses special electronic tags in order to track different types of waste on their journey through the disposal systems of New York and Seattle. Its name? Trash Track. Trash Track will monitor the patterns and costs of urban disposal while raising public awareness about the impacts the garbage can under the sink has on the environment.

Researchers at the University of York have recently come up with a method of recycling that seems like it fell from the pages of a science fiction novel. They want to turn discarded television screens into components for biomedicine.

Achieving a goal of 100 percent energy independence is a little closer for San Jose thanks to a momentous move by the City Council today. The City Council authorized the City Manager to negotiate and execute a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to develop potential lease terms and guidelines for developing an organics-to energy bio-gas facility.

Refuse collection has been mandatory in San Francisco since the 1930s, so perhaps it came as no surprise when the nation’s leader in recycling passed a mandatory recycling and compost ordinance on June 9, but San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom still commended the Board of Supervisors for its passage of the ordinance.

Following the death of Ian Tomlinson during the G20 protests in London and the claimed assaults by the police on several protestors, police forces across the UK are now being challenged on their use, or abuse, of special powers granted to them to manage large demonstrations.

Growing at an annualized rate of 6.3 percent for the past five years to 2008, Recycling Facilities is one of the few industries in the “green sector” to observe a decline. IBISWorld, an industry research firm tell us that recycling is expected to decline significantly in 2009 - after five years of strong growth.

The biogas process, which produces fuel from animal and human waste, is prompting many supposedly amusing posts that could have a negative effect. Googling “biogas and poop” gives 12 800 hits including The Power of Poop, California Cow Poop Power and Turning Cow Poop into Car Power. This is counter productive as it distracts from the potential that biogas holds for both developing and developed countries.

Besides the comical slant of the titles, it is surprising that biogas is often presented as something amazing & unknown although it has been around for hundreds of years, is used in tens of millions of rural household and is a significant contributor to Europe’s renewable energy production.

Biogas - Amazing Natural Technology

The fermentation of organic material such as biomass, manure, sewage, farm waste, municipal waste, green waste and energy crops in the absence of air produces biogas. The same anaerobic fermentation produces swamp, marsh and landfill methane.

Ecologic Designs’ story starts like this:  “There is always talk about a killer set of waves and dolphins playing in the surf, an epic afternoon rolling across warm red rocks on your bike, or a hike in fresh powder on a full moon snowshoe trek. There is also talk about a beach polluted by sludge or surfing next to trash, trails that all of a sudden become strip malls, or the snow trip sans snow because of global warming.” It’s this kind of understanding that guides Ecologic Design, through their two brands Green Guru Gear and Green Goddess, to craft products and fashions in Boulder, Colorado, that have a positive environmental and social impact, while raising ecological awareness.

Take Green Guru’s Blow Out series bi-fold wallet, for example.  The company uses reclaimed bike inner tubes to create a stylish and waterproof exterior. Every item in their Blow Out series is made from 98% reclaimed and recycled content by weight.  Each wallet features a six card and two bill compartments.  The ultimate in a locally-based enterprise, drawing from a readily available waste stream, Green Guru’s butyl rubber comes from Reclamation Stations within about eighteen miles from there they’re manufactured. Green Guru Pouches, Chalk Bags and Messenger Bags are also made from the upcycled inner tubes.

Since spring of 2007, Ecologic Designs has been an ecopreneurial trailblazer, creating viable and sustainable enterprises by harvesting the waste stream, often referred to as “upcycling”: the practice of recycling or repurposing items destined for the landfill and transforming them into something of further use and value. Upcycling was coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.  The butyl rubber, also called vulcanized rubber, is not cost-effective and very difficult to recycle; therefore these inner tubes usually end up in local landfills where they won’t degrade for many years.  Unfortunately, tires and inner tubes account for over 50% of the rubber produced each year.