Green Options

Mobile phone service, kajeet, innovates by rewarding customers for choosing refurbished phones by planting trees. Win-win for kajeet, customers, and our planet.

There’s been a lot of noise in recent years about the widespread construction of Wal-Marts and other big box stores. A new development is the rise in vacated megastores. Recently, resourceful communities and individuals are re-imagining better uses for these behemoth structures.

A body of data and stories has been collected by Julia Christensen, author of the recently published Big Box Reuse. Her book, published by MIT Press, offers a detailed overview of ten communities that have transformed vacated Wal-Marts and Kmarts into civic structures.

BBC Scotland is leveraging kids’ pension for codes, clues, missions and 007-style in a fun little interactive for young kids 7-9 called The Environmental Intelligence Unit.

In classic “the world needs your help” secret agent mode, the game puts the child in ‘action-hero’ context to take on traffic, pollution and rubbish aligned with the three R’s of reduce, reuse, recycle.

It’s a pretty basic primer to seed core concepts in sustainability, but definitely age appropriate, incorporating factoids and video clips as kids become environmental agents on a mission to ‘find the missing R.’ (spoiler alert: the teacher’s page will fill you in on what that “R” is!)

There are four island missions (house, clear out, school, beach) and if kids engage in all four to obtain the right code words they can receive a final Eco Certificate. (hmnn…I know this is geared more for ‘reach and teach’ tactics, but I could think of some more creative/green awards that might be a better fit than a printout! So ping me, BBC, the idea hamster here will give you some freebie creative director ideas!)

Earlier this week I posted A By-the-Numbers Look at Paper Recycling. I posed the question of whether or not individual efforts to recycle paper adds up to an amount that can actually save trees.

As I researched some numbers to identify how much paper comes from one tree, I inadvertently kept a singular focus on corporate environments and office paper. It wasn’t until I later caught a reminding glimpse of the stack of magazines sitting on the night table next to my bed that I realized where, perhaps, the true impact lies: periodicals.

The simplified look at how much office copy paper it takes for one person to save a tree in one year is 33 sheets of paper per day. I figure that’s unreachable, at least for me, because I am selective about how much I avoid printing things unnecessarily — emails and other documents.

But magazines and newspapers — there are dozens and hundreds of pages per issue.