Adventure Ecology is taking to the sea and setting sail from San Fransisco and heading to Australia. The catch? Their boat is made from water bottles. How cool is that? They are also teaming up with Sculpt the Future Foundation to challenge you to come up with something just as awesome to do with trash.
So get your thinking caps on, brush up on your upcycling and take that trash and turn it into treasure for the SMART Art ‘Trash into Treasure’ competition. Your sculpture, functional item, photograph, video or music could net you fame and fortune, or a winning cash prize, as long as you can show reuse.
12-year-old Max Wallack stole the show at Design Squad’s Trash to Treasure contest with his “Home Dome.” The contest asked kids to repurpose trash into practical inventions.
Think hardcore environmentalism requires living like a monk? Not if you ask Dave Chameides, a steadicam operator living in L.A. who collected all his trash for a year and blogged about the project.
Dave created less trash in all of 2008 than an average American family throws out in a week. And more impressively, he achieved this eco-feat while drinking beer and eating potato chips.
“I didn’t want to change the way that I was living my life,” Dave says. “If I wanted to drink beer, I wasn’t going to say, well, I can’t find a way to drink beer without creating packaging, so therefore I’m not going to. Instead, what I’m going to do is look at the packaging in beer and pick the most ‘eco-friendly’ way to do it.”
The idea behind Dave’s project was to focus on things people could do without drastically changing their entire lifestyle. “There are definitely people out there who have done similar things where they’ve cut everything out of their life,” Dave says. “A lot of people who are really really hardcore have emailed me and said, ‘You know, you can just not eat potato chips.’ Well, yeah, but I wanna eat potato chips!”
The town of Lowell, Ind., is examining whether or not to build a $ 200 million plant that would convert garbage into ethanol.
Though such a plant might conjure up visions of the “Mr. Fusion” unit in Doc Brown’s DeLorean, the plants could create 165 permanent jobs and 400 construction jobs in the small town southwest of Gary.
Usually, people who recycle and donate to charity are commended for their efforts, but Robert Jessberger of Bexley, Ohio is being asked to stop, according to the Columbus Dispatch.
Jessberger reportedly collects items that people in his neighborhood set out as trash. With some cleaning and fixing, most of the items he collects are good as new. He donates thousands of dollars worth of cleaned-up items to charity every year and [...]
Natural Beeswax product manufacturer Burt’s Bees recently gave their employees hazmat suits and had them jump into two weeks’ worth of company trash. What some people will do to keep their job…
Actually, what they found was surprising. When the clouds of dirt and dust cleared, they had found recyclables that will total $25,000 in annual savings for the company. Burt’s Bee has “zero waste to landfills” by 2020 [...]
Think twice before you put your recyclable items out for pick-up. You may find that many plastic or glass containers can have multiple uses. I’ve found several crafty ways to use some:
Individual serving sized yogurt containers make great paint pots for the kids. They can be used to hold water or paint.
Peel off the label of a pickle jar. Wash, rinse and allow it to dry. Now, fill it up will all those stray buttons you have. Jars also make great containers for glue sticks, embroidery floss, ribbon and craft sticks (recycled frozen treat sticks). They can also be used as a way to keep your paintbrushes, colored pencils and other tools neat and tidy.
You might be more green than the definition of the word at home but does this carry through to when you step into the doors of your office? Not according to Envirowise, British sustainability business experts who says that good domestic environmental practices do not necessarily translate to the workplace.
An Atlanta, GA-based company called Geoplasma is using trash to provide power to 50,000 homes in Florida. The company’s plasma refuse plant, which should be online by 2011, is a first for the United States. It will process 1,500 tons of garbage each day and send 60 MW of power to the grid.
A number of elephants have died after eating plastic from a garbage dump in Chobe National Park in Botswana. The Chobe District Council says it has no choice but to continue dumping trash at the site.
Elephants, hyenas, baboons and birds all gather at the dumping site in Chobe to feed. Just this year, three elephants have died after consuming plastic from the garbage heap.
Thunya Sedodoma, the principal wildlife warden in the park, said that last year, plastics were found in the stomach of a dead elephant. She said it is not uncommon to see plastic in the feces of elephants. Sedodoma said that this year alone, the park has recorded over 70 deaths of wildlife, all related to feeding from the garbage dump.
