Recycling · Eco-Chick

Browsing all posts tagged with Recycling

Eco Wandering through Germany

Countrywide, Germany generates more than 7 percent of its electricity from the wind.

After three years of living in Germany, I’ve started to forget all the cool eco things that are happening here. Stuff like taking the train or bike everywhere and returning all the beer bottles for reuse has become so routine that I tend to forget other people in other places don’t do this every day. I guess you could say I’ve been living in a bit of a bubble lately.

Which is why I found this “Spontaneous eco-wander through Germany” by William Powers such a delightful read. It was a nice reminder that the panorama of wind turbines that I see from my balcony every day is something that people find interesting. And before I got too up-on-my-green-horse, Powers did an interesting job of reminding me just how far we have to go yet in Germany, the land of no-speed-limits and non-fuel-efficient Mercedes and VW and BMWs.

Even if you aren’t planning a trip over to this side of the sea, have a look at the article to see just how green life can be.

Germany, Recycling, wind power

Pickens Plan LIES, plus Recycling Your Gadgets for Cashola

1 Comment

by Starre Vartan · 07/31/08

The folks over at Zaproot continually impress me with their weekly show. This round is one of the best ever, showcasing a devious greenwashing plan in Texas and how you can buy an iPhone (guilty!) and recycle it too.

gadgets, oil, Recycling, water, wind power

You Might Be an Eco Chick If…..

6 Comments

by Starre Vartan · 07/02/08

…….you have so many tote bags that you end up giving the person at the checkout line behind you a couple to keep them from plastic-bagging it. You think that maybe some free reusable bags is all that it will take to convert them.

…….you get crazy dehydrated because you REFUSE to buy water in a plastic bottle and you forgot your Sigg at home. Then you get really mad because the public water fountain seems like an endangered species.

……..you decide to paint your wood floors (hey, it’s trendy at least) because you can’t deal with the refinishing chemicals being in your bedroom, using no-VOC paint of course.

…….you carry around your old cell phone in your bag for weeks because you just KNOW you’ll eventually come across a place to recycle it (and you do)!

plastic bags, plastic bottles, Recycling

Recycling Does A Milk Carton Good

26 Comments

by Melissa Goldberg · 06/24/08

I was reading a recent issue of National Geographic’s The Green Guide (Spring 2008) and on the last page of the magazine was an image hundreds of milk cartons lining a street to demonstrate how much milk American’s consume. The image was taken from National Geographic Channel documentary Human Footprint.

According to the movie, America consumes 989,985,594,240 half gallons of milk over the course of a lifetime and it takes more than one trillion kilowatt-hours of energy to produce, ship and landfill the milk cartons. That amount of energy emits 740,674,244 tons of greenhouse gases. Amazingly, only a tiny fraction of the cartons are recycled.

That got me thinking. How many milk cartons does my household go through over a short period of time, say a week? More importantly, why are milk cartons not recycled? They are made of paper aren’t they? Even more puzzling is the fact that on the side of some of the cartons I buy, it says “please recycle”. I want to, but my town will not take them. So I decided to do some research on how to recycle a milk carton, and why my town won’t do it. I thought the information would be readily available. I was wrong.

Initially I was going to save my cartons for one week, assuming this would be plenty of time to get enough information to write on the subject. Well, do a “Google” search on “milk carton recycling” and you will basically come up with… nothing. Four weeks and 30 cartons later, I am finally writing about it.

This is what I discovered…

Milk cartons ARE recyclable, however, according to an EPA report of MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) provided to me by the National Recycling Coalition, in 2006, 510,000 tons of milk cartons were generated in the United States and less than 0.05% (5,000 tons) were recycled.

In 2006, only a little more than 550 towns across the country recycled milk cartons (source: Organic Valley). To put this into perspective, there are 556 municipalities in New Jersey. Doing a non-scientific search on the internet of various towns across the country, I discovered you cannot recycle milk cartons in San Diego, DC, the entire state of Pennsylvania, Los Angeles and Austin but you can in New York City and Boulder, CO.

But why?

Carbon Footpring, Milk, Recycling

Green in Paris

13 Comments

by Melissa Goldberg · 05/19/08

So I think I have used up my allotment of fossil fuels for at least the remainder of this year, or more likely the next decade. Why? My husband surprised me with a birthday trip to Paris last weekend.

Americans have a love/hate relationship with the French. So of course as an American and a “greenist,” I had to do some hardcore observations of Parisian “green” habits and compare them to what we do here. What I discovered from my four days in the “City of Lights” is as follows.

(1) Recycling
There is a recycling program in place in Paris, but I am not sure if the Parisians are interested. On some streets they have huge recycling bins for bottles and cans, but most of them were covered with graffiti (which happens to be all over the city). In the parks, they have recycling bags next to the the garbage bags but as you can see in the picture, recyclables are also placed in the garbage bag. On a walking tour the Marais, I asked our tour guide about how well Parisians recycle. She said they are horrible and during our tour she opened a recycling bin from an apartment building to show us what she meant. It was filled with recyclables and non-recyclables.

(2) Reusables
My husband and I went in a few supermarkets (which I love to do whenever I travel abroad), and outdoor markets and I think I saw maybe 5 people using reusable bags. The worst was in the outdoor markets where you can buy fruits, vegetables, meats, cheese, bread, fish, flowers and much more. The biggest one we went to was in Versailles, and everything was put in a plastic bag. Many did bring their own reusable totes but those bags were then stuffed with plastic bags. It appeared to me that they may use more plastic bags than we use.

(3) Transportation
Paris is a very busy city with lot of traffic. But I would not say that they have any more traffic then New York City. They do drive smaller, and most likely, more efficient cars (I didn’t see one Hummer or SUV) and many people ride bikes and take the subway. I think more people ride bikes in Paris then they do in Manhattan–but not as many as in Beijing. But the most ingenious thing that we observed in Paris was a bike rental system called Velib. The system began in July 2007, with 10,000 bikes, and now they are up to 20,000 bikes all over Paris. Riders can buy monthly, daily or hourly passes to rent bikes stationed at more than 1,400 automated stations across the city. A bike can be rented from one station and returned to another. From what we saw, and from the doubling of the number of bikes in use, it appears that the Parisians love the system. My husband and I wished we had more time to try it out. Its funny, the first few days in Paris we weren’t sure what these bikes were. Initially we thought they were motorized, then we didn’t understand the rental system. By the time we figured out what was what it was it was time to go. I wonder if this would work in NYC?

(4) Food
You should know that I have an obsession with food. Our trip to Paris had some gastronomic highs–the picnic in Versailles– and some lows–dinner at Chez Andre off the Champs-Elysées. So of course I had to find out where the French food comes from. I think this is a department that they really do better than we do. French farmers say no to GMO’s –they even strike and riot to oppose them on a semi-regular basis. None of the fruits or vegetables grown in France are from genetically modified seeds. NONE! We can’t say anything like that here. You can also find organic produce in Paris. We spoke to some butchers and they insisted that none of the meat is treated with antibiotics or hormones and that beef is grass-fed. One of the butchers we spoke with even made a stink face when referring to grain fed beef. I could not find anywhere on the internet to confirm or deny this so I have to take their word, for now. I did ask Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed beef farmer from Sap Bush Farms and author of The Farmer and the Grill and she said “It is my understanding is that not all meat in France is grass-fed. But a fair amount is. Quite often it depends on the breed – charolais beef, for example, is supposed to be exclusively raised on grass. When I was there I saw a lot of cattle grazed and fed in the barn – a model that is infinitely more sustainable than factory farms, but not, according to our strict definitions, grass-fed. The meat is also much more likely to be raised on small farms, not from confinement facilities.”