On January 1, 2016, businesses in the Twin Cities (13 county metro) will be required to recycle at least three items. While this won't be new to some, it will be a change to others. See an update from Emily Barker from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, via our friends at Environmental Initiative!
America Recycles Day - Nov. 15, 2015
November 15th is America Recycles Day. It is a day to celebrate our nation’s progress in recycling, but also reflect on its problems. The New York Times op-ed written last month by John Tierney sparked outrage nationwide and received a whopping 487 comments on the web. Although there are MANY holes in his arguments and he seems to express an opinion against recycling, John acknowledges there is a lack of incentives for recycling in America.
An Economist article published in April discusses the state of recycling in America. Companies want to use recycled material, but it is costly compared to virgin material AND there is a low supply. The country’s recycling rate has been stagnant at 34% for 2 decades. Americans THROW AWAY $11.4 billion of recyclables per year, even though recycling an aluminum can emits 95% less greenhouse gas emissions.
Let's face it, America, we have a recycling problem.
Recycling has great economic, environmental, and community benefits, SO let's do something about it! When you throw something in the recycling bin, you are consciously making an effort to reduce your carbon footprint. This great ad campaign by Keep America Beautiful captures what could happen if we simply closed the loop-
It’s not complicated. You don’t have to rally your politicians or stop using your car. We just have to put materials in the right bin AND tell your friends and family to join. For America Recycles Day, take the pledge here.
And on November 15th, find a way to increase your personal recycling rate by reusing waste in some way, bringing food residue to a compost drop-off site, or making signs on your garbage bin that read- "Can I be recycled?"
And that, America, is how we RECYCLE.
Your Cereal Box
When you buy a $3 box of cereal, you are purchasing more than just 6 to 7 bowls of sugary goodness. You are purchasing the packaging, which includes the box AND the plastic bag inside the box. The other month there was a sale on Malt O’ Meal brand cereal and I decided to give up my General Mills loyalty to try them out. But these "Spooners" come in a bag, so I also gave up the box.
Malt O’ Meal started a campaign called - Bag the Box. It is exactly what it entails. To reduce packaging waste, their cereals are in a sturdy plastic bag instead of a box. Check out this video:
But that’s not all Malt-O-Meal (MOM) is doing to reduce packaging waste. If you take a look at their cereal bags you will find, next to the “Bag the Box” label, the TerraCycle label.
The international company’s slogan is “Eliminating the Idea of Waste”. Their mission is to turn common waste materials, like MOM brand cereal bags, Clif Bar wrappers, and applesauce pouches, into innovative products. The first step is to select the “brigade”, then gather the materials, and ship them to the nearest collection site where they will be creatively reused. The MOM products brigade is shown below:
More information about TerraCycle can be found here.
This is just one example of a company's successful waste reduction campaign, but there are ways that you, as a consumer, can reduce packaging waste. Here are some ways to REDUCE packaging waste with your groceries:
skip the individually wrapped snacks - chip bags, cheese sticks, granola bars, apple sauce pouches, juice cartons - although these are easier to use, especially with kids, try using reusable containers, bottles, and bags
buy in bulk - (this saves $$$ too)
purchase loose produce ... and reuse your produce bags
avoid Styrofoam at all costs
opt for brands, like Malt O’ Meal, that use less packaging
In the hierarchy of waste management, reduction is ranked as the highest priority, above reuse and recycling. You can start making reduction a priority in your home starting with the grocery store.
Bike for a Free Coffee
Today, after a yummy lunch, I walked out of Everest on Grand and spotted a blue and yellow sign on the window that read - “Bicycle Benefits” 10% off!
The restaurant was a member of a nationwide organization, Bicycle Benefits, that provides bikers a discount at participating businesses. By purchasing a 5$ sticker and placing it on your helmet, you can receive discounts at coffee shops, grocery stores, or the florist simply by riding your bike.
Why?
In economic terms, biking is a positive externality, an activity that indirectly benefits society. By choosing not to drive their car, bikers are reducing global carbon emissions. In the ideal world, we would pay bikers to keep biking, or subsidize bike riding. And that’s where Bicycle Benefits come in.
The organization is raising awareness about the power of bike riding by offering bicyclers a reward at local businesses, similar to a subsidy. Consumers respond to incentives: BOGO, SALE, clearance, and so the signage is also growing a bike revolution.
Participating shops and cafes value the importance of bicycling, and are willing to give up some cash to offer discounts to those who ride their bikes. You can check out the Twin Cities participants
And hop on your bike for a free coffee! You deserve it :)
"Becky Sue"
On September 24, 2015, Environmental Initiative held a press conference with Mayor Chris Coleman and representatives from St. Paul Port Authority and MN Pollution Control Agency. The star of the show? “Becky Sue”, a 38 year old diesel tugboat that is due for a makeover.
For 10 years, Project Green Fleet, a program of the Environmental Initiative and the MPCA, has worked with businesses, government, and nonprofits to retrofit diesel vehicles. These trucks, boats, and buses contribute to 50% of Minnesota’s air pollution affecting the health, economy, and environment of the state. Since its start, the project has upgraded 3,284 school buses, 1,304 trucks, and other heavy-duty vehicles with a total reduction of 27 tons of particulate matter emissions each year or 500,000 cars off the road annually.
Soon, “Becky Sue” will have two new diesel engines reducing air pollution equivalent to removing 12,000 cars off the road each year! Project Green Fleet relies on public and private investments to support this work and hope to double their efforts with more projects.
Is there a “Becky Sue” needing an upgrade in your city or county? Push local government to look into the maintenance of publicly funded fleets and push businesses to pursue possible equipment retrofits. These actions can add to the new and improved eco-fleet of Project Green Fleet.
BAGNADO
BAGNADO. You may have met this monster if you visited the Eco Experience at the Minnesota State Fair, but if not, catch a glimpse of the news story here. The tornado represented the number of plastic bags thrown out in the state of Minnesota within 5 seconds.
5 seconds.
This adds up to 87,000 tons of plastic bags dumped in Minnesota each year, a loss of $7 million worth of recycled plastic, and potential job growth in plastics recycling. There is more to this issue than the environmental consequences of burning plastic. Growth in the recycling industry can build the economy.
California cities and Hawaii counties have banned plastic bags, and other states, like New York, Delaware, Maine, DC, and Rhode Island have adopted legislation to incentivize recycling of plastic bags. And Minnesota? Currently, St. Louis Park is in the process to ban plastic bags, but have received pushback from business owners at recent hearings.
Even if a plastic bag ban is far from the horizon, BAGNADO should inspire us to make a few small changes-
say no to the bag when shopping
buy reusable bags for produce
bring your own jars when purchasing bulk items
collect your plastic bags at home to recycle
Although, most likely your home recycling collection service will not accept plastic bags, many grocery stores in Minnesota, like Target, Rainbow, Kowalskis, and Cub, have bins to recycle them.
And eventually BAGNADO will be history.
Creative Approaches to Zero Waste
I've been posting on Facebook more than here, but the information is worthy of sharing!
The past few years of work have been centered around waste - be it managing materials on a tv commercial sets, donating large custom props to keep them out of the landfill, helping the MN State Fair assess their front-of-the-house waste, to working with commercial entities and institutions to implement organics collection.
Every little thing counts. I've noticed more recycling containers around the Minneapolis park systems and lakes and curbside organics recycling is just about roll out in Minneapolis!
Here are some links regarding waste initiatives around the world that make a difference:
Germany. A grocery store that translates to "Original Unpackaged". The entire store is package free!
The Take Away did a great piece about Dan Barber, the executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Sleepy Hollow, NY. The restaurant makes no waste! Scraps are made into special lemonades, veggies burgers are made from peels and pulps. Innovation creating no waste, and food people didn't know they wanted!
Clothes made from ocean trash and other plastic waste!
Can Can Wonderland, mini golf and artist-created amusements: an economic engine for the arts, in St. Paul, recently received nearly 60 PVC tubes from EcoSet Consulting. This is one example of EcoSet keeping custom prop built for one meeting out of the landfill, giving materials to artists, and showcasing that reuse is also good for the budget!
Hennepin Energy Recovery Center
I participate in a Waste Collaborative group through Environmental Initiative - a Minneapolis-based non-profit that builds partnerships to find solutions to environmental problems. This group consists of a variety of businesses (health care, recyclers, grocery stores, food producers, manufacturers), non-profits and public organizations. It provides a space to share best practices, challenges, innovative solutions, and business connections.
The last meeting was about zero-waste initiatives and included a tour of the Hennepin Energy Recovery Center - or HERC - which is right smack in the middle of one of the most vibrant areas of downtown Minneapolis - the North Loop.
The HERC serves Hennepin County and processes 365,000 tons of waste per year. That averages out to six pounds of waste per person, per day (yikes). This doesn't include construction and demolition or yard waste, which are processed at other facilities.
On average, HERC burns 3,000 tons of waste each day. Trucks dump on the tipping floor, and the waste enters the pit, which holds 7,000-10,000 tons, before being craned into the burners. For kids that love diggers and machinery - running the crane would be a dream job!
The tipping floor on the left is where garbage trucks dump their loads. Waste is then pushed into the pit. The crane moves waste around - pulling out large objects like mattresses and bicycles. Loads are then craned into the burners on the right, where waste is incinerated, and heat captured and turned into energy.
The burning process is highly regulated for emissions, and HERC continues to come in well under their authorized emission rates. The onsite burning (at 1,500-2,000 degrees!) in huge, multi-story ovens, provides 31 megawatts of energy to Xcel - heating Target Field and several other downtown businesses. Recovered heat from the Cooling Tower is used to heat glycol tubing underneath the Target Station Pavilion, which means no snow removal required (no need for staff and no need for chemicals).
The tour is open to the public and I encourage everyone to go see it. I'm trying to do what I can to help people actually see what we produce - to get the trash out from behind the building. 7,000 tons of trash sounds like a lot - but seeing it burns that image into your mind!
We can do better than six pounds of waste per person, per day. We can use what we now think of as waste as a resource. Limit purchasing. Be thoughtful about packaging. Choose recycled content items. Compost.
Pay attention to what you're producing and know where it goes after you're done with it.
Minneapolis Organics Collection
It's amazing how things change as you get older ... especially the things you get excited about. For example, I received a surprise, already installed new toilet for my birthday a few years ago and it remains one of my all time favorite gifts!
I felt that giddy excitement with the City of Minneapolis roll-out of single sort bins for recycling, which I almost always fill to the top - as a single person. That excitement continues for the City of Minneapolis organic collection. Although I am disappointed the bins are small, and that my house isn't on the spring 2015 map, I'm still proud that steps are being taken to change the way we address waste.
I've been participating in commercial grade composting at home for about a year now, dropping the bags off at a site not far from home. It's so easy and so remarkable. I'm down to about one plastic-sized Target bag of trash per week. It basically just contains product wrappers. Between that and bags of dog poo, everything else is composted or recycled! It's so satisfying.
I wish that my amazing green bin would arrive sooner, but until then, I'll continue to drop off compost. Better yet, I'll continue to work with companies big and small to help them achieve the same sort of excitement that comes from progress. I urge you to do the same.
Dirty Little Secrets.
I recently finished reading Edward Humes' "Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash". Working in this industry, I was assuming it would cover a lot of information that I already knew. It did. But I was also blown away by several sections of this book.
In addition to siting the Environmental Protection Agency's 249.6 million tons of trash (in 2008), Garbology also pulled in research from Colombia University and the journal BioCycle, which has "more accurate, scientific surveys". This research reviews that we're sending "twice as much waste to landfills as the EPA's calculations let on, and recycling proportionately far less than the rosy official stats suggest", or 389.5 million tons.
We have to start getting trash out from behind the building. It's too easy for people toss their bags in and have no idea where it goes.
We are in denial about our dirty little secrets.Waste certainly isn't sexy. But there is so much potential to change the way we consume.
Be thoughtful about what you buy. Be thoughtful about how you dispose of things. Reuse and Repurpose as much as possible. And as a last resort, recycle and compost.
Read this book. Or several other good ones out that. Take a little time to be aware.
Creative reuse
In the past few weeks, a few stories have come out highlighting companies repurposing materials in interesting ways, such as Jet Blue - they've been collecting their used uniforms and are saving 18.5 tons of fabric from the landfills! And then there is Repurposed Materials in Denver - their entire store is made up of repurposed materials from pool covers to fish netting.
Over the past few years, with I've been able to work on similar projects - keeping interesting items out of the landfill with a little creativity and industry connections. Projects have ranged from scraps from t-shirts that needed the logo's destroyed that turned into hundreds of new onesies for mom's in need by Bundles of Love in Minneapolis, a decommissioned hot air balloon donated to an environmentally focused apparel non-profit for a design contest in Minneapolis, a jumbo hanger used during an event now draws people into the Dress for Success office in San Antonio, and scraps of wood from an industry product launch that now make up part of an indoor skate park in Brooklyn.
So much waste is added to the landfill every day. With a little time an effort, there are so many alternatives to this practice! But let's not forget to try to reduce consumption first.
State Fair Waste Audit
Native Sustainability, in collaboration with Made, is working with the Minnesota State Fair to assess the probability of all trash cans being converted to compost cans. That switch could save the Fair more than $50,000 a year, as well as provide amazing educational opportunity about organics in the waste stream.
Minnesota Public Radio did a short piece about the initiative. Read it here!
I also did an interview with Environmental Initiative regarding the efforts. Many thanks to the EI staff members who helped us with day one of sorting!
http://www.environmental-initiative.org/blog/2014/08/27/auditing-waste-at-the-minnesota-state-fair/
Inglorious Fruits and Vegetables
France got it right.
Noting the vast amount of "not perfect" food waste being created (300 MILLION tons per year), they started a new campaign. It reached 13 million people in a month! We're not perfect, why do we expect our food to be? This gives a whole new meaning to "it's what's inside that counts".
Full Circle Organics
The specially designed compost turner
I got the opportunity to do a site visit at the Full Circle Organics processing plant in Becker, MN. While only being open for two months, they were already processing seven windrows of compost. With many of my clients doing waste projects, it was important for me to see the behind the scenes of where the compostable items end up, and what happens from there.
The raw materials are coming from a variety of places including Hennepin County, Canterbury Downs (the bedding from races) and a paper processing facility. The variety of material allows for the proper mix to ensure high quality end product.
The view from inside the turner.
I was able to ride on the custom piece of equipment to turn a windrow - which they do on average, one time a week, depending on the temperature. The machine drives down the row and mixes the product, which aids the processing. It was interesting to see the natural process in action, and hear the challenges the facility faces. It's pretty amazing that what months ago would have been trash is now being transformed into a commodity!
Photos in a weeks worth of trash...
Photographer, Gregg Segal beautifully captured images of people in a of weeks amount of their person waste contribution (which the EPA estimates at 4.38 pounds per person, per day). He has ongoing series, “7 Days of Garbage,”. Segal hopes "...the series is guiding people toward a confrontation with the excess that’s part of their lives. I’m hoping they recognize a lot of the garbage they produce is unnecessary".
See the related Slate story here.
This is a great step in getting waste out from behind the building. We need to be aware of what our contributions really are and trust that people can change. Let's start from source reduction, thoughtful purchasing, getting food into hungry people and animals and only then, to compost. We can do better.
Beauty in the small things.
I live near Grass Lake in Minneapolis - originally part of Richfield Lake, but separated during the Highway 62 Construction project. It's a little pocket of nature tucked into the residential area, with a short little trail that connects the south side of the lake to the streets that wrap around the other edges. I was reminded tonight how amazing it is to live in a City where water and green space is almost always just steps away. That a quick walk with my pup can make me breathe (clean air!) deeper and hear birds signing, see turtles and watch ducklings swim. It's a good reminder to keep doing the work I love - protecting these natural spaces and making sure they're in even better shape for future generations to enjoy!
Theodore Roosevelt
I just returned from a great weekend in Washington DC.
One of the memorial experiences was a trip to Theodore Roosevelt Island - which sits in the Potomac River and is part of the National Park Service. In the 1930's it was transformed into a memorial for the 26th President.
Known as the "Conservation President" due to his commitment to the environment and establishment of several National Parks and Monuments, he's always been a president I've admired. I recently read River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard, which recounts Roosevelt's adventure down the Amazon river. Roosevelt led an interesting life!
The monument is surrounded by woods, while the rest of the island is mainly walking trails through wooded uplands and swamps. Large stones with inscriptions, and a much-larger-than-life statue surround a water feature. The sentiments on the stones struck me, that words of generations past still resonate so clearly today. Roosevelt's thoughts on Nature:
There is delight in the hardy life of the open.
There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, it's melancholy, and it's charm.
The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation, increased and not impaired in value.
Conservation means development as much as it does protection.
The memorial also displays his sentiments on youth, manhood and the state - all containing empowering words as applicable today as they were then.
I was glad we stumbled upon this memorial that I didn't even know existed. And that I also learned one more fun fact - that the stuffed animal we all know as a "teddy bear" is named after Roosevelt! On a hunting trip in Mississippi, Roosevelt refused shoot a restrained bear, as it would be unsportsmanlike - leading to a national cartoon depicting a cuddly bear, and the rest is history.