What I learned at today's picnic

I won't make you wait: what I learned is that the composting and recycling bins have to be the same height as the trash can, otherwise people don't notice them. Everyone at today's picnic who had been alerted to the fact that we'd have composting and recycling did fine, but the few people who didn't went straight for the trash can, which was twice the height of all my bins.



Dreamy chocolate-chip cookies (the first dessert I ate)



Fabulous black cherry/rhubarb crisp



Trash from today's event with about 50 people: one diaper. Great job going nearly zero-waste, everyone!!

Barbette makes zero waste a priority

I know Barbette composts through Eureka Recycling, so I wanted to see what they had in mind for their Bastille Day party, and a big grin came to my face when I saw how prominently they put the words "A Zero-Waste Event since 2004" on their flier! Check it out. They also use local and organic ingredients whenever possible, and support local-food and sustainable-agriculture efforts.

Stop that junk mail (including credit-card offers, magazine offers and catalogs)

At the Direct Marketing Association's web site, you can opt out of unwanted mail for five years for free.

the categories:

catalogs

credit offers

magazine offers

other mail offers, including retail promotions, donation requests and bank offers

Want more info? Click here.

Rubbermaid's green streak

In writing to Rubbermaid to compliment them on marking the type of plastic on all three pieces of their beverage pitcher (I can't tell you how many times I've come across a container that's marked but then the lid isn't), I visited their website and discovered they're doing a whole lot more than just stamping plastics. They've got an extensive Green Living page with multiple mentions of how important it is to recycle plastic and that virgin plastic comes from petroleum. Also, they take back old containers if you don't have a local option for recycling #4 and #5 plastic. Another discovery:

Rubbermaid wire shelving products use 100% post consumer steel in manufacturing
Rubbermaid laminated wood shelving suppliers use a high percentage of recycled content

Sure it's in their best interest to promote themselves since they're a storage-container company, but I think they're going about it the right way.

Chef Shack: delicious, local, ethical AND eco-conscious!

We checked out the Kingfield Farmers Market today (I last went there about two years ago), and it's really improved and is a wonderful place to shop and eat now.

Chef Shack sets up shop there (and also at the Mill City Farmers Market, Northeast Farmers Market, Uptown Farmers Market and was at last year's Holidazzle Parade), and I wanted to point out what a great company they are. Not only is their food totally scrumptious and creative, but their ingredients come from family farms and co-ops in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They cook up Thousand Hills Cattle Company hot dogs, bison burgers from Buffalo Gal, Fischer Farm's pork and grass-fed beef tongue. AND they only use compostable containers, dishes and serviceware.

So when Kingfield starts composting organics, Chef Shack'll already be compost-compatible. Thanks, Chef Shack! You guys are awesome.

The "trash" can at Kingfield. I'll bet 98 percent of this is compostable. It took all of my willpower to not drag this whole bag home.

Meanwhile at the Uptown Farmers Market...
there were a lot fewer vendors and the scene was much quieter, BUT they have organics collection already set up! They need more signage or someone monitoring, though, because there was just as much food and paper waste in the trash can as there was in the organics cart.

trash cart on the left, organics on the right

This guy gets it:




A volunteer told me the city of Minneapolis offered the organics collection service for free to the market, which is excellent.

the black cart on the left is for recyclables (there's a round hole cut into the lid)

Selling veggies is tiring work when you have to get up early to harvest!

One last item of note: organic and environmentally friendly lip balm, soaps, lotions, bath seltzers and pet products from Prairie Apothecary.

And look at this! Refillable lip balm!!

From their website: Our product packaging philosophy is, "Less is more." We use as little as possible, with several packaging options. From having the ingredients on the front of the package, we try to recreate packaging similar to that found in the 1800's and early 1900's. We try to limit our color selection to those that could could be derived naturally. We want our labels and packaging to break down in the environment at the end of their life. We will now introduce more 'Bulk' packaging in 6, 10, 12, and 24 packs, and therefore savings for the customer. We want you to buy our product for the product, not for the packaging! Our packaging also does not contain any Pthalates, and is approved for the contents we place inside of them.

Happy about Naked Juice's packaging

The Coon Rapids recycling coordinator was incensed that Naked Juice, which promotes itself as all-natural, healthy, good for you, etc., comes in a #7 (mixed resins) plastic bottle, which is unrecyclable. So she said I should write to Naked, which I did, after visiting their web site.

Dear Naked Juice,

I'm smiling right now because I was poised to send you a letter asking you why your juice bottles are made with #7 plastic, which is generally not recyclable. I go to your website to find contact info, and lo and behold there's the reNEWabottle. I'm very very pleased to see you're taking such an innovative step to try to close the loop on packaging your product. You should market your move extensively so that lots of people take notice, and hopefully other beverage companies will follow your lead! Thanks and good luck! In fact I'm now going to start buying Naked juice!

Sincerely,
Nancy Lo
Minneapolis

Here's the reply:
Nancy:

We're glad you're so excited about the Naked Juice reNEWabottle. We're pretty stoked about it ourselves. Mother Nature gives us all our best fruits, so we always do our best to keep her happy and healthy.

Even with our current bottles, they're probably more recyclable than you think. To make a long story short, Naked Juice 15.2 oz bottles are technically #7, but they can be recycled as #2 plastics. If you'd like the whole story in more detail, here are the facts:

1) Naked Juice 15.2 oz containers are made almost entirely of HDPE (#2) plastics.
2) The only other plastic we use is a thin layer of nylon which keeps oxygen out of our juice, and thus keeps them fresher.
3) Because we use two different plastics, our bottles are technically #7 plastic. (#7 just means mixed plastics.)
4) However, since the nylon doesn't interfere with the recycling of the plastic, you can recycle the bottles as though they were 100% #2 plastic. We put the #2 or the words "HDPE Compatible" on the bottle to highlight this fact to our consumers.

I hope this information is helpful, Nancy. Thanks for your interest in our brand. We hope you can continue to enjoy our products and our new bottles.

Dan
Naked Juice Consumer Relations

Here's details on their new reNEWabottle, which is made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles, which then can be recycled again to make more new bottles. Naked is the first nationally distributed brand to make their bottles entirely from 100% post-consumer plastic, and once they transition their whole line to the new bottles, they'll save 8.1 million pounds of virgin plastic per year and reduced their oil consumption by 57,000 barrels annually!

Recycling electrical cords, small electronics, VHS tapes, cassettes and floppy disks

My neighbor is cleaning out decades worth of stuff from her basement, and she didn't know what could and couldn't be recycled, so I went over to help. We collected three full boxes of electrical cords and small electronics, as well as hundreds of VHS and cassette tapes. The electronics went to Best Buy (thank you, Best Buy!) for recycling, and the tapes went to GreenDisk (thank you, GreenDisk!) for recycling. The tapes weighed 64 pounds, and the electronics weighed about the same, so that was 120 pounds worth of stuff diverted from the incinerator. (She'd already thrown away hundreds more tapes, but I couldn't intervene because I didn't know it was happening.)












GreenDisk is doing a lot of awesome, ground-breaking, conscientious stuff. I spoke with owner David Beschen, who told me GreenDisk is working with the entertainment industry in earnest. His company actually makes it cheaper for studios, renters and manufacturers such as Warner Bros., Blockbuster and Technicolor to use his recycling services rather than shred their DVDs and send them to the landfill. His business model is built around sustainability and closing the loop. Much of the plastic GreenDisk gathers is ABS plastic, which is accumulated in 40,000-pound loads (approximately 1.2 million CDs or DVDs). GreenDisk even has a coring machine that takes tape out of cassettes and VHS tapes so the plastic can be recycled. Just one example of closing the loop: Beschen found a company in North Carolina that makes new DVD cases out of old DVD cases. He soon will have Technotrash cans in Blockbuster, Best Buy, and Wal-mart retail outlets! And all his recycling is done in the United States and the materials are then sold to U.S. manufacturers rather than being exported. On top of all this, he uses disabled workers and motivates them by paying them good wages at a job they can feel good about.


64 lbs of tapes packed up for GreenDisk

Opting out of phone books

Go to this website (the Yellow Pages Association) and enter your info.

Our visit to Cedar Summit Farm

We went to Cedar Summit Farm's Milkapalooza (family farm fun) today, and it was an educational visit.

We talked at length with John Zinn, grazing specialist for the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service. We already were proponents of raising cows on pasture, but John greatly expanded our knowledge, and now we know rotational grazing really is THE way to go for the full spectrum of benefits: environmental (fertile soil means rainwater's soaked up like a sponge, greatly reducing runoff and soil erosion), and animal and human health.

The Minars raise their 150 cows on pasture 5 to 6 months out of the year. Letting the animals forage for themselves results in:
1. much healthier animals, who instinctively choose which plants are the most nutritious for them
2. fewer vet bills
3. much lower machinery and fuel costs because you're bringing the cows to the food rather than vice versa
4. tamer animals
5. more nutritious milk, packed with conjugated linoleic acid
6. and a longer lifespan (they have some 15-year-old cows still producing milk vs. in a conventional milking situation the cows are done by age 6)

Also in this type of farming situation, calves stay with Mom for 2 months, getting TLC and learning to graze, vs. a calf in a conventional setting gets some colostrum and then right away is separated from Mom to be raised on a bottle.



The cows are rotated to a different parcel of land, called a paddock, every 12 hours. The weather we've had lately has resulted in lush vegetation growth, so the cows were happily picking their favorite edibles. The cows are averaging 60 to 70 lbs. of grass consumed per day!

In the pasture, manure is spread out over a large area and rapidly decomposes and fertilizes the soil (the dung beetles immediately go to work on fresh grass-fed cow patties because they're not full of antibiotics and pesticides). Contrast that with a factory-farm situation: John told us his cousin, who has 1,100 cows living in close, crowded quarters, has a man working for him whose sole job 8 hours a day is to clear manure with a skidder.



I just had to include this picture because I thought the cow underpass was brilliant. They use this tunnel under the road to move the cows back to the farm to be milked and then out to the pasture again.



And of course being Trashbasher, I collected 3 grocery bags of organics. I was really happy to see the family had set out a bin for plastic bottles. And as a result I found not one bottle in the trash.





Here's what the trash looked like after I took out the food and paper waste (the barrel was nearly full when I started).

Yuban: an environmentally friendly surprise

I really love being pleasantly surprised, and this week's Pleasantly Surprised Trashbasher Award goes to Yuban coffee! Their canister is made from 50 percent recycled materials! And then when I went to their website I discovered Yuban is the world's largest supporter of Rainforest Alliance Certified coffee beans! Who knew?? Also, check out their 30 ways to make a difference link.

Exciting composting news in St. Paul's Macalester-Groveland neighborhood

Eureka Recycling unveiled its residential composting project in St. Paul's Macalester-Groveland neighborhood Wednesday. They plan to do this for three months using three collection methods: truck, bicycle and drop-off. And they're dividing the neighborhood into three 200-household chunks, to see who participates and which collection method makes the most sense holistically (people participating, energy used, carbon footprint, economic viability, etc.) Lots more details are here. These photos are from the media event; St. Paul City Council members Pat Harris and Russ Stark, and folks from the Macalester-Groveland Community Council, the Green Institute, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Macalester College, Linden Hills Power & Light and the University of Minnesota attended.




Green cart is for curbside collection, pink bin for drop-off


Turning food scraps into compost (a.k.a. really good dirt)


Prof. Christy Manning, who teaches and studies the psychology of sustainable behavior

Make your next event, big or small, zero-waste

Thanks to Keiko Veasey for telling me about a great resource on Rethink Recycling's website. On the Green Gatherings link, there are lots of helpful tips as well as case studies from people who have written about their events. With the number and variety of tips, you can pick and choose to take small steps or big ones to green your next event.

An experiment in giveaways

I've always given things away for free via Craigslist, but today I decided to try Twin Cities Free Market. So I posted 4 items on Free Market, then just to be sure I posted the same 4 items on Craigslist. Within an hour I'd given away 3 of the 4 things via Craigslist -- and none via Free Market. But I did eventually give away the 4th unclaimed item via Free Market, so that worked out perfectly!

And I'm very excited at the prospect of finding new homes for this stuff -- some of which have been sitting around our house for years!

Just in case you're curious about what I gave away

some ceramic knobs


3 couch cushions filled with goose down


epoxy-covered steel grids from a shelving unit