Happiness is a half-empty trash bag

The zero-waste efforts at the Linden Hills Festival just keep getting better and better. This is my third year of helping out with disposal monitoring, and each year the trash decreases. This is what happens when everyone from festival organizers to vendors to visitors are on board with reducing waste.


Covered in cotton candy!

Mmmmmm, mini donuts.

Plenty of helpful signs ...

plus friendly disposal monitors ...

equal a very happy Trashbasher!

10 64-gallon carts filled to the brim with organics, and just a half a bag of trash (on the left). The official weights:

organics: 588.5 pounds

trash: 16.5 pounds

plastic bottles: 7 pounds

cans: 30 pounds

Linden Hills Power & Light paid for this compost to be delivered to the festival to show residents how their food scraps and non-recyclable papers get turned into this lovely, rich compost. And the compost was free for the taking.

Spotlight on Seventh Generation

Seventh Generation is partnering with Preserve Gimme 5 to produce post-consumer packaging for Seventh Generation. They don't say what packaging the post-consumer #5 plastic is being made into, so maybe they're going to make it into laundry-bottle caps, which are already #5 plastic. I'm happy to see Seventh Generation is now a sponsor of the Preserve Gimme 5 program (consumers drop off #5 plastics for free at Whole Foods stores), because it's an awesome program but it can't be a cheap one. Read the news release here.



Also check out 7th Gen's 96% post-consumer resin bottles and their 100% recycled fiber recyclable or compostable bottle. Love the use of post-consumer materials in packaging! Love the concentrated formulas, which use less water and less packaging! BUT there's an inner plastic pouch (see photo below) that holds the laundry detergent that has very limited recycling possibilities, whereas a traditional bottle can be recycled entirely.




And here's info on the greenhouse-gas impact of their materials usage.

Closing the composting loop

One of the main things I've been working on for the past six weeks has been organizing a school compost media event. Seven Hennepin County schools that're participating in organics recycling were part of our one-day event on May 17, which involved the county arranging for compost to be delivered to the schools for their students to use in their school gardens. This was the composting process coming full circle: lunchroom food scraps and non-recyclable paper that students separated in the fall were coming back to those schools in the spring. The news media and county commissioners were invited to attend.

On the big day I went to two schools: Meadowbrook in Golden Valley (Hopkins School District) and Nellie Stone Johnson in north Minneapolis (Minneapolis School District). It was a hot and sunny day, one of the few that we've had this spring, which has been super rainy.

In the morning, I was at Meadowbrook. About 25 students did the planting, and Patch.com and Channel 12 came out to cover the event.

Composting Champion and Educator Extraordinaire Louise Miller handed out potatoes to plant.

A lot of veggie seedlings went into the ground this morning.

The students learned about the process of composting in class, and now they were getting to see the finished product. About 120 schools in Hennepin County are doing organics recycling!

In the afternoon, I went to Nellie Stone Johnson, which has a gigantic garden.

Sunflower seeds going into the ground.

Tasting radish seedlings!

Prepping a new bed.

It was an extremely successful day, I'm happy to say. County Commissioners Mark Stenglein, Peter McLaughlin and Gail Dorfman all came, and then talked about the event later that day at their board meeting.

These dog collars tell a story

Back when the Minnesota Valley Humane Society in Burnsville was still operating, dogs would be brought in to be surrendered, most still wearing their collars. MVHS staffers would take off the collars and usually throw them away, but they started saving them for me when I asked them to. Most are in good shape and can be reused.

So I finally got around to this big project last weekend, pulling about 100 of them out of a bag and sorting them into reusable and unsalvageable.

These were in good enough condition for reuse.

While I was sorting, sadness washed over me: every one of these collars was on a dog that had been unwanted. A lot of them found new adoptive homes through MVHS, but quite a few never made it onto the adoption floor. And some of the collars were filthy, indicating the neglect or indifference these dogs endured and also the low value placed on them by their owners, who couldn't be bothered to make sure the one thing that was always on their dog was clean.

The pile of unsalvageables: too worn or torn to be used.

The winner of Ugliest Dog Collar. This reminded me of a car interior from the '70s.

And the Filthiest Dog Collar.


Here you can see the words, but note how the edges have ground-in grime.

Pile of collars with salvageable metal and plastic hardware removed.




Dirty unsalvageables on the left and freshly washed salvageables on the right. These collars represent a lot of surrendered dogs.

Getting filthy in Seward

It was a beautiful, hot day for a recycling ridealong in the Seward neighborhood's two-sort recycling pilot program. I didn't bring nearly enough water, and at the end of 9 hours of riding along with the recycling crew, I was dehydrated, overheated and exhausted.

Someone put yogurt containers in their bottles & cans bin, which is a no-no.

"You were tagged because there were one or more problems with the way the recyclable materials were prepared, as circled below."

Check out the rings of grime on my neck! My skin was coated with sweat and dirt. Remember that scene in "The Fugitive" in which Harrison Ford gets himself cleaned up in a public restroom after evading Tommy Lee Jones? That was me in the Seward Co-op bathroom (well, except for the beard-shaving, hair-dyeing, wound-dressing and painkiller/antibiotic-in-the-butt injecting).

A nice plate of food and a freshly squeezed icy lemonade at the Seward Co-op. Ahhhhh

Guest Recycler Kristi!

Neighbor Kristi was kind enough to make a trip to Eastside Food Co-op to drop off #1-7 plastics for me.



We filled her van.



What'd Kristi think? "Interesting place! I'm glad I got to see it!" she said.