Java Junkies!

Do you get your fix of coffee everyday? You need to get the ultimate in eco-friendly fashion. The remarkable, reusable coffee sleeve. Check out Threadbeaur for great coffee sleeves made from salvaged fabric. Fabric with a history, and trying to avoid the landfill, given a second life as an everyday useful item. Green fashion is everywhere you look, from reusable shopping bags, to the ability to buy offsets for your carbon footprint. Why not just reduce your carbon footprint on your own. There are small things that we can do everyday to reduce our waste. Just like getting a reusable coffee cozy instead of the cardboard offered in the local coffee shop. If everyone did this think of all the room we have saved in our landfills! It adds up.

Curbside Recycling

Today at work we watched the trash man come pick up the cans of garbage. He then grabbed the recycling bins, and tossed them right in with the garbage. We could not believe what was happening. We spent time separating the recycling, breaking down all the cardboard boxes, and rinsing the handful of plastic juice jugs we go through every week.

Do you think your separated items make it to the recycling center or to the landfill? If people start seeing that they are separating their items for no reason, they will stop doing it. That will be bad for everyone. Then the people who are paid to pick up the recycling will be out of a job, and the landfills will start to increase it size, and we will need more.

What can be done? Is your town a recycling town? How good is the program?
All I know about my recycling program, is what I can and can not put out on the curb to be recycled. After they pick it up I don't know what happens, I have a sneaking suspicion that it ends up with all the other trash.

I would like to hear about your towns recycling, have any of you had this same problem?

Midnight Raid

Not so long ago, our neighbors were replacing an old fence with a nice new wood fence. We happened to drive by and saw the scrap fence pieces by the trash pile. Later that night, we did, what we like to call a, Midnight raid. We drove by and got the scrap lumber from the trash. I like to think of it as recycling. Anyway, after we got the goods, we went straight to work, we made several cute little bird houses from the fencing material. They sat for several months, then over the winter with no roofs, needless to say, we had no tenants for the bird house.

Then today I worked on a new project. I fused plastic bags together. Yes, regular plastic shopping bags from the grocery store. This process was quick, and easy, I did open the window just in case the fumes got to bad. I ended up with a piece of plastic "fabric", which I immediately took downstairs and attached it to the bird house. It was the perfect roofing material. I made the entire bird house from recycled material, that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill. Now this sweet little bird house may have a tenant this spring.

PLASTIC

I don't even know where to start, I was reading some other blogs on the subject, and just started thinking. Every time I go to the grocery store and forget my old paper bags, I put my hat scarf and gloves back on and trudge back out to the car and bring them back in. I don't want anymore bags, plastic or paper. I intend to use the paper bags that I already have until they start falling apart. There are so many sites telling you the problem with plastic. Everything is plastic these days, from kids toys to water bottles to the bags we put them in. I am trying to convert to cloth reusable bags (I make my own), and so are many other people from what I can tell. However, until plastic bags have an actual price tag on them (other than destruction of the earth) people in general will keep using them. We use lots of them in the billions per year, or more, and they will take hundreds of years to decompose, if ever. So what do we do? The first action should be the consumers, stop using plastic bags, period. Then if consumers insist on using plastic bags the retailers should charge a fee for each bag. By doing that I think people would think twice about taking home yet another plastic bag. Lets all try to use a little less, we are living in a society where more is better. If everyone does a little it can make a big difference.

There are many options for reusable cloth bags. On Etsy.com there are handcrafted options, and many retailers will sell you their bag for a few bucks. I would love to have a great cloth bag for a few bucks, than any amount of plastic bags.
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On a side note, I was in Florida last weekend and the Lake County Chain of Lakes was doing their annual lake clean up, the amount of trash they collected in one day was 20 thousand pounds. That is an incredible number for the size of the project. Now just think if everyone would make everyday clean up day. Just pick up one piece of trash, it will make you feel good.