chores

I spent 3 hours washing my garbage today–sterilizing soy milk containers, plastic bottles, cans, washing out chip bags, and peeling labels off bottles. Glamorous!

reuse vs recycle

Reuse vs recycle

By Green Living Tips | Published 04/22/2007 | home , gadgets , family , energy

Think reuse before recycle The recycling movement has gathered plenty of steam in recent years which is wonderful, there's far less hitting our landfills and resources being reclaimed. However, there is concern building that the recycling wave is allowing us to still be rampant consumers, a throwaway society; and recycling some justification for maintaining this mindset. For instance, those very handy cans of gourmet flavored tuna, great to pack in a lunch box but I can empty the contents with a single mouthful! I can alleviate my guilt somewhat by recycling the can, but in order to get that mouthful of tuna, an awful lot of resources have gone into the packaging - and that's not to mention the added costs in purchasing products in this way. What's more economical and energy efficient is buying a larger can of tuna and spooning out the equivalent amount into a reusable container. It's the same sort of situation with a plethora of other products - cans vs. large bottles of drink, traveller packs of anything - all these handy sizes which cost us more can be recycled; but we forget the amount of energy it takes to do so. While the energy required to recycle the aluminium in a drink can is one twentieth of that to produce the can from raw materials; when you start thinking in terms of billions of cans; it's still a lot of energy consumed. You can buy the equivalent of 5 cans in a plastic PET recyclable bottle and I suspect (I'm not sure on this) that the recycling process would require less energy. In terms of larger items, let's say an old busted washing machine - we can send it to scrap merchants who may strip it of useful components for recycling which is great; but Fred from down the road is handy with washing machines and he may find that it just needs a fuse or some cheap component. Fred may be able to make use of it or resell the item. Reuse extends the life of a product before it has to hit the recycling stage. You may have saved Fred (or someone else) some cash in having to buy a new washer, so there's also a definite feel good aspect to re-use aside from the consumption issue. With the growing number of people understanding that reuse is the first option before recycle, all sorts of groups have started up where you can offer your items for free to others who can make use of them. One such service is The Freecycle Network™ which currently has nearly 3.5 million members globally. If you're in Australia, a great new service is E-Cycled. I've been reading some amazing stories of people who believed *no-one* could make use of their junk, only to find it snapped up when posted to these sorts of sites. Think re-use before thinking recycle :). Michael Bloch Green Living Tips.com

recycling energy savings vs creating from raw materials

Recycling energy savings

By Green Living Tips | Published 12/18/2007 | energy

Recycling, glass, metal, plastic and paper - energy savings If you visit a lot of environmental forums, no doubt you would have come across people claiming that recycling isn't all that effective - that it can take as much energy to recycle materials as it does to extract and produce them in the first place. I don't claim to have any special knowledge or education, but here's some information I researched on the energy savings involved with various common materials from what I believe to be fairly good sources. Energy savings - recycling metals These figures also take into account the sorting and transportation of materials. Aluminium - 95% Copper - 85% Lead - 60% Steel - 62 - 74% Zinc - 60% Data from the British Metal Recycling Association Aside from the energy savings, the more metals that can be recycled, the less (or slower) destruction of the environment from mining. While the recycling process may produce toxic materials; mining certainly does. Energy savings - recycling plastics Post-consumer products may contain as many as 20 different types of plastic material; so one of the biggest challenges is sorting it all. However, according to Dr. Mike Biddle, President of MBA Polymers, recycling plastics uses only roughly 10 percent of the energy that it takes to make a pound of plastic from virgin materials. Again, the savings aren't just in energy - plastics are still mostly made from petrochemicals; i.e. crude oil. Nearly 10 percent of U.S. oil consumption, which equates to approximately 2 million barrels a day - is used to make plastics. Recycling plastics also means saving oil - through the production process and base materials. Energy savings - recycling glass According to Waste Online, for every ton of recycled glass, 1.2 tons of raw materials are not required and after taking into account transport and processing needed to recycle glass, nearly 700 pounds of carbon dioxide is saved per ton of glass melted for the purposes of making bottles and jars. The Glass Packaging Institute states recycled glass uses only two-thirds the energy needed to manufacture glass from raw materials Recycled glass isn't just used for making more bottles - it can be turned into fiberglass (which is also used in house insulation), and as a component of bricks; requiring less energy to create the bricks and as the product is lighter, less energy is used in transport. Glass can be recycled indefinitely. Energy savings - recycling paper The Department of Energy states that a ton of paper made from recycled fibers conserves 7,000 gallons of water, up to 31 trees, 4,000 KWh of electricity and up to 60 pounds of air pollutants (not including carbon dioxide). Overall, recycling paper uses about 60% less energy than making paper from new materials. In case you've heard that there is a glut of old newspapers around and therefore paper is now often shipped to landfill and burned; that used to be the case in some parts of the world, but through new techniques, products and widespread consumer acceptance, demand has caught up with supply. The recycling trap Here's a trap that many people fall into - because an item can be recycled, they might feel that extra consumption is no longer a bad thing. Recycling is the last of the 3R's i.e. Reduce, Reuse... lastly, Recycle. Reduction of consumption means that less needs to be produced in the first place (and you'll save a stack of cash too). Reusing gives old products new life with little or no energy being used for repurposing, whereas recycling still does require substantial energy. Michael Bloch Green Living Tips.com

plastic bag lamp shade

This is an easy, beautiful, atmospheric enhancer.

It's best to use CFL's or LED lights so you don't melt the plastic.

1. Cut the handles off your plastic bag and cover the light on any lamp.

2. Turn the light on.

viola!

plastic bag fusing

prepare the bags
1. Cut the handles, bottoms, and one side off plastic bags, so the make one sheet.

2. Stack 6-8 layers of plastic bags depending on thickness. Too few will create burn holes. Too many wont heat evenly.

iron
3. Place 2 sheets of parchment paper on either side of plastic layers. It is best to keep the printed designs on the inside
or the ink will melt everywhere.

4. Set the iron to rayon. When hot, keep the iron moving. You will need to play with the timing to find best results.

5. After you are done with one side flip it over and
repeat on the other side.

before you know it.....

viola! fused plastic.

design problem

I don't have enough garbage! This experiment has really cut back on my purchasing power. Just knowing that I have to keep my waste has changed my spending habits. I have completely reduced. After a month, I barely have collected a kitchen sized trash bag full of recycling!? So, now I am off to the local restaurants to collect their garbage--entering the meta level.

make your very own plastic island

plastic found in birds belly

More than half a pound of plastic was found in the stomach of a fledgling Laysan albatross (nicknamed "Shed Bird"). This bird was stuffed with Plastic lighters, bottle caps, and other plastics that are carelessly tossed often wind up floating on the ocean surface.

plastic islands in the pacific

The very thing that makes plastic items useful to consumers, their durability and stability, also makes them a problem in marine environments. Around 100 million tons of plastic are produced each year of which about 10 percent ends up in the sea. About 20 percent of this is from ships and platforms, the rest from land.

The Plastic Islands in the Pacific are stated as being twice the size of Texas and weighing 7 billions pounds. Some reports call it an enormous soup of plastic debris that has grown rapidly to twice the size of the U.S. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. An ongoing voyage into the foul soup of garbage has revealed it is composed of two huge vortices one in the eastern Pacific and one in the western Pacific. The vortices are maintained by a confluence of subsurface currents and by regions of high atmospheric pressure above the subtropical Pacific Ocean.

There’s six times as much plastic as biomass, including plankton and jellyfish, in the gyre.
These plastic patches have profound implications for wildlife because birds tend to eat bits of plastic and marine mammals can be strangled by them. Moreover, the plastic can accumulate in areas where currents are forcing nutrients upward - zones of high biological activity. The consequences are deadly to a wide range of species.

50-60 years ago there was no plastic in the sea.