Last night, I attended a meeting hosted by SF Environment, a department of the city and county of San Francisco.  I was in awe and inspired by how much one city can accomplish when it comes to educating the public about energy efficiency and environmental consciousness.  Not only is San Francisco leading the domestic urban composting charge with a city-wide composting program, whereby the city mandates composting in addition to recycling, but the city is making the process of being an ecoconsumer easier and easier.

When I relocated here two months ago, I was astounded at how commonplace composting was – the city simply places compost bins throughout the city and provides them to each city resident.  In addition, SF Environment provides free compost containers for your kitchen so you… [view entry]

Tara Holmes

This past Friday, I attended a workshop lead by Dr. Doug McKenzie-Mohr entitled “An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing: Fostering Sustainable Behavior.”  As someone who’s personally very intrigued by the oftentimes overlooked (and dare I say critical) link between our everyday psychology and environmental sustainability, I was eager to attend. What I learned was both enlightening and somewhat anticipated.

In brief, humans, at least the populations Dr. McKenzie-Mohr has studied, tend to default to the easiest common denominator of behavior when it comes to environmentalism.  Of course, this isn’t to say there aren’t outlier personalities who go above and beyond the “green” call, but overall, unless regulated to do so, or cajoled by neighbors or friends, most people will resort to the path of… [view entry]

Debating on whether or not to get a real or fake Christmas tree this year?  Well, if you haven’t already, then think twice: a recent article by the New York Times reported that unless you keep your fake tree for 20 years or more, it’s more environmentally conscientious to purchase a real tree. It sounds counterintuitive – aren’t Christmas tree farms agriculturally damaging and don’t we need more trees intact to act as carbon sinks? Turns out, it might not be that clear cut.

Using calculations that included greenhouse gas emissions, use of resources and human health impacts, a Montreal-based environmental consulting firm found that the annual carbon emissions associated with using a real tree every year were one-third of those created by an artificial tree over a standard six-year lifespan.… [view entry]

The front of the warehouse, where trucks unload.

On Wednesday I went on a tour of the Casella recycling plant. Cambridge’s recycling director, Randi Mail, is hosting tours before the town switches over to single-stream recycling October 25. Casella is already handling single-stream loads from many towns in Massachusetts, including Boston. It was fascinating to see the elaborate sorting process.

First, giant piles of recyclables are dumped off the trucks and bulldozed onto a conveyer belt, which levels them out into more manageable amounts.

A teeny tiny bulldozer pushes the recyclables onto a conveyer belt.

Then the mass of recyclables are spun around a tunnel with 1-inch holes in the sides. Centrifugal force holds lighter materials to the side while glass falls to the bottom and shatters, over… [view entry]

On Tuesday, I shared my conversation with Randi Mail, recycling director for the City of Cambridge, about Cambridge’s new single-stream recycling program. In the process we touched on some general waste and recycling questions that I thought I’d share here. If you have any other questions or want to attend the recycling facility tour, let me know in the comments and I’ll pass it on to Randi.

Are there any plans for collecting compost in the future?

The limiting factor on that right now is that there is no facility within reasonable driving distance of the city that can handle the kind of volume of food scraps that we’d get if we had a curbside collection program for residents. There are a few private companies that are moving forward… [view entry]

Recycling directory website, 1-800-RECYCLING has a recent story about the obscure problem of tire—or tyre in most Commonwealth nations—disposal, accompanied by some pretty astonishing photographs. There aren’t too many major reuses for old tires where the resource doesn’t go up in smoke, so they keep piling up, but research is under way. Off hand, it seems like ground tire might be usable as some part of a road bed or surface, maybe even as a playground tan-bark replacement …except for the heavy metals; which one ends up breathing anyhow. Other uses? Ten Thousand Villages—including the Central Square location—sells wallets made of repurposed tire. The adventurous can also try making their own sandals or resoling shoes.

A new type of architecture has been infiltrating the traditional world for years; homes, condominiums, offices, and all other manner of buildings are being built from industrial storage containers that we would normally see on the back of an 18-wheeler or a shipping barge. The containers are easily stacked, and work quite well for the inhabitants once they are properly insulated, and turned into homes.

These new structures are subtly environmentally-friendly, in the most obvious way. We are all familiar with the chant “Reduce, re-use, recycle,” and this type of construction is a legitimate way of re-using the excess industrial storage containers that are finished with their initial use.

Shipping container architecture has been around for several years, but this topic presently comes to light again because the… [view entry]

Since the beginning of April, 2010, Target has launched a massive nationwide recycling initiative in its 1,740 U.S. stores. The recycling stations will accept aluminum, glass and plastic beverage containers, plastic bags, MP3 players, cell phones and ink cartridges. Making it easier for some communities without curbside recycling to reduce the amount of material burned or buried, and for others to recycle some specialized goods.

“The launch of store recycling stations allows us to continue to partner with [our guests] to curb unnecessary waste in our stores and our communities,” said Shawn Gensch, vice president of brand marketing.

Target is developing all kinds of sustainability programs to improve its green image, including programs to green its supply chain, use less energy and produce less waste. Of course, one of the motivations of… [view entry]

“The Plastic Bag” directed by Ramin Bahrani, this 18-minute film chronicling the life of a plastic bag, and questions the environmental impact of consumerism in a world that treats it like trash. “The Plastic Bag” has been screened at many film festivals, and was commissioned by the Independent Television Service through a project in which 11 filmmakers were asked to examine issues in the United States and dramatize the potential consequences. The series includes another environmentally themed film called “Seed,” about a future in which genetically modified seeds dominate the world and organic seeds are illegal.

Of course plastic bags don’t have to be modern tumbleweeds. Besides being easy to recycle there are several interesting projects one can do with them including making your own messenger bag… [view entry]

When it comes to environmental discussion, waste management is an environmental concern that many feel needs to be addressed. Many also feel that clean energy innovations are needed to ensure a greener earth. Yet, what many fail to realize is that the solution to the garbage and clean energy problem may be garbage itself.

Denmark has installed a number of garbage plants that take trash and make it into energy. These plants are at the forefront of waste/energy technology. How they operate is that the waste taken into the plant is incinerated which creates heat that generates steam for a turbine that goes on to run generators that create electricity and even heat. Statistics have shown that plants like the ones in Denmark, while creating new forms of… [view entry]