"recycling" news and stories

No matter how much we talk about the environment, no matter how many times we're told to decrease our waste, we're inundated with food products. They are practically suffocating with extra or unrecyclable packaging. I write this as someone who not only finds it ridiculous to buy products that result in tons of hard-to-reuse waste the minute you get it home and unpackage it, but also as someone who has a cap on the amount of garbage that's picked up free of charge.

This isn't just an argument for the environment -- the space available to dump garbage continues to be a problem, so why fill it with needless waste? Save it for the garbage that's much harder to prevent. It's a matter of common sense. Do you want to waste space on fleeting convenience, or the garbage that you can't avoid?

The biggest culprit is styrofoam. My god, it's everywhere, and in most cases, highly unnecessary. The saran+styrofoam combo is rampant in grocery stores -- with meats, vegetables, sliced cheeses, mushrooms. Since much of the food doesn't last long in that packaging, like mushrooms and meats, it must be unwrapped and used immediately, or repackaged in something else to maintain freshness or freeze. The styrofoam is left behind -- useless, unrecyclable. And cheese slices -- my god, I've seen four slices of cheese wrapped this way before -- which is particularly infuriating when it's right next to the same cheese on a deli counter that can be sliced on request and slipped inside one small plastic bag.

In addition to being a moderately decent brewer, Heineken has also flirted with becoming a force for change in the world. In the early 1960's, during a vacation in the Caribbean, one of Heineken's brewers noticed two problems that he thought might have the same solution. While the local beaches were littered with beer bottles, many people weren't able to find reasonably-priced building materials. When he got back to work, the brewer convinced Heineken to create the "world bottle" (WOBO), which also became known as "the brick that holds beer." Basically a rectangular-shaped beer bottle, world bottles were designed to fit comfortably end-to-end, making it possible to make walls, doors, and windows without resorting to glass cutting.

Heineken ended up making a small production run of the world bottles, but never released them to the public. Today, the only two WOBO structures in the world are a shed on the Heineken estate and a wall at the Heineken museum in Amsterdam. However, even though the world bottle never went into production, other people have found a way to turn left over Heineken bottles into livable structures.

Using one million discarded Heineken and Chang beer bottles, Buddhist monks in Sisaket, Thailand constructed the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew monastery. A beautiful, graceful structure, it shows that all those empties that we put in our recycling bin have the power to make a major difference!

I had a friend once who saved the corks from wine bottles. He said that he sent them to his brother for some reason or other I can't remember now. Now there really is a reason to save your corks (and not just for all those cork stamps you've been planning on making).

According to Chow: The Grinder, a new program called ReCORK America is operating in Oregon and California. ReCORK America collects and recycles used wine corks. It's sponsored by a Portugese cork manufacturer, Amorim, and works mainly with institutions that go though a lot of corks. However, they also have drop off centers so individuals can also participate.

In honor of Earth Day, here are a few things you can do to keep common "trash" items out of the landfills.

Everyone nowadays is concerned about the environment. Big business is especially concerned with its image. It wants the valuable consumers that a good green image can bring.

Coca Cola is no different, of course. The soft drink giant has already taken a number of steps to green-ify its image. The beverage maker has already pledged to recycle all of its plastic packaging in the US. Now it's time to tackle aluminum. Coca Cola has now decided that it will recycle 100% of the aluminum cans produced in the US.

To coordinate everything, the drink maker even created a whole division dedicated to collecting and recycling all of its waste packaging. Coca Cola Recycling just built a plant in South Carolina. The division says that the aluminum recycling initiative will use 95% less energy and reduce carbon emissions by 95% than creating new cans.

So here you go; another big company working to beef up its green image. I think it's great. A company as big as Coca Cola recycling all of its waste can make a huge impact on what goes in the landfills. It also makes a lot of business sense. So this kind of thing is a win-win for everyone.