Getting Creative About Recycling

I haven't been able to stop thinking about recycling since China decided to dramatically reduce their intake of foreign recycling. A couple articles with more information here from Forbes and The Seattle Times. While short term this means more of our recyclables will end up in landfills, and long term this presents an opportunity for innovation, we should take a moment to remember "refuse", "reduce", "reuse", "repurpose", and "upcycle". I'll work to focus my 2018 posts on these concepts.

Another option is companies that will specifically take back their waste products and recycle them. And these are often products that you don't think of as traditionally recyclable. Last year, I wrote about Terracycle, a company who facilitates relationships between individuals, companies, and municipalities and the companies that will take back waste.

I see their boxes often at the entrances of stores to take back odd products like batteries and wine corks.

But for the first time ever on Friday, I saw a municipal partnership! Here I am, at a bus stop in Seattle, and see a Terracycle cigarette butt collector. (No comments about smoking, please, we all have our vices.)

What this reminds me is: think outside the box for what might be able to recycle or re-purpose, and think outside the box against traditional curbside recycling. For the city, this is pretty straightforward - they have ashtrays on many of their trash receptacles anyway. And this little box is really non-obtrusive with a roughly 9" footprint. 

Ways you can participate: 

(Beginner) Participate in Terracycle "brigades" and mail in your own items. Or, drop of your items in bins at participating businesses. 

(Intermediate) Talk to your local businesses about putting boxes in their entryways. 

(Advanced) Talk to your local administrations or community associations about installing more permanent fixtures publicly. The cigarette canisters above were a partnership with Seattle's Metropolitan Improvement District, a non-profit funded by downtown business memberships.

2017 - A Year in Review

 As we move into the new year, let's reflect on the awesome things we've discovered this past year. Thanks for hanging out with me through 37 posts in 2017!

Travel: 

• The Costa Ricans show that Pura Vida extends to their view on waste.
• The Container Park is a sustainable gem in the heart of Sin City.
• My hotel in Tempe saved on packaging by providing full sized, refillable toiletries and saved $5 per night by declining housekeeping.
• A Detroit restaurant uses reclaimed materials for its furniture!

 Clothes: 

• I saved $37 by thrifting a top and using the Buy Nothing gifting community for some jeans.
• I saved $100 by scoring an awesome peacoat as a hand-me-down.
• I saved $60 thrifting a bold patterned top.
• We discovered that going green is even trendy with the celebs!
• I found online thrift stores make thrifting as easy as any online shopping.
• I saved about $100 and added months of life to my pants with some quick mending.
• I saved $32.55 on brand name digs at a consignment shop in Portland. 
• I saved $41.24 by DIYing my own crazy Halloween costume from thrifted materials.

Non-clothing Thrift: 

• We recognized Half Price Books as a way to both save money on books and earn money selling books for others to enjoy.
• We discovered stores that focus on "creative re-use" where you can get craft supplies for about 80% off!

Health, Bath, and Body: 

• We reduced packaging and saved 22% ($1.96) by buying bathroom products in bulk.
• I saved $18 by investing in period panties. 
• High end nail polish comes with friendlier ingredients at no extra cost.
• We saved packaging materials and transport costs by buying concentrated bath products.
• We sent the year out with a sparkle, by recommending eco friendly glitter.

Home and Garden: 

• We grew vegetables for free from our scraps. Free food and fun hobby! I saved $2 after a couple small rounds of harvesting. :) 
• Reusable flatware saves on plastic utensils, and bamboo doesn't add weight to your bag.
• Wool dryer balls save you dryer sheets and significant drying time!
• I saved $4 by regrowing my store-bought basil.
• We saved on plastic produce bags by getting reusable mesh bags - and also discovered a tag on Etsy for more eco shopping: "teamecoetsy".
• We recovered rare earth elements by recycling our old phones.
• We reduced food waste by purchasing imperfect produce.
• We substantially reduced our paper mail by signing up for 2 services.

Around town: 

• Community dog parks save money and resources by collecting users' grocery bags for waste pickup and collecting rainwater for doggy drinking water.
• We reduced fuel use by shopping local small businesses for Christmas.

Cool eco projects:

• The Washed Ashore Project makes giant sculptures creates beauty and educational pieces from collected ocean debris.
• We discovered 3D Printing and Knitting as options to upcycle plastic.

And finally, we forgave ourselves when we could be perfect greenies all the time. :)

Overall, we saved about $401.75 by making some smart choices, and made a huge dent in our environmental impact! Way to go Thoughtful Consumers!

Ooh Shiny!

This girl loves glitter. It could be for a festival, or a party, or Halloween, or a Tuesday. I like glitter makeup, embellished outfits, crafting.

So of course I'm totally crushed when my zero waste peeps remind me that glitter is actually just micro-plastic. Buzzkill.

OK, you're going too far with this eco-warrier stuff, you say. However, micro-plastics are far from a foreign concern. Several countries, including the US, have already banned or started phasing out microbeads in beauty products. Now, research scientists are starting to suggest glitter should be banned as well, and one chain of UK preschools has proactively banned craft glitter. The concern is that these tiny plastics quickly get into our water and are a pollutant to sealife including seafood. Plastic is now also found in the large majority of our drinking water.

Fortunately, we can still sparkle on. There are plenty of people who both love glitter and the planet that are making affordable, alternative products.

 (Image via ecostardust.com)

Almost all of these are made from cellulose from sustainably farmed eucalyptus trees! They are vegan, cruelty-free, biodegradable, compostable. Here are just a few examples:

UK
Eco Stardust - Each pot of cosmetic grade glitter is under $5.

Eco Glitter Fun - Individual glitters run around $5 with kits costing around $10-30.

NY
Greenpoint Glitter - Fine and chunky glitters starting from $12.

Found on Amazon
Minke Bio Cosmetics

Found on Etsy
The Sparkle Party - a shop from Australia offering a variety of chunkiness/sizes.


and a ton of other options searching tag "sustainable glitter".


Now that we know how to safely source all the sparklies, shine on! :)

Holiday Fail

Well, dears, I've been meaning to make reusable gift bags out of all that lovely fabric I got from Seattle ReCreative. I've cut the fabric, gotten all lined up with my sewing machine, and... it jammed. Repeatedly. For hours.

I think it just needs to be cleaned well, but in the meantime, I'm going to give myself a gift: a little patience.

My Mailbox is Full of... Just Advertising

This time of the year, my mailbox is extremely full. No, it's not Christmas cards quite yet. It's catalogs, and more catalogs, and some reminders to charitable organizations I've donated to in the past.

While I will likely be doing a bit of shopping and donating this holiday season, I don't need a full recycling box to remind me to do so. :)

To stop the madness, you can always call or email each company directly. However, this can take a lot of time to track down each company.

I'm loving a site called Catalog Choice to opt out of paper mailings. This is a free service. Per their FAQ, they have over 9000 companies listed. Most of them you can fill out a quick form on their own website to opt out. For some, they redirect you to the company's website to their own form or email address (they've already done the Google legwork for you!). All of your history is tracked in a personal dashboard for reference. Catalog Choice is non-profit reducing mail for environmental purposes, so they communicate their environmental wins. If this screenshot is too small for your device, a couple impressive numbers are 500K mature trees saved and 3.6B gallons of water saved.

 

Another service is DMA Choice. This service costs $2 for 10 years. DMA is the Data and Marketers Association and has about 3600 members that you can opt out of mailings from. In addition to catalogs, they also have magazine offers and other categories of mailings. A couple cool things: they allow you to opt out in bulk. If you are getting mailings from specific companies you've done business with previously, you still need to remove yourself from that business itself, but this removes you from mailing lists that these direct marketing companies purchase. Direct Choice also lets you register deceased relatives. While a bit morbid, it's nice to be able to stop receiving ironic insurance offers for someone who can no longer benefit.

If you're starting to think about New Year's resolutions and getting 2018 off to a good start, take a half hour and make junk mail a thing of the past! :)

Re-Use, Re-Cycle, Re-Creative?

We're all familiar with thrift stores, second-hand stores, and consignment shops offering a variety of goods from clothing to toys to furniture to small housewares. But have you heard of reuse shops that specialize in arts and crafts supplies? Let me introduce you to Seattle ReCreative, located in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle.

This store is roughly 1000 square feet of many types of creative supplies plus room for classes and workshops, kids parties, and community events. What is cool to see is the broad variety of supplies they carry. Some more traditional fine art supplies, to common paper and fabric crafts, to more obscure ideas like vinyl records (seriously look at Pinterest for all the amazing ideas to paint on, cut up, or melt records into new objects!) and empty plastic bottles (perhaps to mix paints or store beads in).

Here's a sampling of some of the great inventory today. A huge box of of rubber stamps:

Buttons - use them for their original purpose or to craft an adorable angel ornament:

Paints galore:

Scrapbooking or cardmaking paper. Full 12" sheets and smaller pieces:

Canvas stretcher bars for the serious painter:

A whole wall of yarn! Some partial balls, and some completely new skeins, along with knitting needles: 

And the reason for me going today. They carry a large selection of fabrics, and I scored about 14 yards of holiday fabric. Check out my next post for what I'm doing with it. ;)

Not shown here were stacks of postcards, greeting cards, National Geographic magazines, vintage photographs, tile, beads... great for collage, card-making, school projects, mosaics, jewelry-making. Today, I observed that most items were going for about 10-20% of what they would cost new/retail. For example, the fabric was just $2/yd, an incredible skein of fuzzy sparkly yarn was $2, and cards and postcards were just $0.10.

This store has so much potential for both shopping and donating. How many times have you tried a new craft and decided it wasn't for you? Donate the leftovers! How many times have you or your kid wanted to try a new craft but you're worried about the investment just to give it a try? Shop at a steep discount and see if you like it. Even better, you can just buy a few pieces of something without purchasing full sets. I think too about teachers who end up having limited budget for supplies or even spend some of their own money: think how far that same money would stretch here, for art supplies for their students or creative materials for bulletin boards.

Ultimately, this store allows for low-risk creative pursuits, while funding a community space and keeping many pounds of leftover arts supplies out of the landfill.

You're Funny... Looking!

We waste a ton (actually 1.3B tons or 40%) of food each year in the US. That's... insane, especially given the numbers of hungry people that could feed.

While some of this food is meal leftovers, a good portion never even makes it to our plates. It is sorted out prior to grocery sales, because it is less attractive or doesn't meet a certain standard.

There's nothing wrong with this produce besides it's a little funny looking. Some petitions are working on making governmental or corporate changes similar to the law France passed last year that fines grocery stores for throwing away food instead of donating it. They are appealing to alternative options such as using that produce in the store's deli offerings (a lumpy tomato isn't noticed when diced in a salsa), or just plain selling the produce.

Imperfect is a California-based company that is seeking to interrupt this cycle by going straight from the farm to the end consumer. They deliver customized boxes of organic fruits and/or veggies to your door on a subscription basis.

Shortly after I learned about Imperfect, they announced that they were going to start serving the Seattle area, and this week I got my first box! I was thrilled with the experience. While I didn't need to be home for delivery, they texted me when the driver was in my area and again when the box was delivered.

I didn't customize this first box because I was just curious to see what I would receive. Already, from the label on the box, I'm getting excited.

This is about 7 lbs of organic produce for about $15, and hey, I needed potatoes, onions, and leeks for my Thanksgiving menu anyway. :)  And I've literally never purchased a pomegranate, so that will be fun to try out something new. Now to open the box:

That's a lovely selection! Outside of some of potatoes being a little large and lumpy, and the onions and oranges being a little small, it's all perfect quality.

A bonus: they included a little recipe book for what to try with seasonal produce.

I'm definitely excited for my next box. Organic fruits and veggies with door-to-door service at non-organic store prices? Sold.