Search Greenrightnow
Environmental Headlines
Home
Tagged : recycling
A documentary about Egypt’s ‘garbage people’; a lesson in recycling
From Green Right Now Reports
Garbage Dreams is the paradoxical title of an upcoming PBS documentary on Egypt’s Zaballeen, or in English, ‘garbage people’. The Zaballeen collect the trash in Cairo. They are born into the job and live on the city’s outskirts, within the large garbage village composed of Cairo’s waste.
[caption id="attachment_9693" align="alignright" width="171" caption="Egypt's Zaballeen are born into the garbage business"]  [/caption]
[Read more →]
Tags: · documentary, Egypt, Garbage Dreams, Recycle & Reuse, Recycle & Reuse
Recovering chairs, Blugirlart turns throwaways into thrones
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Recycling doesn’t mean settling for something less. It can mean adding value for less. But the end product might even be better than ever. (Hence, the term upcycling.)
[caption id="attachment_8807" align="alignleft" width="190" caption="VictorVictoria chair (Photo: Blugirlart Inc.)"]  [/caption]
But whether a first iteration or an item’s reincarnation is superior hardly matters when the end result makes the owner happy and the object serves its purpose well, maybe even rises above, to a higher calling.
Those who reclaim items for a second or third life are often driven by this reward, the thrill of taking something bound for the trash and rescuing it, restoring it and assigning it to a better life. We’re thinking of artists who meld old garden tools into garden sculpture or carpenters who assemble barn planks into gleaming table tops.
[Read more →]
Tags: · Blugirlart Inc., home furnishings, Max Rudolf, reclaimed furniture, recovering chairs, Recycle & Reuse, reupholstery, Suzanne Meyer-Pistorius, upcycling
eBay and RecycleBank hook up to reward re-users
By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now
eBay, the giant online garage sale facilitator, and RecycleBank, the company that figured out how to get Americans recycling by offering them consumer rewards, have announced a partnership in which each company will offer incentives to the other companies clients.
Kind of like a swap-meet in the middle of a flea market.
A little history: eBay, the online marketplace that began in 1995, began thinking green in 2007 when a group of employees formed eBay’s Green Team community. The Green Team tries to inspire eBay’s 90 million users to “buy, sell & think green every day” by offering pertinent eco-friendly tips and sustainable advice.
[Read more →]
Tags: · eBay, Green Team, Recycle & Reuse, Recycle Bank, reselling
U-Haul to help redistribute unwanted goods
[caption id="attachment_8122" align="alignnone" width="360" caption="U-Haul's Reuse Centers provide a redistribution network for gently used household items. (Photo: U-Haul)"]  [/caption]
From Green Right Now Reports
If seeing your discarded household goods, furniture, etc., headed out to the nearest landfill doesn’t make you feel so good about yourself, U-Haul offers an alternative solution.
Don’t want that old couch? A U-Haul customer or employee might. The U-Haul Reuse Program is a national initiative that provides a redistribution network for gently used household items, furniture, sporting equipment and clothing — all kinds of items that might otherwise come to a less environmentally-friendly end.
[Read more →]
Tags: · household goods, Recycle & Reuse, reusing, U-Haul Reuse Program
Recycling, it’s the least we can do
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
If you haven’t seen it, please take a look at our story about America Recycles Day. Find out just how much energy we can save by recycling, a no-brainer if ever there was one.
Last year, a Harris poll found that 91 percent of Americans reported that they recycled. But that figure seemed really high, given the low recycling rates in some cities, like Houston, Dallas, Detroit and Indianapolis. Those were some of the slackers revealed in a study of municipal recycling in 2008 that showed major US cities varied wildly in the amount of recyclables they collected, from San Francisco’s near 70 percent to Houston’s under 3 percent.
[caption id="attachment_6582" align="alignright" width="206" caption="Plastie bottle spewing"]  [/caption]
[Read more →]
Tags: · aluminum, BarbaraKesslerBlog, bottle recycling, glass, Harris poll shows 91 percent of Americans recycle, mixed-use recycling, Paper, paper recycling, Plastic, Recycle & Reuse, recycling rates of US cities, recycling slackers, US Cities
Continental Airlines reports 800% jump in recyclables collected in 2009
[caption id="attachment_6526" align="alignright" width="280" caption="(Photo: Continental Airlines)"]  [/caption]
From Green Right Now Reports
Houston-based Continental Airlines today announced a major increase in the amount of waste being recovered in its recycling programs following the company’s decision to put special emphasis on recycling projects.
As the United States prepares to observe “America Recycles Day” on Sunday, Continental said that so far in 2009, it has collected more than 4 million pounds of mixed recyclables from terminal operations at its Houston Bush Intercontinental, New York/Newark Liberty and Cleveland Hopkins hubs – an 800 percent year-over-year increase. Mixed recyclables include newspapers, cans, and plastic bottles contributed by co-workers and customers via designated “EcoSkies” recycling bins in hub airport terminals.
[Read more →]
Tags: · America Recycles Day, Continental Airlines, Leah Raney, Recycle & Reuse
Harris Poll finds many Americans are actively green, others have not signed up
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
The latest Harris Poll on green behavior in America is a good news/bad news story.
The good news: Most people have done something that’s green, by recycling a computer or cell phone; switching to tap water from bottled; made their home more energy efficient in some way.
The bad news: Only a tiny fraction of US residents (2 percent) own hybrid cars and vast numbers of people have not “engaged” in most of the green activities the survey asked about, like for example composting (only 17 percent do), walking or biking to work (15 percent), or even getting a low flow shower head (17 percent).
[Read more →]
Tags: · appliances, buying local, buying organic, carpooling, CFL lightbulbs, Composting, energy efficient appliances, energy improvements, green actions, green Americans, Harris Poll, hybrid cars, low flow showerheads, online bills, Recycle & Reuse, reusing, Tap Water
Landmark restaurants sign up for green certification
By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now
Some of our nation’s most prominent locations are greening up their dining practices. Restaurant Associates, the operators of eateries inside some of America’s museums and landmarks, has committed to a five year partnership with the Green Restaurant Association.
All current and future cafes within the US House of Representatives, American Museum of Natural History, and the Lincoln Center will become more environmentally friendly.
[Read more →]
Tags: · American Museum of Natural History, dinegreen.com, energy efficiency, Green Restaurant Association, Lincoln Center, polystyrene, Recycle & Reuse, US House of Representatives
Saving the past, and the future, with furniture created from reclaimed wood
By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now
Only a few years ago, you couldn’t give old wood away. Dilapidated barns and falling-down sheds were a nuisance to most people who owned them; they’d actually pay you to come haul the stuff off.
 Boy, how things change. Daniel and Amy Balog find it ironic, and exciting, that reclaimed wood has become fashionable. The Tennessee-based furniture makers are riding that trend simply doing what they do best – reusing old things and creating cool, utilitarian designs.
[Read more →]
Tags: · 11th Hour Furniture, barn wood, Building Materials Reuse Association, building salvage, furniture, Greener Businesses, Habitat for Humanity, Hudson Furniture, Live Edge, reclaimed wood, Recycle & Reuse, ReStore, Tennessee, Unbuidling: Salvaging the Architectural Treasures of Un
Waste Management wants you to not waste juice and milk cartons
From Green Right Now Reports
Finally, those paper juice cartons that seem to fit somewhere in your recycling — but you never know quite  where because they don’t fit with either the plastic milk jugs or the catalogs and newspapers — will have ordained passage to a recycling facility.
Waste Management in conjunction with Tropicana has announced that it will be taking in juice, milk, soy milk and other paper cartons in for recycling. Just throw them in your mixed-collection bin or together with your sorted bottles for recycling and they’ll sort them out at the plant.
So if you have WMI service, go fish those Tropicana cartons out of the garbage. If you have another service, carton recycling may still be available. To find out if your local collection service accepts them, see the Carton Council’s “We Recycle Cartons” handy online locator.
[Read more →]
Tags: · cartons, Recycle & Reuse, Tropicana, Waste Management
San Jose apartment recycling shows great results
From KGO-San Francisco
SAN JOSE, Calif. — California recycling is at a record high with 58 percent of all the state’s waste being recycled, not dumped in landfills. But, one group is still lagging behind: People who live in apartments.
So, the City of San Jose launched a new program to turn that around and the results are dramatic. Recycling is a way of life in most of the Bay Area now.
> Watch Now
[Read more →]
Tags: · Apartments, KGO, Recycle & Reuse, San Francisco, San Jose
|
