Consumption

3 Creative Ways to Kill the Need for Single-Use Plastic Bottles

We’re always on the lookout for creative ways to reduce kill the use of plastic in innovative ways. We’ve found 3 examples we just have to share – an event, a city and a school:

At the Montréal Jazz Fesitival, the organization invited Fontaine Naya a water-bottle refilling service from Quebec-based Naya Waters designed to minimize plastic waste.  For an affordable price (CAN$1.50) event patrons could simply refill their water bottles and stay hydrated while doing good for the planet.  Public, outdoor events are huge consumers of plastic water bottles, this jazz festival has been carbon-neutral 2008 but this past summer they focused on water and reducing plastic consumption and trash. Their success, we hope, will inspire other event organizers to consider a water refilling stations to keep their crowds healthy and hydrated.

TapIt is a community program that enables people to refill their water bottles at participating cafés, completely free of charge in, and around, New York City (and now San Francisco and Washington, DC!). For the water-totting crowds in this city, the goal of this program is to help people stay healthy and hydrated without relying on single-use plastic bottles. And it’s so easy – restaurant or café with a soda dispenser or tap that gives clean drinking water can sign up as a partner. Thirsty consumers can find taps online or via TapIt’s iPhone app, and are provided with information on the type of water that’s available, telling discerning customers whether the water’s filtered or non-filtered, room temperature or chilled. How great is that?

In Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, the Kingswood Regional High School and Middle School a recently rebuilt middle and high school go beyond LEED certification, and for the coveted CHPS certification. Aside from new synthetic and natural turf athletic fields as well as a Geothermal Ground Heat Exchanger piping system to serve the entire campus, the new school takes advantage of natural light,  LED lighting when needed, energy sensors and other energy-saving efforts. But what really stood out to us? They have been smart enough to include reusable water bottle refilling stations right by the traditional water fountains on campus. Through their efforts, they are teaching the next generation the importance, the beauty, and the need to be green in our personal and public environments.

We’re so impressed that people, communities, events and even whole cities are finding ways to encourage people to stop using single-use plastic
bottles and reuse environmentally-friendly water bottles. Now you’ve got access to water, and we’ve built the only reusable glass water bottle made from a minimum of 75% post-consumer recycled glass and ZERO plastic.

Share with us, what do you do to minimize your use of single-use plastics?

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Video: Plastic State of Mind

With the millions of videos hoping to get you to better understand the perils of plastic to both our health and our environment, we’ve work to find and share the best ones we can (see some of them  here, here and here). This video today, Plastic State of Mind, is really impressive in the fresh beats it brings to the plastic bag issue.

Plastic State of Mind – OFFICIAL from Ben Zolno on Vimeo.

It’s not just plastic bags that are a hazard to our health and our environment, but it is one small difference you can make. Now, do you still use single-use plastic bags? If so, do you recycle? If not, how do you remember to bring your reusable bags?

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Plastic Fails to Fill Recycling Promise

This past week, The Wall Street Journal, reported on a PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic recycling plant in Spartanburg, S.C. built to meet the demands for recycling plastics. What started out as a promise to push PET products like beverage bottles from landfills (and our oceans) and back into reusable materials, has fallen miserably short. Centered on Coca-Cola’s promise to recycle 100% of its bottles and cans by 2020, the article focused on the challenges of  getting plastic out of our trash and into recycling facilities like the one here in S.C.  Unlike glass, which can be endlessly recycled and not lose its quality, plastic recycling requires type-based separation or it can be deemed defective and defect cannot be reused for product packaging.  It’s not just the mixing of plastics that’s the issue – simply put – not enough of our plastics are making it out of the trash and into the recycling bin.

A few points that stood out:

  • As a nation, we recycle a smaller percentage of bottles today than we did in 1995.
  • Coca-Cola’s bottles contain less PET recycled content today than they did 5 years ago – 5% versus 10%.
  • PepsiCo’s bottles contain only 10% recycled PET.
  • The U.S. recycling rate for plastic bottles made from PET, typically derived from petroleum, was 28% in 2009.

You can read the whole WSJ article here, or watch the video with reporter Mike Esterel.

What’s clear is that while we wait for incentive-based programs like bottle-deposits,
or we wait for better access to convenient recycling, or while we wait for engineers to find ways to better recycle plastics, our landfills and oceans are filling up with the nearly 75% of plastic that ends up in the trash.

What can we do? Here are 3 things you can do to help put plastics where they belong:

  1. Limit the plastic you consume. Choose and use a reusable glass bottle whenever possible. Use glass food storage containers and limit purchasing ‘convenience sized’ products which are usually plastic-wrapped and highly wasteful.
  2. Recycle. If you have to use plastic, we hope you’ll recycle it at your curbside, or in public recycling centers.
  3. Reward.  If you live in one of the 10 states with a bottle-deposit reward program, take advantage and get that coin back in your pocket. If you’re in one of the 40 states without such a program, write your state elected officials and get
    rewarded for recycling.  (States with bottle-deposit reward programs have on average 2x the plastic recycling rate of states without such a program.)

 

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Tapped – The Real Story of Your Bottled Water

Sometimes the only way we get to the truth, the way we get behind the marketing, ad campaigns and propaganda is through truth-tellers. We share with you some of the best reasons to evolve beyond plastic – your health, the environment, cost savings and more. But sometimes the visual story tells us more and moves us to more urgent action. The documentary Trapped is one of those visual stories sharing the truth of your plastic bottled water. Not only are plastic bottles leaching chemicals, clogging our landfills, floating in our oceans, but the about40% of bottled water is nothing more than tap water. That’s right, the same stuff that comes out of your faucet.  So check out the trailer, then check out the film and tell us what you think.

 

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Earth Day Experiment: My Plastic Inventory

For Earth Day next week, I decided to do a personal inventory of the amount of plastic in my daily life. I l kept it simple and didn’t include things related to having two young children (it’d seriously skew the number). I only counted plastic containers, products or pieces of plastic I consumed or touched as part of my day. I kept a Daily Plastic Tally for 5 whole days. And the results? It isn’t pretty – on an average day I touch 53 plastic products (the range went from 34 to 76). Here’s my average list of things:

  1. Alarm clock
  2. Shampoo bottle
  3. Soap holder
  4. Razor
  5. Moisturizer
  6. Sunscreen
  7. Deodorant
  8. Toothbrush
  9. Toothpaste
  10. Dental floss container
  11. Trashcan
  12. Hairdryer
  13. Hair products
  14. Medicine container
  15. Make up pods
  16. Lip balm
  17. Cereal liner
  18. Milk carton
  19. Toaster (plastic lever)
  20. Yogurt cup
  21. Dried fruit container
  22. Hot water kettle (for tea)
  23. iPhone case
  24. iPhone charger (wires are coated in plastic and the charging base is plastic)
  25. Credit cards (made of plastic)
  26. Car (so many parts are made of PVCs and other plastics)
  27. Hand sanitizer
  28. Tissue soft pack
  29. Desktop screen
  30. Keyboard
  31. Desk phone
  32. Pen
  33. Presentation remote
  34. Elevator button
  35. Bread bag
  36. Deli meat container
  37. Condiment jar
  38. Refrigerator
  39. Snack zip-top bag
  40. Frozen vegetable bags
  41. Food packaging
  42. Radio/CD player
  43. Light switches
  44. DVD case
  45. TV Remote control
  46. TV
  47. Camera (I take pictures nearly every day with a digital SLR, but the body is mostly plastic)
  48. Various gym equipment (this could get long – think treadmill, bike helmet, swim goggles, push up bar, etc)
  49. Random kitchen tools like spatulas, measuring cups
  50. Dishwashing soap
  51. Sponge scrubber
  52. Dish drying rack
  53. Laundry soap and measuring cap

 

To be fair, plastic is unavoidable in certain things and in some ways it can reduce the weight of products or increase the convenience. But as I kept tallying – day after day – I kept realizing I could make better choices and cut down on the plastic in my life.  For the last 36 days, I’ve been tweeting the 1 green thing (see #my1greenthing) and challenging myself to make an effort to be better for my health and the environment. Thankfully my water bottle is glass with silicone grippers and cap and I switched to glass food storage containers. Small changes add up.

So what do you think? Or better still send me your Daily Plastics Number and any tips you have to cut down on the plastic.

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