Brave New Leaf

Target & Archer Farms reinvent cereal box packaging

A Minneapolis-based Target in conjunction with Archer Farms (an organic line) is trying to reinvent cereal packaging.

The new packaging removes the need for the inner plastic bag to hold the cereal in. It also features a snug-fitting lid to keep the cereal fresh.

The packaging itself is made from 55% recycled material with 50% post-consumer content, and claims to be fully recyclable itself.

Little else is known about the packaging since Target seems to be keeping mum on the subject.

Link [Sustainable Is Good]

Mr. Ellie Pooh's Elephant Dung Paper

When we first walked by this booth, we thought this might be a joke: a clever skewering of recycling extremes. But, it turns out that this stuff is legit. There is actually paper that is made out of 75% elephant poop from Sri Lanka.

I can personally vouch that the paper had no foul odor, and looked nice and colorful. But when I asked the woman at the booth why elephant dung, specifically, was the poop of choice for making paper, she looked at me like I was crazy. I'm still curious. If you're going to make paper out of poop, why not choose something a little more widely available like dog poop?

But, it's not everyday you can read a book about elephants printed on elephant crap. Hooray for new life experiences.

Plastic Bag Monster

One of the first people that we ran into at the Festival was the Plastic Bag Monster. He was pouting because he's been kicked out of San Francisco, and he's worried that Seattle is not far behind. He was looking for a new permanent home, so if you're interested, stop by and make him an offer.

First rubber roads, now rubber sidewalks?

Last month, we discussed how oil-heavy street asphalt contributes to our nation's carbon footprint, and how a new development in road technology using recycled tires is making our roads quieter, more durable, and more environmentally-friendly.

My hometown, the City of Bellevue, has taken a cue from this innovation and has decided to experiment with rubber sidewalks of similar construction.

The problem they face is two-fold: how do they make sidewalks more environmentally-friendly, and how do they prevent sidewalks from being destroyed regularly by the roots of trees?

The answer, they hope, lies in a modular rubber construction. The rubber is flexible enough to accomodate some root growth on its own. But then, when the root growth gets out of control and heaves the sidewalk, the individual squares can be removed to let maintenance workers gently trim the roots. And of course, being made from recycled materials means that less tires are going into landfills.

The installation is going in soon, and I'm going to make a trek over there to see what it looks like in real life. Stay tuned.

Gorgeous furniture made from reclaimed wood

Brazilian designer Carlos Motta was an avid surfer who noticed that there were gorgeous pieces of wood washing up on the beaches he frequented.

This realization started him down a path to build furniture with a reduced environmental impact by only building it out of reclaimed wood. What a great idea, and the pieces are gorgeous (if a bit expensive).

Read more at treehugger.com.

Nordstroms transitioning to eco-friendly boxes and bags

Seattle company Nordstrom has announced that they are introducing environmentally-friendly packaging options for customers. Nordstrom's is famous for their trademark silver gift boxes, which cannot be recycled because of the foil coating. Starting in April, they will start using boxes that are fully recyclable and tissue paper that contains 30% recycled content. Their new bags will also be fully recyclable.

Brave New Leaf encourages shoppers to use a simple canvas tote instead of new packaging material, but still applauds Nordstrom for taking the step forward!

A new way to recycle your tennis shoes

Nike has been catching the green bug lately.

First, they've launched the Reuse-A-Shoe initiative where they accept all used athletic shoes (of ANY brand!) and downcycle them to become integrated into the surfaces of sports facilities. There's just something incredibly poetic about your old Air Jordan's metamorphosing into a basketball court.

Then they created a new shoe called the "Trash Talk", designed for Steve Nash (who I love), and available in stores, which is their first major effort on a sustainable shoe. It's more environmentally friendly because:

• "The upper is pieced together from leather and synthetic leather waste from the factory floor using zig-zag stitching.
• The mid-sole uses scrap-ground foam from factory production
• The outsole uses environmentally-preferred rubber that reduces toxics and incorporates Nike Grind* material from footwear outsole manufacturing waste.
• The Phoenix Suns’ colorways will have shoe laces and sockliners which use environmentally-preferred materials and will be packaged in a fully recycled cardboard shoe box."

The Search for Green Electronics

In the search to find the greenest electronics out there, Greenpeace performed a survey amongst major electronics manufacturers. The results were extremely interesting. 37 products from 14 manufacturers were evaluated from the likes of Sony, Nokia, Dell, HP, LG, Panasonic and others.

The products were rated on the following "green" criteria:

1.  use of hazardous chemical substances
2.  energy efficiency of the device
3.  product lifecycle: greenhouse gas, energy, and recycling stories
4.  innovations and marketing

Good news was hard to find, but there was some. Turns out that most manufacturers are going beyond legal requirements for hazardous materials in their products, and are making encouraging headway towards energy-efficiency improvements.

However, the lack of a concrete lifecycle methodology with their products means that producing the products still uses lots of energy, produces tons of greenhouse gases, and the short lifespan of the products (avg: 3 years for cell phones, 7 years for pcs, 10 years for tvs) means they are landfilled extremely quickly.

No individual product scored better than 5 out of 10 on the survey. However, three products did meet that halfway mark. And to my surprise, they are all from Sony! The top three greenest electronics surveyed were:

• Sony Vaio TZ11 notebook computer
• Sony Ericsson T650i mobile phone
• Sony Ericsson P1i PDA

Brave New Leaf applauds Sony for its commitment to create more sustainable electronics, and encourages them to go even further in their efforts.

If you're interested in reading the rest of the Greenpeace survey, you can find it here.

A peek inside a Recycling Sorting Facility

This video offers a very quick look into all of the work that happens at a recycling sorting facility. That's right - when your city moves away from having you sort your recycling, somebody at a plant gets to do it for you.

The process is incredibly imprecise. At the beginning, the first thing that is done is plucking through the garbage and opening up plastic bags, etc.

Then a huge tumbler separates out "heavy" items (metals and other trash) from "light" items (paper and plastic). The paper and plastic get put on a line where a bunch of human beings have to weed through it and try to sort the right types of things.

The heavy items go through a conveyor where glass is pulled out by hand, metal is pulled out by a big magnet, and the rest goes into a waste area.

Though the citizens of Seattle recycle over 50% of their garbage, over half of that ends up going to the landfill anyway after sorting. I doubt that all of that is actual trash. Getting better at sorting our recycling is crucial to improving our recycling capabilities.

Beth at Fake Plastic Fish also has a number of great videos documenting her visit to Bay Area recycling facilities that are worth checking out.

What do I do with: Printer Cartridges

My inkjet printer stopped printing colors the other day. This was pretty inconvenient since we were trying to print boarding passes at the time, and nothing came out looking right. We bought a replacement cartridge (man, those are expensive!) to remedy the immediate problem, but I sat for a while staring at the old cartridge trying to figure out what to do with it.

Since it was an HP cartridge, I first went to the HP website. They have a recycling program for cartridges where you print out a postage-paid label, and send the cartridge in for recycling. Well, downcycling really. They shred the materials and put them in auto parts and other products.

I printed out the label, but immediately noticed that in order for my cartridge to be recycled, I have to mail it to Tennessee. From Seattle.

Let's think about this a moment: does that make sense? Won't we lose more in energy shipping it such distance back to HP than we gain out of the recycling process? We can figure this out.

Let's assume a semi-truck, 2800 cubic feet of space, drives straight to Tennessee, at the semi-truck average of 6 miles per gallon. My printer cartridge, individually packaged in a standard-size UPS box, is about 1 cubic foot, so let's say the truck has 2800 cartridges on it. Tennessee is 2500 miles from my home, so we're looking at 417 gallons of gas to get there. That's about .15 gallons of gas per cartridge to ship it back to HP. Best case.

On the flip side, it takes 2.5 quarts of oil to make a new printer cartridge. That's .42 gallons of gas. We don't know how much oil is conserved by the downcycling process, but given other similar recycling programs, let's put it at 40% efficiency. That means that recycling the cartridge will save .16 gallons of gas.

.15 gallons to ship it, .16 gallons saved in the recycling. It's not a very compelling argument for recycling. And that's even assuming that once the cartridge gets to Tennessee that it doesn't get shipped anywhere else to be processed.

I figured there must be some other options. And there are!

Refill until you are forced to recycle
Most printer cartridges can be re-used 4-7 times before they reach end-of-life and need to be recycled. Many companies, including Walgreens and Staples perform refill services. Lots to beware though. Some programs ship the refills out, so you should ask where it is going before you sign up.

Also, the quality of refilling is a bit dicey. Depending on the health of your used cartridge, it might not work as well as a new cartridge. Still, since refilling is significantly cheaper than buying a new cartridge (25-50 dollars cheaper per cartridge!) it's worth the risk of trying it.

Check with your local waste utility
Checking with King County Waste led me to a Kirkland-based business called Eco Cartridge. They are experts in refilling and re-manufactured cartridges and guarantee the quality of their work. They refill cartridges in-store in 10-15 minutes, and have a handy set of guidelines for keeping your cartridges working at their peak. They also work with local recycling agencies once the cartridges are no longer viable.

Finding a local resource like this is valuable since it keeps the miles down on your recycling effort.

Whatever you do, don't consider home refills
While home refill kits exist on the market, it's extremely difficult even for an expert to perform a cartridge refill with home equipment. One of the reasons for this is the compression needed in the cartridge for it to work properly. There's not a good way to replicate this at home. If you try it, your results could be rather...disturbing.