Recently in National Category

Seattle has become the first city to ban restaurants from serving single-use containers that cannot be recycled or composted.

The City has made a contract with a local company, Ceder Grove Composting, to handle all the compostable packaging and food waste that is disposed of by restaurants.

Every food service establishment will eventually be required to have bins to collect compostable and recyclable waste.

The City estimates that the new ordinance will divert as much as 6,000 tons of waste made up of disposable food service-ware and food waste from ending up in landfills.

Seattle City Councilmen Mike O'Brien praised the ban as a step towards Seattle's larger environmental goals. "With our requirement that food service packaging must be compostable or recyclable, Seattle has taken a big step toward a zero waste future,"

Seattle is the first and hopefully not the last city to enact such a policy. San Francisco and Toronto have also been considering similar programs.


Photo Credit: joephoto from flickr creative commons 

A small start-up in San Francisco's Noe Valley called Green11  is taking the refill concept that has been successful with water and coffee, to cosmetics and cleaners.

The company's retail shop simply sells you refills of shampoo, soaps and household cleaners for your own refillable containers. Green11 also has a strict policy of only carrying products that are non-toxic, with no known harmful chemicals. They currently carry brands such as Kiss My Face, Bio-Kleen, EO and Shikai

Product containers and packaging makes up over 30% of municipal waste. This includes 31 million tons of plastic waste generated each year!  71% of translucent plastic packaging (HDPE) that are commonly used for many types of cosmetics and cleaning products end up in landfills..

Skipping the need for a new plastic bottle for these products on a large scale could make a huge difference in reducing this waste. We hope to see shops like this show up in neighborhoods around the country.

You can vote for them through the Pepsi Refresh project here.
 

The America Water Works Association (AWWA) has an annual conference to bring together water utility professionals from all over the country.

I imagine the conference, held in Chicago this year, is incredibly wonky and the average person might not be able to appreciate it without falling asleep.

However, they have a pretty serious tap water tasting competition every year, where many cities from all over the country participate to find "the best of the best". The surprise winner this year? Stevens Point, Wisconsin. That is impressive. A small town beating out the biggest, most sophisticated water systems in the country.

But what is more impressive? New York City, the biggest mega-metropolis in the country was number two!! TapIt's beloved home city beat out the best, including Boston, San Francisco and many other cities with amazing water systems.

New York is doing something right with it's water, that's for sure.

Photo credit: Jenny Downing on Flickr

Out of the grim saga of the Gulf Oil Spill comes some hope that BP could possibly be held accountable in a significant way for polluting the Southern US's coastline.

Three environmental groups, the Gulf Restoration Network, Louisiana Environmental Action Network and Environment America are suing BP under the Clean Water Act, charging the company with allowing oil to leak into the gulf and failing to measure the true volume of the leak.

The Clean Water Act was, after all, partly inspired into law by a 1969 oil rig spill near Santa Barbara, CA. Additionally, the Exxon Valdez Spill in the Gulf of Alaska in 1989 helped inspire the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) that strengthened the Clean Water Act to open up criminal charges and civil action against companies responsible for oil spills.

The oil rig spill near Santa Barbara leaked 100,000 barrels of oil. The Exxon-Valdez tanker spill was responsible for 10 million gallons of spilled oil. BP Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico? 22 to 35 million gallons so far. If this does not spur catastrophic fines for BP and other companies involved and new stronger legislation, I don't know what will.

Because the BP clean up effort seems to have vastly underestimated the volume of oil leaking into the ocean and used banned practices such as releasing toxic chemicals into the water to break up the oil, legal experts believe the companies could be fined as much $4.7 Billion under the Clean Water Act.

Lets hope these environmental groups are successful against what I imagine is a massive BP legel effort. We just can't afford for something like this to happen again.

You can support these groups through the following links: Gulf Restoration Network, Louisiana Environmental Action Network and Environment America.

Photo thanks to jeferonix on flickr under Creative Commons license

Plastic grocery bags have been in the news quite a bit lately. Following Washington DC's 5 cent bag tax earlier this year, California is moving closer to a statewide ban. In New York, Chicago and Tuscon, stores are now required to take back plastic bags for recycling.

Never-the-less, plastic bags still have an estimated 13% recycling rate and mostly escape to live second lives in landfills, forests, beaches and oceans.

Film director Ramin Bahrani brilliantly follows the immortal and existential journey of the plastic bag in his new film 'Plastic Bag' for the FutureStates short film series. The plastic bag is played by renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog.

Watch the film in full below: 

Dave Matthews Band is teaming up with Filter for Good to attempt to rid their 2010 Summer Tour of bottled water. This is a huge challenge, as large concerts tend to be notorious trash producers.

Venues along the tour will be equipped with 'Hydration Hubs' where concert goers can get free reusable water bottles and fill up with filtered water. Visitors to the Hubs will get a chance to take the FilterForGood pledge and learn about other things they can do to reduce their environmental impact.

Concert goers will have the chance to recycle, 'offset' their carbon footprint from traveling to the event and learn about local environmental groups.

The band itself will be driving in biodiesel fueled buses offsetting any other carbon emissions associated with putting on the concerts.

"In our 20 years of tour greening, this will likely be the greenest tour of its size in history," said Michael Martin, CEO of EFFECT Partners who has been organizing the tour's sustainability plan.

Dave Matthews himself describes what the tour is trying to accomplish with it's green efforts (see video below).

 


photo credit: stephenyeargin under Creative Commons license

I am a huge fan of finding new ways to reuse plastic waste. Yes, making an entire building out of PET water bottles may be a bit extreme. But finding ways to use those bottles that you may find while out and about or around the house is great. I have come across a few products that will assist you in making useful things out of what might otherwise be tossed out.

The Twist & Spout makes any plastic soda or water bottle into a water cool pourer (see photo)! You can make your soda bottle into a device that can water your plants for a long time, turning disposable into useful.

RePlayGround also makes some neat kits that make it easy and fun to reuse. One of my favorites is the Bottle Lamp kit. You simply add 6 glass bottles (or I suppose plastic if they were the right shape) and they becomes a nice little lamp! Check out the rest of the site for other great reuse kits.

While recycling is great, it is good to remember that reusing as much as we can from what we already have, saves the most energy and keeps the most waste out of landfills. With the US plastic recycling rate floating around 27%, we need to do as much reusing as possible. 

TapIt is happy to be officially launching our program in the Portland, OR this week! Big thanks to the Portland Water Bureau for partnering with us to get the word out. You have great tasting water! 

TapIt has signed up over 50 local Portland food service businesses to be official 'TapIt Partners' who will always offer free tap water to the public. When on-the-go, Portlanders or visitors can use the TapIt iphone App, mobile website or look for a TapIt sticker on the windows of cafes to find where they can easily refill their personal water bottles, no questions asked.

TapIt was inspired by the idea that we should all have easy access to a great public resource like water. Even if you are away from your home or your office, you should not feel forced to buy water in a plastic bottle. You should have a clean place to get a water refill, for free. Our partner businesses believe in this idea and want to support the community by offering this service.

We think that using the TapIt network can be fun and helpful. We also hope TapIt will encourage people to think about water, how important it is to us and how we need to work together to keep it clean and plentiful.

Nothing wrong with a little friendly competition, right? The organizers of RecycleMania think so. They have organized a competition among more than 500 colleges across the country to see who can recycle the most and reduce the most waste per student.

Schools compete in various categories including who can collect the most recyclables and increase the overall recycle rate per student. The competition now also includes a waste reduction category so there is incentive to not just to recycle but also to use less.

The school to recycle most and to reduce the most waste generated per student becomes the Grand Champion.

Last year, Recyclemania helped recycle 69.4 Million pounds of garbage. Last years Grand Champion? California State University San Marcos, who has won 5 years in a row, which is  impressive to say the least.

Starting on Friday, results will start coming in each week for the 2010 leaders. You can track those results here. Can anyone beat CSU San Marcos? Check to see if your school is participating here.