Not the most encouraging piece of news, but I think we all benefit from knowing a bit more and looking for more information from the sources that are out there.
Archive for June, 2009
Need a cool Million? Try recycling that old mattress!
That’s what Fresh Start does. We take our mattresses to a place in North Vancouver called www.mattressrecycling.ca check them out. I’ve spoken to Trent and they’re the real deal. Metal springs are recycled, foam gets pulled and sold, fabric recycled. It’s legit!
2808 Main Street, Vancouver
Did a very quick job today for Klondike Contracting at 2808 Main Street. Thanks Annaliesse!!
A small amount of drywall to be recycled, and some garbage in the cans
I think we spent about 15 minutes actually on the site loading up the truck. An excellent call, and typical of what we do all day. Sometimes larger, sometimes smaller but all similar. Another satisfied customer! 🙂
Drywall recycled and we pulled the pop bottles and cans out of the 2 trash cans.
Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
I’m a big fan of www.Ted.com TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. As I was looking for things to blog about today, I noticed a talk by Seth Godin. Here he talks about tribes and the death of mass marketing. He talks about how it should be more about uniting people with a common yearning than bombarding them with a message and trying to convince them that your way is the best way. The result of this, he argues, is that your customers & your followers are supportive and willing participants who go on to expound the virtues of what’s happening. Why was Al Gore’s, “An Inconvenient Truth” so pervasive? Because the people that enjoyed it went on to tell others. He united a group of people with a common belief in the environment who, in turn went on to share that with others.
Here’s the talk, it runs 17:23 and I really enjoyed it. Do you have any experiences uniting people of a common thread?
Clean Air Day!!!
A thought occurred to me yesterday as I was attending Metro Vancouver’s Wood Waste Symposium (sounds boring, but actually really interesting!) Like, did you know that 25% of the garbage generated from construction and demolition in Vancouver is wood that can be recycled? 25% of the GARBAGE! Not including the copper pipes, drywall etc. 25% of the garbage.
I thought that was really, really very interesting and I’m preparing some more blog postings around that with stats and charts as I acquire them.
But it got me to thinking because I get a lot of phone calls to recycle everything EXCEPT wood. Wood’s like this invisible thing that that ends up in the trash. People are super concerned that their old stove gets recycled, but aren’t too bothered about the wood.Which is where, if they new that 25% of their garbage was recycling, they’d care about. Recycling the stove, is a “no brainer”, it’s diverting the wood that there’s a real difference made. Of the 10 construction bins on a site, 2.5 should be diverted. Those are big numbers!
And this lead me to an analogy about hybrid vehicles that is akin to the wood problem and relevant to Clean Air Day.
On the construction sites, people are hyper concerned about metal. And by percentage, metal makes up a very small part of the waste stream. Most of it is recycled and therefore not counted in the garbage audits municipalities conduct. And the wood on sites is mostly ignored, which makes up a far, far greater percentage. In much the same way we have people driving already very small cars desperate to get into hybrid vehicles where I think we need to focus on getting people out of LARGE gas guzzlers like Suburbans or Escalades and full size pick-ups etc. and into SMALLER, lighter cars. Hybrid or not, who cares.
The amount of green house gases that you would save if you switch from your Civic to your Civic Hybrid, is really pretty measly compared to the amount of green house gases you can save by switching from a large SUV, to a small car like an Echo or Yaris. The fact that it also burns gas is made nearly irrelevant because the amount of energy needed to move you from A to B is so dramatically reduced! Personally, if I switched from my scooter to a hybrid, I’d INCREASE my carbon footprint. I now also buy the high-test gasoline for my scooter because it gives it a bit of extra “go”, and instead of spending $4.80 to fill the tank, I might spend $5.20. Do I care? No, definitely not. Why? Instead of spending $40 to fill the tank of the car I used to drive, I’m spending $5 to fill my present ride, regardless of the octane.
Here’s a link to a blog that discusses fuel consumption. It’s really what lead to this blog posting, coincidentally, it’s Clean Air Day. I hope you find it interesting. I sure did!!!
Greenmuze tracks down Tom Szaky
Tom Szaky has one super impressive company. I’ve read interviews in magazines, seen him on TV shows like Donny Deutsche and watched a tonne of videos on Youtube including clips from CNN and the BBC as well as had a couple of phone conversations with him. Tom Szaky is one cool dude and the owner of Terracycle. Terracycle got it’s start turning worm poop into fertilizer and essentially turning garbage into gold, literally (well, not ‘literally’). They were then sued by Scott’s for having similar packaging design, and Tom, clever guy that he is created another website “Suedbyscotts.com” which no longer exists. Why? They settled out of court. And now? He’s doing so much more!!!! He’s turning Capri Sun packages into pencil cases, wine barrels into rain water barrels, e waste into flower pots, he has his buildings painted for free at “graffiti jams”.
All in all, wonderfully impressive. Can you tell I like him? Here’s “his story” taken straight off their site.
Greenmuze, a Canadian blog from Vancouver Island interviews him on May 27th
Fresh Start Recycling Blog 