Greenversations

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

One of the “gifts of the season” we usually overlook is the amount of STUFF we have left over - food scraps, dead batteries, old fir trees, and more.  But most of these things can be recycled or reused in some way, or at least disposed of properly.

How will you handle holiday waste?

En español: Cada semana hacemos una pregunta relacionada al medio ambiente. Por favor comparta con nosotros sus pensamientos y comentarios. Siéntase en libertad de responder a comentarios anteriores o plantear nuevas ideas. Preguntas previas.

Uno de los “regalos de la temporada” que solemos ignorar es la cantidad de COSAS que sobran y se acumulan – sobras de alimentos, baterías inservibles, viejos pinos, y más. Sin embargo, muchas de estas cosas se pueden reciclar o reutilizar de alguna manera, o al menos deben ser desechadas de manera adecuada.

¿Cómo maneja los desechos de las fiestas?

Cómo educar a los niños sobre el reciclaje

Acerca del autor: Vicky Salazar comenzó a trabajar en EPA en 1995. Labora en nuestra oficina en Seattle en asuntos relacionados con la reducción de desechos, conservación de recursos y civismo ambiental.

El reciclaje es difícil. Yo misma me pregunto a veces qué debo reciclar. Por lo tanto cuando hablo con los niños acerca del reciclaje, ¿a dónde debo comenzar? Bueno, tuve que enseñar a unos niños de edad pre-escolar acerca del Día del Reciclaje en Estados Unidos y esto fue lo que aprendí.

He aquí unas reglas sencillas:

• Latas, papel, cajas, potes y botellas van en el recipiente de reciclaje.
• Si está sucio, lávelo y descártelo.
• No recicle las tapas de los potes y envases, esas van en la basura.
• No eche alimentos en el recipiente de reciclaje—aún si están unidos a otra cosa.
• Si está roto, échelo a la basura.
• Si puede volverse a utilizar, úselo nuevamente o dónelo a alguien que lo pueda utilizar.

Póngalo en práctica – Hay que practicar realmente. No fue hasta que los niños lo hicieron varias veces que pudieron recordar qué había que poner en cada lugar.

Habrán errores—Aprovéchelos como una oportunidad para enseñar.

Relacione el reciclaje con la importancia de proteger la Tierra y los animales. Los niños verdaderamente quieren ayudar.

Póngalo a prueba con sus hijos. Es divertido, informativo, y me recordó cómo reciclar. ¿Cómo funcionó para usted?

About the author: Viccy Salazar joined EPA in 1995. She works in our Seattle office on waste reduction, resource conservation and stewardship issues.

Recycling is hard. Sometimes I don’t even know what to recycle so when it comes time to talk kids about recycling, where do I start?? Well, I had to teach recycling to a bunch of preschoolers on America Recycles Day, here is what I learned.

Make the rules simple –

• Cans, paper, boxes, jars, and bottles go in the recycle bin.
• If it is dirty, clean it or throw it away
• No Lids, they go in the trash.
• No food in the recycle bin – even if it is attached to something else.
• If it is broken – in the trash
• If it can be used again, use it again or donate it to someone who can.

Practice - When we actually practiced, the kids couldn’t remember what went where until they had tried it a few times.

Expect mistakes – use them as a teaching opportunity.

Relate it to protecting the earth and the animals. The kids really wanted to help out.

Try it out with your kids. It was fun, informative and reminded me what to recycle. How did it work?

About the author: Felicia Chou is a Communications Specialist in EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. She recently graduated from Syracuse University with a M.S in Media Management.

This is always a crazy time of year. In my family, the holidays are all about large quantities: lots of food, lots of gifts, and lots and lots of relatives. This year, I’m going to simplify one part of the holiday experience (and help the environment at the same time) by reducing the amount of material that gets thrown out after the holidays. There are a lot of things you can do to reduce waste around the holidays – here are a few:

Find the greenest tree. You can save a tree (and reduce greenhouse gas emissions) by buying a potted tree that you can plant after the holidays instead of cutting a tree down. If you do decide to dispose of your tree, look for ways to recycle it instead of sending it to a landfill; your community solid waste department may collect the trees for mulching.

Send personal, paperless greetings. Save paper by creating your own greeting cards from scrap paper – this can be a fun family project or a way to give your cards a personal touch. You can also skip the paper altogether and e-mail an electronic card. If you do plan to buy cards, look for ones containing a high percentage of recycled content.

Reuse wrapping paper. Not every piece of wrapping paper gets ripped to shreds; some can be saved and used again next year, which saves money and trees. You can also “wrap” gifts in reusable gift bags instead of wrapping paper. And if you want to avoid wrapping paper altogether, give gifts that need little or no packaging, such as concert tickets or gift certificates.

Look for Earth-friendly electronics. Electronics are a popular gift, and some electronics purchases are more environmentally-friendly than others. For example, before you buy a new computer, ask yourself if the performance you’re looking for can be gained by upgrading your current computer, perhaps by upgrading your hard drive or RAM. If you do decide to buy a new computer, make sure you buy one that is Energy Star-qualified, which can save both energy and money. Also, an online tool called EPEAT (exit disclaimer) makes it easy to find the computer with the best environmental attributes. Finally, don’t throw away the electronics that get replaced; there are lots of opportunities to reuse or recycle old electronics.

About the author: Jeff Maurer manages Web content and does communications work for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. He has been with EPA since 2005.

A recent trip to the EPA GreenScaping exhibit at the US Botanic Garden (recently featured in a Green Scene video) revealed this: my dad owes me compensation for hundreds of lost hours during my childhood. By my calculations, I am owed no fewer than 220 child hours, the equivalent of two-and-a-half trips to Disney World or 73 afternoons at Chuckie Cheese. I have already let Dad know that I expect to collect on these damages promptly. Here’s my reasoning…

We had a large yard growing up, which needed to be mowed every Saturday. Because we lived in the South, that realistically meant that it needed to be mowed every Saturday morning, unless you wanted to risk heat stroke trying to shove our dreadnaught of a push-mower across the grounds. Mowing in the evening was out of the question, as allowing our lawn to remain unkempt through the afternoon would have caused my family to become the subject of public ridicule. Or so went my dad’s logic.

With fall came Sisyphean bouts of leaf-raking. The leaves, of course, needed to be raked so that the grass wouldn’t die. For some reason, it never occurred to Dad that if we abandoned the leaf-raking task, the lawn mowing task would become unnecessary as well, which seemed like a total win-win to me.

Periodically throughout the year, we would fertilize the lawn. The fertilizer was bright green – not so much “grass-colored” green, but more “spent-nuclear-waste” green. The fertilizer’s primary function was to clog the machine that applied it.

These chores constituted a never-ending maintenance ritual that, though burdensome, I grudgingly acknowledged as necessary. And that is what I believed, until I saw this sign in our GreenScapes exhibit:

I went to the natural lawn care page on our GreenScapes site, and it turns out that if you run a mulching mower over fallen leaves, it creates a natural compost that fertilizes your lawn! We could have combined these three chores into one! And there are more lawn care tips like that one that could have saved me countless hours of poorly-paid child labor! If I had known that a mulching mower was all that was standing between me and Saturday morning cartoons, I would have gladly used my allowance to subsidize an upgrade. A recent question of the week also revealed that many people have known about this for years. Unfortunately, my dad isn’t one of those people, which is why he now owes me several Saturdays worth of cheese pizza and ski-ball tickets.

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Fall is upon us: time to take out those rakes! As you prepare for cooler temperatures, have you thought about what to do with all those leaves, old plants, and other debris?

Do you compost yard waste and why?.

En español: Cada semana hacemos una pregunta relacionada al medio ambiente. Por favor comparta con nosotros sus pensamientos y comentarios. Siéntase en libertad de responder a comentarios anteriores o plantear nuevas ideas. Preguntas previas.

El otoño se avecina. ¡Ha llegado el momento de sacar los rastrillos! A medida que se prepara para las temperaturas más frescas, ¿ha pensado en qué hacer con la hojarasca, las plantas viejas y otros escombros del jardín?

¿Usted hace compostaje y por qué?

About the author: Jeff Maurer manages Web content and does communications work for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. He has been with EPA since 2005

We had a question of the week a little while ago about what type of bags people use at the grocery store. There were a lot of interesting answers, and a lot of creative ideas about how to reuse plastic grocery bags (dog owners, for obvious reasons, seem to be enthusiastic re-users of plastic bags). Our intern counted up the comments responding to the grocery bag question of the week, and posted the final numbers in a followup. Now, I realize that readers of this blog aren’t a random sample of the population, but I think we can still conclude: canvas grocery bags have gone mainstream.

This is great news. We’ve recommended reusable grocery bags on our list of environmental shopping tips for years. I started using canvas bags a couple years ago, and they’re becoming ever more common at my grocery store. For those of you who haven’t yet made the switch, let me share a few things about canvas bags that you might want to know:

Canvas bags hold a lot of stuff. As many of the commenters in the Q&A noted, canvas bags are sturdier than paper bags and hold more than plastic. As a member of a warehouse shopping club, this is a priority for me: a 10-pound tub of gummi bears will decimate your average paper or plastic bag. My canvas bags have a long strap that you can throw over your shoulder, and I’ve also got an insulated one that helps keep cold things cold.

The people working at the store are used to canvas bags. There was a time, long ago, when presenting a bagger with your own bag would unleash utter confusion. When you did manage to explain what you were doing and why, you were viewed as some sort of fringe naturalist, the type of person who lives in a cabin with no plumbing and makes their own clothes out of hemp. Those days are over; plop your canvas bags next to the register nowadays, and everyone knows what to do. Also – and this is in response to something my wife once wondered out loud – it is okay to use bags bearing a certain store’s logo at another store. The 16-year-old kid bagging groceries isn’t getting paid enough to bag groceries AND be the brand identity police.

Canvas bags save money. More and more places are charging a small fee for plastic bags. A couple of stores do it, and a few cities are considering it as well. All of Ireland does it. The charge isn’t much, but neither is a canvas bag: I bought mine for a dollar each. Considering that I’ll probably use them for several decades, it won’t take me long to recoup that investment.

About the author: Viccy Salazar joined EPA in 1995. She works in our Seattle office on waste reduction, resource conservation and stewardship issues.

I work for the government. One of the things that this means is that I spend a lot of time in meetings. Since I, or someone on my team, is often planning the meetings, my team decided to see what we could do to ensure that the meetings we host don’t use unnecessary resources.

The first thing we did was look on EPA’s website for green meetings. We clicked on the link for meeting planners and go directed to a list of 10 easy things to do – well, it didn’t seem easy to us but we were committed so we moved ahead. As a team, we decided that we wanted to 1) be as zero waste as possible, 2) minimize the amount people had to travel by providing options, and 3) track our result and savings.

We thought zero waste would be the easy one. We called up our local organic caterer and asked if they did zero waste. By zero waste we meant - no packaging, durable serving platters, plates, silverware, and cups, they would compost the food waste and any other non-durable items, and finally, they would carry away and wash everything. Simple, right? Well, not really. They said they did organic but not zero waste. We worked with them and finally got ‘almost’ zero waste. It required some work and the vendor had not done it before. One thing we learned was that it was important to be very specific with your food vendor and conference facility about what you want. Getting recycling at the event seemed easier but we still had to educate the meeting attendees to actually recycle!

We don’t always order out. Sometimes, we go and buy the food for meetings ourselves. When doing that, we learned some lessons like: buy from the bakery and take in your own platters. Almost all of the packaging provided by the shops is either plastic or has a plastic window in it – not zero waste. Provide drinks by making it up in a pitcher, serving drinks in cans (very recyclable) or making coffee/tea. Most other drink types had lids that needed to be disposed of. Fruits and vegetables work great – just be sure to carry in your own bags so you don’t end up with plastic bag waste.

The upshot of our lessons for providing food at meetings is:

1. be clear about what you want, ask for it – we want it to become part of their service package,
2. communicate to the meeting attendees what you are doing, they like it, and
3. do the best you can – you can’t always get everything you want.

Each week we ask a question related to the environment. Please let us know your thoughts as comments. Feel free to respond to earlier comments or post new ideas. Previous questions.

Last week, we asked what you think about when you buy a new computer. Now we want to know about the old ones. You can “ecycle,” donate them to charity, give them to a friend, etc. Some people store them because they’re not quite sure what to do.

After you buy a new computer, what do you do with the old one?

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En español: Cada semana hacemos una pregunta relacionada al medio ambiente. Por favor comparta con nosotros sus pensamientos y comentarios. Siéntase en libertad de responder a comentarios anteriores o plantear nuevas ideas. Preguntas previas.

La semana pasada, le preguntamos sobre lo que piensa al comprar una nueva computadora. Ahora queremos saber qué hace con las viejas. Puede reciclar los aparatos electrónicos al donarlos a entidades caritativas, o a algún amigo, etc. Algunas personas las almacenan porque no tienen claro qué hacer con ellas.

¿Después que compra una computadora nueva, qué hace con la computadora vieja?