Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Scott's Music Co in Cedar Springs on April 24, 2020 from 1:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Gorby's Music, Inc. in South Charleston on April 22, 2020 from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle event at Music Villa in Bozeman on April 22, 2020 from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, the first 20 musicians to bring in any old instrument strings for recycling will receive a new set of D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Wasatch Musician in Sandy on April 25, 2020 from 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Mountain Music Parlor in Reno on April 25, 2020 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

Local musicians are invited to attend a free recycle and restring event at Scott's Music Co in Cedar Springs on April 24, 2020 from 1:00 pm to 7:00 pm. Sponsored by D’Addario® and international recycling company TerraCycle®, musicians can bring any old instrument strings for recycling and get their electric or acoustic guitars restrung with D’Addario NYXL or Nickel Bronze Acoustic strings. Old strings collected during the event will be recycled through Playback, D’Addario’s free, national recycling program.

I've never been a minimalist, and I never will be. I love color, live in patterns, and in general just like having options - lots of them. What I don't like, however, is clutter. As a self-proclaimed "beauty girl" and collector for over 12 years (three of which were spent as a beauty editor), it's no surprise I amassed quite the product stash. Sure, I'd done several purges over the years, dividing some products between friends and throwing old ones in the trash. I'd also made my way through quite a few, using them up until the last drop or swipe. All that being said, I still had more than I would ever need. A massive beauty declutter was definitely overdue. Long bubble baths, massages, and indulgent skincare routines are often touted as popular forms of beauty self-care. But I'm arguing that purging your excess products - and reorganizing, cleaning, and maybe even donating in the process - trumps them all. So if you're looking for an excuse to get productive and take a much-needed internet break, this might be the perfect activity. Keep reading as I share my approach to decluttering, including a handful of tips, organizer recommendations, and the final results.

  You’ve heard of topsoil and potting soil and maybe even seed-starting soil. Did you know there also are organic soil, vegan soil and soil blends just for hanging baskets or cannabis? Chances are some of the bags of soil in your garden shed are made in Lancaster County. Frey Group in Lancaster’s southern end makes soil and sends it throughout the East Coast and into the Midwest.   It’s a family business that started with a metal shop, added a sawmill and started selling the leftover bark as mulch. Now the third generation is part of the team coming up with new soil blends.   So what exactly is soil?   Soil isn’t dirt. It has nutrients to help plants grow, plus things like beneficial fungi and good bacteria.   “It’s an ecosystem,” says Dustin Frey, sales manager for the mid-Atlantic region.  

Making a soil mix

  At Frey Group’s headquarters in East Drumore Township, the soil starts as towering piles of peat moss, coconut coir, compost, pine bark fines and sand. Some of the materials need to be broken down to the right size. Some need to be aged. Compost, for example, is ready after it’s heated, to kill any internal seeds and pathogens, says Felicia Newman, quality director.   Each soil mix has its own recipe, like Frey’s most popular blend, the professional potting mix found in the purple bag. The soil amendments are mixed with inputs such as fertilizers, bone meal, blood meal, lobster meal and perlite (to lighten the soil). There also are custom blends created to match the needs of a customer’s crop.           Once laws changed to allow growing hemp, Frey created a custom hemp soil mix and worked with growers on the new recipe, Dustin Frey says.   Coast of Maine Organic Products, which Frey merged with in 2017, has a custom cannabis mix. Newman has been working with home gardeners in Maine to develop that soil blend. In Maine, medical marijuana has been legal for two decades. Patients and caregivers there can grow several of their own plants at home. Frey has since created its own custom cannabis mix for professional growers.   Two blends go to Penn State’s Southeast Agricultural Research and Extension Center near Manheim. This year, more than a thousand flowers will be evaluated in the flower trials. Some like geraniums will be potted in a mix with a higher pH and others will be planted in a general flower mix, says Sinclair Adam, flower trial director.         The recipes for these blends are tweaked regularly to meet the needs of the plants. Adam likes that he can contact Frey and make those changes easily.   More mixes are in the works. Peat lightens the soil, holds moisture and improves soil structure, according to Oregon State University. However, peat takes hundreds of year to form. Frey hears from customers concerned about using an unrenewable resource. So the business is looking into designing peat-free mixes along with vegan mixes made without animal byproducts, like blood meal or cow manure in compost.    

From a metal shop to mulch

  Making soil is the latest pivot for the business Dustin’s grandfather started in the 1960s. Ernie Frey started the business next to the family farm. There was a construction company and a metal shop that specialized in cattle equipment. He added a sawmill and started selling the byproduct, mulch. That took off, and by the mid-1990s, the company shifted to making mulch. Later they added soil mixes.   The second generation, siblings Ernie Frey Jr., Jamie Kreider and Karl Frey, took over the business. Now, Dustin is the third generation.   The business merged with Coast of Maine in 2017. After the merger, Frey went through the process for its products to become listed with the Organic Materials Review Institute, a nonprofit that monitors organic products. Now, the Lancaster operation makes conventional soil mixes and organic mixes.   Some is bagged and sent from Maine to South Carolina and as far west as Illinois. Some is sent by the truckload to customers, and some of the materials simply blow away in the wind. The company lately has been using a drone to measure the size of the piles of soil, mulch and inputs, Dustin says.   The soil goes to garden centers for sale to home growers. It also goes to large-scale growers in their own greenhouses.   Production ramps up in April and May to send out fresh soil throughout the region, says Ernie Frey Jr., operations manager.   After a busy spring, the company plans to make a few changes to help the environment. A new bag will include plastic made from sugarcane. Another bag will be recycled through Terracycle.   “I’m not a big fan of the plastic use, and I know our industry is a big one for it,” Dustin says. “So it’s nice to see that we’re doing something to help clean it up.”

Right now, the brave doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers all over the country are experiencing a shortage of PPE — personal protective equipment aka the masks, gloves, goggles, and gowns that’ll protect them as they’re on the frontlines of the battle against the novel coronavirus. And on my final outing before New York went on “PAUSE” — in other words, lockdown — I felt confident that I found where all the protective gear had gone: It was littered all over the ground, right outside the door of the pharmacy I was exiting.   Unfortunately, a quick search of Twitter and a scan of my town’s community group made one thing abundantly clear: This was by no means an isolated incident.   People from all over the world have taken to social media to lament about others abandoning their gloves and masks as soon as they’re done with them instead of disposing of them properly.  The problem with this is (at least) two-fold; not only is it completely defeating the purpose of the PPE user's sanitary precautions by exposing other people to the used products and potentially the virus , it’s also blatantly littering.   Though these single-use products are incredibly strong when it comes to protecting individuals against catching or spreading COVID-19 — when used properly — they are also incredibly light-weight, which means masks, gloves, and the like can easily be picked up and swept away with the wind, and could end up in waterways or otherwise in nature, hurting birds and marine animals who can mistake the rubber for food and ultimately choke to the death. If you are in possession of masks or gloves, the best thing you can do is donate it to those medical professionals who are in desperate need of supplies to battle the virus; Mask Match is a peer-to-peer exchange for people to connect with medical professionals directly and hand off their masks (without contact, of course). Donate PPE makes it easy to find a hospital in your area that is looking for specific donations. (Remember, N95 respirators need to be properly fitted in order to work effectively.) A quick search on Google or any social network will probably lead you to doctors in your community who are in desperate need of the PPE.   If you aren’t a doctor, the best thing you can do to protect yourself — even better than a mask and gloves if you’re healthy — is wash your hands for at least 20 seconds with soap and water, and continue to practice social distancing by staying home.  If you need masks or gloves, whether it’s because you or someone in your home is infected or you’re a caregiver for a member of a high-risk group, there are steps you can take to make sure your products are disposed of properly.   Certain areas will accept latex gloves in your recycling, as long as they are properly disinfected and sanitized; if you work in any sort of medical facility, you can enroll in Kimberly-Clark’s nitrile glove recycling program, though right now it is not available for individuals. Kimberly-Clark collects the waste (which isn’t limited to gloves, and includes other medical supplies) and then recycles the raw materials into new, eco-friendly products.   TerraCycle — a private company that recycles hard-to-recycle materials — offers a program specifically for single-use gloves; by investing a collection box, you can dispose of your used gloves (nitrile, latex, and vinyl gloves) and then send it back to TerraCycle’s private facility. They then separate the different types of plastic, and, per their website, “the separated plastics then undergo extrusion and pelletization to be molded into new recycled plastic products.”   As far as gloves go, probably the the best thing you can do is be wise about your consumption; while these are a necessity for the healthcare workers, if you're properly social distancing and staying at home, you won't need to send any gloves to the landfill, where nitrile gloves will likely take centuries to biodegrade and natural latex can take years to decompose. As far as masks go, things are a bit more complicated; in order to avoid the public health risk associated with the masks, they have to be thrown out and sent to the landfill in order to be discarded properly. If you’re using a mask because you are sick or you’re caring for someone sick, it should be removed from behind, wrapped in a tissue, and thrown out in a closed garbage pail in order to prevent the spread of the virus, according to the WHO. You should then immediately wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.   During a time of pandemic, it’s easy to feel distraught about the global implications — especially when the medical benefit of these single-use tools may conflict with your usual feelings as an environmentalist to send as little to the landfill as possible. But even in these times of what feels like heightened panic and uncertainty, there are eco-friendly lessons to be learned; over the world, places like NYC and China have seen drops in air pollution, and the water in Venice even cleared as the result of mandatory lockdowns and successful social distancing.  As my colleague explained, rather than looking at this as a benefit of the pandemic, we can instead view it as “irrefutable, firsthand evidence that burning fossil fuels to power cars directly contributes to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," which leads the heating of the planet and air pollution. In other words, we can see not only that human interference is undeniable, but also that change — and improvement — is possible.   The best way to prevent contracting or spreading coronavirus is with thorough hand washing and social distancing. If you feel you may be experiencing symptoms of coronavirus, which include persistent cough (usually dry), fever, shortness of breath, and fatigue, please call your doctor before going to get tested. For comprehensive resources and updates, visit the CDC website. If you are experiencing anxiety about the virus, seek out mental health support from your provider or visit NAMI.org.

NEXT Trends 2020 Expo West series—a look at "time honored processing," one of the New Hope Network NEXT Data and Insights team's ancient wisdom trends. Mar 25, 2020   NEXT Trends 2020 series: In an effort to help support retailers and brands, we will be publishing regular brand features for the next few weeks. Brands are selected from those that registered to exhibit at Natural Products Expo West 2020 and were curated as great examples of one of 50 trends New Hope Network is monitoring in the marketplace.   These trends are part of New Hope Network's NEXT Expo Guidebook and trend hierarchy.   Today, we look at five companies that are innovating in the "Time Honored Processing" trend within the Ancient Wisdom macro force. These are brands that are challenging conventional modern-day food systems and supply chains by reviving old-word processing techniques and philosophies in collaboration with modern tools.    

1. Soda Press Co.

What is it? Organic soda and kombucha syrups. Innovation: Soda Press sources organic fruits and ingredients like real cola nut, rosemary and lavender extracts for Organic Cola, or natural quinine from the bark of the Congolese Fever Tree for the Classic Indian Tonic. Mixes are certified organic and low in sugar. Natural Products Expo Connect profile/products Soda Press Co. website  

2. Lifeway Foods, Inc.

 What is it? Dairy and non-dairy kefir products. Innovation: In addition to its kefir line, Lifeway now has non-dairy kefir as well as frozen kefir pops. Lifeway only uses milk that comes from grass-fed cows that have not been treated with any artificial hormones or antibiotics. Its packaging also incorporates 100% recyclable plastic and uses TerraCycle boxes at events. Natural Products Expo Connect profile/products Lifeway Foods, Inc. website  

3. Honey Mama’s

What is it? Honey Mama’s makes honey-cocoa bars made from five nutrient-rich ingredients. It makes its chocolate bars from five whole foods: raw honey, virgin coconut oil, cocoa powder, Himalayan pink salt, and either sprouted almonds or shredded coconut. Innovation: These honey-sweetened, coconut oil-based chocolate bars are made from five whole food ingredients. They are gluten, soy, dairy and grain free. Natural Products Expo Connect profile/products Honey Mama’s website    

4. Nounós Creamery

What is it? Nounós Creamery produces Greek yogurt using locally sourced ingredients, a family recipe and an Old World bag-straining method. Innovation: Most Greek or Icelandic yogurts strain using high-speed industrial equipment, with powdered milk or processed thickening agents. Nounós strains yogurt the same way it has been done in the Southern Peloponnese for centuries: straining bags and gravity. The result is a thick, velvety, protein-rich yogurt. Natural Products Expo Connect profile/products Nounós Creamery website  

5. Sahi Sukuti

What is it? Sukuti is a traditional air-dried water buffalo meat dish of Nepal which as a recipe passed through generations. Innovation: Sahi Sukuti sources locally raised, free-range water buffalo, which is air dried into jerky. Natural Products Expo Connect profile/products Sahi Sukuti website