The Earth911 team has a lot to celebrate this year. We’re live on Google Assistant, where you can now ask how and where to recycle materials with a simple “Hey, Google!” Evelyn Fielding-Lopez and Mitch Ratcliffe sit down to talk about the last year and where sustainability is going. Learn how to be environmentally friendly at college — the lessons there will affect a lifetime and can be applied by anyone. We have a lot of confidence that youth will live in greater harmony with the planet. Check out Seattle-based Ridwell, which provides home pickup of batteries, textiles, and plastic film. Adding flexibility to the single-stream waste system is the best hope for increased recycling success. We also take a look a the sustainability of cannabis farming. As the fast-growing industry evolves, will it embrace sustainability information for consumers? We’d like to see information about recycling on cannabis packaging. For those looking for a natural remedy, we also discuss the benefits of sleep, hydration, and natural medicine to staying healthy. Of course, we also answer your Earthling Questions. How to organize community action to get recycling services? One of our listeners just lost local recycling and wants to bring it back. What is working with TerraCycle like? Jessica, a listener on Facebook wants to partner with TerraCycle to address mixed materials, such as composite packaging. And what do you do with used antifreeze? Can it be filtered and reused at home?

Gift cards are a major pet-peeve of mine. I strongly believe that they are doing more harm than good by making us impulse shop and buy crap we simply don’t need, have you ever thought about What Happens To All Those Plastic Gift Cards? Can you relate? Someone gives you a gift card and you feel the urge to use it right away? Gift cards are also made from PVC, a type of plastic that is typically not recycled and is also not accepted by most recycling system. So they end up in the garbage, and then landfill. Related: A Guide To Re-Gifting Without Remorse Credit cards and hotel key cards are made of PVC, as are items like pipes, vinyl siding for your house, records, shower curtains and mattress covers. According to the International Card Manufacturers Association, nearly 17 billion plastic cards were produced in 2006. And 10 billion new gift cards are created every year. 10 billion gift cards have the potential to add 75 to 100 million pounds of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) material to landfills. That’s because gift cards are often made from PVC — a toxic compound that produces carcinogens and toxins including chlorine residue and heavy-metal pollutants. Even worse, when burned, PVC releases dioxins and gases such as hydrogen chloride. That’s a big issue and I am not sure one that can be solved easily as a recent survey showed that they are the most popular thing to give in Canada. Realted: Great Lakes Facing An Attack From Micro-Plastic We actually have an entire website dedicated to buying gift cards. UGH! In another survey 53% of us will opt to buy gift cards this year. Now you are probably thinking what’s the big deal?  these are so small? But when you consider that in 2014, two billion gift cards were purchased in the U.S. alone it’s a lot. According to Giftrocket.com each physical card contains about five grams of PVC and generates 21 grams of CO2. That means in total, gift cards created 10,000 tonnes of PVC waste and 42,000 tonnes of CO2 in the U.S. alone in 2014. So what can you do? Talk to the retailer and ask them if they have a take back program. Consider and e-gift card that can be used electronically. Mail the used card to a recycling centre  such as Terracycle. They allow you to send in your plastic gift cards for recycling. These companies break the plastic cards down and create new plastic products from the material. Upcycle your gift card into something else. If you’re feeling crafty, you can always use the plastic gift card for a wide range of projects. For example, you can use a gift card to keep your earbud cords from tangling. Reload the card and gift it to someone else. I’d love to see more retailers offer better options that plastic, like wood or paper AND it would be even better if the cars could be reloaded, in many cases they can’t be. Earthworks Systems, which manufactures gift cards from 100% recycled PVC, will also accept old cards for recycling. To get instructions about recycling your cards, fill out the registration form on the company’s website and a representative will email all the necessary information. There has been some progress with some retailers offering cards made from corn sugar that are biodegradable. But this raises the issue of using food crops, or crops on land suitable for food production, for something other than food. I’ve also read about PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) being used – PET is one of the easiest plastics to recycle and is most commonly found in the form of soda bottles. The barrier to uptake appears to be cost, with PET costing about 20% more. We all have plastic cards in our wallets: drivers licences, health cars, credit cards etc. and we are all responsible for where these little plastic cards end up.

Plusieurs entreprises ou sites se proposent de recycler ou de donner une deuxième jeunesse aux jouets.

Le Père Noël va bientôt passer avec sa hotte remplie de jouets et de peluches. S'il y a parfois trop de cadeaux pour certains, les jouets restent quand même trop chers pour d’autres. Plusieurs solutions écologiques cherchent à remédier à ce paradoxe de Noël. De bonnes options en attendant qu'une révolution touche le secteur du jouet en 2022 avec la création d'une filière de collecte et de recyclage, comme pour les piles ou les emballages. Les jouets vont coûter quelques centimes ou quelques euros de plus pour financer un éco-organisme qui devra les collecter et les recycler. Il devra aussi éco-concevoir les produits pour en refaire de nouveau plus facilement. Aujourd’hui, des distributeurs et des marques comme Hasbro travaillent avec des professionnels du recyclage des plastiques comme Terracycle pour ne plus polluer nos sols ou notre air à cause des 100 000 tonnes de jouets jetés chaque année en France.

The reusable shopping platform, which launched with big hype and is now eyeing retail, has already raised one key question in its early days: What are the true costs of convenience? Tom Szaky, CEO of recycling company Terracycle, firmly believes that ditching disposable packaging doesn’t have to mean disposing of its benefits. Affordability, mainstream selection, "having the cool, new thing," and, most of all, convenience, are all elements of modern retail Szaky feels can be preserved in a package-free economy. Brands, he believes, just need the right model. In May, Terracycle launched a venture in circular economy shopping called Loop, bringing mainstream food and personal care products to consumers’ doorsteps in reusable, refillable packaging. The products come from some of the world’s biggest plastic polluters as defined by a 2018 Greenpeace audit across six continents. The idea has been to even out a skewed playing field between disposable and reusable packaging options, turning the complicated process of refilling and returning empty containers into a simple, one-click act. Since the launch, Loop has been hailed as a new take on "the milkman," a nostalgic reference to the dairy industry’s unique, circular model of distribution that once had so much consumer buy-in across the United States. Yet far from the simple routes of the neighborhood milkman, Loop is reverse engineering circularity onto products and supply chains designed for recycling or disposability. Its direct-to-consumer trial has been a virtuosic case study in marketing and reverse logistics. But the pilot – the object of much hype in the last six months, with a reported waitlist of 85,000 – was never designed to exceed 5,000 households in North America and another 5,000 in France. The company is planning to launch a more integrated approach and expand into multiple new countries next year. And while TerraCycle says it is too early to know how these pilots will perform, many in the recycling sector are curious to see just how disruptive this concept might be. The experiment, as it has unfolded until now, begs a pressing question: What are the true environmental and logistical costs of convenience? Rethinking convenience Szaky has good reason to want to bring convenience to a niche, package-free market. Currently, it’s in short supply. Catherine Conway, a package-free consultant based in the U.K., said she has found one of the main challenges for this form of shopping to be the behavior change it asks of consumers. Her business Unpackaged targets waste by reinventing stores’ bulk aisles to encourage reuse and refill with bring-your-own containers. "For the last 30 or 40 years, consumers have been told that all they should care about is convenience and price. So currently all they care about is convenience and price," explained Conway in an interview with Waste Dive. "You’ve now got to get across the message of why it’s going to be a bit inconvenient for them." This, she says, is why package-free shopping has remained on the fringes of retail. Many are put off by the limited offerings available in bulk, or simply aren’t willing to perform the extra work it entails. "I think there’s a lot of misconceptions out there about the number of hoops a consumer will jump through in the name of more sustainable packaging," Adam Gendell, associate director of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC), told Waste Dive. After all, any system is only as good as the number of people who will actually use it, and most people will only use it if it’s easy for them to do so. Gendell lauded the "milkman style" distribution model that Loop has adopted, where little is asked of consumers and the company is "not asking people to take 20 steps to get the package back" but instead "saying 'Here’s your reusable package, please get the stuff out of it, put it back outside, and forget about it.'" For shoppers, Loop’s direct-to-consumer model appears to do just that. The only behavior change required is to place used containers back in the Loop tote and schedule a pick-up online. Customers are incentivized to perform this last step because they have put down fully refundable container deposits on each item (a requisite for participation in the service), though these can be quite high. In her review of the service, Supply Chain Dive’s Emma Cosgrove commented that in addition to some products being more expensive – Loop’s dry black beans, for example, were 60% more than a bulk price in a grocery store – the deposits were cause for some sticker shock. "On my first order," she wrote, "I paid $30.50 in deposits including the $15.00 deposit for the shipping box – 23% of my total order." For brands, who also put hefty down payments and investment in new packaging to participate, Loop acts as an accommodating plug-in to a relatively hands-off reusable model. "Everything we do is always as a third party," said Benjamin Weir, Loop’s North America program manager, in an interview. The company's first task is working with brands to develop and test reusable packaging for each product. This can be simpler when brands request a "stock" container (a glass jar or an aluminum tin). It can get more complicated when they require customization, like in the case of the Häagen-Dazs stainless steel container or the Crest glass mouthwash bottle designed in conjunction with Kohler, featuring a silicone sleeve and a stainless steel cap. Once packaging is selected, a sanitation system is determined and then audited by brands. Loop outsources this portion of its work to specialized vendors at a cleaning facility located in Pennsylvania. It’s a learning curve, Weir told Waste Dive, as vendors providing sanitation services typically clean medical-grade equipment or aerospace parts – products far too valuable to dispose of after a single-use. For Loop’s purposes, they must be trained to clean consumer product-sized goods. In addition to cleaning services, Loop also provides brands with fulfillment – not to be confused with product refilling – at a warehouse in New Jersey, where orders of Loop totes are packed and prepared for delivery. These warehousing services are also outsourced. Finally, once the orders are prepared, totes are delivered to shoppers’ homes by UPS, the carrier Loop has partnered with for logistics. Balancing sustainability with availability Preserving ease-of-use for brands and consumers doesn’t come easy. The dairy industry to which Loop is so often compared enjoyed the luxury of managing just one product, produced and distributed regionally, with a standard package that had been designed with reusability and sanitation in mind from the very start. Production, cleaning, fulfillment and distribution all happened in the same place and dairy farms had relative control over their local supply chains. And milk, a product consumed regularly, was delivered on a "subscription" basis making the demand for refills constant and stable. Loop enjoys almost none of those advantages. The pilot offers 123 products on its website featuring over a dozen different types of packaging, each with its own distinct sanitization process. And being a third party means that, while Loop is responsible for sanitation of containers in regional warehouses, refilling remains in the hands of manufacturers located throughout the country. Nestlé, who is trialing Häagen-Dazs ice cream with Loop, told CNN they’re trucking refills of product from California to the East Coast. The winding reverse logistics for products that are – unlike the milkman – not locally sourced have caused some to question whether the additional impacts aren't nullifying any sustainability goals. "Loop is trying to minimize waste, but does that process still take into account the emissions to take that product back and reuse it and wash it and reprocess it and send it back out?" queried Alexis Bateman, director of the Sustainable Supply Chains program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with Waste Dive. "I think that overvaluing one impact over another is usually the pitfall that these kinds of solutions come into." Weir said Loop is aware of some of the environmental impacts posed by adding mileage to the supply chain and using higher grade materials. "We’ve always said that this system is not always designed to service a large quantity of households. You’ll never see more than 5,000 households in our system right now, as is," he said. Working with the consulting firm Long Trail Sustainability, Loop has performed life cycle analyses (LCA) on all of its packaging to determine the cradle-to-grave environmental impacts. Rick Zultner, Loop's vice president of research and development, told Waste Dive these assessments showed that at 10 reuse cycles, the Loop e-commerce trial had a 35% reduction in global warming potential as compared to a "similar model." "The Loop system is very proficient at solving the waste problem, but we have to think beyond that," said Weir. "We have to think about the sustainability of the entire ecosystem and whether we are creating new problems with new solutions. That’s of course never the goal." Limits of LCAs Reusable systems like Loop open the door to a larger debate within the field of environmental accounting. In recent years, officials at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) have surveyed literature and pioneered studies assessing the sustainability of reusable systems in a range of contexts, from water bottles to beer kegs. "There’s no simple answer to the question of disposable versus reusable packaging," said Peter Canepa, an LCA practitioner at the DEQ, in an interview with Waste Dive. At the request of local brewers in Oregon, the DEQ performed an LCA to determine the impact of the industry’s traditional reusable stainless steel kegs when compared with the rise of new single-use plastic beer kegs. "Even with the washing and sterilization, all those steps were accounted for and reusable stainless steel kegs were more beneficial," said Canepa, referring to the LCA results. "But there started to be a point of inflection." Reuse made sense for breweries in Oregon who distribute their product locally, but numbers began to tilt in favor of disposable as distance was added to the supply chain. According to Canepa, breweries distributing East of the Mississippi found there were sufficient environmental implications, to the point that "making a new plastic keg, using it once, and disposing of it was actually less impactful." It is at this point that the LCA school of thought diverges from the one Loop more closely adheres to. Advocates of circular economy theory (like SPC’s Gendell) still promote the use of LCA as a tool, but put far more weight on systems being regenerative. The idea is that waste from one system forms a resource for another. "That can’t always be measured with any type of precision with a tool like LCA, which is an important, but imperfect science," Gendell explained. LCA, for example, does not yet have a way to quantify the effects of litter on marine or land environments, a category in which disposable materials score very poorly. Unpackaged’s Conway agrees that literature on reuse can often be difficult to decipher. "The thing that’s annoying is that it’s very hard to get independent environmental data … These industry-sponsored studies are not 100% reliable." She argues that just because reusable systems like Loop require more upfront resources than disposables shouldn’t be a reason to discount them, even if the LCA initially says otherwise. Especially in the beginning, it may be the case that they just require a bit of scale to make it worth it. "I don’t think that’s a bad system until they get to that point, I think they just have to be aware that it’s probably going to be inefficient to start off with," she said. The experiment continues Loop’s pilot model (the length of which is said to be undetermined) preserves extreme convenience, but that likely will not be way this service grows in the future. "What we’re doing now, to make it as convenient for consumers as possible, is really allowing them to order and return packaging at any time," explained Weir. "The purchasing of the products and the returning are truly two separate interactions." In an ideal world, pick-ups would coincide with drop-offs and vice-versa. And retailers, who have their own fleets of trucks, would leave warehouses full in the morning and come back full with returns (as opposed to returning empty, as they do now). In the future integrated version, consumers will purchase and return Loop products at retail locations directly. Confirmed partners include Walgreens and Kroger in the United States, Carrefour in France and Tesco in the U.K. The advantage to this model is that products would be sold in locations many shoppers already frequent, side-by-side with disposable counterparts of the same items. "That kind of brick-and-mortar shopping is going to open up additional avenues for the consumer," said Patrick Browne, director of sustainability at UPS, in an interview with Waste Dive. The company continues to work with Loop on the e-commerce model, but Browne said that retail deliveries would pose less of a logistical challenge. They take place in more dense settings, where drivers are delivering multiple packages per stop, making them more efficient. Whereas "in e-commerce, which is residential, typically your stops are a little bit farther in between houses." Loop’s decisions about reuse and disposal are not purely determined by environmental impact, sparking further complications. This comprises perhaps Loop's biggest challenge: balancing the complex, fragile world of environmental accounting with the extremely qualitative world of corporate branding, which has an altogether different set of values. For the companies Loop works with, packaging isn’t just about getting a product from here to there, or even strictly about safety. It’s also about maintaining brand uniformity and image. Disposable packaging, where each purchase yields a fresh container, does this quite well. Conversely, "packaging that is reusable will naturally scratch. It will naturally bend," said Weir, "There are very few ways around that. Especially when we’re looking at high, high numbers of reuse cycles." Loop’s challenge has been encouraging companies to reconsider their traditional stance on wear and tear, which is typically viewed as a performance failure. In the end, participating brands determine what is the standard for reuse, and where to draw the line between refilling and disposing. It is Loop’s job to adhere to that standard, meaning disposal may occur on the hundredth cycle, or the tenth. “The positive side is that I think these solutions are important to start to change the dialogue on end-of-life packaging and waste that’s become so normalized in American culture,” said MIT’s Bateman. "Even if the future of Loop looks very different from what it is now, the trials of today are essential to shifting the discourse on disposables." At the end of the day, Loop reveals an inconvenient truth about reusable systems: In the current market, it takes more work to make less waste. According to DEQ's Canepa, that extra work is necessary because, in a reusable world, more durable materials with a higher lifecycle impact raise the stakes. “This sounds really banal, but if the thing made to be reusable is not reused, or more specifically is not reused a specific number of times,” he explained, “then you actually may be doing worse [sic] for the environment.” Reusable programs thus require vigilant stewarding to ensure proper use, an inescapable part of Loop's grand experiment. "They can’t be left to operate to themselves,” emphasized Weir. “There needs to be certain rules, there need to be certain frameworks. Because one-to-one, a stainless steel container versus a paper pint, I mean, there’s no comparison.”

Our most popular profiles of projects focused on improving the world, from climate to plastic waste to homelessness to housing. The world could seem like a hard and hopeless place on many, if not most, days in 2019. In spite of that feeling, there are people who are devoting their time to trying to do good work, and we try to bring you those stories when we can. Of the thousands of people and projects we profiled this year in Fast Company‘s Impact section, a few stories really struck a chord with readers, and so we’re collecting them here for you.  Perhaps they’ll make you feel compelled to do something similar yourself. Perhaps they’ll just make you a little more hopeful about the future. They range from a village of 3D-printed houses to a young man reaching the next step in his years-long quest to clean up the ocean and from cities finding ways to end homelessness to cities finding ways to end driving. See what inspires you. A COALITION OF GIANT BRANDS IS ABOUT TO CHANGE HOW WE SHOP FOREVER, WITH A NEW ZERO-WASTE PLATFORM As the world’s attention turned to single-use plastic this year, many companies began offering plans to cut back on their waste streams. But one of the boldest plans involved many companies—including giants like Unilever and Proctor & Gamble—joining forces to both eliminate packaging and change how we shop. The new project, called Loop, was organized by recycling company TerraCycle. Each item available for delivery on Loop comes in a reusable package, like ice cream in a stainless steel pint container. When you’re done, you return it to Loop to be cleaned, refilled, and sent back to another customer. Read more. 3 CITIES IN THE U.S. HAVE ENDED CHRONIC HOMELESSNESS: HERE’S HOW THEY DID IT A program called Built for Zero uses a combination of intense data and cross-department meetings to track homelessness. “By ending homelessness, we mean getting to a place where it’s rare, brief, and it gets solved correctly and quickly when it does happen,” Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, the nonprofit that leads the Built for Zero program, told us. “That’s a completely achievable end state, we now see.” The nonprofit calls this goal “functional zero,” and it’s already proved effective in places like Bergen County, New Jersey, and Abilene, Texas. So far, nine communities have reached the goal of “functional zero” for veteran homelessness, and three communities have reached the goal for chronic homelessness. Read more. THE WORLD’S FIRST 3D-PRINTED NEIGHBORHOOD NOW HAS ITS FIRST HOUSES New Story is a nonprofit that used to build houses in the developing world the old-fashioned way. But wanting to speed up and smooth out that process, it worked with construction company Icon to develop a giant 3D printer capable of generating the walls of an entire 500-square-foot house in 24 hours. After that, workers add doors, windows, and roofs. The first community of homes is currently being built in Mexico, and the organization is now exploring the idea of bringing the technology to the U.S., as well. Read more. THIS STARTUP WANTS TO PUT A FREE TINY HOUSE IN YOUR BACKYARD Backyard houses won’t fix California’s housing crisis, but they could be an important way to get more people on limited land in cities. Because a new California law has made it easier to get the permits to build such structures, there’s a lot of hope for their growth. But it’s still a lot of work with big upfront costs to get a contractor to build you one. Rent the Backyard wants to make it easier: it will handle the building of what’s called an “accessory dwelling unit,” or ADU, in exchange for splitting the rent with the homeowner. Read more. The Norwegian capital removed 700 parking spaces and replaced them with bike lanes, plants, tiny parks, and benches. As we wrote at the time: “A few spots are left, converted into parking for disabled drivers or EV charging, and some streets are open for delivery trucks for a couple of hours in the morning. Emergency vehicles still have access. But other drivers have to park in garages, and traffic restrictions help nudge drivers who don’t need to go through the city center to take a ring road around it instead. In a new zoning plan, the city is taking its intentions further, giving pedestrians, cyclists, and public transportation greater priority than private cars, and planning a network of pedestrian zones that are fully car-free.” The city coupled this with a heavy investment in public transit, and the results are good: the air is cleaner and businesses—which were worried about the change—are seeing increased foot traffic. Read more. Instead of using standard asphalt, Los Angeles is testing a new road material that’s made partly from recycled plastic bottles. The roads are meant to last longer, which means less time and money doing street repairs. But more importantly, it enables a machine to chew up the old road, remix it with plastic, and lay it right back down when it’s time to repave—instead of hauling away the old asphalt and trucking new material in. Read more. After Medicare for All, the Green New Deal has been one of the most animating policy ideas of the Democratic primary. Shortly after the initial bill was introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey, we took a deep look at what it could mean for transforming business in sectors from agriculture to tech to philanthropy. “The Green New Deal is a framework for exerting external pressure on industries,” Markey told us. “But it can also be a framework for internal corporate operations for every industry, and guide the discussion going forward inside every company and sector.” Read more. ‘PRESCRIBING’ FRUITS AND VEGGIES WOULD SAVE $100 BILLION IN MEDICAL COSTS Fruits and vegetables: they’re quite good for you. But they can be expensive. A study looked at what would happen if Medicare and Medicaid subsidized the cost of fresh produce and found that it would prevent 1.93 million cardiovascular events (such as heart attacks) and 350,000 deaths, as well as cut healthcare costs by $40 billion. Read more. LOS ANGELES IS TESTING ‘PLASTIC ASPHALT’ THAT MAKES IT POSSIBLE TO RECYCLE ROADS Instead of using standard asphalt, Los Angeles is testing a new road material that’s made partly from recycled plastic bottles. The roads are meant to last longer, which means less time and money doing street repairs. But more importantly, it enables a machine to chew up the old road, remix it with plastic, and lay it right back down when it’s time to repave—instead of hauling away the old asphalt and trucking new material in. Read more. HOW TO DESIGN A GREEN NEW DEAL THAT REALLY WORKS, FOR EVERY INDUSTRY IN THE U.S. After Medicare for All, the Green New Deal has been one of the most animating policy ideas of the Democratic primary. Shortly after the initial bill was introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey, we took a deep look at what it could mean for transforming business in sectors from agriculture to tech to philanthropy. “The Green New Deal is a framework for exerting external pressure on industries,” Markey told us. “But it can also be a framework for internal corporate operations for every industry, and guide the discussion going forward inside every company and sector.” Read more. THESE TREE-PLANTING DRONES ARE FIRING SEED MISSILES TO RESTORE THE WORLD’S FORESTS Planting trees is one of the simplest ways to sequester carbon and thus mitigate the effects of climate change. One study found that one trillion trees is the number needed to make a real dent in the problem. One trillion, though, is a lot of trees to plant. But what if we outsourced the tree planting to drones? In Myanmar, a company called Biocarbon Engineering is building drones, training locals how to use them, and then using the drones to fire seeds into the ground, helping regrow the country’s mangrove forests. Read more. THE OCEAN CLEANUP DEVICE HAS RETURNED FROM THE PACIFIC GARBAGE PATCH WITH ITS FIRST LOAD OF PLASTIC Boyan Slat first proposed the idea for the Ocean Cleanup machine—a giant device to collect the ocean plastic that has collected in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—at a TEDx talk in 2012. Since then, he’s managed to raise the funds to build it, test several iterations, and finally get a functional prototype out into the Pacific Ocean. Now it’s returned, and we can see the results: 60 one-cubic-meter bags full of trash. Now that the proof of concept is done, the next step is building even bigger devices, and launching a whole fleet of them, with the goal of cleaning up half the garbage patch in five years. Read more.

Brands saying no to plastic

The global plastic crisis is getting out of hand. Many single-use plastic items, only designed to be used once, take centuries to decompose. With just 14% of plastic packaging being recycled, according to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and World Economic Forum, recycling clearly isn’t working either. Fortunately, some companies are making huge strides in reducing the amount of plastic they use – click or scroll through as we take a look at what they're doing.      

  Though I’m a frequent flier, I’m embarrassed to say that it took me a long time to identify my “must-have” travel items. A simple suitcase, a bag, and a jacket — that’s all I took with me on flights. It also didn’t matter if the flight was two hours long or seven hours long, a red-eye or a midday affair. Of course, this resulted in some miserable flying experiences, all because I just didn’t take the time to figure out what would make traveling easier for me.   Then, last year, I arrived at the airport for a red-eye flight to Paris with a major headache. I didn’t pack any painkillers (again, unprepared me), so my first stop post-security was a store that would have some. I was waiting to pay when I saw the Colgate Max Fresh Wisp Disposable Mini Toothbrushes — the person in front of me had grabbed a package of them from the checkout kiosk.   I had never seen them before, but my only toothbrush was in my suitcase, and I was in for a long flight before I reached Paris. Surely, my breath would be terrible by the time I got there (and the copious amounts of coffee I planned on drinking upon arrival weren’t going to help it). So I grabbed a package too.   It was during that flight that I discovered the beauty of the Colgate Max Fresh Wisp Disposable Mini Toothbrushes. They can be used anywhere, without water or a sink — all you need is the toothbrush and your mouth, and you’re good to go. (That said, I would still recommend going to the bathroom to use it, because you will still look like you’re brushing your teeth, and it’s just polite.)   To use, simply pop the toothbrush in your mouth, and press it against one of your teeth to break the seal on the prepasted toothpaste. I recommend doing this with your back molars, but it doesn’t fully make a difference if you do it with another tooth — have fun with it, you know?   Once you break the seal, you’ll be able to brush with it like a normal toothbrush. Since there’s no water, the toothpaste won’t get as frothy as you’re used to, but your mouth will still take on that minty, just-brushed feeling. Once you’re done with the toothbrush, just toss it. (Even better: The toothbrushes are able to be safely upcycled through the Terracycle recycling program.) These things are single use, making them even more perfect for plane travel — you don’t have to figure out where to store them once you’re finished.   I used to go on full red-eye flights without brushing my teeth, but once I actually started using this product, I realized what I difference it makes. To land at your destination feeling like you’ve just used a real toothbrush wakes you up and readies you for whatever you have ahead of you.   I’ve traveled by plane a lot since that life-changing flight to Paris — often on red-eyes — and not once have I left these Colgate Max Fresh Wisp Disposable Mini Toothbrushes at home. Each time, I’ve truly found them to be the most convenient and refreshing travel accessory you can take with you on a plane, probably next to straight up water. And, as a bonus, I now always land after flights with nice breath, as opposed to ‘I’ve just spent seven hours on a plane without brushing my teeth’ breath.

THERE ARE MICROBEADS, BHA and BHT preservatives, silicones and phthalates … oh, and don’t forget formaldehyde, selenium sulfide, hydroquinone and something called ethylene-diaminetetraacetic acid. It is difficult enough to pronounce some of these hidden ingredients in cosmetics, let alone determine whether or not they will harm the environment or our health. As a former wine country spa director and as founder and CEO of the subscription service and curated retail brand Beauty Heroes, Novato resident Jeannie Jarnot has spent much of her life working to discover the cleanest and most environmentally sound cosmetic lines and has built education into both her online subscription service and her recently opened flagship store in her hometown. The clean beauty business is predicted to become a $22 billion dollar industry worldwide by 2024, and Jarnot, who has been called an “eco-preneur” and is quoted widely in her role as a clean, green and now “blue” beauty expert, asks consumers to consider the lasting impact of their purchases. We sat down with her to get an insider’s view of healthy beauty and how to make the most environmentally sound product choices.

Swiffer®, a pioneer in the Quick Clean category and used in more than 50 million households worldwide, has partnered with international recycling leader TerraCycle® to make their Swiffer Sweeper™, Duster and WetJet™ refills nationally recyclable. As an added incentive, for every shipment of Swiffer waste sent to TerraCycle through the Swiffer Recycling Program, collectors earn points that can be used for charity gifts or converted to cash and donated to the non-profit, school or charitable organization of their choice.   “We are very excited about our partnership with TerraCycle to offer free recycling of all Swiffer refills in the US. This is an important step towards sustainable solutions for our products and the start of an exciting journey with Swiffer and TerraCycle” said NA Brand Director, Kevin Wenzel.   Through the Swiffer Recycling Program, consumers can now send in the following Swiffer cleaning products to be recycled for free:   ·            Swiffer® Sweeper™ Wet Mopping Cloths ·            Swiffer® Sweeper™ Dry Sweeping Cloths ·            Swiffer® Sweeper™ Wet Heavy-Duty Mopping Cloths ·            Swiffer® Sweeper™ Dry Heavy-Duty Sweeping Cloths ·            Swiffer® Dusters™ ·            Swiffer® Heavy-Duty Dusters™ ·            Swiffer® WetJet™ Mopping pads ·            Swiffer® WetJet™ Heavy-Duty Mopping pads ·            Swiffer® WetJet™ Wood Mopping pads   Participation in the program is easy, simply sign up on the TerraCycle program page at https://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/swiffer and mail in the accepted waste using a prepaid shipping label. Once collected, the waste is broken down, separated by material and the plastics are cleaned and melted into hard plastic that can be remolded to make new recycled products.   The Swiffer Recycling Program is open to any interested individual, school, office, or community organization. For more information on TerraCycle’s recycling programs, visit www.terracycle.com.