Your efforts to help the planet don’t have to take a vacation just because you are traveling. Many West Michigan destinations, businesses, and organizations are making sure to do their part to promote eco-friendly and sustainable practices to conserve energy and minimize environmental impact.  

Eco-friendly lodging 

  Crystal Mountain’s village in Thompsonville has been built iteratively, piece-by-piece, over time and the same approach has been applied to make meaningful strides toward a more sustainable future, such as:  

• Designing the resort as a pedestrian- and bike-friendly village, reducing use of carbon-emitting transportation
• First resort in Michigan to invest in wind energy credits, offsetting the carbon footprint of the Crystal Clipper high-speed quad chairlift to help supply the grid with more clean, renewable energy sources—reducing CO2 emissions by 174,000 pounds annually
• Building the first LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) spa in the Midwest—one of only four in the nation in 2009—that uses 28% less energy than a baseline structure
• First northern Michigan resort to provide complimentary electric vehicle charging stations
• Including a closed-loop, geothermal heating and cooling system as part of a $12 million expansion to the Inn at the Mountain (2018), reducing CO2 emissions by 150,000 pounds per year
• Setting aside a 30-acre wooded preserve leased to Michigan Legacy Art Park for $1 per year
• LED lighting in accommodations and public spaces, including the resort’s 33,000 square-foot conference facility
• In-room recycling, electric golf carts, re-fillable bath amenities, efficiency sensors for irrigation and snow-making and more

  Courtesy West Michigan Tourist Association   Grand Traverse Resort and Spa’s Green Committee is dedicated to creating a sustainable vacation experience. Here are just a few of the ways Grand Traverse Resort, located in Williamsburg, works to improve their carbon footprint:

• Partnership with TerraCycle, to recycle partially used and empty toiletry bottles. TerraCycle provides the Resort with a penny for each bottle, saved up to donate to local green nonprofits.
• Partnership with Eminence Organics, which plants a tree for each product sold. To date, over 3,500 trees have been planted.
• A composting program with Bay Area Recycling for Charities that directs roughly 100 tons of food waste from the Resort’s dining outlets away from landfills.
• In 2016, the Resort replaced an aging boiler with a Micro CHP (Combined Heat and Power) unit with an engine that runs on natural gas to generate electricity with useful heat—clean hot water—as a by-product of cooling the engine. The Micro CHP is estimated to save up to $20,000 in electric energy each year, and received an EPA certificate of approval for commercial emission standards.
• The Golf & Grounds team has won numerous awards for their eco-friendly approach; resort is certified as a Michigan Turf-grass Environmental Steward; is adding space to the no-mow natural zones on the 900-acre property.
• The Resort is eliminating single-use plastic products from the property—a work in progress.

In Mecosta County, being eco-friendly is something that hospitality businesses are familiar with—most hotels have a detailed Green program as part of hotel policy. The Holiday Inn and Conference Center in Big Rapids has an eco-friendly initiative known as the “Green Engage”, striving to provide a sustainable environment. This particular hotel achieves these policies through the maintenance of the building as well as housekeeping—ensuring that there is energy-efficient output on all room units, light bulbs, furnaces, etc. Housekeeping offers guests opportunities to re-use personal items like towels and toiletries. Be sure to check out CityFlats Hotel in Holland, the First LEED Gold-certified hotel in the Midwest.  

Green activities and events 

  Your headquarters for Upper Peninsula outdoor adventures in Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale National Park, the Keweenaw Adventure Company hosts Lake Superior sea kayaking and world-renowned Copper Harbor mountain biking. Environmentally conscious and community players, the Keweenaw Adventure Company celebrated their 25th Anniversary this season, and are proud to be “ultimately contributing to the region’s well-being through education, stewardship, conservation and sustainable tourism.”   Courtesy West Michigan Tourist Association   For over 30 years, Inland Seas Education Association in Suttons Bay has been teaching people about protecting the Great Lakes through their programs on tall ship schooners. Participants engage in hands-on activities as they collect lake samples and analyze them to determine the health of the Great Lakes. Some of the programs also collect microplastics. Individuals also get a chance to raise the sails and steer the ship. Click through to find more information about ISEA public programs. A hidden gem tucked behind tall dune hills, Lost Lake at Muskegon State Park is a botanical treasure with plants found in both bog and coastal plain marsh habitats. A three-mile, unpaved trail leads around Lost Lake, easily accessed from the Snug Harbor parking lot. A wheelchair-accessible trail from the Muskegon Winter Sports Complex leads to an accessible overlook and viewing scope on the wetland’s north side. John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids is committed to conserving resources and in doing so strives to make all of their operations as green as possible. The Zoo stays green by diverting 80% of waste from landfills through compost and recycling. They offer compostable straws and other plastics at the concession stands and have a variety of sustainable gift options in the gift shop. The Zoo is also committed to conserving endangered species around the world and right here in West Michigan. Every year John Ball Zoo sends zookeepers out into the field to help native species like the Kirtland’s warbler, Massasauga rattlesnakes, piping plovers, and wood turtles.  

Sustainable eating and shopping 

  Going Green in Ludington is made easier with a number of restaurants using compostable containers, utensils, bags, and straws, or implementing a no-straw policy. Stores use biodegradable paper bags, eco-friendly cleaning practices, and some businesses have promotions in place with donations going to local eco-minded organizations. When visiting Mt Pleasant, grab a snack and refreshments and know you are helping local businesses with their sustainability practices. Visit the Mt. Pleasant Convention & Visitors Bureau site to learn more. Visitors looking to minimize their impact on the planet can feel good about visiting the BarFly Ventures restaurant family, which includes HopCat locations in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, East Lansing, and Holland, as well as Stella’s Lounge in Grand Rapids and Grand Rapids Brewing Co. The businesses recycle all metal, plastic, cardboard, and glass and locally compost all food scraps, napkins, straws, and any other organic materials, diverting up to 90 percent of their waste from landfills and incinerators and helping to create soil instead of trash. BarFly has helped raise more than $50,000 for local clean-water nonprofits.   Courtesy West Michigan Tourist Association   Visit the Holland Farmers Market on Wednesdays and Saturdays 8am-2pm and support local agriculture. By purchasing locally grown produce, shoppers and vendors cut back on packaging and emissions that would otherwise be used to transport goods to grocery stores from across the country. Crane’s Pie Pantry in Fennville has gone strawless. Paper straws are only available on request. If you refuse a bag in the bakery or bring your own reusable bag, you leave with a free donut.  

When Fort Greene wood-fired restaurant Metta closed this summer, the team behind the sustainability-minded restaurant hinted that a future project was in the works: “We will see you in September with what comes next,” read the message on its website.   What came next is owner Henry Rich’s strongest statement for sustainability and its impact on climate change yet: It’s called Rhodora, a zero-waste natural wine bar that Rich hopes will help further the conversation around sustainability at New York restaurants. The wine bar at 197 Adelphi Street, at Willoughby Avenue, opens tonight with pours from small-farm natural winemakers accompanied by tinned fish, oysters, cheese, and vegetable snacks. Beer, cocktails, and a nonalcoholic drink menu of teas and kombucha is also planned.   Rich, who also runs popular Brooklyn hangouts like June and Rucola under his company the Oberon Group, created a food menu inspired by the tapas bars of Portugal and Spain, where drinks are paired with conservas (canned seafood).   “We went to great lengths to avoid plastic and avoid waste,” he says. “How do we do the most basic kind of wine bar food without creating trash? That is the challenge for us.”   Part of that feat was finding suppliers willing to ditch single-use plastic and styrofoam packaging; Rhodora’s oyster vendor, for example, agreed to ship them in reusable containers that can be washed and returned.   Liz Clayman   Rhodora replaces the group’s prior restaurant Metta, which was converted to a carbon-neutral restaurant in 2017. Rich worked with nonprofit Zero Foodprint, founded by Mission Chinese Food co-founder Anthony Myint, which helps restaurants offset their greenhouse gas emissions by sourcing locally, buying renewable energy, and investing in carbon-negative initiatives.   “Talking to him, I came to understand what impact our industry was having on climate change. I hadn’t understood that food as a whole actually had a greater impact than transportation,” Rich says.   Last year, after hosting a pop-up with chef Doug McMaster, the man behind UK’s acclaimed zero-waste restaurant Silo, Rich says he learned about the effects that food waste has on the environment and felt the need to make Metta a zero-waste space.   Working backwards with Metta wasn’t doable, though, he says. “We realized we had to start from zero, no pun intended. Everything from our food program, beverage program, and staffing model has the zero-waste mission as its deciding factor,” he says.   Buying a composter, a dishwashing machine that electrocutes salt into soap, and a cardboard shredder are all investments the team made to get the wine bar open. Any food diners leave will be fed into that composter, and there aren’t any trash cans around the restaurant, including in the restrooms. Instead, there will be two boxes from a company called TerraCycle, which specifically deals with hard-to-recycle items.   Rhodora has a unique staffing model, too. The wine bar does away with the traditional hierarchy among front- and back-of-house staff and instead has every employee trained for every role. That means there’s no executive chef, sommelier, bar manager, host, or server, and every staff member shares a tip pool, plus owns a profit share in the restaurant.   Rich says he started with a wine bar because it’d be too difficult to open a zero-waste full-service restaurant in NYC at this time. Meanwhile, his team is working on converting his other restaurants into carbon-neutral establishments by the end of the year.   “Once you go zero-waste, you kind of just see waste everywhere,” he says. “We would like to continue opening zero-waste projects, but for now we really have our work cut for us with Rhodora.”   Rhodora is open Monday through Thursday from 5 p.m. to midnight; Friday from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m.; Saturday from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m.; and Sunday from 2 p.m. to midnight.

What follows is an imperfect list, a subjective selection of great quality beauty brands trying to do better for the good of the planet. They are not all doing everything; some are better than others and they could always be doing more. But as industry experts at a recent sustainability conference told me, again and again: we don’t have time to wait for perfect, or for people to reject all the conveniences of modern life. It is more important to do something now than nothing at all, to our later cost. I take the view that big change comes from big business, which is why I’ve included global megabrands where there is at least the will and potential for improvement. What constitutes improvement is another bone of contention, of course. Some believe 100% organic, non-GM products are the only way to go; others rightly point out that some crops can be grown organically only thousands of air miles away. Many of us look for recycled plastic (living only about three lives), others prefer infinitely recyclable (but much heavier to freight) glass. This lineup is more expensive than previous “best lists”, which tend to run the gamut from mass market to high luxury. Locally made, renewable and sustainably grown ingredients cost more than petrol derivatives and virgin plastic, made in bulk in China. So I apologise if some of these prices make you wince, as they did me. vg vegan, v vegetarian, cf cruelty free: all not sold in countries where animal testing is mandatory; vg contains no animal-derived ingredients. No brackets: not tested on animals in the EU, where it’s illegal, but sold in countries where animal testing is mandatory.

O projeto coordenado na UFF Campos pelo prof. Samuel Campos, vinculado ao Departamento de Ciências Econômicas, tem como objetivo coletar resíduos provenientes de material de escrita como lápis, canetas, refil usado de quadro branco, borrachas, lapiseiras, etc. São aceitos resíduos de todas as marcas e de toda a população campista e da região, universitária ou não.

A Comissão Permanente de Gestão de Qualidade (CPGQ), da Prefeitura de Gramado, elaborou um projeto de coleta de materiais de difícil reciclagem como cápsulas de café e materiais de escritório (pincel atômico, lapiseiras e canetinhas) em parceria com a empresa TerraCycle.

A Comissão Permanente de Gestão de Qualidade (CPGQ), da Prefeitura de Gramado, elaborou um projeto de coleta de materiais de difícil reciclagem como cápsulas de café e materiais de escritório (pincel atômico, lapiseiras e canetinhas) em parceria com a empresa TerraCycle.

Common household items that are actually bad for the environment It’s no secret that the environment is facing some serious challenges. To help give you a better idea of what surprising household items are hurting the environment, Stacker has put together a gallery of 30 common items that are ecologically harmful.     It’s no secret that the environment is facing some serious challenges. In May, the United Kingdom declared a state of emergency because of climate change, and shortly thereafter Ireland, France, Canada, and New York City all followed suit. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reports that issues such as land degradation, water scarcity, loss of biodiversity, and climate change are all “growing problems that need to be urgently addressed.” Other issues include air and water pollution, deforestation, wildlife destruction, and resource depletion. According to UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner: “If current trends continue and the world fails to enact solutions that improve current patterns of production and consumption…then the state of the world’s environment will continue to decline.”   Air pollution causes one in 10 deaths worldwide, according to the World Bank, making it the fourth-largest risk factor throughout the globe. In North America alone, about 140 million people are exposed. Further, UNEP says that new chemical contaminants are emerging every day. Global warming is another huge factor impacting North America. “Climate change is damaging the environment, human health and well-being and, in some cases, human security in the region,” the organization says. In addition, there are threats to waterways and coastal ecosystems because of acidification, ocean warming, sea level rise, and marine debris.   With these threats, it’s hard to know where to start if you want to help. However, some environmentalists say the best place to begin is inside your own home. Many everyday items lying around your house can be contributing to the problem because of what they’re made of, how they’re produced, or how they’re disposed of. But it’s not always obvious. Sure, there are the easy ones like plastic bags and motor oil, but many of the biggest threats are more insidious.   To help give you a better idea of what surprising household items are hurting the environment, Stacker has put together a gallery of 30 common items that are ecologically harmful. In each slide, we’ve provided information about why the item is harmful and what you can do to reduce your impact. Take a look to see which ones surprise you.

A Comissão Permanente de Gestão de Qualidade (CPGQ), da Prefeitura de Gramado, elaborou um projeto de coleta de materiais de difícil reciclagem como cápsulas de café e materiais de escritório (pincel atômico, lapiseiras e canetinhas) em parceria com a empresa TerraCycle.

Do you wear contacts and hate the idea of throwing away the packaging? Bausch + Lomb and Terracycle have created the first contact lens recycling. Contact lens and their packaging are small, and it doesnt seem like a big deal, but if you wear daily lenses, or even bi-weekly, it adds up.

Sustainability is a buzzword that seemingly every corporation is promoting nowadays.   Green initiatives and waste reduction plans can be found on nearly every corporate website, but how many companies are really making a difference in their communities?   Johnson Automotive is taking its latest environmental cause seriously and inviting the community to take part in it, even if they aren’t Johnson customers.   The initiative is a partnership with TerraCycle, a recycling company that eliminates barriers to safely return hard-to-recycle waste. This means everything from plastic packaging to one-use coffee capsules can be collected and recycled without having to worry about it being accidentally sent to a landfill.   “It’s pretty cool – anyone can buy a TerraCycle box,” explained Katelyn Paul, marketing communications manager with Johnson Automotive. “You can buy them and have them for your house. When it’s filled up, the shipping is already prepaid, you just have to mail it back. The TerraCycle box is for things that are hard or impossible to remove from the waste stream on your own.”   TerraCycle’s home-use boxes range anywhere from $81 to $199, depending on the size and how much your household plans to recycle. You just select which type of waste you’re looking to dispose of and order the correct box. Options include one-use coffee capsules, general kitchen waste, art supplies, disposable gloves and more. There are a variety of different sizes available, so everyone can find a box that fits their lifestyle.   Don’t think you make enough waste to justify a box at your home? That’s where corporate partners like Johnson come in.   “We have our big boxes, and you can bring the things that go in them,” Paul said. “We’re having people bring bags of K-cup pods from nearby offices. They’re bringing them in to our store. A lot of people are saving disposable cups, straws, soda and coffee cans, and bringing them in – we also have a snack wrappers and bag box. I haven’t run into a situation where somebody brings something we can’t take.”   The boxes are all labeled, but separation is still an important part of ensuring the TerraCycle process is a success. When you’re conditioned to just toss a wrapper in the trash, it can be a hard habit to break. Johnson ensures that all of its employees are trained on properly sorting so that they can answer any questions customers might have and they make use of the boxes themselves.   “It’s an awareness thing,” Paul said. “We do a really good job making sure someone’s been trained on the boxes. We wouldn’t want someone to throw their chip bag into the trash can when its right next to a TerraCycle box. We are one of the largest Subaru dealer in North Carolina, so we have a lot of people visiting our dealership. That means a lot of coffee and snack-related waste.”   The word has spread; not only are employees and customers taking advantage of the TerraCycle boxes, community members who have no interest or desire to buy a car have been dropping off their recyclables.   “I have people call, and they come and bring [recyclables] in, and fill our boxes,” Paul said. “You don’t need to want to buy a car, we won’t sell you. Just bring us your recycling.”   The outreach has worked, with Johnson returning thousands of units of recyclable material as of April 2019. The TerraCycle boxes have become such a draw, the dealership has given some of its boxes to Marbles Kids Museum in Raleigh, creating another easy drop-off point.   The TerraCycle partnership started as a part of the Johnson Subaru’s “Subaru Loves the Earth” initiative, which has now placed the zero waste boxes in Subaru dealerships around the country. The partnership, which began in 2018, has proven incredibly popular, and Johnson Subaru is committed to continuing it.   “When we initially discussed TerraCycle, it was born out of Subaru corporate’s zero waste initiative. TerraCycle is a boots-on-the-ground example of how the brand itself is really committed to that. We love being able to share and tell people about it,” Paul added.