PORTLAND, Ore. — Environmental and public health groups say cigarette butts are the most littered item on earth, making up nearly 40% of all collected litter.   Worldwide, that adds up to four and a half trillion cigarette butts disposed of on the ground and in our oceans.   Today's Everyday Hero has found a way to reduce the number of butts on Portland streets, helping the environment and Portland’s homeless.   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   For the past three weeks, Chelle Hammer has been paying cash for discarded cigarette butts, to the tune of about $2 an ounce, or two bucks for each one hundred collected.   “One day Chelle came up with her cart, put out her little table and her scale, put up a little sign that said she was buying cigarette bucks,” said Tyrone Grove.   Grove figured he'd try it himself.   “Found out it was pretty lucrative,” Grove said. “I mean, I could go out in a couple hours and make 30, 40, 50 bucks. Easy.”   Hammer, who worked for Amazon from 1998 through 2011 before starting her own company (and subsequently getting laid off this past summer), has been helping the homeless near her house at McCormick Pier under the west end of the Steel Bridge for decades.   “These guys are my neighbors, and it’s important to me to help my neighbors,” she said. “And so, that’s what I do.”   Her support came in the form of grilled cheese sandwiches, cookies and soft drinks.   But with the help of her church, a GoFundMe site, PDX Butts4Butts, and her own money, she hit on the idea of paying people for cigarette butts, which are made of a cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that’s slow to decompose.   “I was thinking, what can we do because there’s a lot of trash but not a lot of cans and bottles because of the redemption program. So I thought, what would be the next logical thing, and I came up with cigarette butts,” she said.   In just three short weeks, she has collected, paid for and recycled more than 45 pounds -- or about 72,000 discarded cigarette butts.   “I collected a whole bunch of them,” said Dan Whitehouse. “I wanted to make sure the lady was serious, and she’s really serious.”   Whitehouse is a believer in the program.   And he's developed a strategy.   “I go to places where people gather, like bars, restaurants or waiting near train stops, because they don’t allow you to smoke on their stops,” Whitehouse said.   Hammer said the effort pairs with her and her church's philosophy.   They’re excited about it, yeah,” she said. “The two values that we have at the church and one of them is helping the homeless and helping other people, and the other is helping and cleaning the environment.”   The butts collected by Chelle Hammer are recycled by a company called TerraCycle and made into shipping pallets, plastic lumber and decking and, yes, ashtrays.

One company is working with giants like Tide and Häagen-Dazs to re-fill, reuse and deliver household staples right to your door.   Household products, toiletries, food, and more currently utilize single-use plastic containers and wrappers that end up in the trash. One company is changing that with reusable, refillable packaging.   Tom Szaky is the CEO and Founder of TerraCycle, based in New Jersey, and he says his mission is to make recycling a convenient and streamlined part of everyday life. For nearly 20 years, Szaky has been working with some of the biggest companies in the country to create recycling-friendly packaging for their products, and now, he has a new division called Loop, which “feels like disposability as much as absolutely possible,” explains Szaky.   While the service, in some ways, is a mimicry of people’s existing bad habits, Szaky says that minimal effort on the part of consumers is key in making a big change. “The more we ask a consumer to do, the less likely they are going to take part,” he adds.   “A few years ago we started thinking about, ‘how do we solve waste at the root cause?’” - Tom Szaky, TerraCycle   Loop will refill everything from your laundry detergent, to your favorite ice cream in reusable packages that are easy to ship out. As of now, they’ve partnered with Kroger and Walgreens, and the service will soon be coming to Detroit locations.   “A few years ago we started thinking about, ‘how do we solve waste at the root cause?’ and we believe the root cause of waste is using something once and throwing it out. From that question came a new division called Loop which is all about shifting packaging from single use and disposable to multi-use and reusable, without feeling like a reusable system,” says Szaky.

Click on the player to hear TerraCycle’s Tom Szaky talk about the challenges of single-use packaging.

Research institutions need to reflect on their attitudes toward plastic waste and make sustainability a priority in laboratories. Whether it’s encouraging the use of reusable cups, banning plastic straws, or charging customers for plastic bags in grocery stores, it’s clear that some companies and policymakers are beginning to take measures against the growing issue of plastic waste. It’s easy to imagine science as an answer to our current sustainability crisis, as it offers the development of new environment-friendly materials, low emission technologies, and the production of discoveries and evidence that can help us fight climate change. But could those working on the solution also be contributing to the problem?   According to an audit at the University of Washington, disposable gloves, made from nitrile or latex, are a laboratory’s main contribution to landfill waste, making up around a quarter of the waste sent to the trash by scientists. Gloves contaminated with chemicals are considered hazardous waste and must be disposed of accordingly to ensure public and environmental safety. Some researchers choose to reuse gloves that are still clean after one use, but this is not always possible — gloves can get sweaty, tear, and are sometimes tricky to put on once they’ve come off. Importantly, gloves are mainly a prevention measure and do not always become contaminated, so they are thrown in the trash rather than the hazardous waste bin, ending up in a landfill. Instead, gloves could be recycled. In the last five years, the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry has diverted one million gloves — 15 metric tons of plastic — from landfill waste. The department was the first in Europe to sign up to the KIMTECH Nitrile Glove Recycling Program, also known as RightCycle, run by Kimberly Clarke Professional, a multinational consumer goods corporation, and TerraCycle, a company that specialises in recycling unconventional items. The scheme is operated not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States, with laboratories at the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Illinois, University of Texas Austin, and Purdue University signed up to the program. Between 2011 and 2017, more than 360 metric tons of waste — about 24 million gloves — were diverted from landfill because of the program. The nitrile gloves are turned into plastic granules that, after blending with other recycled plastics or being milled into a powder, form composite raw materials that can later be processed and turned into bins, garden equipment, furniture, or even rubber flooring and ground covering for sports facilities.   Tim Calder, Waste Management Officer for the University of Edinburgh’s School of Chemistry, came across the scheme when talking to a Fisher Scientific representative who mentioned the nitrile glove recycling program. Calder bought 200 collection boxes in February 2014 and notified laboratory staff that they could take one to their lab on request. Since then, when the boxes are full, they are taken down to a larger collection point in the school’s stores facilities, which are emptied every six to eight weeks by TerraCycle. “I was involved with sustainability at the university and looking for new opportunities,” says Calder. He believes the initiative has been successful because “the staff and students here have been happy to do their bit.”   According to a 2015 estimate, around 5.5 million tons of plastic are produced in bioscience research facilities alone every year — so why aren’t recycling programs more popular? The reason why many single-use plastic products, including laboratory gloves, are not conventionally recycled, is that doing so is not usually economically viable. Collecting and processing them through regular streams costs more than the value of the material left at the end. However, this particular recycling scheme works because TerraCycle collects a range of hard-to-replace plastics, from a variety of institutions, which are processed and then combined to make composite materials that can be processed into useful products. Participating laboratories only have to pay for the transport of the gloves to their nearest collection warehouse location. The School of Chemistry is currently the only department at the University of Edinburgh to take part in the RightCycle program, despite sharing a campus with other science facilities. Even when individuals have the initiative to adopt more sustainable practices in their labs, it is difficult to know where to start, or how to design programs that can be upheld in the long-term and will be embraced by students and staff. Each university or research institution has different protocols for how laboratory waste streams are handled, so a collective effort between building managers, laboratory staff, and department heads is crucial for the success of such initiatives. The implementation of the glove recycling scheme in current universities has often relied on the initiative of staff or students, which is often rare as researchers are often already too busy to spend their time developing sustainable policies for their departments. Institutions should instead fund a position dedicated to supervising the management of waste, someone who can liaise between their institution and recycling companies, as well as looking at how to make sustainability a priority in the department’s policies.   In fact, there are other laboratory materials that recycling programs could target: researchers go through plenty of other single-use plastic items daily, such as pipette tips, petri dishes, and vials. Currently, chemical contamination limits the amount of material that can be recycled, but future efforts should focus on finding ways to neutralise equipment contaminated with common solvents to enable their recycling. To reduce plastic waste, facilities could also look at replacing plastic equipment with reusable glassware where possible, or recycling the plastic packaging in which chemicals are purchased.   The question of sustainability in the lab goes beyond plastic waste, with increasing efforts to adopt a “circular economy” approach by recovering used solvents for reuse, sharing leftover chemicals between departments, and creating chemical management systems to ensure efficient distribution of resources. As these lab practices become more widespread, they will serve to not only minimise waste but also save funds and materials.  

Think about how much plastic you have in your home. There’s packaging from the Amazon Prime order you got yesterday, plastic shopping bags from the grocery store, yogurt tubs, ketchup bottles — and the list goes on. There’s also plenty of plastic in your body. Citing research published in Environmental Science and Technology, National Geographic reports the average person consumes 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles each year. It’s still unknown how consuming this much plastic affects our health. The world is experiencing a crisis of excess plastic waste, which the International Energy Agency estimates will double by 2030 and quadruple by 2050, according to PRI. Yes, some of it gets recycled, but a large percentage ends up in developing countries, burned, or dumped. Increasingly, we’re running out of places to put it, and the most impoverished nations are shouldering the burden of First-World countries’ excess. The good news is there are many ways to reduce our impact and use less plastic. It starts by better understanding how much plastic we actually consume and where it all goes when we’re done with it.

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

The United States leads the world in plastic consumption. According to an investigative report by The Guardian funded by The Ford Foundation, the U.S. generates 34.5 million tons of plastic each year. That’s enough to fill the Houston Astrodome 1,000 times. And National Geographic reports that each year, 18 billion pounds of this plastic flows into our oceans from coastal regions. If the trend continues, UN Environment estimates that by 2050, our ocean will contain more plastic than fish. Globally, it’s even worse. UN Environment also notes that worldwide, we produce 300 million tons of plastic waste. That’s almost the equivalent of the entire human population’s weight. It’s hard to wrap your mind around such numbers. And alarmingly, the United States is about to start producing even more plastic. According to S&P Global Platts research, also cited by PRI, plastic production is set to increase by 40% by 2028. Companies are building many of these production facilities close to the oil refineries along the U.S. Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana.

The Problem With Recycling

But plastic is easily recycled. As long as we put it in the recycle bin each week, it’s OK. It’s not like it’s ending up in a landfill — right? On the surface, this sounds like a somewhat reasonable excuse. But when you dig down just a little bit, the truth is much more sobering. The Guardian’s report found that each year, the U.S. ships hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic to developing countries for recycling. But 70% of these countries mismanage the plastic waste. The recycling process is dirty, time-consuming, and performed by locals paid a few dollars a day to hand-strip plastic waste into what’s usable and what isn’t. These countries — which include Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Senegal — have very few environmental regulations or worker protections. That means workers “recycle” our plastic in increasingly hazardous conditions. One plastic sorter The Guardian interviewed in Vietnam admits she’s afraid of breathing the air. And no one will dare drink the water there. Environmental group Gaia released a comprehensive study in April 2019. It found the people living in the countries that import our plastics are experiencing adverse effects like skyrocketing respiratory illnesses and contaminated water supplies. The photographs in The Guardian and Gaia reports are horrifying and illustrate the stark truth: The United States uses more plastic than any other country on Earth. And this excess consumption is literally ruining the lives of people in developing nations all over the world.

How to Use Less Plastic

The plastic crisis is a grim and depressing reality that affects us all. Making small changes in how we eat, shop, and live will help slow our consumption of plastic and make a big difference over time.

1. Recycle Intelligently

One big problem with recycling is what Gaia calls “aspirational recycling.” Aspirational recycling is throwing all sorts of things into the recycling bin hoping somewhere down the line someone will find a way to recycle it. These items include dirty plastic bottles and packaging, broken toys, plastic grocery bags, dirty to-go food containers, and even used diapers. Plastics labeled No. 1 and No. 2 are in highest demand for recycling. But you need to rinse the containers out before putting them in the recycle bin. And those aren’t necessarily the only plastic codes you can recycle. Make sure you know what your local municipality will accept for recycling and what they won’t. One item you can’t put in the recycle bin is plastic shopping bags. While these can be recycled, they can’t go through a typical facility’s single-stream sorter because they clog the machines. Take these bags directly to retailers for recycling. Walmart and many other large grocery store chains have collection bins at the entrance to recycle plastic shopping bags. Last, check TerraCycle to see which companies they’ve teamed up with to reuse hard-to-recycle items, like juice pouches, guitar strings, and toothpaste tubes. You can send used packaging to TerraCycle for free, and they turn it into new products like backpacks. 2. Avoid Bottled Water Bottled water is an expensive convenience, and the U.S. consumes a lot of it. Beverage Daily.com, an industry trade publication, reports we consumed 13.7 billion gallons of bottled water in 2017, a 7% increase from the year before. But CBS News reports that 7 out of every 10 plastic water bottles wind up in a landfill or incinerator. Plastic water bottles also leach microplastics, which we ingest every time we take a sip. Research from the study published in Environmental Science and Technology found that people who drink only bottled water consumed 90,000 microplastics per year, while people who drink only tap water consumed 4,000 microplastics per year. Get out of this cycle by using a reusable water bottle, ideally one made from glass or stainless steel. It’s not always easy to remember to bring water with you, especially when you’re wrangling kids or rushing off to work. Leave some extra empty water bottles in the car to fill up at a restaurant, convenience store, or water fountain. Or leave a note near the door to remind yourself to grab your water bottle.

3. Remember Your Reusable Grocery Bags

In the United States, we consume one single-use plastic shopping bag per person per day on average. That’s 365 bags per person per year. Compare that to Denmark, which consumes an average of four bags per person per year, according to National Geographic. As of 2019, only two states, California and Hawaii, have a statewide plastic shopping bag ban in place. But the movement to ban single-use bags nationwide is growing. Some cities — such as Coral Gables, Florida; Anchorage, Alaska; and Greenwich, Connecticut — have citywide bans on plastic bags. Others, such as Chicago, impose a tax of anywhere from 5 to 10 cents on each bag to discourage use. You can see a full list of which cities have banned plastic bags on Forbes. Switching to reusable bags makes a big difference in your plastic consumption. Reusable shopping bags are inexpensive, especially if you get them on Amazon, and come in a dizzying array of colors and designs. Keep them in your car or purse, and make it a habit to return them to your car or purse as soon as you’re done using them so they’re ready for next time. Or let your kids help you remember to bring reusable bags to the store. Let’s face it: Their memories are often a lot better than ours.

4. Bring Reusable Cutlery

A visit to any fast-food or fast-casual restaurant often means lots of plastic and paper waste, from plates to cutlery. Reduce this waste by bringing your own reusable items, like stainless-steel drinking straws, bamboo cutlery, and a reusable cup. Or bring a set of cutlery you already have at home. Keep your dinnerware in a small bag in your car, purse, or backpack so they’re with you when you need them most.

5. Rethink Oral Care & Beauty Products

Oral care products are hard to recycle because they’re often made from a variety of plastics. Toothpaste tubes in particular can’t be cleaned and often contain an aluminum coating. Bamboo toothbrushes have a bamboo handle, which is compostable, and nylon bristles, which aren’t. However, most plastic toothbrushes aren’t recyclable at all — unless you use Colgate brushes, which you can recycle through TerraCycle’s program. Another option is to use a Preserve toothbrush. They’re made with 100% recycled materials and come with a mailer to send your used toothbrush back to the company for recycling. Many people also use disposable razors, which are mostly plastic. However, an increasing number of companies — like Parker and Vikings — make high-quality safety razors. They’re designed to be used for years and eliminate the need for plastic razors. And that’s just a sampling of the green alternatives to disposable beauty products.

6. Try to Avoid Plastic Clamshells

Some fruits and vegetables come in plastic clamshells. These are hard to recycle because they’re made with different types of plastics. Thus, they end up in a landfill or shipped off to another country. But avoiding plastic clamshells is sometimes easier said than done. So much fresh food comes in these packages, making a visit to the produce section of the grocery store a frustrating experience. But food at farmers markets doesn’t come in clamshells. Use LocalHarvest to find one near you. You can also make different choices at the market, like buying loose fruits and veggies instead of those wrapped or bagged in plastic.

7. Use Reusable Produce Bags & Wraps

Grocery stores keep a ready supply of plastic produce bags for people to carry fresh fruits and vegetables. But why do we need them? Produce won’t get that dirty on the way home, and it gets washed before we eat it, anyway. Skip the produce bags and put fruits and vegetables right into your shopping cart. If that’s inconvenient, bring reusable produce bags, which you can buy inexpensively on Amazon. At home, try reusable food wraps made of cloth and beeswax instead of plastic wrap to store a variety of foods, from fruits and vegetables to sandwiches. They typically last a year under normal use. Read the product reviews carefully, though. There are plenty of options, but the less expensive wraps don’t always hold up well over time. Look into established brands like Bee’s Wrap.

8. Buy From Bulk Bins

Bulk bins make it easy to reduce your plastic consumption. Just bring a jar or bag and have it weighed at checkout. There are plenty of bulk grocery stores in big cities like San Francisco and New York, so finding food in bulk there is usually pretty easy. But if you live in a smaller town or rural area, finding a store with bulk bins is almost impossible. To make it easier, use the free app created by Zero Waste Home to find one near you.

9. Make Your Own Cleaning Products

Walk down the cleaning aisle at the grocery store, and you’ll see a sea of plastic. Unless you find a specialty brand that packages their product in glass bottles, avoiding plastic here is almost impossible. But it’s easy, inexpensive, and healthier to make your own cleaning products using ingredients like baking soda, vinegar, and lemons. There’s even a way to make DIY laundry detergent, which is more effective and safer than commercial brands. Store your products in glass jars — large Mason jars work well — or a reusable plastic spray bottle. And instead of using a plastic scrub brush to wash dishes, opt for cloth dish rags instead. Plastic scrub pads harbor a ridiculous amount of bacteria. Researchers found an average of 362 different varieties on the average plastic scrubby, according to a 2017 study published in Scientific Reports, and a total of over 5 trillion bugs per sponge. Cloth rags are much cleaner as long as you use a fresh one every day. If you need something with scrubbing power, opt for a cotton and wood pulp Skoy pad, which is completely biodegradable. Another easy way to reduce your plastic consumption is to use bar soap for handwashing rather than single-use liquid soap pumps. Bar soap is less expensive, and if you opt for locally made or natural soaps, they’re plastic-free.

10. Rethink Feminine Hygiene

Feminine hygiene products like pads and tampons contain a lot of plastic that can’t be recycled. However, there are now plenty of options to reduce your environmental impact dramatically. Try using reusable menstrual cups, such as the Diva Cup or Lena Cup. They last five to 10 years and save you $1,000 or more compared to buying disposable pads or tampons over the same timeframe. Make sure you find the right size for your body, though. It’s tricky if you’ve never used one before. The website Menstrual Cup Advice does nothing but reviews on menstrual cups, and they have an extensive Q&A section if you need advice on sizing. Washable reusable pads are also an option for those who don’t feel comfortable with a menstrual cup.

Final Word

Trying to reduce your plastic consumption may feel like a futile endeavor. After all, plastic is everywhere. How much of a difference can one person possibly make when it’s so prevalent in modern society? Yes, it feels overwhelming, especially when you walk into the grocery store and see plastic everywhere you look. But no change, however small, is ever wasted. And when you multiply a single change by thousands or millions of people, it really does begin to make a difference. The key is to avoid the throwaway culture that’s become so prevalent in our society. Simple steps might feel insignificant in light of the mountainous environmental problems we’re facing, but they’re not. If you need some inspiration, check out Beth Terry’s blog My Plastic Free Life. Since 2007, Terry has been blogging about her mission to avoid using plastic in her life. Her website is full of tips to avoid plastics and clever products to help you reduce your consumption. What tips can you share on how to cut down on plastic consumption?

Once Upon a Farm, the beloved kid nutrition brand that makes organic, cold-pressed baby food, smoothies and applesauce, has expanded their partnership with international recycling company TerraCycle® to offer consumers a free, easy way to recycle packaging from their entire product line.

The recycling drive, primarily at local schools but also at some community gathering points, will run through early November. Its goal is to encourage people to think critically about how much waste is produced during holidays.   JUNO BEACH — Through early November, Loggerhead Marinelife Center is offering an alternative to throwing away your Halloween candy wrappers.   The Juno Beach sea turtle rehab, research and conservation center is coordinating a wrapper recycling drive called Unwrap the Waves across 34 schools from Martin County to Miami-Dade and other drop-off points in Palm Beach County.   For the fourth year, Loggerhead staffers will collect the wrappers and send them to New Jersey-based recycling company TerraCycle, which will refashion them into school supplies and other goods.   The goal is to get people thinking critically about how much waste they create, particularly ahead of the year-end holiday season, said Lindsay French, Loggerhead’s STEM education coordinator.   “We’re trying to encourage people to reduce the waste they’re producing or buy things that have some more sustainable packaging,” French said.   Different wrappers are fine to be recycled at the drop-off points, French said. Everything from Hershey bars to Smarties, just make sure the candy is no longer inside and that it is a true candy wrapper — not packaging for snack bags, for instance, she said.   The project is particularly centered on schools, French said.   Recycling bags have already been dropped off to schools and will be collected Nov. 11, about the time the community drop-off points will stop accepting wrappers, French said.   French described it as a successful project that’s growing. Last year, Loggerhead collected more than 19,000 candy wrappers. They expect more this fall.   “By having kids collect these wrappers, they get a firsthand account of how much waste is produced in a single holiday,” French said.   Community drop-off points in Palm Beach County include: FPL’s Manatee Lagoon, Florida Atlantic University’s Pine Jog Environmental Education Center and Boca Raton’s Office of Sustainability at Gumbo Limbo Nature Center.   There also will be wrappers collected at Lion Country Safari’s Spooky Safari Halloween and Hobe Sound Nature Center’s Creepy Creature Feature, both on Saturday; Palm Beach Zoo’s Boo at the Zoo from Friday to Sunday; and at Sugar Sand Park’s Shriek Week from Thursday to Saturday.   Loggerhead Marinelife Center has published a list of participating schools on its website.  

A growing number of people have become conscious about their impact on the environment, and have begun to do things like phasing out their use of plastic bags, containers, and water bottles. But who would have thought to look at contact lenses as a contributor to pollution? Contact lenses might seem small in size, but it turns out their impact on the environment can really add up.  

Contact lens usage

  The contact lens industry is growing, with over 125 million wearers reported worldwide as of 2007. While there are several types of lenses available (dailies, monthlies, etc.), none are currently biodegradable.     However, it’s not just the lenses themselves that are thrown away. Plastic packaging and top foil, as well as plastic containers holding cleaning solution, also contribute to the waste. In 2011, a research group estimated that each pair of 100-milligram daily contact lenses came with almost four grams of plastic packaging, which were then both thrown away every day. Plastic that makes it to landfills takes up to 500 years to decompose, contributing to a surge in plastic leaching into our soil and water.  

Microplastics and the environmental and human impact of contact lenses

  With many people flushing their contacts down the drain, researchers at Arizona State University looked at what happens to the lenses in wastewater plants. They found that microbes in the facility altered the surface of the contact lenses which, in turn, caused the lenses to break down and form microplastics. Microplastics are just that – very small (less than five millimetres) pieces of plastic, that can pose a variety of problems.   For instance, marine animals can mistake microplastics for food. However, the material cannot be digested, which makes it dangerous not only for the animals themselves, but also for other animals along the food supply chain, including humans.   Microplastic particles can accumulate in the organs and tissues of animals and humans, causing immune responses (foreign body reactions and inflammations) called granulomas. A 2019 report from the World Health Organization, titled Microplastics in Drinking Water, said “if plastic emissions into the environment continue at current rates, there may be widespread risks associated with microplastics to aquatic ecosystems within a century, with potentially concurrent increases in human exposure.” They then demonstrate how living beings might be impacted by the absorption of microplastics. Researchers observed a 2% increase in bisphenol A (BPA) in mussels, a plastic that we are now accustomed to avoiding for its harmful health effects.   What’s more, microplastics can absorb toxins like pesticides and herbicides, concentrating these chemicals and moving them up the food chain as well.      

Can you recycle contact lenses?

  Although recycling programs for contact lenses and their packaging do exist (such as the ONE by ONE Recycling Program and TerraCycle), emphasis should first be on reducing waste, so that there is less need to divert so much plastic away from our water and soil.   Researchers are looking into contact lenses made of biodegradable materials such as soy, but there have been no concrete developments. What’s more, materials like soy could pose a problem for those with severe allergies.  

Contact lenses alternatives

  Glasses and contact lenses have plenty of practical drawbacks, but even if the hassles don’t bother you, the impact on the environment (as well as animal and human health) is certainly worth thinking about.  

With a wide range of procedures available, laser vision correction is a wise choice for both you and the planet. Book your free, no-obligation consultation today to learn more.

O Instituto Akatu para o Consumo Consciente fez uma conta, a partir dos dados coletados pela Abrelpe – Associação Brasileira de Empresas de Limpeza Pública e Resíduos Especiais (Abrelpe): como cada brasileiro produz mais de 1 quilo de lixo/resíduos por dia, ao se considerar uma família de quatro pessoas, que mantenha essa produção diária ao longo da vida de todos os membros da família, somente essa família ocuparia quatro apartamentos de 50 m2 lotados até o teto somente com os seus resíduos. Segundo essa mesma lógica, cinco famílias precisariam de um prédio de dez andares somente para “guardar” os seus resíduos.

Você sabia que a esponja de lavar louça é um colchão de bactérias? Por incrível que pareça, é um dos itens mais sujos da cozinha e, por isso, tem uma vida útil reduzida. O ideal é que você use a mesma esponja por apenas sete dias.

Remember when plastic straws were at the forefront of everybody’s mind a couple months ago?   Massive corporate chains left them behind in exchange for paper, hemp, or steel straws. Debates raged about whether or not eliminating them was an accessibility barrier for people who can’t lift glasses or drink from rims. There was a hashtag.   That was just one of many moments in the ongoing push to recycle, reuse, and reduce plastic. If you remember the three R’s, this concept likely isn’t new to you, but anything that can only be used once should probably not be mass-produced in today’s rapidly warming climate.   Many leaders in business and innovation have dedicated their careers to that idea, and an impressive group of them will be meeting at the Vancouver Convention Centre on the last two days of October for the 2019 Zero Waste Conference. Among them is Valerie Craig, deputy to the chief scientist and vice president of operating programs for the National Geographic Society.   “What gets public attention are the really flashy, exciting sexy things – people love to hear about the latest water bottle made from seaweed or edible utensils,” she says. “Those make great stories and demonstrate the opportunity for innovation, but they’re just scratching the surface of the problem.”   Craig will be highlighting the issue of ocean plastic — and what can potentially be done to address it — as the closing keynote presenter for the first day of the conference on Oct. 30. Ocean plastic/Shutterstock   The following day includes presentations from plastic upcycling innovators Arthur Huang of MINIWIZ and Tom Szaky of TerraCycle, as well as a panel called Plastics: A Global Challenge & Opportunity for Circularity.   The idea of a “circular economy” contrasts to our current system of a “linear economy,” which is based on creating, using, and disposing of materials. In a circular economy, resources are used as much and for as long as possible. When that’s not possible anymore, they can be reused for a different purpose in the future.   This concept is integral to the upcoming Zero Waste Conference, and equally so for the Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge started by the National Geographic Society and Sky Ocean Ventures.   Far-reaching impact of climate change/Shutterstock   The challenge was created to “source ideas from around the world about how to address plastic waste” and calls for three things: development of zero-waste packaging solutions, establishment of circular economy and zero waste business models, and support of spreading awareness about the scale of the plastics pollution problem. It will be discussed at the Zero Waste Conference, although its results will not be released until later this year.   Although Craig acknowledges that “plastics have undeniably changed our lives, and in many ways for the better,” she also emphasizes that we have “created a pollution problem of an almost unimaginable scale” with its production.   “Today, plastics have been found from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and from the sea floor to the surface,” she says. “They’re everywhere.”   Educating yourself is one of the most proactive things you can do to take climate action, and learning about it gives you what you need to take action whether you’re a creator or consumer. There are more innovators in environmentally sustainable technology and business than ever before, and their plans and ideas could be part of the movement to shape our future on this planet. Zero Waste Conference/ZWC   Pretty serious stuff, but the conference itself is your guide to the people, ideas, and actions that are having the biggest impact. Interested? Register online and take the first step towards a greener future.  

2019 Zero Waste Conference

  When: October 30 to 31, 2019 Time: Wednesday, 8:30 am to 5 pm; Thursday, 8:30 am to 1:30 pm Where: Vancouver Convention Centre East – 999 Canada Place Tickets: Available online now