This holiday season, many of us may be throwing dinner parties, and expecting more guests than usual on a typical Saturday night. Maybe we'll pull spare seating out of the basement, or rent chairs, fold-out tablecloths, and white linens for the evening, but the last time I checked party rental shops didn't rent light fixtures. So, the next best thing is to fashion one of our own.
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Italian architect Gianluca Soldi, who is deeply involved with environmental issues, designed the Ovetto Bin ($255) to make recycling easier and more organized, offering three segregated divisions for your different types of recycling. A friend of mine has been advocating just this sort of thing for a while now, a functional recycling bin that makes recycling not a chore but a thoughtless routine. While I'm certainly pleased with the advent of an alternative to those useless blue office bins, I'm not keen on Ovetto's looks.
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In attempting to save the environment, I think it's important to teach wee ones about recycling and other green tips at an early age. If you walk the walk and talk the talk, it will soon be second nature to your youngsters to look for a blue recycle bin or green compost can instead of searching for gnarly silver buckets all the time.
In addition to giving your tot the chore of taking out the trash or doing the dishes, encourage her to keep an eye on the household's recycling.
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Most tots I know are stringent recyclers — teaching their parents a thing or two about renewing, reusing and recycling. Suit your sweet one up in a familiar blue box full of recyclable items. Their neighborhood buddies will find the costume endearing and your wee one might be able to impart wisdom on a few fellow trick-or-treaters along the way.
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During her time at the Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands, artist Anneke Jakobs salvaged Chiquita Banana boxes and cut out their cheerful banana shapes and iconic logos. She then cleverly arranged them into chandelier form, fastening the cardboard together with cotter pins. Jakobs has made a PDF manual for re-creating her chandelier available on her website, and interested buyers can also email her for pricing.
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In the past, I've given you the lowdown on which plastics can be recycled and told you 21 surprisingly recyclable things. But aside from the question of pizza boxes, I haven't gotten around to telling you what not to recycle. We all know that recycling is important, and San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom even thinks those who fail to should be punished.
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This is the trashiest story I've ever heard. Dave Chameides is on a mission — a mission to save all of his garbage as an experiment to see exactly how much refuse one person makes in a year. This sends shivers down my clean-freak spine: his basement is lined with soda bottles, pizza boxes, Styrofoam trays, used tea bags, and plastic wrap.
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I like my Sancerre, my Sauvignon Blanc, and my Beaujolais Nouveau, and I have been known to drink wine from a box. Heck, I'll try any kind of wine you pour. When all of these bottles are finished, and I toss them into my recycling bin, their corks don't land in the trash; I've been saving my corks for a few months now to make a wine cork mirror.
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If you've recently painted your house, or have plans to, don't throw those paint cans in the trash. Despite the drips and drabs of paint that may be left on the cans, they can still be recycled. According to Benjamin Moore:
Always check your local recycling regulations, but in general, once they are dried out, they are safe to recycle in your regular recycling.Eco-stylist extraordinaire Danny Seo recently painted his house and was left with "who-knows how-much paint from Benjamin Moore's Aura Exterior line," so he did some research to find out the regulations.
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The Freecycle Network is a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement and online community, launched in 2003, made up of 4,528 groups with millions of members across the globe giving and receiving free stuff. The online tool connects people on a local level, via local groups and a local volunteer, so that neighbors can pass along their possessions. As a result of this international sharing, over 300 tons a day of good stuff is kept out of landfills.
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