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Recycling Fact and Fiction: Can You Tell the Difference?

casasugar — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:00:56 -0800

Recently, I was inspired by a Popular Mechanics article that cleared up a lot of the misinformation around recycling. Think you can spot the facts from the fiction? Then take my quiz! Source

DIY: Recycled Glass Chandelier

casasugar — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:00:19 -0800

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. With a few recycled materials and some tea lights, you can make a gorgeous, energy-efficient, glass chandelier that you may just end up hanging year-round. Make one to hang about each table, and your guests will be well-lit. Just add good food, wine, and conversation! To learn the steps,

Love It or Hate It? Ovetto Bin

casasugar — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:00:32 -0700

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. I'm sure it jives with the design elite, but I'd like to call for something that blends in with the rest of our kitchens, not one that looks like a dinosaur egg/Saarinen table fusion. I want to see something so ordinary that its aesthetics are almost an afterthought, that aims to actually get people recycling rather than win design awards in Milano.

Love It or Hate It? Ovetto Bin

Love it

Hate it

Undecided

Cool Idea: Recycled Chiquita Banana Box Chandelier

casasugar — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:00:08 -0700

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. "At the end," she says, "it's everyone's choice to spend their time or their money on something."
Source

Casa Verde: What Not to Recycle

casasugar — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:00:45 -0700

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. It's also pretty darn easy, especially if you've got a proper recycling bin system. However, tossing trash into your recycling bins can really complicate things for your local recycling crew. You'll have to check your local recycling guidelines to see what restrictions apply in your neck of the woods, but to get a general idea of what is not allowed in recycling,

Casa Quickie: Recycling Paint Cans

casasugar — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:00:08 -0700

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. This is great news!
Source

Casa Verde: From Bottle to Building

casasugar — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:00:08 -0700

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. But if cork décor isn't your style, you can still recycle natural cork, thanks to ReCork America.ReCork America takes already used and overstock corks from the wine business, and then recycles them into flooring tiles, insulation, and other products. There are several locations in California and the Pacific Northwest that are collecting used cork in their day-to-day business operations, and hopefully in the future there will be locations for public collection. Do you know of any cork collection programs in your neighborhood?
Source

Cool Idea: Freecycle

casasugar — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:00:00 -0700

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. Membership to Freecycle is free; everything posted must be free, legal, and appropriate for all ages; and navigating the groups (Yahoo! Groups) is quite easy. To give you an idea of how extensive this network is, San Francisco proper alone has 10,666 active members. Have you used Freecycle? Would you? What items in your home would you give away for free?

Cool Idea: Ample Sample

casasugar — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:30:18 -0700

Ample Sample challenges architects, interior designers, and home decorators alike to "Rethink. Reuse. Upcycle," and repurpose the carpet samples that they test for their homes and projects (and which are otherwise "destined for the dumpster") to make a design product from the carpet specimen. Creatives transform their carpet samples into design ideas, making a fixture, furnishing, or personal accessory meant for much more than a soft place to step your feet. Winning designs of annual Ample Sample contests are judged on criteria of aesthetics, purpose, ease of creation, creativity, durability, number/volume of carpet samples used, and promoted at NeoCon World’s Trade Fair 2008. I love how the contest brings attention to something oft overlooked and ignored as environmental waste. What other household items can you try to repurpose? Plastic bags? Scrabble letters? Light bulbs?
Source

Ask Casa: Can I Recycle Pizza Boxes?

casasugar — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:30:36 -0700

Hi Casa,
I know you always have recycling information on your site and was wondering if you could help me with a question. I always try to recycle when I can, but the other day when I was at the waste disposal center, I was throwing away a pizza box and a woman yelled at me for not recycling it. I was surprised. Are you supposed to throw pizza boxes in the recycle bin? Since it has cheese and sauce stuck to the bottom of the box, I always just threw it away. She made me feel bad, and now I am not sure what to do with them in the future. Thanks for any help you can send my way.

Thanks,
Liss

Hi Liss,

First of all, ugh! How rude! Perhaps it's just the Midwesterner in me, but I don't see why people can't just try to be nice and mind their own business. I'm sure that lady wasn't doing everything in her life super eco green, so I don't know why she felt she should pass judgment on yours. And in fact, if she is recycling her pizza boxes, all she's doing is contaminating her recycling pick up.

To hear the rest of my answer,

Casa Verde: Recycling Bins

casasugar — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:00:11 -0700

You can't expect yourself to recycle if you don't designate a location for your used items. Your needs may vary depending on how many people you live with and what products you buy, so I thought I'd offer you several recycling bin options for home. Unless you have a city recycling program that lets you mix recyclables, you should be separating your recycling products (paper, plastic, glass, aluminum, etc.), so you might need a
bin or basket for each type. And, if you haven't yet, get yourself a composter, and get in the habit of composting. Also, consider whether you'll be keeping your recyclables inside your house or outdoors before you buy. After you choose what recycling system works best for you, make sure you know how your curbside recycling program works, and what type of plastics it accepts. If you don't have a curbside recycling program, definitely find out where your local recycling center is, so you can drop it all off!
Source

Cool Idea: Nick De Marco's Garbage Chair

casasugar — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:30:27 -0700

Artist Nick DeMarco from California College of the Arts designed this chair for a sustainable production furniture class. His XS chair is essentially a shell that can be filled with any excessive item you have around the house — from bottles and cans to old clothes or newspapers. He wanted to draw attention to the reality of trash, and how it can be reused. The chair was presented at the ICFF in New York this month, as part of the Sustainable Design For Mass Production exhibit. While I think the project works on a conceptual level, I can't imagine even the most eco-hippie communal homes filling their living room with such furniture.

For a video of Nick describing his project,

Casa Verde: Know Your Plastics

casasugar — Fri, 30 May 2008 05:30:42 -0700

You may have noticed some numbers surrounded by chasing-arrow symbols on consumer packaging like water bottles, plastic bags, bottle caps, toys, etc. If you have, good! That's step one. But, do you know what they mean? Contrary to what you may think, these icons do not mean that the products can be recycled, or that they're made of recycled plastic; they actually identify which types of plastic a product is made of. Once you know this, you can determine if it can be recycled or not. Unfortunately, not all plastic can be recycled. Most recycling centers accept types one and two, types four and five are less commonly recycled, and types six and seven are rarely, if not virtually never, recycled. For a rundown,

Before and After: A TV Cabinet Turned Bar

casasugar — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:00:13 -0800

When a friend offered up artist Alpine Butterfly a vintage TV cabinet, she put on her DIY face and turned it into a swanky cocktail bar with a sound system. It was the first time she'd grouted, cut glass, or sewn curtains, so she used mostly recycled materials, and it turned out marvelously! She used some old pieces of MDF board for the shelves, a cigar box for the mp3 player drawer, speakers from her attic, a bathroom mirror for ornamentation, and a household wine bucket. It's really inspiring to see how much someone can do with all the junk sitting around the house. To see the transformation,

Casa Verde: 21 Surprisingly Recyclable Things

casasugar — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:34:16 -0700

Once you start recycling, it's hard to stop, and I'm always sad to throw anything in the trash. (Some of my biggest pet peeves are excessive packaging materials like peanuts and bubble-mailer envelopes.) So I was genuinely relieved to find this list of 21 things you didn't know you could recycle via Treehugger.

Some of these you may already know about, but some of them really surprised me, such as the aforementioned packing peanuts and eyeglasses. Check out the list and tell me what you think. Here are some of my most surprising finds.

Appliances: Goodwill accepts working appliances, or you can contact the Steel Recycling Institute to recycle them.
Cardboard boxes: Contact local nonprofits and women’s shelters to see if they can use them. Or, offer up used cardboard boxes at your local Freecycle.org listserv or on Craigslist.org for others who may need them for moving or storage. If your workplace collects at least 100 boxes or more each month, UsedCardboardBoxes.com accepts them for resale.

For the rest of my favorites,

DIY: Fusing Plastic Bags

casasugar — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 07:30:57 -0700

While we're fretting about what to do with our plastic grocery bags, I thought I'd throw out another recycling option for all of the crafty types out there. Etsy Labs has a great tutorial on how to fuse plastic bags into new "fabrics" that can be fashioned into tote bags (left), purses, and anything else you dream up.

What you'll make out of your fused bags is up to you — and better left to another post. But fusing the bags is easy and quick; just be sure to open a window so you're working in a well-ventilated space! For a list of what you'll need and step-by-step instructions on how to do it,

Casa Verde: Recycling Plastic Shopping Bags

casasugar — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:40:52 -0700

I try to always carry my groceries in cloth bags, but despite my best efforts, I still end up with plastic shopping bags from time to time. There are plenty of ways to reuse them — as trash can liners and dog-poo holders, for instance — but even then, the bags still end up in landfills, where they can take months to hundreds of years to break down.

The best option, of course, is not using plastic bags in the first place, but if you can't cut them out entirely, you should definitely recycle them. For a primer on what can be recycled and where to take it,

Casa Verde: Wash and Reuse Your Plastic Bags

casasugar — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:15:19 -0700

I used to give my dad a hard time about being a cheapskate because he washed and reused his Ziploc bags. But as I've become more eco-minded, I realize how wasteful it is to toss a baggie after just one use. Here are some tips on how to get more mileage out of your plastic sandwich and freezer bags.

Taking a sandwich or a snack to work every day? As long as the food is something relatively dry, such as bread, carrots, or pretzels, you should save the bag when you're done and just repack it the next day.
For wet or sticky foods, wash your plastic bag with hot water and soap at the end of the day, then allow it to dry before using it again.
The same goes for plastic freezer bags. Unless you’re storing raw chicken or something similar, storage bags rarely get so tainted that you need to toss them after one use. A little hot water, dish soap, and rinsing, and they’re ready to store something else.
To dry the bags, try stringing a mini clothesline over the kitchen sink and drying the bags upside-down with clothespins. Or, buy a rack like this Plastic Bag and Bottle Dryer ($15.95) and set it up next to your dish rack.