Since I happened to be visiting
Ecojot's headquarters and designer
Carolyn Gavin was in, I decided to take the opportunity to pick out
my first Giveaway winner. I guarantee there will be many throughout the year! I wrote down all participants names, including those who emailed me entries
:) and placed them in my winter hat (known as a
toque here in Canada). Carolyn was kind enough to assist...
And the December Giveaway Winner is...
Larry, who shared the following eco-factoid:
"For every tonne of newspaper's that are recycled, 17 trees are saved."
Thanks Larry. And thank you to all participants! Please watch out, maybe even as early as tomorrow for January's chance to win. The Giveaway will be another new Ecojot product! Also, visit Carolyn's site for a second chance to win soon... She also holds monthly giveaways :D
xo,ej
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5 comments:
"waste reduction" - I read a website somewhere or other with a garbage challenge... you basically have to keep (or I believe it was actually carry around) all of your accumulated garbage for a week (maybe it was longer).
I've never tried it, as it doesn't seem practical for a non-highschool student, but the thought nags me every so often.
"carry all your accumulated garbage for a week (maybe it was longer)?" WOW, that's quite the waste reduction challenge...
i think perhaps i will make January's "challenge" simpler. i'm taking other suggestions ;)
but thanks for the comment, michael. and if you come across the website/article, please share or pass along. cheers!
This challenge is a neat idea, but I see problems.
Problem 1 is that the inconvenience posed by certain types of garbage is completely unrelated to how bad that garbage actually is in the grand scheme of things. For example, my roommate and I have a "battery bag" in which we have the last several years of our used battery output. We tried getting rid of it in a reasonable way but the city isn't cooperative in this regard and I'd feel pretty bad just throwing it out, so the bag persists somewhere. This is years of toxic waste but it's maybe a 2lbs bag and carrying it around wouldn't be an issue at all - more of a mild form of exercise. Now imagine instead carrying just several days worth of food waste you generate; the bits you cut off the veggies as you were cooking, scraps from dinner, a few apple cores, a mouldy bread end you forgot about, that thing that went bad in the back of the fridge... It'll be a huge leaky mess in no time and it will smell like something died (because it did) and you'd be reduced to sitting in an outdoor location, wafting horrid odours, because no one would let you in to an office, store, school, your own house, or any other enclosed area. And yet, the more problematic waste from the standpoint of the challenge isn't that big a deal. Ideally it'll go to compost but even if it ends up in a landfill, it will decompose fairly quickly and, if the landfill owners have some brain/initiative/gov't subsidies, the ensuing methane will be burned to power a small generator. The battery bag, meanwhile, will leach murderous acids into the ground for years to come.
Problem 2 is a different form of problem 1 - consumer waste (the stuff you'd end up carrying around in the challenge) is only part of the waste generated when your goods are made, and again, the size and shape of the things you own, or the mess that ensues when you throw them out, isn't necessarily related to how much mess is made when they're manufactured. The battery bag may only be 2lbs but if I were to carry around all the chemicals that were used to make them, I'd probably be dragging a big bucket of carcinogenic death... And so on and so forth.
Then there's plastic. It's pretty light and you can crush it, fold it, do whatever to make it okay for the challenge, but it's just not nice in the environment.
WOW, P you seriously thought about the "garbage challenge" at 2AM this morning!
:D
PS - I agree, Toronto needs to work on their battery waste collection. Have you contacted your city councilor? Also weren't the new tall (ugly) billboard-esque litter and recycling bins on the sidewalks suppose to have battery waste options?
Alright! I won, :D
Thanks to everyone, and especially this great site!
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