Transglass Bottles via This Is Glamourous

Yesterday at the SIFT July Board Meeting the Trustees voted in a new trustee. We welcomed Dairne Poole to the team which now brings the trustee numbers up to 5. Hopefully, in the near future we will do a little post on her and her thoughts for SIFT but for the moment we welcome her as a great new addition to help SIFT achieve its objectives.

Here are a few cool links we have found this week:

• Gorgeous re-designed glass bottles from Transglass via ThisIsGlamorous.
• Love these simple yet stylish reusable food storage systems via ReNest.
• The MfE announced that it will be funding a $700,000 grant for Envirocomp (nappy composting) through the Waste Minimisation Fund to develop a plant in Wellington – go Envirocomp!
• Heard of Poetry Bombing? Check out this great video of a poetry bomber in Miami, USA via Good USA.
• Another bit of stylish design – this time a flat pack DIY beehive (via ReNest).
• Slow Living Essentials looks into Sow.Give.Grow-  leaving packets of seeds around the neighbourhood/city for people to take – great idea for expanding and growing the use of own-grown food. More here.

Have a great waste free weekend.

Image found via trademe

Why don’t we bring back the glass bottle for milk and other liquid drinks? They can be reused over and over and recycled many times unlike plastic which has potential health issues with leaching chemicals and definite resource issues as plastic comes from a finite resource.

Found this article from TVNZ in 2005 on when glass milk bottles disappeared and this article on the 2010 WWF New Zealand Eco Design Competition winners – a team from Massey University with ‘No Frills, Just Refills’ . A great idea for refill stations in supermarkets.

Don’t forget to check out UnPackit and send in your ideas for best and worst packaging from NZ.

O-I is a big company. Huge in fact. It is the leading manufacturer of glass products in the World. With 22,000 employees across 21 countries, it’s scope covers the majority of the globe.

The glass products have been designed for the food and beverage industry – to maintain the purity and flavour of the product within. The success of the company since it formed in 1903 has largely been credited to the fact that the Owens’ invented the automatic bottlemaking machine. This meant that production could increase and bottles of all shapes and capacity could be made. Something as simple as  the shape of a bottle has so intricately worked its way into marketing, think Coca Cola, perfume, cosmetics – the shape of the packaging is almost as important and symbolic as the contents.

O-I have taken some leading steps in sustainability and resource responsibility as well. The company responded to the pressure that was being placed on the manufacturing industry to report on the life cycle of products. So O-I started the Life Cycle Assessment that demonstrated exactly what occurred from he extraction of raw materials to the reuse or recycling of the container. As with all LCA studies, O-I could then calculate the carbon emissions generated by each phase in a product’s life cycle.

This is the first assessment process in the industry that reports stage by stage carbon impacts – as there is little regulation requiring companies to fully report emissions.

The major achievement of the O-I life cycle assessment is that it takes into account  remainder of the product’s life cycle – the transportation of finished products to distributors and retailers, use by consumers and reuse, recycling or disposal of material.

The benefits of having a life cycle assessment, is that O-I can now amend any practices at any given production or distribution phase – therefore making each phase far more efficient and environmentally friendly. For example, by establishing that recycling glass uses less energy than producing glass from raw materials, O-I was able to generate enough savings to completely offset the emissions produced by our finished goods transportation.

To read more about Owens Illinois, visit the website here.

Last week I posted about reducing waste to landfill through better work waste management systems and asked our readers to send in their new/innovative/creative waste management systems in their offices. My sister-in law happened across the blog post (cos’ she follows us on Twitter here too) and sent in the above photos and the following comment:

“At my workplace we have recently implemented a strategy which Crown Research Institutes have been doing for a while. In your office you get a large cardboard tray for recycling and a tiny wee box for rubbish. Then you have to empty these yourselves at one of the depots. Unfortunately we don’t currently have a strategy for organics, so the depots only have landfill, glass/plastic, and paper/cardboard. The cleaners no longer empty bins in our offices and only empty these larger communal bins.”

Thanks Nicola. This is a great example of in-office waste managment.

First thing last Tuesday morning I arrived at the CCC2 Materials Recovery Facility in Parkhouse Road. The sky was super dark and it was really cold (arrived in a hail storm) but the tour of the massive recyclables sorting machine was still very informative (the MRF machine is housed in a 4000 square metre building). The photos are not the best due to the bad light but it gives you an idea. It was put in place about 15 months ago and can process all of Christchurch, Selwyn and Waimak’s recyclables. Each stage of the machine does a different process and there is still some hand sorting in some areas (like pulling out clothes, floppy plastic and in one case a toy plastic gun!). Clothes are the biggest contaminant of recyclable bins – we as yet have no facility to recycle textiles and fabrics.

A basic run down  is that all of the trucks come in to the park and dump the recyclables that have come from the yellow bins into a big pile at one end. This is then scooped up and placed on a movable floor. At different points there are different types of screens and separators so that different types of waste drop down onto another conveyer to go into their respecitive piles and there are even magnets to pull out the metals. Small items like bits of glass also drop down into their own conveyer belt and there is a large glass pile at the end of the process. This glass is used for such things as grit blasting and filtration systems. Nearly at the end of the process there is an optical sorter  that can determine the different types of plastic (HDPE, PET etc) through the use of infared scanning and group them so they are separated (making it easier to on-sell) and then right at the end is the baler to bale up all of the different types of wastes (for local and international recyclers).

CCC have done a great video of the whole process which shows you much better than the photos below. You can watch a video of the process here.

Here are the photos from the site visit:

Pile of Rubbish for Recovery

Pile of rubbish behind an 7ft metal wall

Rubbish moving up the conveyer belt (there were about 4 of these inclines)

Rubbish moving through the recovery sorting process

The separate glass conveyer

Looking back from the baler end of the process

A final conveyer belt

The pile of glass outside

Waimakaririr River Source: Teara.govt.nz

A productive (but rainy) week this week. As well as progressing a number of projects SIFT also spent some time meeting a some more people who work with waste and waste minimisation in Christchurch and Canterbury. Notably I met with the Solid Waste Asset Manager, Kitty Waghorn, from the Waimakariri District Council and learnt all about the waste systems in place for that district. They have two transfer stations – Southbrook and Oxford and have big plans for a new Resource Recovery Park at the Southbrook station as well as expanding into organics (they promote the use of home composting and you can pick up an EM Bokashi system from Waimakariri District Council Service Centre) and providing a recycling solution for the rural residents of the district. Southbrook transfer station includes a Resell shed which they are also looking to expand in order to reduce the amount of rubbish that is sent to Kate Valley Landfill. They will also be launching a Hazardous Waste drop off point in July. And the general outlook for waste reduction in this district is positive with an increase in the amount of recyclables being collected and a reduction in rubbish.

You can find more information on Waste and Recycling for the Waimakariri District here.

Here are the interesting links for this week:

• Trees weeping blue sap from PattersonEnvironmental – shocking dumping of Hazardous Waste in our backyard, Canterbury. It is in our backyard (IIIOB) not NIMBY!
• The desert island with a rubbish problem.
• Fake Plastic Fish takles getting rid of the small bit of plastic in the middle of the pizza – yet another unnecessary bit of plastic (we have seen these used in NZ but not sure how prevalent it is).
• More information on the Glass Packaging Forum’s newly accredited Glass Product Stewardship Scheme.
• A list of New Zealand’s top High School Environmental Champions for 2010 – no one from the South Island?
• Greenpeace’s updated Guide to Greener Electronics – big move to reduce hazardous components.

No Frills Just Refills - WWF NZ Eco-Competition Winners

It’s been rather a busy one this week. Lots of projects on the going that lets SIFT continue on its journey of being a catalyst for change in reducing how much of our waste goes here.

But, from around the world, there have come up some inspiring, interesting, informative, innovative and impactful ideas  including these:

• More ideas for reducing your disposables use from The Good Human.
• Green postcards perfect for that arty yet greeny someone.
• Hello! Glass Straws – perfect idea – no more plastic straws!  – Just don’t forget to get a little brush cleaner too!
• Excellent Life Cycle Analysis of washable versus disposable nappies.
• Making it cool – we all know that the best way to change behaviour is to make it cool – check out this video of some extreme recycling – love it!
• Make Do and Play – great new website on making do with what you have and adding a few reusable connector items for some great play time.
• Haven’t tried this yet but looks like an excellent reuse of cardboard – the cardboard laptop stand.
• Waste Art = Judith Selby Land and Richard Lang collect beach plastic and turn it into sculptures.
• A great video on Recycling bed mattresses – is this being done here in NZ anywhere?
• Millions and millions of disposable coffee cups end up in landfill each year so Starbucks is sponsoring a Betacup design competition to find a solution. We have a source that says that 4.75 million non recyclable non-biodegradable coffee cups are landfilled each year in NZ – yikes! We look forward to seeing the winning solution. Also Starbucks are planning to have only reusable or recyclable coffee cups by 2015 – good move.
• A very simple and easy to understand blog post from Simply Organic on how to make your own compost.
• Are you a knitter or crafter? Ever thought of havesting the yarn from second hand jumpers? Great post on how to here. It will save you money and have less of an impact on the environment.
• Another great Re-Nest find, Nature’s Paper. Paper made in Australia from left over wheat straw – genius idea!
• And finally the WWF New Zealand Eco-Design competition has a winner – No Frills Just Refills. A new milk bottle design for supermarkets that is 100% recyclable and reusable and with a self-service milk station (the 21st century Milk Bar?) to cut down on emissions from transportaion and production of plastic milk bottles. Plus, the design is excellent. This is the kind of innovation New Zealand needs to become more sustainable. Congratulations to the team – we would definitely buy this from our supermarket!

Source: Flick Snappy Clam

4% of all Christchurch’s waste to Kate Valley Landfill is glass – that’s 8684 tonnes in 2008/2009.

About twice that (approx 16,000 tonnes) is recycled. Currently only glass jars and bottles (brown, green and clear glass) can be recycled leaving glass items such as windows, lightbulbs, pyrex containers, medical glass, screens (pc and car) and other specialist glass items going to landfill. As well as finding more uses for the glass we do recycle we need to find solutions for the glass that goes to landfill.

You can find more information from the Glass Packaging Forum and from O-I New Zealand in Auckland, where glass goes to be recycled.

Pete Dungey Pothole Garden

Here are this weeks favourite links:

• Fall fashion week 2010 with clothing made from waste.
• Reduce plastic waste by making your own bread in 5 minutes here.
• A few more ideas on collecting household waste without plastic bags from Fake Plastic Fish.
• Ellerslie International Flower Show will have a new Sustainable garden this year.
• Glass recyling at the recent More FM winery tours with Tim Finn, Dave Dobbyn and Bic Runga.
• By 2014 British Airways planes will be run on London’s waste.
• And another great blog post from Fake Plastic Fish and carrying our own containers for food and takeaways.
• Moving to a sustainable future we need more wisdom.

In 2006 3.156 million tonnes of waste went to New Zealand landfills – that’s around 756kg per person per year. 28% of that waste is organic which could be composted at home*. The easiest and most impactful way to decrease the amount of waste that goes to landfill is to reduce our consumption. Here is a great quote from the book Living the Good Life by Linda Cockburn (2006) (a bit graphic but you get the point):

“Imaging trying to stem the flow of blood from someone with seven severed arteries using a single bandaid. That’s pretty much what our recycling efforts could be considered as. Often  people feel they are doing their bit by recycling plastic bags, glass jars and aluminium cans. There is a false sense of  ‘doing your bit’ towards the environment, when it will never staunch the flow, only marginally slow it.”

There are many ways to take action to reduce your use, some we have already talked about. We would love to know what you are doing to reduce waste to landfill.

*Statistics from the Ministry for Environment and Statistics NZ.