Eating Design from Marije Vogelzang as part of Go Slow Cafe - love the representation of food miles on the board. Source: BlackEiffel

Another tiring week of earthquakes but lots of great stuff happening locally and around the world around sustainability to keep the spirits up. Here are a few goodies we found this week:

• New Greening The Rubble website – more on this next week.
• News from the Beehive- Environmental Champions and Green Ribbon Award Winners
• NZ Herald article on a new grass turf product from company Woolgro made from old coffee sacks and sheep dags. Great reuse.
• Interesting video of a Trimaran made from recycled plastic bottles.  Similar to the sea voyager Plastiki.
• How to turn a wine bottle into a customised water carafe for home – From Re-Nest.
• 10 ways to reduce food waste at home (American but easily customisable to NZ readers) from Good USA.
• Look at this Seed Cathedral! (from BlackEiffel)
• Great recycled fashion blog and facebook page from across the ditch. Quite inspiring.
• More on Marije Vogelazang’s Go Slow cafe restaurant concept here.
• Depressing but true – our oceans are in a dire state – reported by Hot Topic. Final quote by Hot Topic: “This is a cri du coeur from the world’s ocean scientists. We ignore it at our peril…”
• And do you have your issue of the lastest Good Magazine. We love it! Brimming full of inspiring and informative editorial. Simple choices for a better life indeed.

Have a great waste free weekend and hopefully an less shakey one for Cantabs.

Les Mees Solar Farm France Source: The Guardian (Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images)

This is the first list of Friday Favourites for June – lots of interesting links to peruse over Queen’s Birthday weekend:

• Ten places to visit before they vanish with global warming.
• Fishermen being paid to “catch” plastic.
• Re-imagining recycled materials.
• Beautiful fields of…solar farms in france. This could work here.
• The Colours of Rubbish – beautiful or not?
• The new Nissan Leaf Ad – would you buy one?
• Carbon Dioxide Emissions for 2010 increased – worrying for tackling climate change – we need to do more, now.
• More on Carbon emissions here from the Guardian.
• New solution for dealing with organic waste – project funded by the Ministry for the Environment.
• New types of planters – ideas for Spring.

Source: Re-Nest

Here are some great links we have found over the past week on sustainability, waste and plastic:

• Sustainability vs. Renewability – A Love Affair
• Plastic fantastic? A great read that will give you the true long-term effects of the world’s obsession with plastic in every-day life.
• Seven basics to help you maintain sustainability
• Your chance to be part of something BIG that will educate, inspire and encourage recycling!
• Proving that reusing and recycling can be fantastically stylish: the chair made from recycled refrigerators
• DIY recycled plastic bag pendant light from Re-Nest

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.

Kate Valley Landfill (SIFT photo)

Here are some interesting tid bits we have found in the past week:

• Ministry for the Environment is funding a project to make recycled plastic into road cones.
• A nice article from ReNest on “why sustainability is boring and consuming less is not the answer“.
• Awesome video on the Good USA site on climate change from the next generation.
• Have you checked out Unpackit’s Facebook page – you can see what people are submitting as the best and worst packaging in NZ.
• New movie coming our way (soonish) called Carbon Nation.
• Could you go plastic free for a month? That’s the challenge over on the Huffington Post.
• Hot Topic discusses a new 100% Renewable Energy Report from WWF.
• Rugs made from recycled plastic straws.
• Great video showing how we are all connected – from the WWF.
• And another great video on why we need to halt CO2 emissions now (via Hot Topic).

Have a great waste free weekend.

Source: Free Fashion Challenge The Life of Clothes

February is here already! Here are a few of the interesting waste and sustainability links we have found this week for you to enjoy at the end of the first week of February.

• Got a small kitchen and not sure where to put your compost bin – ideas from Re-Nest here.
• Beth Terry from My Plastic Free Life gives a few pointers on travelling plastic free.
• How to be more organised with meal planning from Zero Waste Home.
• Biodegradable PET plastic bottle putting a spanner in the works for USA plastic bottle recyclers here.
• Reduce textile waste by having a Mend It party
• Ted Talk from Eben Bayer who has invented a new type of packaging made from mushrooms.
• Lots from the Beehive recently:

1. Green Growth Fund initiative announced.
2. New Clean Air goal posts.
3. The BlueGreens Key note speech from the Hon. Dr. Nick Smith last weekend in Akaroa.
4. Public input requested for new National Policy Statement on Biodiversity

Have a great waste free weekend. Are you trying anything new to reduce your waste this weekend?

Plasback Scheme Mgr Chris Hartshorne & Agpac GM Chris Dawson

Earlier in the week Plasback’s Chris Hartshorne (of the Agpac/Plasback project that SIFT funded – more here and here for the blog post on the TV3 story) announced that they have exported 30 tonnes of plastic resin to Australia and Korea. This plastic resin is made up of the on-farm waste plastics that they have collected, such as used baleage wrap.

Chris Hartshorne stated:

“Our on-farm collection service and the tonnage of waste plastic we collected grew considerably last year and we expect that trend to continue in 2011. More farmers and contractors have joined Plasback, and those who use the recycling scheme  are learning how to maximise the efficiency of the collection service and minimise their costs. Plasback is a user pays scheme. There are no expensive levies placed on manufacturers or importers as we place greater emphasis on adding value to the waste stream as this in turn supports the collections from farms”.

“The government of NZ emphasises that product stewardship is the way of the future. The means manufacturers and consumers take responsibility for the full life of the products they use. The Plasback scheme plays an important role in helping the rural sector look after the environment that they and we all depend upon.”

Congratulations to Chris and the Plasback team – this is a great win for the environment and great leap forward for Product Stewardship in New Zealand.

14012011 Agpac Media Release Plasback resin sale

In the spirit of New Year resolutions we thought we would give our individual resolutions over the next couple of weeks.

Being the General Manager I’m going first:

Scanwood utensils

My green resolution for 2011 is to continue to reduce my use of plastic in my house (and work),  most importantly single use disposable plastics, and move to other forms of packaging or products that have less of an impact on the environment (and potentially my health) and are more durable for the long term (e.g. moving from plastic cooking equipment to wood or ceramic).

We’d love to know yours.

So much so that any green resolutions that are sent through to us will go into the draw to win this great Sulo Talbot compost bin (below) that we were given as a Christmas present from the lovely people at Sulo Talbot. All green resolutions need to be sent through to us either via email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or via our Facebook or Twitter by the 31st of January 2011. Please send us your full contact details and address and your green resolution.  The winner will be drawn at random on the 1st of February and notified via email (if you let us know by Twitter or Facebook we will get in touch to get your contact details).***Please note that this competition is only open to New Zealand residents – it’s a rather large  to post out of NZ!***

We will also post all green resolutions online anonymously.

This Sulo Talbot compost bin is 31cm wide x 22cm deep x 17cm high.

Sulo Talbot Compost Bin SIFT image

Wallpapered Rubbins Bins from Re-Nest

At the close of another week here are some of the cool/interesting things we have found from around the world:

• LoveNotes – Love Notes is a New Zealand company that provides a collection service to businesses to upcycle their one-sided non confidential paper into note books. Love it!
• Children’s toys made from recycled wood and plastic from Go Green Games.
• PlanetGreen.com’s top 10 Great Green reads of the past 10 years.
• The camp in your kitchen – stackable and very practical kitchen gear from Pila.
• A new eco-index for clothing will be able to tell you the complete life cycle impact of that item of clothing. Be great to see that here.
• Re-Nest lists the 10 alternatives to plastic wrap here.
• Is one of your New Year resolutions to reduce the amount of stuff you have then check out Zoove.

Have a great waste free weekend.

Source: Re-Nest Post it Notes from Wood Waste

Welcome to the first Friday Favourites for 2011. This is a quick round up of the intersting links and tid bits we have found online from across the world and at home about sustainability, waste, recycling and how to reduce the waste that you have. From what we found this week there is a lot going on in the world already. Here are our faves for some interesting reading this weekend:

• Using “polluted wool” for natural clothing from Good USA
• This is the best Ted talk – Birke Baehr is 11 years old and wanted to know where his food came from and how the food system in the US worked. So now, instead of wanting to be an NFL player he wants to be an organic farmer. Hope for the next generation. He spoke at the TedXNEXTGENERATION talk in August last year.
• Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish has renamed and relaunched her blog as My Plastic Free Life.
• Post it style notes made from wood waste via Re-Nest
• Great low impact tips for storing holiday decorations via Re-Nest.
• Molly Eagen from the US has completed her thesis on 100 days without oil and is now doing the No Impact Project Challenge.
• A Guardian journalist takes a look at what happens to Oxfam donations in the UK.
• A great guest blog post on how to live with more simplicity on the Rowdy Kittens blog.
• Saatchi and Saatchi’s Strategy for Sustainability website takes a look at what 2011 will hold for sustainability.
• This is a bit of a gross one but interesting if you have even been to London  – The Guardian takes a look at the sewers and waste water (what does you sewer system contain?).
• Good USA asks it’s readers if they could stop using soap and shampoo for a whole year – could you? There some to be a lot of good reasons! More here.
• Owens-Illinois and Monteiths Beer are going black for their glass bottles and it’s 100% recyclable via Scoop.

Have a great waste free weekend.