Final Friday Favourites for July and my last as GM of SIFT. For all future enquiries for SIFT please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

So here are the cool links that we have found in the past week:

• Update from Re-Nest blogger Landis Carey on her goal of living with less
• An idea on how to reuse old materials scraps (via Re-Nest)
• Great idea for the summer – reusing old wine bottles as water carafes – so easily and stylish (also via Re-Nest)
• Some gorgeous Furoshiki over on Frolic Blog.

Have a great waste free weekend.

A nice little Friday interlude – a video of the Johnson family from the blog Zero Waste Home (USA). Everything looks so uncluttered and simplified and achievable. It would be great to be able to take our own containers for meat, cheese and fish as Bea Johnson does to our supermarkets. We look forward to reading more about what the Johnson family do to be zero waste.

Zero Waste Home Video - click on the image to go to the site to watch

Have a read of the blog and you might some new ideas and tips to make your life one with less waste.

SIFT 2010 Christmas Tree

The 100% Recyclable and Compostable Christmas Tree

Here at the Sustainable Initiatives Fund office we enjoy getting in the Christmas spirit while implementing our core values of sustainability and minimisation of wastestreams. For these reasons, it was fitting for our office Christmas tree to be one which embodies the three R’s, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

The ‘tree’ is made from bamboo shoots and assembled with unbleached twine.  We created our own decorations by using outdated business flyers: creating stars, Christmas chain and even a little angel. The decorations were held together and hung with cotton and we added small torn calico bows and finished the look off with a tree-topping star made from old office file dividers. Through creativity we have made a 100% recyclable and compostable* Christmas tree. The finishing product was so good that it will be the face of SIFT’s 2010 Christmas card!

Let us know how you are reducing your waste this Christmas.

A couple of entrepreneurial and environmentally positive locals from Christchurch are holding the Greatest Dress Sale Ever.

The sale is to be held on Saturday 4th December from 9am – 4pm at 86 Rattray Street, Riccarton. You can either get involved as a seller, a buyer or both!

For sellers: All you need to do is register by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . In the email please include; the size of the dress, the label, the style / brief description, the price you would like the dress sold for, and the minimum you would accept for the sale of the dress. If you want to sell your pre-loved dresses, there is a simple one-off fee, with no profit taken from the sale of your items.

$5 – ONE DRESS
$10 – TWO TO FIVE DRESSES
$15 – FIVE TO TEN DRESSES
$20 – TEN TO TWENTY DRESSES

The selling fee is to be deposited into a nominated bank account (please ask them via email) then drop your sale items of this week by arrangement through e-mail or at the sale address tomorrow (27th November), between 9am and 12pm. No more sale items will be accepted after Wednesday 1st December. Following the sale you will receive an email stating which items were sold and when to pick up your earnings!

For the buyers: The dress sale is on Saturday the 4th and it starts at 9am. Like all good sales it is advised that you get in quick to get the best picks. Private changing areas will be provided. So for all the women in Christchurch, gather your mothers, sisters, daughters and girlfriends and get involved with this fantastic local opportunity to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle.

This is a fantastic opportunity for all to get together for an enjoyable day while conciously shopping for your new (old) summer dress.

Baled Alumnium Cans

Some call it lazy blogging we call it extending knowledge – sharing the cool, interesting, inspiring, good things that we come across each week that are related to sustainability, environmentally positive living, waste and anything else we think you might like.

Here are this week’s Friday Favourites:

• tips on keeping glass jars from Down to Earth
• Celsias summarises Environment Minister Nick Smith’s climate challenges speech at the Australia New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference – here.
• Know your symbols to buy consciously – from Greenpeace.
• CO2 Now’s latest monthly newsletter – the number keeps going up – it needs to start coming down!
• This is a great mockumentary on the life of the plastic bag.
• Great case study on the savings made by New Zealand Post by working with Target Sustainability (originally via WasteMinz).
• Have you bought your compostable toothbrush yet? If not, check out these from rubbishfree.co.nz.
• Great graphic on the amount of renewable energy other countries use (NZ is not there but it is about 70%) from Good (USA).
• Love this behaviour change campaign (from Toyota) for more fuel efficient driving – drive with a glass of water on your dashboard. Might try it this weekend!

Have a great waste free weekend – see you next week.

Happened on this lovely educational song by Jack Johnson. It starts about a minute and half into the video.  It’s a great little song to teach children  about Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. You can watch another version on You Tube here – it gets stuck in your head for the rest of the day! “Because three it’s the magic number… Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!”

Fashion Trade - www.countryroad.com

Following on from Olivia’s blog on the Lyttleton Harbour Festival of lights and the ‘clothing swap-o-rama-rama’, we have found out that there is another opportunity for eco-friendly fashionistas to pay it forward with their well worn duds.

Introducing the launch of Fashion Trade on 1st July, being run by Country Road in co-operation with the Red Cross. Fashion Trade is a clothing donation program that focuses on rewarding Country Road customers, and their social conscience, by giving a $10 Country Road voucher to be spent in store on any item over $50 in value, when clothes are donated to the Red Cross (must include at least one Country Road item of clothing). Country Road is an international brand with 11 stores throughout New Zealand. The clothes are going directly to the Red Cross which has 6 shops in the Canterbury region, so you can be sure that your donation is reaching people in who are in need. More information on Fashion Trade here.  Or to find out more about the work of Red Cross visit www.redcross.org.nz

Spare a thought to the effects textiles have on local landfill every year: Textiles waste accounted for 4% of all waste to landfill in the 2007/08 year, which to make more tangible  equates to approximately 126,000 tonnes. Think about every time you overfill your suitcase to go on holiday (it is about that much added to landfill per person per year).

Follow Country Road’s lead, and ask your favourite clothing retailers what they are doing to minimise the amount of textile waste that is landing in Canterbury’s landfills. As the consumers, our power is in our wallets; by preferring to spend with the brands that instill a social conscience and are actually reducing their impact on the environment, than less environmentally aware brands who are sure to follow suit.

This got us thinking of all the cool ways to reinvent your current wardrobe, or tips to reduce the amount of textile waste that is being sent to landfill.

1) Have a swapping session – (This really is one for the ladies!) – but it requires no money to change hands, just a big enough lounge to sprawl all of your no longer worn clothes, and sitting room for who ever else is invited to swap your clothes with. Beware, it can get ugly!

2) Quality over quantity. In a buy now society, sometimes it is hard to resist opening up the wallet and splurging on the current must haves. Restricting your buying to fewer, higher quality purchases, will ensure that they last beyond one winter and will take a lot longer before they reach landfill.

3) Be environmentally conscious when choosing what your clothes are made out of – We have wools from numerous animals,  bamboo, mercot, cotton and hemp to name a few, these natural fibers wear beautifully – and if you shop carefully, a lot of labels are now listing their fair trade inclusion – so you know the farmers and manufacturers are getting a just deal too. So you no longer need to buy anything with poly in the ingredients list.

4) Buy vintage and second hand. There are lots of great second hand and vintage stores around Canterbury including places like Save Mart and also online like Trademe.

Newspaper as Wallpaper from Re-Nest

Happy Friday! Here are the cool things we have come across this week:

• Recycled Coca-Cola bottles made into a chair on Re-Nest.
• What to do with old books here.
• Emily Harris from Sustainability and the City asks why we can’t opt out of receiving phone books.
• Genius technology that recycles old bricks and concrete into new bricks!
• This is what Christchurch needs – better storage facility for its bikes. Check out what the Japanese are doing.
• Buy in bulk? Here is a great idea so you can reuse your storage containers – from Re-Nest.
• The future of publishing – a great insight into the next generation on the wonderful Minimonos site. Makes us smile!
• Turn a tshirt into a scarf - great winter idea.
• Buildings made of waste here.
• Beth from Fake Plastic Fish discusses how to store food without using plastic here. It would be great to find glass or stainless steel containers suitable for food storage and like the containers Beth links to in New Zealand – we are on the hunt.

Annie Leonard and the team at Free Range Studios have done it again. A lovely little video of the Story of Plastic Bottles. One of the easiest ways to reduce plastic bottle waste is to buy a recyclable metal bottle and fill it up with water from the tap and re-fill, re-fill, re-fill. No more throwing out plastic bottles even if they get recycled.

Even though the video is aimed at the American audience it still has some excellent messages. Christchurch and Canterbury has great home grown tap water that we can use to keep us healthy and hydrated instead of imported bottled water.

You can watch the video here: Story of Bottled Water

Source: Flickr Ed's Photostream 11 Butterfly

The Sustainable Initiatives Fund Trust is a catalyst for change. We know (roughly) how much waste is generated, how much goes to landfill, what the negative environmental impacts are of that waste (leachate, toxins, global warming from methane emissions etc) and the amount of work and cultural behaviour change that is required to reduce how much waste is generated and sometimes that can be rather overwhelming and depressing. But, everyday we are reminded of those individuals, businesses and community groups who are doing good work and we are uplifted everyday by those we are helping to make the numbers better and improve the health of our environment – one step at a time, one day at a time.

Sometimes it can take a few years from the start of the relationship to the final outcome of the project. And that final outcome may just be the first step in many steps to creating a sustainable and commercially viable process that can help to significantly reduce the amount of waste that goes to Canterbury’s landfills.

It is about having a long term goal for our future – a sustainable Canterbury future where any waste generated is reused, recovered or recycled on shore first and where landfill and sending it offshore is the last resort (for all waste streams). But it will take time, patience, innovative ideas, advancement in technology, sound investment, collaboration (public and private partnerships), commitment, affecting cultural behaviour change, walking the talk, leading and being the catalyst for change. That is what SIFT is about – being a positive force for good as a social lender.

We have profiled a few businesses that are leading in waste management on our blog in the past and you can see some of the good and impactful work that we have done  here. We have a number of super exciting projects on the go at the moment that will make a difference to Canterbury’s waste and will let you all know in due course about what they are and what good they will do.

If you are looking for funding for a project that will reduce the amount of waste going to Canterbury’s landfill or have a new idea that we could help with you can apply here.

You can check out our Flickr photos here too.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.