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.

It’s a beautiful sunny end-of-summer day here in Christchurch (New Zealand). Back to blog posts now after concentrating on the new website. If you haven’t already go for a spin and check out what SIFT is all about. Lots of great projects that are making a difference to reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfill. We also have a few projects in the pipeline we are really excited about.

The deadline for the government’s Waste Minimisation Fund is 5pm on Monday. If you miss out and have a project focussed on Canterbury  try applying to SIFT.

In the meantime here are the favourite links we have found from around the world:

• Love this great Hermon Miller blog called Lifework on life in offices and working spaces. Did you know the super comfy Herman Miller Aeron Chair is 94% recyclable and made from 64% manufactured from recycled content.
• Over at Fake Plastic Fish Beth contemplates matches or lighters in her quest for zero plastic living.
• The Dancing Guy over on Adam Werbach’s Strategy for Sustainability – are you the first, second, 10th, 100th or last person part of a movement? What will be the catalyst for more sustainable living changes?
• To reduce waste we need to live with less and many finding that less is more.
• Cool new uses for vintage suitcases – how many of those are now sitting in landfill?
• Super stylish ceiling lights made from coat hangers.
• This is what we need more of in NZ – an eco-friendly general store.
• Our favourite sustainability leader, Melissa Clark-Reynolds talking to Good Morning recently.
• Reduce waste in your kid’s lunches from Simple Organic.
• Emily Harris of Sustainability in the City, based in Auckland, has a dream that we can all help with.

That should keep you all going for a while. Have a great weekend.

Suitcase Chairs via The Violet Hours via Apartment Therapy

An often blogged about business that is taking a lead on selling products with little or no packaging is London’s Unpackaged store.  Set up in 2006 to provide a better way to sell food you can only purchase items if you bring your own refillable storage containers with you. There are some items in cans and glass that can be recycled for purcahse and we love the wooden crates and super large paper bags that contain a range of fruit and vege. They only stock products that are good for the environment. As they say on their website recycling will not be enough to reduce the amount of packaging waste that goes to landfill so we need to consume items with little or no packaging first – again it’s about reducing our consumption to reduce our waste.

Source: Unpackaged

Source: Unpackaged

Source: Unpackaged

Source: Unpackaged

For those living in Christchurch Piko (and Lyttle Piko in Lyttleton) is probably the closest wholefoods store that we have that also has a policy of bring your own refillable containers. Last year they celebrated their 30th birthday and are now a favourite of many who live sustainably. As well as great bulk produce (some organic) they have a great range of seeds (for growing your own produce – no packaging), fair trade goodies and organic goods. There is some packaging but most can be recycled. If you need to use a bag they have brown paper bags which can go straight in the compost.

Keep a look out for other ways to shop with less packaging – visit farmer’s markets, fruit and vege stores that package in old cardboard boxes, grow/make your own, reusable bags for the supermarket (especially reuse those plastic bulk bin bags) and recycle what packaging you do get. And for businesses – start looking at the amount of packaging you produce for your product (or service) and think of ways to reduce or provide packaging that can be recycled (or returned to you for recycling as part of a Product Stewardship scheme) or better yet – can you do without packaging?

Reduce First, Reuse Second, Recycle Third and then only landfill if you really have to.

Catherine Gibson - SIFT's bookeeper

This weeks Green Collar Job Q&A is with Catherine Gibson who assists SIFT in what it does by keeping the books and accounts in order. Thanks Catherine!

1. What do you do to live more sustainably (with a low impact) in your life?

Recycle, recycle, recycle! Walk when I can and have a vegetable garden.

2. How do you live more sustainably at work?

Recycle and bring lunch from home.

3. What do you think is the biggest environmental issue we need to deal with in Christchurch/New Zealand?

Pollution, waste and hazardous substances.

4. What makes you smile?

Puppies and babies.

5. What is your biggest pet peeve?

Arrogant drivers.

6. What is your favourite colour and why?

Purple – it’s rich, royal and wise.

7. Do you have a favourite place in the world? Describe why?

South Bay, Kaikoura – my sanctuary.

8. What’s your connection to Sift?

I’m the keeper of the books.

9. Do you remember your favourite teacher and why they were your favourite?

Miss Thompson – she was pretty, kind & smart!

10. What do you want to leave behind?

Four awesome adult children impacting their world!

11. What do you think the future will bring?

Too much to put into a sentence.

12. Who is someone you really admire and why?

Nelson Mandela – he had the faith to believe when it seemed hope was lost.

13. What is happening outside your window right now?

The moon is rising.

14. What is your favourite breakfast?

Muesli, fruit and yoghurt.

15. What is the best piece of advice you can give us?

Always be true to what you believe and know to be right.

RecycleNow.org Cardboard Christmas Tree

Merry Christmas to all who have been reading our blog posts for the past few months. Have a wonderful Christmas break what ever you end up doing and don’t forget to be conscious about the waste you will be producing (reduce, reuse, recycle). We are looking forward to relaxing in the Summer weather and recharging for a super busy 2010. We have lots of plans and projects in place to continue reducing the amount of waste that goes to Canterbury’s landfills and look forward to sharing the successes and challenges here.

We will be signing off from the blog for a few weeks and won’t be back in the office till the 18th of January.

Until then Merry Christmas and all the best for a sustainable 2010.