Ever heard this one? “I don’t need to carry my own reusable water bottle. I’ll just recycle this disposable one later.” It might sound like a reasonable compromise, but let’s not delude ourselves here. Sure, recycling can have a green impact, but it’s important to be able to triage one supposedly green action above another. For the skeptical among you, getting lulled into the recycling catch-all can seem like an easy way to be green — or, in the case of skeptics among us, feel like you’re being green. Add to that that it can be easy to confuse greener and green, and it can become quite problematic.

Recycling vs. reuse turns out to be a matter of perception, most of the time. When you think of recycling, you might think of a shiny, efficient factory where old plastic bottles are processed and turned into new bottles at the snap of a finger; old stuff goes in, new stuff comes out, but that’s not the whole story; plastic’s chemistry, and a couple of other factors, give the reusable water bottle (and other objects with similar lifecycle designs) a big edge. In short, there’s a reason that it’s Reduce, then Reuse, then Recycle.

How Plastic Recycling Works

Let’s take a look at how plastic recycling works. First, we have to consider where the plastic bottle comes from to begin with. It should surprise no one that plastic is a petroleum product, a non-renewable resource; once the oil gets used to make that plastic, that’s pretty much all it will ever be — there’s no going back. When it comes time to recycle it, and you drop it in the blue bin and forget about it, but that’s just the beginning. Recycling involves essentially re-melting and re-casting the plastic. Though, according to the U.S. EPA, manufacturing new plastic from recycled plastic requires two-thirds of the energy used in virgin plastic manufacturing, recycled plastic isn’t often used for the same products over and over again.

But, as any chef who has ever tried to re-heat a Hollondaise sauce will tell you, the quality isn’t quite as good the second time around; the same goes for plastic. Plastic is made from a series of polymer chains — you might remember the term from high school chemistry — and those polymer chains (learn more about them from Wikipedia) often break during the heating and melting process of recycling. What does this mean to you? Plastic is often downcycled as it is recycled, leading to a lower and lower-grade product; eventually, all it’s good for is as another space hog in the landfill. And that ain’t green, no matter how you look at it.

How Reusing Plastic Bottles (and Other Stuff) Works

Contrast that with reusable water bottle model: You get one (if you prefer plastic, BPA-free, please) and haul it around with you. Enjoy bottle after bottle of fresh, clean, delicious tap water, while cosidering this number: Tap water has less than one percent of the environmental impact of bottled water. Recycling, and bottled water, and most everything else on the planet, does not exist in a vaccuum; that is to say, it is totally unreasonable to just compare the vessels and leave the contents (and everything else associated with them) out of the equation. There really are a million reasons to ditch bottled water; you can take my word for it or read all our coverage of the topic.

Back to the reusable scenario. Some of you might be saying, “Hey, come on, I reuse all my water bottles, and that’s good, right?” It’s not bad, but it comes down to a matter of design. Truly reusable water bottles — Sigg, Nalgene, whatever you like — are designed for reuse and will stand up to normal day-to-day wear and tear. Disposable water bottles are designed for just that — disposability — and, while that can be convenient, there’s a big price to pay for the convenience. And I’ll pit my two year-old Sigg against your ‘reusable’ disposable bottle any day.

Bottled water can be a little tricky to avoid entirely, but there’s no reason to use it every day, and no reason to think that you can simply recycle your way out of disposability. All of our stuff has to go somewhere, so it’s best to keep as much of it with you for as many cycles as possible.

some ideas for campaign logo…what do you think?

“To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.”

–Theodore Roosevelt, Seventh Annual Message, December 3, 1907

The California Integrated Waste Management Board promotes a Zero Waste California in partnership with local government, industry, and the public. This means managing about 93 million tons of waste generated each year by reducing waste whenever possible, promoting the management of all materials to their highest and best use, regulating the handling, processing and disposal of solid waste, and protecting public health and safety and the environment.

The main problem of using disposable utensils is that it creates unneccessary wastes that could be easily avoided. There is a need for consumers change their states of mind about taking advantage of recycling. Recycling helps reduce waste, but we must not neglect that recycling consumes energy and produces pollution at the same time. What is more, not all plastics are reclyced while most of them end up in waste or even into the Pacific Ocean.

Waste has become a world crisis but unfortunately many of us neglect. It is a relief that California ambitioned to make the state zero waste by the year of 2020. However, to be honest with, 2020 is not far away and by looking at the current state of waste management, I doubt that ambition can be reliazed in time.

Being a part of the community, I feel guilty when I see recycable and compostable materials piled up in the waste bin at San Francisco State University. It is a shame that the most educated population in the city failed to acknowledge the problem of waste management and its importance.

On top of the problems mentioned above, some of the other sub-problems of disposable utensils can be:
+ extra cost to recycle/ compost materials
+ insufficient recycle/ compost bins
+ compostable utensils increase cost

A slight change of behaviors in our daily lives, can help make the world a better place.

Tuesday, June 23rd
First Day of Class

Wednesday, June 24th
Class Discussions and Topics:
‘Formulating the Problem and Purpose Statement’

Thursday, June 25th
Class Discussions and
Review of Problem and Purpose Statements

Tuesday, June 30th
Library Research with Darlene Tong — FA141

Wednesday, July 1st- 9th
Individual Research Time

Tuesday, July 14th
Class discussion of reports reviewed on July 7th
PERT Chart aka Project Management or
Program Evaluation Review Technique
Survey’s, Questionnaires,
Hand-outs posted on iLearn:
Mid-Term Presentation Format and Parameters

Wednesday, July 15th- 16th
Individual student appointments — 20 minutes each

Tuesday, July 21st- July 23rd
‘Mid Term Report’ Due with Presentation

Tuesday, July 28th
Sign-Ups for Final Presentation

Wednesday, July 29th- August 4th
Prototype/Mock-Up Development Time

Wednesday, August 5th-11th
Final Presentation in Class including Prototypes,
Models & Mock-Ups

Wednesday, August 12th- 13th
Finalize Written Reports

Three environmental models: Toyota’s Prius factory, an electronics recycler, and a village that recycles 80 percent of its trash.

By Amelia Newcomb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the December 16, 2008 edition.

Kamikatsu, Japan – Tucked almost imperceptibly into cedar-blanketed mountains an hour’s winding drive from the nearest metropolis, Kamikatsu seems an unlikely spot for a revolution.

But try to throw even a candy wrapper away here, and it’s quickly apparent that residents are radically reshaping their relationship to the environment.

This is a town singularly focused on banishing waste – all waste – by 2020. The 2,000 people of Kamikatsu have dispensed with public trash bins. They set up a Zero Waste Academy to act as a monitor. The town dump has become a sort of outdoor filing cabinet, embracing 34 categories of trash – from batteries to fluorescent lights to bottle caps.

Kamikatsu has probably pushed the recycling ethic as far as any community in the world. But it’s just one small indicator of a national drive by Japan to position itself as a leader in the world’s urgent quest to live greener.

The momentum cuts across a broad base – from individual recycling to factory efficiency to trading in electronic trash.

Just four decades ago, this small island nation had become an environmental cautionary tale, some of its cities synonymous with the high health costs of rapid postwar industrialization.

But the strengths that propelled Japan toward economic superpowerdom – efficient manufacturing and technological refinement among them – have also helped lay the foundation for a more energy efficient and less polluting society.

Last July, Japanese hosted the G-8 summit and gave it an environmental cast, touting how their manufacturers sustained a drive for energy stinginess long after the oil shocks of the 1970s gave way to the cheap fuel and SUVs of the ’90s.

More recently, recycling efforts have burgeoned, as has progress in reducing waste in everything from cars to copy machines. And with cellphones and computers becoming obsolete at fiber optic speeds, Japan is emerging as a top competitor in what is known as urban mining – safely extracting valuable metals for industrial reuse.

“Japan has generally been better than [the US] internationally on a number of issues, including reducing electronic waste, recycling, and energy-efficiency,” says Daniel Esty, director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy in New Haven, Conn. “The region sees Japan as technological leaders, and as we move more toward understanding the technological role in making environmental progress, there’s a sense that Japan has a lot to share.”

At Toyota’s Tsutsumi assembly plant in Nagoya, Japan’s answer to Detroit, evidence of a more environmentally sensitive car industry is on display before you even walk through a door. What was once a vast, gray expanse of industrial might has come to life – literally.

Large trees – 50,000 were planted in May – dot the visitor parking lot to offer a soothing greeting, says the plant’s “sustainable initiative” manager. Insulating vines wend their way up the outside of an employee locker building. Some 22,000 square meters of ex-terior walls are coated with photocatalytic paint that, Toyota says, mirrors the ability of 2,000 poplars to absorb nitrous oxide and process oxygen.

The roof of the visitor center is a mat of grass, designed to reduce waves of heat by 3 degrees C. Solar lights dot the streets and 800-kilowatt solar panels blanket the tops of buildings. Even the red roadside flowers were genetically engineered to absorb noxious emissions and help evaporate water.

Behind Tsutsumi’s face lift lies one of the globe’s most visible bids to lighten the automobile’s carbon footprint: the Prius. Hundreds roll off gleaming Line No. 2 here every day.

Read the whole article here.

Four years ago, when Charlotte Ely found out that the United States produced enough garbage to wrap around the world six times and then reach halfway to the moon, she was determined to make SF State create something with its compost.

Now, a project spearheaded by the environmental studies alumnus, along with ECO Students and the Cesar Chavez Student Center, will blossom by adding new composting bins all throughout the student center starting April 23.

Once the bins are placed, volunteers will staff each station to demonstrate to students how to compost and recycle, said Emily Naud, the student center’s sustainable initiatives coordinator.

“Students should be educated on composting and recycling,” Naud said. “It helps students to know why they’re doing it,” adding that it gives them “incentive to help not only themselves out, but the planet as well.”

The new bins will not be the first time that SF State started composting initiatives at the student center.

When ECO Students performed a waste audit in spring 2006, Ely said the results were striking and smelly.

“We were knee-deep in the student center’s garbage, and it was mostly messy mountains of stale bagels and orange rinds, coffee grinds and paper plates, and murky stir fry, burrito innards and pizza crust mush,” Ely said in an e-mail. “Why send all this organic goodness to the landfill to emit methane — a greenhouse gas 22 times more potent than carbon dioxide — when it could be composted into a valuable soil amendment?”

ECO Students met with the student center governing board and proposed a three-part proposal for composting with food vendors, collecting in areas where students eat and utilizing compostable foodware.

In fall 2006, food vendors began to compost, leading to composting pilot stations for students, faculty and staff in spring 2007.

Further expanding its composting program, the student center added new bins to the West Plaza in spring 2008.

As of April 23, all of the student center’s compost will be collected.

“Our goal is zero waste by 2020, but hopefully before that,” Naud said.

Zero waste suggests that the entire concept of waste should be eliminated and instead be thought of as a “residual product” or simply a “potential resource,” according to Zero Waste Alliance, a non-profit promoting zero waste strategies.

Ultimately, there is a need to reduce the landfills because they cause pollution to local environments, Naud said.

“From soil and water contamination in the off-gassing of methane, peoples’ health are being negatively impacted,” she said. “Composting is a zero waste strategy aimed at protecting the environment and peoples’ health.”

Ely hopes the bins will convey a message.

“Landfills are the largest anthropogenic source of methane,” Ely said. “By diverting organics from landfills, we are helping to fight climate change.”

But the biggest challenge with having the green bins on the student center floor will be ensuring that students properly dispose of their food scraps, she said.

This is why ECO Students and volunteers will be at each bin station, according to Naud.
Anyone who would like to help monitor and educate others about the bins can e-mail Emily Naud at emilynaud@mac.com.

» E-mail Amanda Vergel de Dios @ avergel@sfsu.edu

Problem Statement
San Francisco State University‘s Cesar Chavez Student Center requires a more sustainable and eco-friendly utensil solution.

Purpose of Study
The purpose of this research was to explore a more sustainable solution for utensils waste management.

Mind boggling but beautiful, Chris Jordon depicts the state of consumerism in his work.

Recycling has become so important in our daily lives to a point that we sometimes forget the main reason behind recycling. To help save the environment we should reduce consumption and pollution but many are not aware of the importance of reducing consumption. We begin to take advantage of reclying to save time and make ourselves feel better.  Therefore, I feel that there is a need to inform and educate the public about waste management. It is a social responsibility that needs to be injected into every consumer.