No Plans This Weekend?
Join Recology San Mateo County at two fun-filled free events! Saturday, October 2nd at the first annual Port of Redwood City PortFest and on Sunday, October 3rd at the 8th Annual Save the Music Festival at Twin Pines Park in Belmont.
Saturday, October 2nd
The first annual Port of Redwood City PortFest will be held at the Port of Redwood City Marina. It will kickoff with a pancake breakfast at the Sequoia Yacht Club from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., with other public activities starting about 10:30 a.m.
Event admission, entertainment and parking are free to the public. Food, beverage, and arts and crafts vendors will have goods available for sale. Attractions include:
- A kick-off pancake breakfast at the Sequoia Yacht Club.
- Public dockside tours of a new high-speed ferry boat, the kind that likely will be used in the future for port ferry service.
- An Oktoberfest Bier Garden featuring German beers.
- Musical groups/bands.
- Marine Science Institute – harbor tours aboard their vessel, the Brownlee.
- Arts/crafts vendors.
- Food vendors.
- Historical presentations.
- Children’s activities.
- “Learn About the Working Waterfront” bus tours of Port businesses.
Click here for more information.
Sunday, October 3rd
Whether it’s Bach, The Rolling Stones, or a lullaby, each of us is moved by music. In 2003, School-Force created the Save the Music Festival to bring the community together and help preserve music enrichment programs in our local public schools. Since its inception, the Save the Music Festival has raised more than $400,000 through corporate sponsorships and community participation, funds that have been used to retain music teachers, develop music curriculum, and purchase music instruments. The results speak for themselves, with award-winning band and choir programs! Admission to the festival is free.
A donation of $5/adult and $2/child or senior is encouraged to offset festival expenses & ensure that every possible dollar goes to our schools.
Click here for more information.
Disposable Coffee Cups: From Your Lips to the Landfill
People sometimes complain that recycling is not only too hard, but also too expensive, and that it’s better to just throw things “away”.
Photo by Per Ola Wiberg
A few weeks ago, I read ”Coffee-cup recycling brims with obstacles“ about how our national obsession with coffee results in 3 billion Starbucks-branded paper cups going to the landfill each year. The author explains that although compostable cups won’t turn to goop in your hands anymore when filled with coffee, they’re still ($0.07) more expensive than the alternative. Starbucks would probably pass on the cost of the more expensive compostable cup to the consumer, thereby making the $2.51 Tall Latte more like $2.58. Seriously, can you imagine paying $2.58 for your cup of Joe on your way to work while you fill up your tank with $3/gal gas? I started to wonder if it was any use making compostable products at all. Nonetheless, a compostable coffee cup would mean that at least we can reuse the fibers in the cup as something beneficial–like compost–from which plants and trees can grow.
Then I happened to hear Governor Schwarzenegger’s speech last night on the recently-contentious California Assembly Bill AB32, and something clicked. Climate change legislation in California is not about crippling the economy, but about creating incentives for entrepreneurship, innovation, and positive alternatives to our dependence on foreign oil. It’s about seeing climate change, and its economics in its entirety.
Similarly, although the mint.com article, “Trashonomics,” paints a gross and inaccurate picture about the economics of the garbage industry, it does highlight our problem: we throw good money into a pit in the ground. It’s not just about how many green collar jobs are created by recycling.
So here we are. On the one hand, it’s too expensive to add an additional $0.07 per cup to our daily, designer coffee habit, and other hand, it’s not too expensive to deplete our national coffers and natural resources by sending good, reusable material into the landfill.
Is it too expensive to throw money away by land filling our bad, disposable, single-use habits yet?
Salsa this Sunday! Recology San Mateo County Style
Join Recology San Mateo County this Saturday at Redwood City’s 3rd Annual Salsa Festival!
Redwood City’s Salsa Festival guarantees a fun-filled day of tongue-tingling salsa, great activities, music, entertainment, food, beverages, and a wonderful time for the entire family from noon until 8 pm.
Saturday, September 25
12-8pm
Downtown Redwood City
Working to Recologize!(TM) San Francisco
Last Saturday morning, September 18th, 156 sleepy volunteers made their way through the streets of San Francisco to the Bayview Hunters Point YMCA. Together, they painted the building’s new second and third story hallways, bathrooms, classrooms, and gym, created a garden, painted a mural, and cleaned. The majority of volunteers were Recology Sunset Scavanger, Recology Golden Gate, and Recology San Francisco employee-owners and friends, and some Recology employee-owners traveled from Sacramento and beyond to arrive at the Y by 8AM.
Recology employee owner Ron Walton deserves a big thank you, having contributed no less than 60 hours of his personal time to organizing and leading this event.
The Bayview Hunters Point Y was founded in 1997 and now provides services to 6,000 people, including low-cost programs for youth in a safe, clean, and newly rennovated environment. The three-story, 37,000 sq. foot property has a gymnasium, stage, dance studio, outdoor play area, resurfaced parking lot, computer center, and fitness room.
The big Saturday morning turnout clearly demonstrates Recology’s commitment and desire to support our Recycle Central(TM) facility neighborhood, and one of the communities we serve.
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Growing Reams of Recovered Paper
The American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA) published a paper in May of this year saying that 2.6 million tons of recovered paper, or 7.1% more than last year, was consumed by the U.S. industries. As a country we are also exporting and importing more recovered paper. In other words, we are finally getting the idea that buying recycled paper’s a good thing! It also means that more and more paper is being diverted from landfills. We are proud to be a part of that trend.
Read more about paper recycling and landfill diversion, and learn the best practices for recycling paper.
A Little Recognition is A-OK
Last year, Recology’s corporate office was awarded LEED Gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) award came with the construction of the corporate office.
So, what exactly is LEED certification? The USGBC’s website states that
LEED is a third-party certification program and the nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high-performance green buildings. LEED gives building owners and operators the tools they need to have an immediate and measurable impact on their buildings’ performance. LEED promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health: sustainable site development, water savings, energy efficiency, materials selection and indoor environmental quality.
What’s great about this? Well, among other things, it’s a little recognition of the continuous efforts made by each and every Recology employee towards making a sustainable planet. It’s visible proof of what can be done with recycled and recovered material. It’s proof that we continue to lead the industry, with waste companies following our example. And finally, we are are proud of having achieved that status, since we have practiced resource recovery for other 15 years.
560,000 Tons to Go…
This week San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom took time out to commend some of the 1,000+ Recology employees in San Francisco that helped acheive the 77% diversion rate for the city in 2009.
In a press release dated August 27th, the Mayor’s office explained that the 77% diversion rate for the city sets a new record in the United States. 1.6 million tons that would have gone to a landfill were instead recycled, composted, reused or donated.
The other 560,000 tons of “garbage” that was generated by San Francisco’s residents and tourists went to a landfil in 2009. That’s quite a lot of material, which is why cultivating the right habits and educating others about landfill diversion is so important.
Congratulations to Recology Sunset Scavanger, Recology Golden Gate, and Recology San Francisco for bringing us a little closer to the goal of zero waste!
Your CartSMART Starter Kit
When Recology San Mateo County residential customers get their new CartSMART carts, be sure to remove and read the information kit attached to the Garbage Cart.
Your CartSMART starter kit provides information on what to do with the new and how to get rid of the old!
Reuse, the Forgotten R
We all know that there’s a great, cruical step after purchasing a product, and that is reusing it. It definitely beats just tossing another thing into the landfill.
Photo by Marcus Q
For the sake of clarification the definition of reuse is to lengthen the life of a product and recycle is to reprocess an item into a new material for use in a new product. Recycling materials saves us space in the landfills. Reusing a product not only does this but also increases the product’s life and saves us money.
It is as simple as donating your unwanted useable “trash” to a charity or thrift store, sharing tools with a neighbor, finding another use for that grocery sack and mending or repairing clothing or household items. You can purchase canteen water bottle or Tupperware that can be used hundreds and hundreds of times before they have outlived their useful lives. Also try to get a few more decent uses out of that cutting board, cheese grater, hand towel or whatever it may be, before you go out and buy that new deluxe version. On an individual level, we can take big steps to extend the lives of the products we purchase.
It is important to keep in mind that waste is not just created when consumers throw items away. Throughout the production process of any product—from extraction of raw materials to transportation to processing and manufacturing facilities to manufacture and use—waste is actually generated. So reusing items like plastic bags, boxes, clothes, toys, pots, bottles, and furniture can go a long way to reducing what is in our waste stream.
The next time you go to toss something, think, can I somehow use this again?
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