greendesigncollective/blog* » recycle

Possibly the world’s most excellent water bottle

emKem — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:48:16 +0000

Behold: the Water Bobble.

Image courtesy of Treehugger

Who among us doesn’t now feel a little tinge of guilt when we are confronted with the prospect of drinking from a disposable water bottle? At the conference I attended a few weeks ago, I went through three in three days, which made me feel awful and basically doubled my total consumption of plastic water bottles for the year thus far. But, there was no water otherwise available, and I was already dehydrated. Another thing that’s annoying is that water bottles don’t go well on planes in carry-on bags anymore, although I am usually able to make it on the plane with a reusable plastic one in the depths of my carry-on. And what about if you do have your own bottle, but the only refill options available are a number of unfamiliar taps? Frankly, I don’t care if your city has “the best water in America” – I’ve heard that from at least three places I’ve lived, and I still prefer filtered, thank you very much.

Enter the Water Bobble. The Bobble is 100% recycled and recyclable (check), BPA and phthalate-free (check), made in the US (check), good-looking (check), and at just under $10, affordable (check… wait, this thing is less than $10? Awesome!). The Bobble has internal filtering device that attaches to the external mouthpiece that provides you with clean filtered water in every drink. And yes, they are available right now!

Treehugger has a nice write-up about this product and also provides a head-to-head comparison of several self-filtering water bottles. I’m not sure which one I’ll go with, but the Water Bobble is looking pretty good to me, both for every day use and a probable addition to my recent earthquake kit project. Here’s to being water-bottle-guilt-free for the rest of the year…

Do-It-Yourself projects are good for the environment

emKem — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:29:05 +0000

Lately I’ve been on a big Discovery Channel kick (it’s hard NOT to watch when Bear Grylls is on the TV), and I wanted to briefly mention one of their partner companies, called Planet Green. Hopefully many of you have the Planet Green channel on your cable because it is full of great environmentally friendly-programming, like a show with my favorite “green” celebrity Ed Begley, Jr (who is busy helping Penn State with their Solar Decathalon house). Also I wanted to point out a page on the Planet Green Web site that could be a great resource for people: it talks all about green DIY projects. Green do-it-yourself projects can range from home maintenance to creating something from recycled materials. In fact, if you take a used material and make it into something better, you are “upcycling” – aka, you are increasing the value of the material from what it used to be. Last Christmas, my best friend took about 30 plastic bags from the grocery store, cut them into strips, made a “yarn” out of the strips, and knitted a wine bottle carrier for me. Talk about upcycling! Those plastic bags have never looked so good!

Plastic bag-woven wine bottle carrier!

I’d like to think that the t-shirt quilt that I’m trying to make is upcycling, but as with many sewing projects for me, it’s turning out to be hairier than I initially thought. You see, I already had this fleece blanket from IKEA, so I thought I would size the patches that I cut out from the t-shirts to fit the blanket, and everything would be great. Except that the tag for the blanket said that it was 51″ x 67″ – which I trusted – and as it turns out, it’s closer to 51″ by about 56″. And this is a problem because I sized the patches to fill the blanket along 60″ of length! So I’m going to have to sew the patches about an inch short each. Three cheers for improvisation!

T-shirts pre-cutting

T-shirts after I've cut out the good bits

Patches after they've been ironed onto stabilizer backing and laying them out onto the blanket

If you know me, you’ve probably seen one of these t-shirts before… or perhaps you’ve even given one of them to me! The point of this exercise is, they’ve outgrown their usefulness in my wardrobe but they all mean something to me, and I wanted to hang on to them without having a large pile of unused t-shirts in my closet. So I am putting them all in one place, and the scraps are being donated to either the rag or recycling piles.

Anyway, here’s to DIY projects and keeping something else out of the wastestream! (And if anyone has any t-shirt quilt suggestions for me, by all means post them below, I could probably use the help…)

How do you recycle a car?

emKem — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:38:20 +0000

Tucked away in Wednesday’s edition of All Things Considered on NPR was a short bit where they discussed listener letters, and they answered one letter that was sent in after a report on the Federal Government’s “Cash for Clunkers” program. Specifically the listener wanted to know “what happens to the ‘clunker’ after it is turned in and junked?” Well, I never would have guessed that you could recycle cars this way, but essentially the vehicle is stripped down for parts; it then goes to a special handling facility where it is flattened; and finally, it is sent into a “car shredder”, which shreds it into hundreds of fist-size pieces of metal, plastic, and wood (if applicable). Much of the metal is actually sorted out and reused, but some bits of it, like the plastic, end up in a landfill. Still, it’s good to know that this metal is making it back into the manufacturing cycle! Listen to the story here for all the details.

What is home?

emKem — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:27:27 +0000

I just got done moving out of an apartment in Downtown Los Angeles that I occupied for two years. I managed to purge about 80% of my furniture and at least 50% of my stuff. A long and exhausting struggle to move my remaining belongings into storage really made me start to think about why I’m so attached to all of these items. I am beginning to envy the types of people that can move freely from place to place with little more than a couple of suitcases. We might all know someone like this but I think you’ll agree with me when I say they are a minority, at least in the United States.

Still though, as I leave another apartment behind and go in search of where I belong, I have to wonder what constitutes “home” for me. Sure, there will always be my “hometown”, but there are so many different ways to regard home. If home is where the heart is, then I must say my home is everywhere I have a friend or loved one. And although I placed such a strong value on the goods I ended up keeping, they do not make a home. Hopefully they will make it more interesting though, whenever I decide to settle down.

But, what does “home” mean to you?