Give us your Clothes

Clothes are often one of the most overlooked items for recycling. Most of us either give them to our younger siblings or throw them away. If you want to put a figure to the wastage try 190,000 tons. That’s how much of clothes end in New York landfills alone. That is a shame if you think about it. Clothes can be recycled or even given away to charity.

New York City is trying to do something positive about this issue. From September of this year, 50 collection bins will be placed throughout the city in an attempt cajole the public to do something positive. The bins will be located in high traffic areas in order to achieve maximum visibility and accessibility.

NYC has called for bids from non-profit companies who are willing to come on board for a 10-15 year period. Goodwill Industries International is one of the companies that are interested in the venture. Goodwill appears to want the clothes for reselling purposes as many items are hardly damaged or require very little mending. They also appear to have methods to recycle even tattered pieces of clothing. It is expected that over half the donations will be of resalable nature, most of the rest used in the automotive industry as well as the insulation industry. What remains is projected to be only about five percent of the original volume and that is what will finally end up in a landfill.

If the project kicks off well and finds success, other states are soon set to follow NYC’s example.

Bag Company in Trouble

Biodegradable plastic bags seem to be the solution thus far for part of the plastic problem. In Australia, Goody Environment claimed to have hit upon that solution and vigorously promoted its product. Al seemed to be going well, until now.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is taking Goody Environment and its distributor NuPak to courts over false claims. The commission claims that both companies were engaged in making false representations regarding their product. Goody has responded by saying that they stand behind their product all the way. In fact they are quite confident that the courts will see things their way.

The confidence mainly stems from independent testing results as well as the Australian Standards compliance statement that they possess for the product. However, further investigation has revealed that the statement is not valid for the plastic bags. In fact Flinders University, where the tests were conducted, has stated that the tests were carried out on potato sacks produced by the company and not the plastic bags in question. The university has requested the company to remove the statement displayed on the website.

Further damning evidence was produced by a Belgian company which carried out testing on the bags. They discovered that the bags had not even begun deteriorating after 12 weeks. Going by Goody’s claims, the bag should have completely turned to compost at that point. Goody has responded to this by saying that this is all a result of a witch-hunt conducted by competitors.

The worrying factor, though, is that over 60 million bags were distributed in the country on the strength of Goody’s claims.

Deadly lead in Nigerian village

One hundred and sixty three. That is the number of lives that were lost before any action was taken to save a village from lead poisoning in Nigeria. What is worse is that children began to die of the toxic lead in January and only now is anything being done about it.

The Blacksmith Institute is an environmental engineering organization and is a global leader in cleaning up polluted sites. They were asked to casually check out the village of Dareta for toxins, which is just a collection of mud huts, when the horrific discovery was made. At the time they were engaged in cleaning up a site in Senegal. That site too was saturated with toxic lead, but only 18 people had died there due to it in the past few years.

The discovery in Dareta was so horrific that the small team that arrived there decided to stay and help clean up the land. The levels of lead found in the soil were 10,000 parts per million. Compare this to the acceptable levels of 400 parts to a million, and the severity of the issue becomes evident. The cause for the high levels has been traced to the men of the village who function as gold miners. The metal ore they bring from the mines is then crushed by the women and children. The lead that is prevalent with gold ore, then finds its way into the soil.

Currently, the institute is training the villagers on how to clear the lead. The men have been issued protective suits to help them clean up the soil. That operation consists solely of removing the topsoil, packing it into plastic bags and burying far away from the village. However, they are hampered by having to use their crude tools such as metal hoes, the impending rainy season and the complete lack of any government support.

What is even more shocking than this is that six more villages like Dareto have been identified. None of them have received any support, government or otherwise.

Good News on Waste Emissions

A Brussels based European Environment Agency (EEA) report has delivered some good news in relation to European waste emission levels. The 634 page report gives an overview of the period ranging from 1990 to 2007 and enables all interested parties to understand the situation at hand.

European waste accounts for 2.6 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions and over the seventeen year period analyzed, a thirty nine percent decrease has been achieved. Waste disposal on land was the largest contributor to emissions, but that too had fallen forty six percent in the specified period. In the EU-15, sixty five percent of greenhouse gasses emanated from waste and of that, methane emissions from stood at 1.7 percent. The UK and Germany were the biggest producers of methane at 29.1 percent and 11.8 percent, but those figures represented the biggest improvements in any of the member states. The UK achieved a fifty nine percent reduction and Germany achieved a whopping seventy seven percent in methane emission reductions.

The drive towards reducing the amount of biodegradable materials ending up in landfills by EU member states has been identified as the primary reason for the drop. The total drop in that sector stood at thirty five percent. The UK was singled out as the best nation in methane recovery, as they recovered seventy three percent of all methane produced in the country in 2007.

The report suggests that the is EU on track to achieve the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol .

Recycling Ipods and Mobile Phones

Recycling a mobile phone or any other gadget that you are no longer using is far better than just throwing it away or leaving it lying around. The first benefit, which is the most obvious, is to get some money in return for your old, unused mobile phone. The newer models will bring you more money.

Choosing to recycle your old IPod is clearly a way of helping the environment. Even if your mobile phone or other gadgets do not work, you can still recycle them as their parts can be reused. By reusing old parts, new resources and fossil fuels need not be used in order to produce brand new parts.

Recycling an old phone is similar to having it reused. In developing countries, old phones are refurbished and then sold. This is useful for those who cannot afford to buy themselves brand new mobile phones. While this method not only benefits the environment, saving it from pollution, it also helps to build a more advanced and widespread telecommunications infrastructure.

You might be one of those people who get a new phone every two years, as per your mobile phone contract. If so, then your old phone becomes a spare phone and then slowly forgotten and unused.

It is now, at this instance, that you need to find it and hand it over to a recycling service. FoneHub, is one particularly good mobile recycling service. First specify the model of your phone and then look for the quoted price of the phone you are recycling. Some websites might even ask you for an IMEI number. This is usually found under the battery.

Apart from recycling your old phone, you can also send in hands free kits, Bluetooth headsets and even travel chargers.