Packaging You Can Eat

In future, maybe most of our food packaging will be made of waste material that we can eat. You may even consider growing your own.

Solution to plastic litters in the Philippines

According to a report by Greenpeace, Philippines is the third worst plastic polluter of oceans.

However, there is hope for change through a trash management programme developed by nonprofit, Mother Earth Foundation. The city council of San Fernando allows the poor to make a living by picking through trash from every house daily and bring it all to sell at one of its 35 waste warehouses throughout the city.

Through this new system, more than 75 percent of waste gets composted or recycled and it costs the city council about 80 percent less to manage waste, as trash trucks are no longer required to collect waste from every house.

To boost plastic recycling, Dutch designer, Dave Hakkens, provides free tutorial at Precious Plastic so that one can learn t build a machine that can shred up plastic waste so that the material can be used to make useful artifacts.



More money can be made from a finished product than from recycling, if the poor adopt this idea.

Tracking Electronic Waste

Do you want to know where electronic waste will likely end up in? 

Nonprofit organisation, Basel Action Network (BAN), working with the help of MIT Senseable City Lab, put GPS trackers on e-waste in USA and discovered that much of it ended up in Asia.  You can view the interactive map from "e-Trash Transparency Project" at the following link:

http://senseable.mit.edu/monitour-app/

BAN  issues “e-Steward” certification to recyclers who are able to handle these materials with social responsibility and use environmentally sound practices.  The idea is to keep e-waste out of landfills and to prevent electronics waste from being exported to countries with poor regulations as they can be harmful to their environment and the people put in place to work on them.

The tracking device has enabled BAN to audit recyclers they have certified.  As a result of this investigation, the “e-Steward” certification for Total Reclaim, a Seattle-based e-waste recycler, has been revoked.

That is how Dell discovered that even some of their used electronic items have been exported to Asia. Dell has a "Reconnect program", which encourages consumers to donate electronic items that they no longer use. These should have been collected, refurbished and sold at an affordable cost to those in need or "recycled responsibly" through their partnership with Goodwill Industries, a nonprofit organization. The "Reconnect program" creates green jobs and support Goodwill's efforts to help disadvantaged people and those with disabilities by providing education, training and career services. It looks like there is a loophole somewhere that Dell needs to fix.

If this bothers you, what else can you do with your used electronic devices that you plan to replace? Randy Sarafan has some ideas and you may be inspired to start a new hobby after reading his book, "62 Projects to Make with a Dead Computer: (And Other Discarded Electronics)". 

PET plastics eating bacterium

Good news!  

A team of scientists led by Dr Shosuke Yoshida from the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan, discovered a new bacterium with the ability to completely break down PET plastics in a relatively short space of time.

The scientists were able to recreate the bacterium, which has been named Ideonella sakaiensis, in the lab and have them break down the plastic to its basic building blocks: two environmentally harmless monomers called terephthalic acid and ethylene glycol.

And if you are wondering why should we care about this progress, it is obvious that you have not read about the "plastic soup" that Captain Charles Moore discovered at the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, 

Read this at Gizmag.

Self-sufficient Farming Communities

Roots Up creates self-sufficient farming communities on the Ethiopian highlands by doing away with bad farming habits, upcycling things that are readily available and recycling waste product instead of dumping them.



Let us hope that the greenhouse design that they are working on to allow them to collect water from the atmosphere will be available in the market soon.

Can we start a Zero Waste Community?

Can we start a Zero Waste Community in Malaysia?  If you are wondering what that is, this is how it is being done in USA.

The eyesore? Can raise funds.

Large discarded items are often left uncollected for a period of time.  This is in view that the municipal council have a schedule for collecting them which are often missed.  If you are living in Kajang and you would like to complain about the eyesore, you can find the list of contractors engaged by MPKj to collect them at their link to SENARAI KONTRAKTOR SAMPAH MENGIKUT ZON MPKj.

Then take a look at the list of items that can be recycled by Community Recycle for Charity (CRC) or Pertubuhan Kebajikan Masyarakat Melalui Kitar Semula (PKMMKS) for raising fund to run  charity homes or school projects.

They will send their workers to your place to collect large items, such as, furniture, electrical items, etc. Just give them a call:

Community Recycle for Charity (CRC) or 
Pertubuhan Kebajikan Masyarakat Melalui Kitar Semula (PKMMKS) 
017-3638 100 
10am to 6.00pm 
Monday to Saturday or 
email: community@crcbox.com.my

You can also go one step further by allowing CRC (Ren Ren) to allocate a recycle bin by contacting or writing to the Management Office at:

Community Recycle for Charity (CRC)
47-1, Jalan 5/2, Taman Sg. Besi Indah 
43300 Balakong, Selangor 
Tel: 03 – 8941 5959 
Fax: 03 – 8941 1959 
Email: community@crcbox.com.my 
www.crcbox.org 
www.crcbox.com.my 

What do they do with the items collected?  The items will be refurbished and sold at very affordable prices if they are not required by the charity homes.  

I think that recycling is a great way to raise funds for the projects they support, don't you? 

Broken plastic toy? Print it!

The best toy you can buy your kids is a Filabot 3D Printer.  With it, your kids will be picking up plastics waste so that they can create their own toys.  Don't like what they created?  Never mind, put it back into the Filabot to recreate.  What a great way to explore their creativity.

And no more tears or complaints that a younger sibling has broken yet another favourite plastic toy.  Go print it out, kids.  How?

Let's see.