Tuesday Tabs

recycled glass mosaic tile

So I started blogging for today's tuesday tabs and then I got distracted by etsy and then I got distracted by researching things from 500 Days of Summer and the decoration and design and outfits and everything and then I realized I never finished Tuesdays tabs! Here are some of the links from my procrastinating:
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I think 500 Days of Summer is my new The Brothers Bloom, I'm just going to watch it over and over again.

Begin Tuesday Tabs!
If I lived in California I would be cashing in so hard on my recycling skills. It's ridiculous! If you have a party and recycle 100 aluminum cans afterwards, you get over $5! If you recycle 100 approved plastic bottles you get over $6 and if you recycle 100 glass bottles you get something in between the two. Now that's not a huge chunk of change but it's better than nothing like what we get here in Texas.

Did you know it takes as little as 30 days for a recycled glass bottle to leave your kitchen recycling bin and appear on a store shelf as a new glass container? That's amazing! and glass is 100% reyclable so you can recycle it over and over and over again and it will still look great. From about.com: Every ton of glass that is recycled saves more than a ton of the raw materials needed to create new glass, including: 1,300 pounds of sand; 410 pounds of soda ash; and 380 pounds of limestone.

Tips for when you recycle glass from the City of Austin:
Rinse your glass bottles and jars
You do not need to remove the labels
Some things to not put in the glass recycling: light bulbs, mirrors, window panes, dishes and cups, ornaments and decorations

Austin apparently lets you recycle glass in their curbside recycling, something Houston does not. I don't think it's a good idea for glass to be in the curbside program because it's so easy to break and then it becomes dangerous.

More from about.com
Glass recycling saves energy. Making new glass means heating sand and other substances to a temperature of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which requires a lot of energy and creates a lot of industrial pollution. One of the first steps in glass recycling is to crush the glass and create a product called “cullet.” Making recycled glass products from cullet consumes 40 percent less energy than making new glass from raw materials, because cullet melts at a much lower temperature.

Here are some examples of great things that can come from recycled glass:

adorable mini bowls

the outside of an entire building!

cute plates

colorful tiles

Trash Talking

Today I took out the trash! What's amazing about it is that it's the first time I've taken out the trash since I started composting. I put in a new trash bag the same day I started the composter, July 11th. So that's almost two weeks since my last trash outing! Think about how much I've reduced my landfill pollution! Exciting!! My trash bags are, of course, from the seventh generation brand:

Thunderstorms

Today there was the most amazing thunderstorm in Houston. The thunder was insane and shook the windows! The rain sounded like hail at one point and was just blowing across the street. My street flooded almost completely but by the time it stopped raining it had receded and was fine to drive on. The rain was greatly appreciated though, the Texas heat had started to take it's toll on our plants and grass. Too bad about those pesky mosquitos that come with the rain though. The polaroid is from another rainstorm we had last weekend that left the sky a radiating yellow and the clouds looked like something out of a dream, it really made me appreciate nature and the beauty of the earth. Now I'm going to carpool with some friends to a free screening of 500 Days of Summer.

Tuesday Tabs

For this Tuesdays tabs I did some research about biodegradable tableware. Here in Houston if you go to Brown Bag Deli you get a cup and straw that say they're biodegradable. The first time I saw this I was delighted but now that I've started my own compost, I wonder if those cups and straws are truly compostable? Biodegradable kitchenware is made from corn which is an amazing renewable resource, but the corn is turned into a plastic (PLA or polylactide) so how can it really be biodegradable?

Here's an article from Boston about biodegradable cups-
Biodegradable corn cups: Too good to be true?
This article says corn cups probably aren't biodegradable in your regular backyard compost but definitely in a industrial compost. The cup pictured in the article states

"This cup grew up in Blair, Nebraska. It's made entirely of corn. It's 100% compostable. It will disappear no matter what you do with it."

It's true that the cup will disappear but at what cost? If the cup is just thrown in the trash it will end up in a landfill somewhere and will decompose without oxygen and produce methane gas. Methane is the most potent of all the greenhouse gases and it contributes 25 times more to climate change than carbon dioxide. (TerraCycle)

The FAQ page for this biodegradable store says that their products will biodegrade in 30-45 days in commercial composts and a little longer in your regular old backyard compost.

I found this adorable Biodegradable party kit! I wonder how long it would take this to biodegrade in a regular backyard compost? It's a wonderful idea though. I think I might buy some cold cups for my next party, I wish they weren't made in Taiwan :/. I emailed another site about their cold cups because they didn't have any information on where they were made. If they're made in Taiwan they have to be shipped to the states and think about all that pollution it creates! Anyways, those cups would be great because even if it takes a while to biodegrade, it's a whole lot better than those blue party cups that no one ever recycles. Can you even recycle those??

July 17, 2009

A few days after I posted about the CD dilemma, Treehugger twittered about recycling CDs! It was fate!

Here's an article on how horrible CDs are for the environment.

And here are some solutions to CD recycling:
CD recycling center
Freecycle (but honestly, who wants your crappy old cds?)

Tuesday Tabs

Every Tuesday from here on out I'm going to post some links to interesting things I've found on the wonderful internet that have to do with reduce, reuse, recycle.

First up:
This might be one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. If I was creative and could draw/design I would be all about getting this. It's paint that dries just like a white board!



Second link:
I wish we had inventive people like this in Houston. Also, bigger bike lanes would be nice, bike lanes at all really! ZEBRA

God Help the Girl, she needs all the help she can get

Who doesn't love music? The right song can make you feel 100x better, not to mention kick start a killer dance party in your living room! Some of my favorite songs are sad songs that either help you through a gloomy day or that you just appreciate so much because of their beauty and sadness. I think CDs are probably some of the worst things to happen to the planet though. They're not recyclable (as far as I know) and people just throw them into the trash can to end up in a landfill somewhere where it will lay until the end of time.

The best solution for this problem is digital files. I recently bought the album God Help the Girl after reading about it in Teen Vogue while waiting for a haircut. Here's what Last.fm has to say about God Help the Girl:

God Help the Girl is a musical film written by Belle and Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch. Murdoch has already been at work on demos for the soundtrack. The soundtrack of God Help the Girl will be recorded in spring 2008, and the film is set to go into production in 2009.

Obviously a little dated but the album is amazing! The Teen Vogue review never mentioned a film but it'll be interesting to see. The songs are super cute and very Ronnettes-y. I think my favorite songs are God Help the Girl and Perfection as a Hipster.

In other CD news, instead of ending up in a landfill I'm taking all of my old CDs that I don't want anymore to half priced books and if there are any they won't take I'll give those to Good Will or something. I'm sure they can't wait to get their hands on Aqua and McMusic 11!

positive about composting!

So I decided to change my blog from something I'm not very excited about (drawing) to something I am very excited about: recycling!

compost monster!

I bought a Japanese composter online the other week and it arrived a few days ago. So far things are great, I've put all my food scraps in there and there's no smell or anything. I bought a bag of EM1 Rice Bran Bokashi which is supposed to help the compost with the smell and accelerate the decomposition I guess. Bokashi is a Japanese term meaning fermented organic matter. So maybe all my little bucket is doing is fermenting the food scraps and then I have to make a compost pile somewhere? I've already voulenteered my parents backyard for the compost burrial. Their plants will never know what hit them!

What's disturbing about this moldy bread is that it's been in the fridge since April when it expired and that's all the mold it had on it. The brown bread to the left of it is from May! and it still hasn't started molding! A little concerning...

a map of my compost pile

My naive dream is that I put food scraps in there and then a few weeks later I empty it and the food has magically turned into dirt! Realistically, in a few weeks I'll empty it and it'll be the most disgusting thing I've ever seen. Here's hoping it's somewhere in between the two.