A Frugal Town in Lithuania Erects a Christmas Tree Made from 40,000 Recycled Plastic Bottles

Okay municipalities of the world, pay attention. For a third consecutive year the city of Kaunas, Lithuania approached artist Jolanta Šmidtienė to assist with their annual holiday decorating. Recognizing the city’s somewhat dire financial state the artist challenged herself to build something that wouldn’t rely on any administrative funds set aside for the event. The result: an enormous 13-meter tall Christmas tree made from nearly 40,000 recycled green bottles and zip ties.

At night the tree is lit from the inside resulting in a glowing, translucent, emerald green spruce that’s making headlines across the country.

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source: http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2O5JeC/www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/12/christmas-tree-made-from-40000-recycled-plastic-bottles/

Grand Canyon Plastic Bottle Ban Stopped

from www.care2.com/greenliving  by Jake Richardson,  Nov 14, 2011

Depending on which you source you use, it appears administrators at the Grand Canyon National Park may have been influenced by the Coca Cola corporation to stop a proposed ban on sales of disposable plastic water bottle sales within the park. They are the largest single source of garbage in the park, according to the LA Times. 

Success in reducing plastic water bottles at another national park (Zion) occurred when free water stations were installed, so visitors can re-fill their own water bottles. The same kind of water stations were installed for visitors at the Grand Canyon and tax payer expense, but then the administrators didn’t follow through with banning disposable plastic water bottle sales. 

It appears the reason is due to the fact Coca Cola would have lost money selling Dasani to the park’s visitors, and banning disposables at the Grand Canyon could have set a precedent for doing so across the national park system. A much larger ban could have caused Coca Cola even more revenue loss, and they have donated millions to the park system. 

Disposable plastic water bottles are problematic for a number of reasons, and they need to be eliminated or reduced greatly, especially in our national and state parks,which are supposed to be natural and trash-free. “Americans use about 50 billion plastic water bottles yearly, 167 for each person. About 38 billion end up in the landfills. End-to-end they would circle the equator 217 times. Making them uses ~20 billion barrels of oil and creates more than 25 million tons of CO2,” says the Department of the Interior website. 

The proposed ban would have allowed visitors to have their own disposable plastic water bottles, but prohibited sales of them inside the park. This approach sounds like a sensible one for reducing plastic water bottle trash there – even a compromise compared to banning their presence altogether.

Even a large park vendor management company has said they want a ban on such petroleum-based plastic bottles in all national parks, “We’re of the mind that the clock is ticking on petroleum-derived plastic. There should be a biodegradable alternative. It’s bad for the earth, it’s bad for the oceans, its bad for ecosystems. This is a lose-lose proposition.” (Source: New York Times)

You can do your part by not buying water in disposable plastic water bottles – especially in national and state parks.

Students: Stop using plastic water bottles

from www.tommiemedia.com  by Geena Maharaj,  Nov 2, 2011

Would you ever pay for something that you can get for free? Many St. Thomas students and faculty are guilty of doing this every time they buy a bottle of water. According to the National Resources Defense Council and Environment 911, we are spending 10,000 times more per gallon of water and allowing 800,000 metric tons of harmful pollutants to be released into the air by buying bottled water. The product’s success is truly a marketing mystery.

Bottled water entered the market in the ‘70s. It literally was a crazy idea at the time, but bottled water companies have been incredibly lucrative due to their deceptive and false marketing lexicon. This magic water doesn’t come from a pristine landscape that’s been purified by equatorial trade winds. In fact, blog Drink Tap states that 48.7 percent of bottled water is tap water.

Still, these large multi-national companies are making billions of dollars each year. It doesn’t take much to extract the water from the ground, slap an attractive yet misleading label on the bottle and sell the product at outrageously high and competitive prices.

A taste test done by Showtime Television between tap water and bottled water that supposedly isn’t tap water illustrated that 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred the taste of tap water. These statistics put any concerns of tap water’s purity and taste to rest.

Bottled water is also severely detrimental to the environment. The production of the bottles in the U.S. used the energy equivalent of 86 million barrels of oil to produce and transport plastic water bottles in 2007. That’s enough to fuel roughly 1.5 million cars for an entire year, according to The Sonoma County Gazette. On top of that, Environment 911 said only one out of every four bottles winds up in a recycling bin. The other 75 percent can be seen in landfills and bodies of water.

One reason why people continually buy plastic bottled water is because of its obvious convenience. In this day and age, people are incessantly on the go. Bottled water can keep up with that fast-paced lifestyle. However, purchasing a reusable water bottle is the perfect alternative. You can easily fill a stainless steel water bottle with tap water from your home and carry it with you throughout the day. This reusable bottle will last for years, which will save you hundreds of dollars annually.

In addition, if you aren’t a fan of the taste of your tap water or aren’t sure of its quality, you can easily purchase a filter pitcher or install a faucet filter. These inexpensive products can remove trace chemicals and bacteria.

Plastic bottled water is no purer or tastier than tap water, but harmful to both college students’ wallets and the environment. So the next time you want to purchase bottled water, consider the already extremely wealthy water bottle companies you’re supporting. Think about the harm you’re doing to the world you and your loved ones are living in. And if those factors fail to faze you, think about the money you could save for that hot spring break trip by buying a reusable bottle instead.

Plastic water bottle-makers sued by California over green claims

from www.miamiherald.com  by Susan Carpenter, Los Angeles Times, Oct 31 2011

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris filed a lawsuit against three companies Wednesday for allegedly making false and misleading claims about their plastic water bottles' recyclability and biodegradability. The lawsuit is the first to enforce California's environmental marketing law, which makes it illegal to label a plastic food or beverage container as biodegradable because plastic takes thousands of years to break down naturally and may never do so in a landfill.

According to the lawsuit, Balance and AquaMantra plastic water bottles, marketed by ENSO Plastics in Mesa, Ariz., falsely claim the bottles are both biodegradable and recyclable. The labeling states the bottles contain a microbial additive that helps them break down in less than five years. The lawsuit says the microbial additive doesn't accelerate the breakdown process and also compromises the bottles' recyclability because the microbial additive is considered a "destructive contaminant" by the Association of Post Consumer Plastic Recyclers.

In 2008, California banned the use of the terms "biodegradable," "degradable" and "decomposable" in plastic food and beverage container labeling. California Senate Bill 567, going into effect in 2013, will expand the 2008 law to all plastic products.

An email request for comment to ENSO Plastics' public-relations department did not receive a response as of publication time.

A holiday in asia and a holiday from plastic

from smh.com.au,  by Michael Short

Tom Neal Tacker argues everyone is better off if you take a more eco-friendly approach to booking your next vacation.

There has been much coverage in recent days of Australian travellers' travails. Indonesia, a perennial favourite for budget tourists, has been central. In Bali, we have witnessed the woes of a New South Wales teenager busted for dope possession, as well as the plight of a Melbourne football identity and his family who were set upon in a nightclub. In Lombok, it has been a tale of a Newcastle nurse who suffered brain and kidney damage after unknowingly drinking a cocktail laced with methanol.

These are sad and alarming stories. They highlight the dangers of travel but they should be kept in perspective: the overwhelming majority of tourists enjoy their time away and return home happy and well.

Many of them, though, may well be returning home having inadvertently damaged the holiday destinations they visited, as well as having missed a richer cultural experience.

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Veteran traveller and writer Tom Neal Tacker is here in The Zone to enlighten people about the effects they are having on environments and communities, to encourage people to think differently about tourism and to even inspire experienced travellers and novices to change how they view and experience holidays away from home.

His overarching message is that people ought to be more informed before they leave and more considerate while they are away. He says people are not sufficiently aware of their consumer sovereignty — the power they have by selecting where and how they spend their money.

The way to exercise that power, and a key way to become informed, is to ask questions before booking transport and accommodation.

"For instance, how many other visitors will be there when I'm there? What sort of impact does the tourism industry have on this particular country or region within the country? What sort of impact does my actual travel have on not only the trip itself but on the world's environment?

"Do I really need to fly 16 hours to go somewhere where I'm only going to go to stay five days? Why would I not consider taking a trip within Australia itself by train or going by coach or even driving somewhere? We all know that as soon as you board an aircraft and you fly with however many people on board, your greenhouse gas emissions are much greater using that mode of transport than any other."

As to what people might want to check before they book, Tacker has these thoughts about what to ask travel and destination operators:

"What sort of systems do you have in place for adequate waste removal or recycling? What sort of systems do you have in place for reducing your carbon credits in terms of where you're getting your food from? Are you trying to source as locally as possible or are you shipping stuff in from the other side of the planet?"

It's a planet Tacker is, above all, urging people to explore. It's a planet, though, that lacks a system of eco-accreditation, which puts the onus even more heavily on travellers to spend time on research. If you do not have a web connection, free access is available at public libraries.

There is no simple answer to the accreditation question. A global body would be bureaucratic, lumbering and open to corruption. But so too is self-regulation, so tourists need to take responsibility. This goes well beyond the idea that one can select not to have towels and sheets laundered daily.

"That was a start. But now we're getting to the point where certain businesses — hotels, lodges in various parts of the world — are claiming a certain degree of eco-awareness or eco-co-operation simply through changing light globes in rooms. But they are still not addressing the problems of rubbish removal, recycling of waste, water usage, being water-safe, fair employment, what sort of impact they may have on the local culture and society and religious mores.

"None of these things are being taken into account, and it's very self-regulated. And it's very easy to rort a system which is on a small scale being self-regulated."

The history of public policy is replete with what politicians coyly concede to be "unintended consequences". One such consequence Tacker has discovered is that being listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site can be "the kiss of death".

Consider Vietnam's Ha Long Bay, feted for its limestone formations. Vietnamese authorities have used the listing to spruik the destination, and tourism has boomed.

"The limestone outcrops that stick up in the bay are quite stunning — as long as you do not look in the water. It has now been inundated by visitors from around the world, and there is not still the infrastructure in place to clean up after the people have left. We're talking about dozens and dozens of boats where people are just tossing their rubbish overboard . . . The water is just full of plastic bottles and plastic bags."

Plastic has become a massive problem throughout Asia, in particular, and yet the solution is simple.

Were tourists to take their own shopping bags and water bottles, it would make a huge difference. There is limited waste management and no recycling facility on Bali, for example, where the annual number of tourists exceeds the permanent population.

"If you look at most of the freshwater streams running through central Bali, there are just plastic bottles floating everywhere. There are plastic bags hanging in the trees. There is rubbish everywhere."

Read the full article at: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/happy-holidays-20111016-1lri9.html

City May Ban Plastic Water Bottles and Allow Marijuana Smoking for a Day

from santacruz.patch.com

by Brad Kava

The Santa Cruz City Council may ban the purchase of plastic water bottles by the city government, a step in the right direction toward ending the 1 billion bottles that end up in the trash each year, according to a city report.

The ordinance would forbid the purchase of single-use water bottles in city offices except for times of emergency.

It does not, however, forbid the purchase of the bottles for resale, such as at events held at parks or for use by officers in the field where no other water is available. It will hear the issue at the meeting that starts at 3 p.m.

The council will also consider allowing smoking on October 22 in San Lorenzo Park, as part of a gathering by the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, which supports the rights of terminally ill patients to smoke the green buds.

The ban will be lifted for five hours, between noon and 5 p.m. The city will also look at strengthening its ordinance requiring city services and goods to be bought locally.

Currently it spends 21 percent of its annual purchasing, or $18 million, in the area, but that is on taxable goods and is a policy that not enforceable.

An ordinance would require that all local goods receive top preference. If a nonlocal company submits the lowest bid for a service, the city would reduce the local big by 3   percent and if that is the lowest big, would award the contract to the local at full price.

Why aren’t bottles recycled? ‘People don’t want water that tastes funny’

from Crikey.com.au

by freelance journalist Nicole Gooch

Australians were urged to recycle the more than 260 million litres of bottled water they consumed last year. Yet none of those bottles were made from recycled plastic. All Australian-made water bottles — brands including Mount Franklin, Pump, Peats Ridge or Cool Ridge — are manufactured entirely with virgin plastic, or PET, from non-renewable oil and gas. Australia’s PET bottle recycling technology causes recycled plastic to degrade and leach acetaldehyde, an organic chemical compound, into the bottles. Only bottles of Coke and other carbonated soft drinks contain recycled PET as their strong taste can mask the acetaldehyde. And even then, soft drink bottles only contain a limited amount of recycled plastic because of marketing specifications. Most Australian plastic bottles are manufactured by Visy, which has a 70% share of the Australian bottled water market. It also owns the country’s only food-grade PET bottle recycling factory in Australia. Tony Gray, public affairs manager for Visy, said in an email although acetaldehyde leaching has “no known health effects”, it leaves a noticeable “sweet taint” in bottled water. While that taint is not detected in soft drinks, Gray said: “PET customers set very low acetaldehyde acceptance levels for their water products.” Coca Cola Amatil spokesperson Emma Peacock told the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism in an email that although CCA’s PET plastic bottles contain anywhere between 15-30% recycled PET depending on availability, quality and suppliers, water bottles do not. “The only exception to this is our bottled water products which do not currently contain any recycled PET,” she said, due to tainting issues associated with recycled PET and the level of clarity required for bottled water. CCA controls 42% of Australia’s bottled water market. Visy’s recycling plant manager Phil Jones says while the PET plastic recycled at his factory in Sydney’s western suburb of Prestons is heated at high temperature three times during the breakdown process to meet food-grade standards, this process also increased the amount of acetaldehyde leaching beyond levels specified for bottled water. “The main reason why we are not using recycled content in water bottles at the moment is technology, as simple as that,” said Jones. The factory was built 10 years ago, which means it produces levels of acetaldehyde that are “right on the borderline of being acceptable”. “People don’t want water that tastes funny,” said Jones. New technology is widely available in Europe that is known to reduce the heat cycle and therefore reduce acetaldehyde levels, and 100% recycled water bottles are currently sold in limited amounts in the UK, the United States, Mexico and Canada. But Jones said more money and a big enough market demand in Australia are needed to “justify the outlay”. “Making a recycled bottle at the moment in Australia is more expensive than buying virgin material, and that’s purely because of the volumes of virgin material that is being produced to supply the Chinese market for fibre,” Jones said. Visy’s PET bottle-recycling factory receives an “in-feed” of 900 tonnes of used PET bottles every month, collected from domestic curbside and commercial/ industrial waste. From this they produce 700 tonnes of recycled PET resin pellets, most of which are suitable for food packaging. While the majority of this total in-feed comes from NSW and Queensland, 25% comes from South Australia, which has been operating a successful container deposit program for 30 years. On the other hand, none of it comes from Western Australia or from Visy’s material recycling facility in Springvale, Victoria. PET collected in these parts of Australia gets sent directly to China for recycling, said Jones. “It’s cheaper to put material on a boat and send it to China than it is to put it on a truck and send it to Sydney,” he said. Caught up among the 900 tonnes of bales of discarded PET bottles received by Visy, Jones said there will usually be 2% of general waste, such as nappies or stuffed toys, which come from people throwing them in the wrong bin. Plastic such as HD and polypropylene, used for instance in shampoo bottles, form a “mixed plastic stream” which is also bailed up and sent to China to be recycled as carpet or clothing. PVC labels and bottle caps are rejected off the sorting stream and sent to a South Australian company to be recycled as “low-end point polypropylene applications”, such as plastic flowerpots. But some PVC labels do make it through the sorting stream unscathed, which is extremely problematic. PVC burns at a lower melting point than PET, yet has the same density and is therefore difficult to separate from PET. Just like PET, PVC sinks in water otherwise used to sort different plastics from PET, yet it melts at 300 degrees( PET melts at 180 degrees). The PVC then overcooks and goes black, which affects the colour of the bottle and can cause “black specs” on it. Different plastics also stretch at different rates, potentially deforming the bottle. “You can make a 100% recycled PET bottle if you can get the recycling stream clean enough,” said Jones in an email. Hence, Visy allows for no more than a tight 35 parts a million of “contaminated material”, such as PVC labels or paper, per tonne of recycled finished product. But when asked if it would actually be physically possible for Visy to produce a Coke bottle made of, for example, 70% recycled content if requested by Coca Cola, Jones said yes, but the customer would have to relax its specifications on the appearance of the bottle. He said it has been done a couple of times over the years, but the bottles had a yellow colouring. “And if you stack 25 recycled bottles next to each other on a shelf, the deeper you go the more yellow they will start to look, and if you put them against a virgin bottle, people will go ‘I’ll buy that because that looks dirty’.” For now, most of the recycled PET resin produced by the Prestons plant is used by Visy’s PET bottle-making factories in NSW, where it is blended to virgin PET resin imported from Asia, to make new soft drink bottles. Jones said Visy recycles more than enough PET to meet its PET bottle manufacture share of the Australian market. Visy’s main clients are Australia’s biggest multinational bottled water manufacturers Coca Cola Amatil and Schweppes. The company produces more than 2 billion PET preforms a year (the first step in bottle manufacture) and 1.8 billion PET bottles for soft drinks and bottled water. But, according to the latest survey of the Plastics and Chemicals Industries Association (PACIA), of the 122,000 tonnes of plastic consumed in Australia in 2010, less than half was recycled in any form. Most of the rest ends up in landfill where, according to Clean Up Australia, it can take up to 1000 years to break down. Visy’s Tony Gray said the major reason for such a low recycling rate is “probably that a significant amount of PET bottles are consumed away from the home and therefore away from access to kerbside recycling systems”. He argued: “As public place recycling infrastructure improves, PET recycling levels will also improve.” Others blame the low rate on the lack of a container deposit scheme in states other than South Australia. But even of the 45.7% of PET that was recycled, only 15,900 tonnes — or less than a quarter — was actually recycled in Australia. The remaining 39,000 was sent overseas for reprocessing, mostly in China. Coca Cola Amatil’s Emma Peacock said in an email: “Regarding the tainting issues in recycled PET, CCA is working hard to find the best solutions for increasing the sustainability of our packaging and in fact we take an industry lead on this.” Peacock said CCA is continually looking at ways “to not only reduce the amount of material used in our packaging but to also increase recycled content and to encourage consumers to recycle”. But she was not able to provide any further details as “any plans for expanding our business would be commercially sensitive”. *This story is part of Pure Plastiky, a project of the Global Environmental Journalism Initiative and the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism