Boston's New Trash and Recycling Program

Starting on July 1, Boston will have different trash and recycling pickup days and will be serviced by a new collection company. Mayor Walsh announced the new program last week, saying

“I’m concerned for the environment and we have to do our part by protecting our City. This new contract has been implemented with the goal of encouraging more recycling and trash collection with keeping our current financial climate in mind.”

Below is a Listing of New Vendors, affected Districts, and Collection Days:

Back Bay will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Thursday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Thursday.

Bay Village will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Beacon Hill will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Chinatown will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Downtown will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Fenway will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday.

Financial District will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Leather District will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Mission Hill will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday.

North End will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Friday.

Roxbury will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Thursday, and recycling collection will take place on Monday and Thursday.

South End will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday, and recycling collection will take place on Tuesday and Friday.

West End will be serviced by Sunrise Scavenger. Trash collection will take place on Monday and Friday, and recycling collection will also take place on Monday and Friday.

#SaveCitySoil Day of Action

Zoo New England, under pressure from the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), has formally asked City Soil to leave their land in Mattapan.

City Soil staff has a meeting with Secretary Sullivan on Wednesday, May 14th, but the formal eviction letter is not a good sign. Before the meeting we need to make sure that Governor Patrick understands that our community stands with City Soil;

ON TUESDAY, May 13th, please call AND e-mail Governor Patrick and respectfully ask him to stop the eviction of City Soil.

Phone: 617-725-4005

E-mail: goffice@state.ma.us, jwalsh@devalpatrick.com info@devalpatrick.com

Please let Everett of City Soil (everett@citysoil.org) know when you've called/emailed so that they can keep track of our impact.

If the meeting does not go well, there will be a rally on Saturday:

Rally to #SaveCitySoil!

SATURDAY, MAY 17th

11 a.m.

City Soil & Greenhouse site

415 American Legion Highway, Mattapan 02126

Stay tuned to learn how the meeting goes and if we will need to mobilize. Thank you so much for your support!

Take Action Now to #SaveCitySoil

source image courtesy of The Boston Globe

City Soil operates its composting site at the Boston Nature Center in Mattapan. They have partnered with the Suffolk County Conservation District to develop the Mattapan Ecovation Center, an enclosed composting system and intensive 4-season urban agriculture demonstration on state-owned land leased from Zoo New England.

Unfortunately, the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) recently announced a plan to evict City Soil from 50% of their leased site – including the area dedicated for the innovative urban agriculture project. Why? An out-of-town corporation, Landscape Express, has strong-armed the DCR into evicting City Soil and awarding the leased land to them for sales and parking space, under a no-bid expansion of their contract to manage the DCR’s neighboring site.

To prevent this eviction, hundreds of City Soil supporters such as the Conservation Law Foundation, Higher Ground Farm, Boston Natural Areas Network and more called State Senator Pacheco and Environmental and Energy Affairs Secretary Sullivan. Pacheco called the founder of City Soil that day and let him know that he heard the message loud and clear, but he's not sure  he can do anything about it. City Soil then made its next move and collected over 200 signatures on a petition to send to Governor Patrick.


You can help support city soil by joining the twitter campaign #savecitysoil and by calling Secretary Sullivan or Governor Patrick's Office:

Secretary Rick Sullivan

Phone: 617-626-1101

Email: rick.sullivan@state.ma.us, rachel.kreitz@state.ma.us

Governor Deval Patrick

Phone: 617-725-4005

5 Ways to Use Fewer Zip Lock Bags

source image courtesy of  Speak Up for Blue

Like many, I grew up making my own lunches - peanut butter and jelly in a zip lock bag. Since then, I've become much more conscious of the waste my daily meals create. While bringing your own lunch is much more cost-effective (and often more sustainable) than buying lunch, there are ways to streamline the lunch packing process to avoid adding to landfills. 

1. Glass food containers or BPA-free plastic food containers are your best friend. Especially at offices where there is a dishwasher or sink available so you don't have to carry home a dirty container. 
2. Eat less meat. Freezer bags are often used to preserve meats. Kill two birds with one stone by going vegetarian and eating fresh produce that doesn't need to be stored in a bag. 
3. Re-use your bags. If you must use plastic food-storage bags, wash them out and reuse them a couple times before throwing them away. 
4. Simply don't purchase plastic bags. You'd be surprised how creative you can be when you don't have them as an option at your home. 
5. Stock up on food-making supplies at the office. If you have space, keep a loaf of bread and your other lunch-making ingredients at work - that way you don't have to pack a lunch at all! 

Spotlight: Junkluggers Expand Service to Boston

The Junkluggers is a NYC-based junk removal company that is rapidly expanding across the northeast. Founder & CEO Josh Cohen is planning to bring his green trucks, and eco-friendly green business model, to the land of the Green Monster!

The Junkluggers is planning to open 2 to 3 locations in Boston by the end of 2015, and 10-15 in the state of Massachusetts. The company currently has 5 locations throughout Connecticut, New York City, Long Island, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Each location typically adds 5-10 jobs and the company partners with local charities and donation centers to make sure that the “junk” they remove can potentially find a home with someone who really needs it.

The Junkluggers will remove almost any unwanted item and find it a new home. They avoid sending items to landfills and believe that recycling is a form of passive philanthropy.

iRecycle App Makes Recycling Easier Than Ever

Earth 911's iRecycle App is awesome. It uses your location to tell you how to best recycle different types of materials. This is a total game changer, because recycling systems are different from municipality to municipality. The app. allows you to quickly and easily learn the closest, proper way to responsibly dispose of almost any item! No more confusion about what items go in what bins!

Spotlight: Bootstrap Compost

Last week we discussed Harvest Power, and its mission to turn food waste into the next generation of renewable energy. But what about small scale composting and residential compost collection? This is where another great local company, Bootstrap Compost, comes into play. Bootstrap Compost provides participants with a 5 gallon bin and comes by to collect the compost on either a weekly or biweekly basis. The cost of residential collection is about $8/week. Participants also have the option of getting back their compost in the form of 5 lbs rich gardening soil every 15 weeks. If participants don't want their compost back, it is donated to a local gardening project!

Spotlight: Harvest Power

Continuing with Boston's composting momentum, Boston Green Blog is featuring Harvest Power as the green biz of the week. Waltham-based Harvest Power helps communities better manage and beneficially re-use their organic waste. Their vision is to find the highest and best use for the 500 million tons of organic materials produced in North America each year. Harvest Power is particularly focused on building powerplants and infrastructure for using our organic waste to create biomass energy. To learn more about this, I highly recommend the TEDtalk by the Harvest Power founder, Paul Sellew:

Spotlight: City Soil

As many of you know, the Massachusetts Food Waste Ban goes into effect this year, which makes composting increasingly important in Boston and beyond. This week's spotlight company, City Soil, has played a pivotal role in developing Boston gardens and farms, including at Revision Farm in Dorchester. Responding to the need for responsible compost management, City Soil employs Boston residents to operate the City of Boston’s leaf compost site in partnership with Casella Resource Solutions. City Soil is a leader in compost heat capture. Moving forward, City Soil will continue to responsibly manage Boston’s organic resources and develop opportunities to expand the urban food system.

Keep an eye out for their work! And read learn more here.

New Perspectives: Managing Waste and Climate Change

via wikimedia commons

Whenever people discuss climate change, the conversation usually revolves around fossil fuels. Yet, there is another source of greenhouse gases that is not usually considered when amateur climatologists get together.

The waste management industry accounts for roughly 1-5% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. That may seem like a relatively small amount, but when you consider that garbage production rates have nearly tripled since the 1960’s, the problem comes into focus. The ever-increasing amount of garbage produced in the United States could potentially make waste management an even greater source of carbon dioxide and other GHGs in the future.

If you examine the average waste collection process in the U.S., you would see that each step of the process introduces greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. First, there’s the collection of the trash itself which requires the use of either a truck or car. Then the garbage truck has to transport the trash to a facility, such as a transfer station or landfill. Eventually, some portion of the trash ends up in a landfill where it will slowly break down anaerobically, producing methane and carbon dioxide.

Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas compared to CO2 - making landfills a very worrisome contributor to climate change. Fortunately, all modern landfills incorporate ventilation systems that scrub the gases given off by landfills. Some landfills even burn up the methane or convert it to a liquid form that is of the same quality as natural gas. Currently, there are just fewer than 600 landfill gas-to-energy sites in the United States providing roughly 1.8 megawatts of electricity total. Such facilities are increasingly being sought after by state governments as they demonstrably reduce the eco footprint of both existing and closed landfills, and can generate a large amount of electricity.

Even though the waste management industry is working to reduce its share of GHG emissions; the best solution to curb the impact of trash on the climate is to stick to that old mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle. Reducing your overall consumption of goods means fewer resources have to be used up to produce new
goods. And reusing materials is always better than recycling because recycling uses up a lot of energy,
producing more CO2. But if all else fails, make sure that as much of your waste as possible ends up in the recycling bin.

Author: Kevin Roberts is a content writer for the national dumpster rental company, Budget Dumpster.

Green Tip Tuesday: How to Navigate a Flea Market

Inspired by my recent trip to Brimfield Flea Market, I've decided to share my tips on second hand shopping at flea markets!

1. Early birds pay more for the worm. Later in the market, dealers are rushing to get rid of their goods and are more likely to give you a good price.

2. Curate carefully. Don't make hasty purchases, you don't want to end up having to get rid of the item yourself.

3. Bring cash. It is easier to haggle with!

4. Look out for toxic materials. Just because something is second hand, doesn't mean its green! Be wary of lead based paint, bpa, mercury, etc. 

5. Know what you want. Go to the market with a list. Surf pinterest for DIY/upcycling ideas before you go. 

6. Make sure you can fit everything in the car before you pay. Many flea market vendors offer delivery services, but don't waste the gas if there's no need. 

Most of all, have fun. You know what they say, one person's trash is another's treasure!

Recap of BASG September Meetup

Last night was the Boston Area Sustainability Group meetup regarding the eccentricities of solid waste. It was a fun, inspiring, and educational evening. If you couldn't make it, here is what you missed:

1. "Zero-waste" means no burning or burying at the end of a product's life.

2. "recycling" is a specific process, whereas "zero-waste" is more encompassing of reduce/reuse/repurpose practices.

3. In 2010, each person in Massachusetts produced about 5 million tons of trash. 

4. Only a third of all waste is recycled, though most of the rest of it can be recycled/reused/composted.

5. The climate change / waste nexus is complicated and often undiscussed by policy-makers and legislators.

6. Single stream recycling is controversial since the recyclables are of lower value and more likely to be contaminated than in a dual stream recycling system.

7. Recycling rates are lower in urban areas.

8. Recycling can be cheaper for some businesses than traditional trash pickup.

9. Recycling/Repurposing clothing and textiles is easy because there is already infrastructure for in place for processing these materials. 

10. "Pay-as-you-throw" systems are very effective, and usually reduce a town's trash by about 40%.

BONUS: Reducing the amount of waste you create is THE most important thing you can do to address the issue of solid waste. 

New Perspectives: Shape up your house with high-efficiency plumbing fixtures

We’ve all probably had that bill that made us really take a step back and examine where our money is really going. Unfortunately, I’ve had that happen, and it was on a water bill! Turns out that for a while, I had been feeling the effects of lagging plumbing fixtures. In addition, water conservation is an increasing global concern, so I wanted to do my part to remedy this problem.

Here are some quick replacements that will help conserve both water and money:

TOILETS
It makes sense that the toilet is the most popular choice among consumers when it comes to going green. In fact, most of the time, the other fixtures in this article are favored in the other direction, with low-efficiency setting and builds. Toilets often flush up to six gallons of water per use, which can account for up to 30 percent of a home’s total water usage. Here are some options to lower that number.

Dual Flush Toilets:  This kind of toilet allows you to choose between flushing for liquid or solid waste.

Composting Toilets: This is exactly like an outhouse, except it is sanitary and comes without the smell. These toilets store waste for one year to allow it to decompose naturally. The smell is eradicated with a
special mixture, and VOILA! No water in your toilet.

High-efficiency Toilets: Even the EPA is getting in on this action, releasing their own WaterSense labeled toilets. It’s said that these toilets save people around 4,000 gallons of water each year.


SHOWERHEADS
Toilets are water hogs, but so are showers. These account for about 20 percent of a home’s total water usage, and that probably doesn’t include those people that take hour-long showers…Typical showers use about 2.5 gallons of water per minute, but bigger showerheads can use up to 20 gallons of water per minute. I shudder when I see these types of stats. Ultra-low-flow showerheads reduce the shower’s water output by about 70 percent, which means less strain on your overall plumbing system.


FAUCETS
Faucets are routinely left on to run at-will. Just like with anything else on this list, this puts a toll on the water heater. If you can’t break your habit of leaving the faucet on, check out high-efficiency faucets. They use 1.5 gallons of water per minute. Not bad at all. It’s a small change, but it adds up in the long run. Now imagine with me for a moment – every person in America (just America) made the switch to these types of fixtures, the country would save three trillion gallons of water per year and around $1 billion per year. If one out of every 100 homes made the switch, 80,000 tons of greenhouse gases would  be eliminated!


Author: Diane Kuehl is a home improvement professional and owner of DIY Mother. She lives in Springfield, Illinois with her husband and two kids.

New Perspectives: Reducing the Volume of Your Trash

image courtesy of baubauhaus.com

Year after year tons of products are discarded and relocated to incinerators and landfills to live out the rest of their product lives. This harsh fact is both depressing and environmentally mortifying. The incinerating of excess waste emits mass amounts of greenhouse gasses which in turn contributes to air pollution and human-caused climate change. And, adding recyclables to the landfills depletes our natural resources, takes up valuable space and simply uglies the world.

It is no secret that reducing, reusing, and recycling is the answer to a cleaner and more environmentally balanced future. Recycling refers to the process of turning the old and unusable into something new and usable; it is the rebirthing of a product. Recycling extends the lifespan of the product and keeps it out of the landfills, the process also cuts down on the use of virgin materials and saves energy usage.

Statistics show that close to 65 percent of the thrash we contribute to the landfills are in fact recyclable. Items such as cardboard and other paper products, glass, aluminum, electronics, clothing and food are all recyclable. Cutting down on the waste we produce is perhaps one of the easiest and most rewarding ways of going green. The simple act of recycling most of our trash will restore the value of the ecosystem. If we continue to trash excessively, soon we will literally be living in our own filth. The landfills will overflow, the ground water and air quality will degrade even more and our health as well as the health of our wildlife and plant life will suffer drastically. Reducing the volume of trash you produce may sound like an overwhelming and daunting task, nevertheless, once to know the how’s, where’s and whys of it all, doing so will become like second nature. Below is a quick guide on how to do so:

Reducing the Volume of your Trash

Go Paperless: Our overuse of paper has contributed to deforestation, extinction, loss of habitat
and poor air quality. In our everyday lives we use paper in our kitchens, bathrooms and offices.
We can cut down on the volume of paper by using reusable napkins and washcloths and by
opting for recycled paper toilet paper and printing minimally.

Recycle eWaste: Electronics such as cameras, computers, TV’s, Refrigerators, microwaves,
lamps and batteries should be recycled. Most electronics can be sold, donated or salvaged to be
used again, research online for a recycle center near you.

Buy Sustainable: In an effort to cut down on waste, many companies have opted to make
products out of post-consumer materials. Products such as paper, containers, toothbrushes,
clothing and shoes are produced with recycled materials. Supporting the use of such product is
an easy way to untrash.

Start Compost: Food scraps can have a second life, composting creates natural mulch, and
natural mulch encourages the growth of vegetation. Starting a compost reduces waste and
increases the quality of plant life.

Reuse: When you reuse you obviously throw away less; using reusable shopping bags, water
bottles, snack bags and storage containers are easy ways to cut down on waste.

Author -This post was written by Roechelle Adair of Hug a Tree with Me, visit her for more tips and insights on how to live a more sustainable lifestyle.

Recap of Because Water's Charles River Rummage

photos courtesy of Carven Boursiquot

On August 10th, BeCause Water hosted the second Charles River Rummage where teams of 4 competed on Paddle Boston kayaks to clean as much debris and litter in 1 hour as possible. Once the rummagers got ashore, BeCause Water awarded $100 cash prize, NE Aquarium passes, a gift certificate to Safar Coiffure Salon and full access to the mobile app, DropIn. What remained of the trash was sorted, thrown away, and recycled through Save That Stuff. 

Sounds like an amazing event and I can't wait to see what BeCause Water plans next!

Pencil it in: Boston Area Sustainability Group Meetup

source image courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org

When: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Where: The Venture Cafe - Cambridge Innovation Center, One Broadway, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142

Why:  Some say you should only recycle after all waste elimination and reuse options have been ruled out. If recycling is our panacea, why have recycling rates remained flat despite a perceived growing awareness? Landfills are full, incineration is out, what are we doing with our stuff – from food to pharmaceuticals, from electronics to Styrofoam? Can you connect the dots between solid waste and climate change?

To start the fall, we plan to push the boundaries of familiarity to explore:
- Legislation/Regulation – its challenges, achievements and unintended consequences
- Zero Waste – Is it really zero?
- Product stewardship’s role in waste reduction
- Handling textiles at their end-of-life
- A Day in the Life of a “Fancy Trashman”

Learn more and register here.