Category Archives: Latest Blogs

BON JOVI Goes Eco-Friendly With New Shirts

New Jersey rockers BON JOVI are getting set to release their 11th studio record, The Circle, on November 10TH. To help build up the hype, the band has gone eco-friendly with a new line of Green merchandise.

The new line of t-shirts, called the Bon Jovi Green Line, offers affordable shirts made of either organic cotton or a type of polyester made from recycled Mountain Dew bottles. The shirts, priced at $30 US come in two flavors: an Eco-Friendly Organic T-Shirt or an Eco-Friendly Recycled T-Shirt.

The organic shirt is made of 100% Organic Combed Ring Spun Cotton and is rated 4.5oz Certified Organic Cotton, while the recycled shirt offers something a bit more exciting. The light green Eco-Friendly Recycled T-Shirt is made of 65% Recycled Polyester from PET bottles / 35% Recycled Cotton. One recycled t-shirt is made from approximately 8.5 recycled bottles and will dry in half the time of a normal shirt. The band asks buyers to hang dry the shirt if possible, because it’s better for the environment. The shirt gets its green color from the Mountain Dew bottles.

Americans throw away 2 million plastic bottles every 10 minutes and 1 million recycled plastic bottles saves 3.8 barrels of oil and eliminates 180 metric tons of CO2. 10% of all US oil is used to make plastics.

Start the School Year Off Green!

Going green has become an important priority for schools all over the country. While teachers and administrators are doing plenty to instill green values into school curricula and infrastructure, the best place to teach kids what to do at school, is…well at home!

 

Consider these tips for helping kids to take a few steps forward when it comes to going green as the new school year starts:

 

Ride the bus to school

 

Even if you do not usually take the school bus, consider taking a public bus to school. It is one of the most eco-friendly options for getting to and from school. According to Terra Wellington, author of the book “A Mom’s Guide to Growing Your Family Green, Saving the Earth begins at Home,” one school bus takes 36 cars off the road reducing fuel usage and emissions. The daily fuel cost to transport a child to school is $3.68 for a private vehicle but only $.73 if that child rides a school bus.

 

Pack a low waste lunch

 

You can save money and reduce waste by packing your child’s lunch in reusable bags and containers. For a “no waste” lunch, plan such that the only compostible items are left over, such as fruit peels.

 

Take an ENSO bottle to school

 

While it’s easy to send your kids to school with bottled water, bear in mind that most plastic water bottles do not biodegrade and simply pollute our environment and plug up our landfills. However, ENSO bottles change all that and are designed to break down in aerobic (compost) and anaerobic (landfill) environments, plus ENSO bottles are recyclable! Best of all, ENSO bottles can be used for “Show and Tell” to amaze the teacher and impress the friends by talking about its many eco-friendly properties.

 

By Scot R
ENSO Bottles, LLC
866-936-3676
Web: www.ensobottles.com

Recycling – Is it just a business?

This is a question that I’ve been mulling over for the past couple of weeks. Recently I’ve been reading books and articles that suggest that recycling is more of a business than an environmental solution. The articles claim that the majority of the recycling industry is not based on “helping the environment” but is about picking the easiest and largest money making bottles – #1 PET and #2 HDPE beverage bottles.

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Product Stewardship and Manufacturers Responsibility

Reusing sounds like the answer to reducing pollution and the amount of trash we put into our landfills but it isn’t working. Manufacturers have built in product obsolescence for more than fifty years with the idea of the more we use the more jobs we’ll have. Recycling plays an important role in reducing waste; however, here in the U.S. recycling is failing miserably. Consumes are confused and believe that anything they put into a recycle bin should be recycled. It might be a good thought but recyclers are only removing the items that have market value…the rest goes into the landfill. Keep in mind that even if you reuse something or recycle something sooner or later it will end up as trash. Our landfills in this country are mostly the “Dry Tomb” type of landfill. Dry tomb landfills are nothing more than large pits that have been lined with a protective bottom and as each layer of garbage is bulldozed level it is compacted and covered with a thin layer of dirt. Biodegradation does take place with a dry tomb landfill but at a slow pace. The idea behind the dry tomb is to hide garbage from our sight and smell.

 

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JUNK SCIENCE: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us

The book titled JUNK SCIENCE: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us by Dr. Dan Agin was very interesting book. Dr. Agin has a Ph.D. in biological psychology and thirty years of laboratory-research experience in neurobiology and is an associate professor emeritus of molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago.

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GONE TOMORROW: The Hidden Life of Garbage

heregoneThe book titled GONE TOMORROW The Hidden Life of Garbage by Heather Rogers was a very informative read. This book is a follow up to the 2002 documentary, also titled Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage. Heather is a journalist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York.

 

The United States is the world’s number one producer of garbage: we consume 30 percent of the planet’s resources and produce 30 percent of all its wastes, but we are just 4 percent of the global population. These are staggering numbers which I personally find incomprehensible. I’m guessing that this is one of the reasons why more people do not get involved in this issue. We have implemented over 5,000 recycling programs throughout the country which are more of a means to helping us feel better about the massive amounts of garbage being created. There is no real global plan for stewarding the earth, which is one reason we created the company ENSO Bottles, to address the plastic bottle pollution on the planet.

 

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MICROBES: An Invisible Universe

microbesThe book titled MICROBES An Invisible Universe by Howard Gest was one of the most informative and interesting books I have read on the world of microbes. This book is 200 pages crammed full of detailed information about the history and the function of microorganisms, also known as microbes. The author, Dr. Howard Gest is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Microbiology and Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dr. Gest is widely recognized for his research on microbial physiology and metabolism.

 

The Ecology of microbes to one another and their surroundings is extraordinary with respect to the diversity of chemical and physical conditions that can be tolerated. Microbes thrive in extreme environments with regards to temperatures, high concentrations of salts and sugars, relative acidity, and with or without the presence of oxygen.

 

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RUBBISH! The Archaeology of Garbage, Book Review

rubbish1The book titled Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage by William Rathje and Cullen Murphy was a very interesting read.  Created in 1973, the archaeology of garbage was a program primarily created as an exercise in archeology for students at the University of Arizona Tucson.  The most fascinating aspect of the book is the discoveries of what our garbage tells about us as a society.  It was interesting the amount of detailed behavior that can be discovered by going through trash.  For example, in times of product scarcity our garbage shows that we waste more of the scarce product. Another major fact Dr. Rathje’s team discovered is that our landfills are not filling up from disposable diapers which is taking up about 1% of a landfills mass.

 

There have been some in the PLA (corn plastics) industry who use quotes from Dr. Rathje’s book to support an argument that composting biodegradable plastics is better for the environment than landfilling them.  Their argument takes some of the data out on context by looking at the hundred year old “poor” environmental designs of landfills.  The printing of “RUBBISH!” was in 1991 with most data provided in the book ending in 1988.  Most of the data in the book is over 20 years old.  As with many things from our past we eventually discover better and more environmentally sound solutions.  Yes, it is absolutely true that traditional dry-tomb landfilling is not the best solution for dealing with our garbage.  As a society we have made significant improvements to the methods we use for disposing of garbage.  Since the writing of the book we have implemented hundreds of recycling programs as well as the EPA requiring methane from the anaerobic biodegradation process happening in landfills to be captured and burned or used to create clean energy.  The EPA in the last 5 years has also changed laws with recirculating leachate through a landfill so to accelerate biodegradation by up to 10x.

 

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Sorting out Biodegradable Plastics

There are three main categories of degradable plastics: biodegradable plastics, compostable plastics and degradable plastics.  One of the biggest contributions to the confusion surrounding the subject of degradable plastics is a combination of the lack of common definitions and the loose usage of these definitions.

 

The ASTM International, originally known as the American Society for Testing and Materials, is a standards organization, host to committee D20.96 on Environmentally Degradable Plastics and Biobased Products.  The ASTM maintains a Standard Terminology Relating to Plastics under their designation: D 883 – 08.  The following are the ASTM definitions for degradable plastics:

 

biodegradable plastics—a degradable plastic in which the degradation results from the action of naturally-occurring micro-organisms such as bacteria, fungi, and algae.

 

compostable plastic—a plastic that undergoes biological degradation during composting to yield carbon dioxide, water, inorganic compounds, and biomass at a rate consistent with other known compostable materials and leaves no visually distinguishable or toxic residues.

 

degradable plastic—a plastic designed to undergo a significant change in its chemical structure under specific environmental conditions resulting in a loss of some properties that may vary as measured by standard test methods appropriate to the plastic and the application in a period of time that determines its classification.

 

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