New Search Engine

My husband sent me this link after explaining to him this morning that plastic bags can not go into the recycling, as is common in almost all municiplaties, with a couple of exceptions of course. This search engine however, allows you to search for the nearest recycling facility that collects things that your local municipality may not if it does at all. For example ours does all plastics except styrofoam, #6 and plastic bags. I can search on this for the nearest one that excepts for example #6, for us it is 23 miles away, but at least we now know it is an option. They also have little helpful articles every week, like for example this week's was on composting. A good find!

http://earth911.com/

Commercial composting in Illinois

Illinois allows for local composting only, but on 08/13/09 Governor Quinn signed into law bill SB0099, now public act 96-0418. This bill will allow food waste to be commercially composted and sold all over the nation, a great benefit for anyone with food waste, farmers and the planet! This is a great new avenue for green jobs, since previously you could only compost locally, you could not transport or sell the composted materials. The bill is to take affect in January 1, 2010.

To read more: http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=99&GAID=10&DocTypeID=SB&SessionID=76&GA=96

Support the latest Eco-bill in the Senate

We don't have a lot of time, so hurry and show your support.

http://act.repoweramerica.org/page/s/emailsenate

From Repower America:
Our Senators are getting back to work in Washington next week, and they've just announced that they'll be introducing their version of a clean energy and climate bill before the end of the month.That means there's still a narrow window of time to make sure they get it right. Tens of thousands of folks like you have already sent letters to their Senators asking them to seize this opportunity.In fact, we're only 30,000 letters away from reaching 100,000 -- that's a lot of people sending their voices directly into the halls of Washington. That's a powerful message.

Plastic Bag Update

For those that follow my efforts to never use a plastic bag again I wanted to send out a 13 month update. I have been tracking since 06/23/09 for mainly my purchases and some of our collective household purchases and have saved over 175 bags to date. For those that don't know what these bags do and that most municipalities DO NOT recycle them, including Chicago, see my original post: http://ordinarilygreen.blogspot.com/2008/11/down-with-shopping-bags.html

My total of saved bags as of 06/23/09 (stats kept since 08/06/09):

• 179 Plastic Shopping Bags
  
• 45 Fruit/Veggie Plastic Bags
  
• 19 Paper Shopping Bags

Carrotmob

I ran across this organization that just came to Chicago, but they are all over the US and even in Europe. There is an inagural event at Fox and Obel near Navy Pier on August 9th. The basic idea is that they organize a mob to head to a certain store during set hours to increase their profit which is earmarked for greening their facilities.

Recycle Caps with Aveda

A number of municipalties and trash removal services that offer recycling do not recycle anything above plastics #1 and #2, and rigid plastic caps are typically #5. Living in Chicago, we are fortunate that the City does recycle no.'s 1-5 and 7, however my office does not have the option to recycle becuase it is not served by the City, so we only have paper recycling, it saddens me everyday. A friend and fellow diver sent me this link to Aveda's new campaign to Recycle Caps, which are typically not recycled either properly by most people or not taken by the local recycler. A lot of consumers don't realize that they should seperate their caps from their bottles and such, so that they can be recycled. That whole bottle, in some cases, will end up in the landfill even though you put it in the recycle bin. So collect all of your caps and take them to your nearest Aveda salon, they'll be happy to take them, and then more recycled bottles will make it through the recycling stream.

Aveda's site:

http://aveda.aveda.com/aboutaveda/caps.asp

Understanding the differences between plastics, including what contains the BPA:

http://www.plasticfreebottles.com/pdf/Understanding-Plastic-Codes.pdf

Green Your Dining

I saw this group at the Greenfest and completely forgot until I got my weekly email from Fresh Squeeze today. The Green Restaurant Association is like LEEDS for restaurants! It is a great organization. They have recently expanded to add manufacturer's and distributors. The basic idea behind this organization is for restaurants to sign up and follow a number of steps over a period of time to gain points your first ranking comes at 100 points and the top ranking is 470 points. They have a search engine on the site to find restaurants that are currently listed. Check it out and make your next dining experience a more Green one. They do have for the Diners a certificate you can print out and leave with your bill to help get the word out that you care how green you favorite local spot is.

For the Restaurant: http://www.dinegreen.com/restaurants/

For the Diner: http://www.dinegreen.com/customers/

For the Manufacturer: http://www.dinegreen.com/manufacturers/

For the Distributor: http://www.dinegreen.com/distributors/