Many of us make New Year’s resolutions that barely make it to the spring thaw, but as Andy mentioned earlier this week, “Sustainable Dave” of Los Angeles has held tight to his year long, landfill-free promise.  For 365 days, Dave vowed not to throw anything away, and now that he’s almost at the finish line, he’s challenging others to do the same, or at least keep track of everything that is thrown out.  Check out his blog and this report from CBS News to learn more:

While his undertaking was certainly ambitious, and some might say a bit loopy, the experiment clearly illustrates

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The other day Andy alerted us to growing trouble in the recycling market, but it seems some 2nd graders in West Virginia have taken recycling matters into their own hands.  What began as a class recycling project at Ruthlawn Elementary in South Charleston, W. Va., evolved into a town wide collection program, where other parents and other students were dropping off their recyclables and kids were finishing their milk, just so they could recycle the bottle.  And when the county announced a need to stop recycling because of rising costs, the students began a letter writing campaign to the local government asking them to keep the recycling programs.  It seems their pleas were heard, as the city found a way to continue paper recycling!  Let’s hope these young activists can help restore the full program and inspire other students worldwide to demand a cleaner future.

takepart and find where and what you can recycle near you.

Photo: pomme_rewny’s Flickr Photostream (Creative Commons)

I’ve always found the tradition of Christmas trees sorta odd. I mean, we cut down a tree, put in our house, decorate it, then throw it away. According to http://www.christmas-tree.com the fir tree is associated with Christianity, beginning in Germany almost 1,000 years ago when St Boniface, who converted the German people to Christianity, was said to have come across a group of pagans worshiping an oak tree. In anger, St Boniface is said to have cut down the oak tree and to his amazement a young fir tree sprung up from the roots of the oak tree. St Boniface took this as a sign of the Christian faith. But it was not until the 16th century that fir trees were brought indoors at Christmas time.

Alrighty, well what to do with your tree once the holidays are over? Well, Louisiana does something sorta special when it comes to Christmas tree recycling. They use trees to help restore coastal marshes. The trees are placed in fenced areas to protect coastline from salt water intrusion and to enhance sedimentation. In total, 600,000 trees have been placed in the Louisiana marsh in fenced corrals that now span 45,000 feet. Learn more about Louisiana’s tree recycling program at http://www.cgernon.com/sptf/recyc.htm

And Lousiana is not the only place using old Christmas for good, takepart and www.christmastree.org/recycle2.cfm for other tree recycling programs around the country.

You might think that this economic downturn (officially a recession, I suppose, at this point) recycling would go up, what with the reusing of things, but apparently the exact opposite is happening.  The New York Times reports that the recyclables market has completely tanked, leaving people unable to sell used cardboard, metals, newspaper, or plastic.

Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life.

In the past, cities have been able to sell the recycling they picked up at a profit, thus actually turning recycling programs into revenue.  But now, that’s completely changed.

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To save trees, reduce recycling hassles, and quit the clutter, a lone college student has launched Yellow Pages Goes Green, a campaign to eliminate the unsolicited delivery of phone books.

When you receive the yellow and white slabs on your front step, do you:

a)  Plop them in a corner for use as a door stop or high chair?

b)  Test your strength by attempting to tear one in half?

c)  Peruse the pages in search of new friends, baby names, or prank call victims?

d)  Continue construction of your phone directory fortress to keep out unsolicited mail?

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, the time has come to remove yourself from the vicious phone book cycle.  And you should probably get out more.  While some people still use phone books for actually looking up numbers, most of us could probably live happily without the old clunkers.

takepart by opting out of receiving phone books and support the movement to eliminate waste and save paper.  It’s free, easy, and who knows what new hobbies you might take up!

Recently Jon shared with us the complications involved with recycling electronics in China, and some companies efforts to improve their recycling programs, and now a few e-waste public interest groups are taking matters into their own hands.  Despite one recent crack down, the EPA seems to be having a difficult time tracking down shipments of hazardous electronic waste, and lack any sufficient protocol to ensure safe disposal.  According to Scientific American:

Worried about a “tsunami” of e-waste when new TV standards take effect on February 17, e-waste public interest groups the Basel Action Network (BAN) and the Electronics Take Back Coalition have launched a new program that will independently audit and certify electronics recyclers. The groups will

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Well, we missed another “holiday,” this time being America Recycles Day.  It was Saturday.  Now, treehugger thinks this is a (explitive deleted) holiday, and we should make November 15 Zero Waste Day.  Part of the reasoning is that America Recycles Day is brought to you by the fine people that make things that are put in recyclable despensers: Coke, Bud, Coors, the bottled water industry, and so forth.  It seems also that they’re not too happy with the fact that recycling is a transfer of responsibility from corporations to taxpayers. But what they fail to realize are these very impressive and completely false facts about recycling:

–Every time you say “I don’t believe in recycling,” a fairy dies.

–Did you know that the energy saved from recycling just one can is enough to power the sun for fifty years?

–Recycling comes from the Latin, “recyclicaie,” which means “to be way sexy.”

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Greetings TakePart faithful! We’ve got some exciting news - TakePart is now optimized for your iPhone. Anytime, anywhere you can bust out your sleek iPhone 3G and learn all about ways you can TakePart to make the world a better place.

Speaking of, are you thinking of ditching your old cellphone for an Apple iPhone? Before you take the plunge to AT&T, buy a ton of iPhone apps, and upgrade to iPhone 1.1.4 takepart and donate your old phone to for recycling. It’s the green way to get dispose of your phone and all proceeds go to charity.

A crew for the CBS investigative journalism program 60 Minutes was roughed up at a Chinese electronic waste site. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew were in the Middle Kingdom to trace the illegal black market electronic waste in the world’s most populous country. Upon entering a facility in Guiyu, on the south coast of China, the crew was attacked by a gang of workers who attempted to take their cameras. The crew managed to escape and brought back footage of the incident to air on CBS this week.

The workers at the facility had reason to want to take the cameras as their activities are highly illegal even in the loosely regulated world of Chinese industry. Improper dismantling of e-waste for the black market, as was being done in Guiyu, produces some of the most harmful pollutants known to man. The City of Guiyu is afflicted with some of the highest levels of cancer causing agents on Earth while pregnancies there are 6 times more likely than normal to result in miscarriage and 7 out of 10 children have too much lead in their blood.

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While many stars make no secret of championing their environmental efforts, the film and television industry as a whole has lagged behind and still maintains a massive carbon footprint.  And while many production companies are working hard to reduce waste and energy consumption at their studios and offices, the biggest waste tends to take place on location.  Film and TV producer Judith James writes about the excesses in Traction, an online publication for women in Hollywood:

Consider how much fuel we use. Generators, night shoots, ‘distant locations,’ trucks per shoot, idling trucks, moving cranes, moving everything, people, wardrobe, grip equipment, out to the set and back, move locations, fly crews and helicopters.

In 2007 major studios, including Fox, Disney, Paramount, NBC, and CBS redirected 20,862 tons of studio sets and other solid waste that would have gone to landfills, and instead reused and recycled the materials, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.  This combined reduction of waste eliminated

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