It is easiest to make lunch with a sandwhich and some pre packaged snacks. The reality is that those pre packaged snacks are mostly packaging that is waste and not recyclable. The crinkly plastic wrap is not recyclable and the foil wrap around granola or othe fruit bars is also not recyclable, they are 100% garbage. Although they don’t weigh a lot … they are wasteful in my view and I am going to try and avoid them.

Here are some of the rules that I try and stick to when making lunches:

1. I do not use saran wrap or aluminum foil or plastic bags when packing lunches and plastic bags. I use plastic reusable containers only. The one downs side to using plastic containers (Ziploc or other) is that they do take up more room in the lunch bag or knap sack.   I have quite trying to cram it into the lunch bag or box and leave some items in the re usable container just in the knap sack.

• FACT: Plastic not only adds to landfill space and takes forever to decompose. Used plastic dumped into the sea kills and destroys sea life at an estimated 1,000,000 sea creatures per year!
• FACT: Recycling rates for plastic bags are extremely low. Only 1 to 3% of plastic bags end up getting recycled

2. I only pack a re usable thermos or drink container for the kids.   To keep it interesting for the kids I try and mix up the drinks provided day over day.  I rotate between plain water, peppermint tea (they like it), lemonade and other watered down juices. 

You can get ones to easily clip on to their back pack so they will remember to bring them home at the end of the day.

-      Whatever recyclable containers you do chose to use, make sure you educate your kids so that they know to place them in the recycling box when they are done.

• FACT: The average time taken by plastic bottles to decompose in a landfill is close to 700 years.
• FACT: Almost every hour, nearly 250,000 plastic bottles are dumped in landfills. It is not surprising that plastic bottles constitute close to 50% of recyclable waste in the dumps.

3. Avoid individually packaged lunch treats (as mentioned above) and purchase a thermos or container for both hot and cold lunch treats.  Instead of packing yoghurt in the individual one serving size containers, I buy my yoghurt in a larger or bulk container and put the yoghurt directly into the cold thermos.  Often to spice it up, I put some apple sauce or even a chocolate something in the middle to create more interest in the “healthy” waste free lunch.

• FACT: About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
• FACT: Out of every $10 spent buying items, $1 (10%) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of household trash.

Waste free lunches are definately a bit more work, there is no doubt about it.  I am trying to be very committed about this … and the result is hopefully less waste at our schools and in my house and also that my kids will be eating more whole and less processed foods.  I see it as a win win on both fronts.

The last big win for me is that a waste free lunch will result in less waste at the schools, which will ultimately mean reduced costs for the school boards and more money to enduate our children.

I have researched this internally and have asked our VP Ops to explain to me why this is the case.

Urban Impact’s fleet of diesel trucks are all turbo charged diesels.  They are the cleanest combustion engines in the market place.  When the trucks are working under a heavy load (carrying their cargo) the exhaust gas temperatures are very high (1000 degrees F), this is hotter then a barbeque!   If these engines are shut down immediately after working hard (carrying their cargo) it may result in premature bearing failure (in the turbo charger) and this is a very costly repair (in excess of $10k).   If the trucks have worked under load conditions, they need to run for approximately 5 minutes to cool down before they can be shut off.  Urban Impact trucks all have anti idling technology.  This means that if the temperatures have decreased enough to be warrent shut off, the truck does so automatically if they are in Park.

The Hybrid truck that we put into operation in August of 2009 is the ultimate anti idling machine.  This truck can work (while parked) on its Hybrid battery.  We have tested and measured the results of the Hybrid’s performance and are very pleased with the results.  The Hybrid truck consumes 50% less fuel then its equivalent counterpart.  In addition the truck engine hours are 50% less then its counterpart.  This is a remarkable “savings” and achieves a remarkable improvement in its impact on the environement.  The Hybrid truck we employ works best in an urban or dense client setting, the benefits are not achieved in a more rural or driving style route.

Urban Impact hopes to move all office paper and shredding trucks to Hybrid technology in the next 4 years.

So my question is: Does charging for each bag reduce consumption?

Humans have a funny nature of thinking twice when there is a price attached. Whether 5 cents or $20, people tend to think more when they are being charged. I think charging for bags can help reduce consumption in 2 ways. 1. People want to spend less and therefore use less bags 2. Retailers aren’t just assuming that you NEED a bag, and asking which makes the consumer think “do I really need a bag?” . With any hope, consumers will give their head a shake and realize it’s not that hard to bring a reuseable bag and with any luck cut back the drastic over consumption of plastic bags. My hopes is to eliminate the use of plastic shopping bags all together!

Here are some shocking facts on Plastic bags: http://www.greenerfootprints.com/plasticbagfacts/

Grant and Jen who are in the documentary (Grant is the producer) bring a wonderful amount of energy and enthusiasm to their commitment to zero waste for one year.    The project set out on a very simple quest:  1.  to produce no (or virtually) no garbage for one year and 2.  other then food, buy nothing for one year and 3 (more importantly) Grant and Jen were competing with each other to see who could create the least amount of waste.   I won’t give it away who won, but I can tell you it is amazing and admirable how little garbage they created or needed to create when they put their minds to it.

It certainly would take a considerable effort to get my family to no waste.  With four kids under 8, the consumption habits are prohibitive and to reason with a child that no new toys should be acquired would be tough, for sure.   My 8 year old was asked what she thought about the movie?  Her response was very sweet and painfully honest “I enjoyed it a lot, but thankfully mummy is not making us live zero waste!”  She got it, zero waste means no stuff, for her.

One of the painfully realistic things about zero waste, you do have to consume less in order to try and achieve “it”.   A tough change for our society.   One that I am trying to make. 

I am not sure if I can achieve zero waste right now, but I am going to try and get it to 90% at home and at work.  Stand by for results!

In any event, the most postive experience yet (other then Urban Impact winning the Private Sector award – yeah!) was meeting Grant Baldwin and Jenny Rustemeyer a couple who lived waste free for 1 year.  Can you believe it?  Amazing and inspirational.  The premier of the film is tomorrow at the RCBC Conference and the Vancouver Premier is on Saturday May 29 @ Granville 7 Cinema.

The movie trailer:  http://www.vimeo.com/3301133

Their website: http://cleanbinproject.com/

I admire and applaud what they have done!

We added a new dimension to this years tours, we asked all participaing schools to submit “the top 5 things that they as a class, and that they as individuals could do to reduce waste”.  Ferris Elementary of the Richmond School District won, their submission was amazing!   In my view several of their suggestions should be considered best practices to other schools.  There suggestions were as follows:

1. Reduce what be bring into the school, bring reuseable containers, utencils, water bottle, thermos containers
   (We also encouraged hot lunch provider to use recycleable containers- which took place this year)
2. Performed garbage audits to determine what waste comes into the school and develop a plan to try to address it
   (We classified and weighed the garbage to determine the composition and amount and have comparedf it to previous years)
3. Presented our garbage audit findings to the school and have encouraged them to continue to reduce their garbage (via assemeblies, announcements and made class presentations)
4. Reverse lunch = kids play first and then go out to play = less garbage
5. We encouraged Ikea to donate containers that allow the paper towel to dry before they are placed into the paper recycling. Each class received a metal basket and we were able to take the wet paper towel and dry it overnight so that it could be recycled in the paper recycling

Great ideas and a great example to us all! 

Thank you to all the school classes that participated.  Your energy and questions are invigorating for me, and most importantly they challenge my thinking.  I enjoyed and learned something from each tour and consider it a priviledge to have shared my passion for waste diversion with you!
Thank you to all.

Urban Impact is paying for all the classes to be bused into the facilities (Richmond M-W, New Westmisnter Th & Fr).  This year we have also raised the stakes of the tours, we are offering a $500 prize for the class that provides us with the 5 ways in which they as a class can reduce waste and 5 ways in which they can personally reduce waste.    In addition to the grand prize we give away prizes for the 3 best questions (each tour) and a cool non battery flashlight (curtesy of Science World) for the best science question asked.  It certainly seems to motivate the questions. 

I enjoy the tours, often the questions inspire some blog topics.  In addition the energy and interest of the kids is envigorating and a challenge for me!  Keeps me on my toes.

Here are a couple of the good questions:

• Does recycling reduce the power we consume?
• What does Urban Impact do reduce power consumption?
• What does Urban Impact do to achieve zero waste?
• Is it more important to reduce or recycle?
• Why did you start Urban Impact?

Fun questions to answer!

I certainly had to think about a worthy answer.

My reponse:  Urban Impact’s core vision is to reduce the waste we create and generate.  It is one of the strong pillars on which the company was founded.  The reality is, Urban Impact is a for profit business and in order to grow and deliver our promise we do need to create a profit.  The profit we generate allows us to borrow funds to expand and deliver on what we do.   So to answer the question fairly and honestly, I think the answer is:  we consider both economic and environmental issues when planning and making company decisions.  An additional thought, that in order to stay true to who Urban Impact is and has become  we cannot make decisions without considering both. 

I love getting blog content from school tours!  Keeps me sharp.

I am not sure why all the resistance?  I have been composting at home for 20 years and it is an easy and actually quiet a fun process to participate in.  Watching the compost (over time) become a nutrient and quality soil aditive is actually quite therapeutic.  I only wish it went a bit faster.  Here in the northern hemisphere it does take a little longer to start breaking down and becoming soil. 

Two tips from my home compost system – add some moisture during the dryer season and don’t forget to turn it from time to time.  These two things definately speed it up and make it usable in your garden faster.

Recently we moved to a suburban setting where our neighbors have chickens.  Well these creatures have eliminated whatever remained in my garbage bin (like left overs and cooked foods)!  They will eat anything, a little bit of old soup and some oatmeal porridge leftover for the day – well that is like a gourmet delight to them!   They are not to eat any meat or fish.

So with a little help from my home composter and the chickens next door, we don’t have any organic waste going into our garbage bin!

There are seveal newsprint mills in the near vacinity (WA) that seem to be having trouble.  Blue Heron is in Chapter 11 and its future is certainly up for discussion.

I belive it is certainly a sign of the times.  Less advertising = thinner papers.  Online media is certainly a reliable and easy source of news and I think the newspapers of the world certainly will face an up hill battle keeping us engaged and interested in reading print media.   Newsprint itself might be a dying grade.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months.  Will Catalyst recover and be able to re open, or is it truly a shut down.

Although loosing a local mill is not positive, we still have plenty of markets to sell newsprint to.  There are viable domestic mills purchasing newsprint and certainly export purchasors as well.