Ride the Plastic Whale – on a boat

The other day while walking around in Amsterdam I stumbled on these cute little boats. They all said ‘This boat is made of Amsterdam Canal Plastic’, and on close inspection, their floors were clearly made of plastic waste pieces, so I just had to look up what all this was about.

As it turns out, the company behind these boats is Plastic Whale, and their initiative is as cool as can be. The formula is simple: take people on boat tours, fish out plastic from Amsterdam canals, recycle plastic, make boats from recycled plastic – and then the cycle starts all over. Tour – fishing – recycle – boat, more tours – more fishing  – more to recycle – more boats. Yes, it’s awesome. Check out their wonderful little introduction video here:

In case you are wondering: YES, you can book your own plastic fishing tour with them. I told you, they are pure awesome.

 

 

Cups & Festivals

In the last month I visited 2 festivals in 2 countries: PinkPop in the Netherlands, and Bánkitó Fesztivál in Hungary. I don’t intend to compare them in any meaningful way, as pretty much the only characteristic they share is the fact that they are both festivals. Size, musical genres displayed, popularity index of artists, audience, etc., are all very very different.

But they are both festivals, which means that there’s going to be people walking around consuming things and producing trash. Food, drinks, alcohol, cigarettes. And this is the only aspect in which I AM going to compare them.

Below you can see 2 images, the first one is PinkPop festival main stage, the second one is Bánkitó, on the walking path leading to main stage.

PinkPop festival

Bánkitó festival

I guess I don’t really have to point out the difference in the amount of trash lying on the floor. However, I would like to point out the cup on the right: it’s a RePohár, a re-usable cup for which you need to pay 1 euro deposit, and yes, you have to carry it around with you and refill it anytime you want to drink. And yes, at the end you exchange it back for a euro. Result: no throwaway cups in hands, no throwaway cups on floor.

Now I am sure that for bigger events it’s difficult to implement these things, because yadda yadda yadda, but actually a large scale event, Glastonbury festival has just this year also introduced a reusable cup, in steel form. I really do hope that Dutch festival organizers will also do their share of researching the possibilities and ordering cups from sustainable supplies like Dutch Cups instead of all the throwaway plastic nonsense.

Last but not least, the cherry on top at Bánkitó was this little cigarette bud holder capsule that any smoker could get for free. Don’t let the funny little shape fool you, it’s not a tampon holder nor a vibrator. It’s actually an amazingly useful accessory, and I am surprised the festival business in general hasn’t been handing out their own branded portable ashtray versions yet. Finally a piece of merchandise that would actually be useful! *hint hint*

Recycling can even be cute!

Today’s post is a short one: I just couldn’t resist to take a picture and share this very cute incident that was happening by the recycling bins the other day.

Two adorable little girls, supervised probably by their dad, were throwing the recyclables into the relevant bins:

The little girl was commenting out loud on every piece, asking out loud what it was made of, assessing how useful it was for her, and then in the end disposing of it in the adequate bin.

I loved how the dad just allowed her to take all the time she needs to process the information and also to say goodbye to each of the items.

It’s also really good that for these girls trash separation is part of their routine from such an early age on. This way it’s going to be very automatic for them later on to do keep doing it. This is what I call good environmental parenting! 🙂

Trash cans around the world

Waste separation and recycling is a global issue, the iplementation however is always local. In this post I wanted to give a tiny peek into the differences of public recycling bins I have come across around different points of the world.

Schiphol airport, Netherlands

standard bin includes 3 sections: paper, plastic, everything else

Shanghai, China

trash cans offer 2 options: recyclables (which includes paper, metal, glass and plastic) vs. other waste (includes ‘peel’, ‘leaf’, ‘dust’ and food)

 

Budapest, Hungary

I left my favourite for the end: a burger joint I stumbled onto in Budapest although follows the same bin logic as the NL (paper, plastic and rest), but the message is way more awesome:

Takeaway massage: don’t forget to also recycle on your holiday – being abroad is no excuse!

Because recycling is sexy – and you know it.

Another small step – this time an earphone

Couple of months back I flew with KLM and was highly disappointed by the amount of one-use plastic items. On that airplane model, I also needed to ask for the throw-away earphones because of the outdated plug that the aircraft uses. You need that adapter piece to hear things in stereo, and of course you can’t ask only for the adapter, because they come bundled with the crappy earphones. 

But, I’ve kept the adapter piece you can see above for future instances, and re-used it just now – victory, one less pair of earphones used up!  🙂

Although I must say, the quality and usage of it is insanely weird, as you have to have the jack halfway pushed in just until the right position in order to have actual stereo. But it still works, so yay 🙂

Nothing gets thrown away – in Futurama’s recycling utopia

I love Futurama‘s take on environmental issues and their future. According to one episode, in 2052 New York sent its garbage to space in the form of a giant ball, in action that is biting New New Yorkers in the ass as the giant trash comet is heading back to Earth in the year 3000. Below you can see Leela’s horrified reaction to the wasteful nature of the 20th century, and a quick intro on how recycling is done in the 30th century.

I hope the trash comet will not have to be launched and it’s not going to take us actually a 1000 years to get to the Futurama state 🙂

Trip to the waste collection point + bonus: ducklings and turtles!

I have been collecting a small pile of ‘special’ trash – things that don’t belong into the normal household waste bins nor into any of the usual recycling bins around. This includes stuff like batteries, electronic equipment, toxic waste, medicines, etc.

My pile consisted so far of 2 broken computer mice, a lightbulb, and some leftover expired medicine.

And today was the day I decided to get rid of it. So I looked up the closest waste collection point and cycled there. I found it, it’s quite a nice bikeride through and beyond Westerpark to get there, and the thing itself is surrounded by a little moat, like a fort, I thought that’s quite charming (click for map).

Once inside, I was a bit confused, as there are containers all around for different things, and not too many signs or people to help you around.

Luckily I found a helpful member of staff who directed me to the place where I’m supposed to hand in all the stuff – which is behind that blue door in the below pic (I guess I should have known from the holy-looking rays of sunlight that are surrounding it):

I told the cheerful man behind the counter that I have some stuff, mostly medicine I want to hand in, to which he’s reaction was to exclaim with a big Santa-like laughter that this is great because he is ‘the medicine man!’ I had to laugh, but I also had to immediately scooch away from the counter because an old couple were coming in to deliver cans of paint and other liquids. I also saw another car coming in, someone sitting in the back with a box of who-knows-what. Was nice to witness that people actually take the effort to come here to dispose of their dangerous trash items!

With a sense of accomplishment I walked out of the fort, and just when I was about to get on my bike, I noticed a duck-mom and her 6 little ducklings running across the road at the entrance of the establishment. I already thought the moat was cute as is, but seeing the ducklings plunge into the moat one-by-one raised the cuteness levels exponentially.

And if that wasn’t enough reward in the form of cuteness for my long bike trip (with occasional wind in my face, which we all know is quite a pain), along the canal on my way home I actually spotted also a pair of turtles sunbathing. They were just chilling there on that piece of wood without a care in the world – they barely even blinked when I went close to take a picture. Maybe they were winking at me, saying: thanks for recycling! 🙂

 

There goes the plastic

Ever wondered how those big bins for plastic recycling are emptied? I just managed to catch and film the plastic truck come by today:

NO NO for spam – YES YES for the environment

In this blogpost I will explain how to get rid of paper-based spam in an environmental friendly way for anyone living in Holland.

So, spam. We all get those annoying unsolicited emails – luckily I haven’t been seeing any of those as my spam filters are really good at getting rid of them. But real life spam, well, that’s kind of in your face. You know, all that stuff you don’t need and yet gets shoved into your mailbox over and over. Advertising brochures, newspapers, you name it. A clutter of stuff amongst which you ought to fish out potentially important documents you might be expecting.

And while electronic spam can just be easily filtered out and deleted, paper-based spam has to be printed, then distributed, only to then be maaaaaybe read a bit but for sure to be thrown away quite quickly, regardless of whether it’s read or not. According to the Milieu Centraal,

an average household in Holland receives approx. 66 kgs of unsolicited brochures and newspapers a year.

Yikes. It’s true though, this is the 3kg stack I have collected in about 3 weeks:

In the same article they also say that 30% of households throw things away without reading. Another yikes. That seems pretty wasteful. So basically it’s a pile of unnecessarily printed papers. And I don’t even dare to imagine the % that isn’t disposed of correctly (paper goes in paper recycling, but only after you take off the plastic wrapping…).

However, there is a solution! A spam filter for your mail does exist!

The answer has been in front of you all along. Those with an eye for detail might have already spotted it above on the first picture that there are some well-groomed mailboxes in between the ones that are vomiting out spam. Their secret? It’s the wonderful NO NO sticker depicted below which acts as spam filter for your real-life mailbox. The first NO is about advertising brochures without specifically being addressed to you, and the second NO is about house-to-house newspapers – I guess in case you are an expat in Holland and don’t plan to learn Dutch from a magazine this is something you really don’t need in your life. But it’s available in a NO YES option too, just in case you wonder.

I bet now you’re thinking: ‘Ok great, so I won’t have to go through all the unsolicited mail, but it still gets printed and thrown away somewhere else… so where does the real environmental value come in?’ Well, I have good news for you. This is the best part in the whole thing, because what happens is that the producers of these papers are updated with the number of addresses that have these stickers, and will decrease production accordingly. So basically,

the more stickers are put up, the less paper-spam will be produced.

A-ma-zing. Intrigued? Wanna get a sticker for yourself? Here’s how:

1. either walk into your Gemeente and pick up one for free – more info in Dutch here
   

2. or for the lazy internet people you can just order one online for example here

Mine just arrived today! I am saying NO NO to spam, and YES YES to the environment! Bonus point: this will also massively cut down on the frequency with which I need to empty my paper recycling bin 🙂

 

Who you gonna buy from?

Being environmental friendly in your daily life is hard. Since most of the products are not optimized for this, you need to pay double attention all throughout. This means being conscious about what you buy, where it’s from, how it’s made… And then figuring out where it goes, how to recycle it… It’s time consuming and an exhausting mental effort.

That’s why I always welcome whenever I find a company or product that employs favorable practices in this regard – like this I can switch off the sustainability-alert mode at least for a bit, at least for the time while I am buying products from them. Because someone else has already done the job of figuring out the environmental aspect of the product and I don’t have to worry about it (that much).

I have made a new discovery in this regard with the cosmetics of Lush – I just recently got a whole package of stuff from my former colleagues (yay to them! 🙂 ). I must say, I’m not big on cosmetics in general, and having a sensitive skin has already drove me couple years ago to utilize as little as possible from the simpler options available on the market. However, I have not yet managed to eliminate the plastic waste created from these toiletries, so I was delighted to see this program from Lush that promotes recycling:

Not only do they use 100% recycled materials for their packagings, but they even involve the customer in the process. You not only get to participate in a more sustainable practice, you even get stuff for free! Clever and awesome!

I didn’t know this about them, and this definitely makes me more enticed to use their products. We have to remember that in today’s economy, we vote on a daily basis for companies, practices and ideas – by purchasing their products. We vote with our money. Anything you buy, supports a business. So it’s good if you think twice who you gonna vote for/buy from today!