The Story of Bottled Water was released by the “Story of Stuff” organization, on World Water Day March 22, 2010 to tell the story of manufactured demand for bottled water. Why do Americans buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when we can get it practically free from the tap? Refilling a reusable bottle is cheaper and much more environmentally friendly, especially when you consider the following shocking facts:

Bottled water costs ten to 500 times more than tap water. According to OregonLive.com,  if priced by the gallon Dasani costs $5.76 a gallon (at 4.5 cents per fluid ounce); Fiji costs $7.55 per gallon. Celebrity-endorsed, electrolyte-enhanced Smartwater is $6.14. Meanwhile, Arrowhead, in an “Eco-Shape” bottle, is a relative bargain, at $4.48 per gallon. Remember the outrage when gas reached over $4 a gallon a couple of years ago?  The amount of petroleum used to manufacture water bottles each year is enough to power a million cars. Of all those water bottles created, only 20% is actually recycled into other products. The rest – some 4 billion PET bottles — is sent to landfills or incinerators. More facts can be found at the storyofbottledwater.org via their downloadable pdf.

This eight-minute video uses the Story of Stuff style to explore the bottled water industry’s attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. Please click the “More” link to see the rest of the story and watch the video. » Read more

With a simple swipe, Starbucks customers can join Conservation International to help protect forests and the life that exists within them – as well as fight climate change. Starting March 9 and through December 31, 2010, every time a customer pays with their new Conservation International Starbucks Card at participating stores in the United States Starbucks will donate five cents to Conservation International to help protect forests.

Conservation International (CI) applies innovations in science, economics, policy and community participation to protect the Earth’s richest regions of plant and animal diversity in the biodiversity hotspots, high-biodiversity wilderness areas and key marine ecosystems. The five cents donated by Starbucks with each purchase will provide contributions to support CI’s work to protect and restore forests, essential steps to addressing climate change. As a company that relies on coffee as an agricultural product, Starbucks knows firsthand the importance of protecting the environment. The company has worked with CI for more than 10 years to help support responsible coffee farming, protect biodiversity, and reduce coffee farming impacts on climate in an effort to sustain the supply of the world’s best coffee.

“The involvement of Starbucks and their customers provides a tremendous boost to global forest conservation and climate solutions,” said Justin Ward, Vice President of Business Practices at Conservation International. “We value our long-term relationship with Starbucks and we are pleased that support raised from the Preservation Card will benefit sustainable management of the world’s natural resources.” » Read more

This week marks the beginning of Lent, a period of 40 days of penance and reflection in which many Christians prepare for the coming of Easter. The week typically begins with feasting at Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) parties as people celebrate eating richer, fatty foods before the ritual fasting of the Lenten season.

Ash Wednesday officially begins the season as many faithful receive blessed ashes on their foreheads symbolizing the confession and penitence of the day. The remaining days of Lent are symbolic of the 40 days of temptation that Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism.

According to the Journal Gazette/Times Courier “In addition to special worship services, Christians generally observe Lent with acts of introspection, self-examination, and repentance for one’s sins.” Some may fast or give up something (e.g., a food or an activity) during the time of Lent. Others spend the 40 days in prayer, practicing special devotions, or volunteering for various charities. (Technically, the time period between Ash Wednesday and Easter is 46 days, but Sundays don’t count, as each is considered to be a ‘mini-Easter.’)

This year, Reuters reports,  “Church leaders are encouraging people to give up their iPods for Lent, instead of more traditional vices such as chocolate, to help save the planet.”

What a great idea! The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, and the Bishop of Liverpool, James Jones, are calling it a “technology fast,” and are suggesting that people give up such devices as mobile phones or iPods as a way to cut carbon emissions during Lent.

“Instead of giving up chocolate for Lent, why not fast for justice … to help those suffering from the effects of climate change,” said Jones. “There is no climate justice for the poor. The Carbon Fast helps us change the way we live; the Climate Justice Fund helps the poor adapt to a changing climate.” » Read more

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Americans throw away more than 30 million Christmas trees at the end of the Christmas season.

If you want to make sure your cut tree finds an organic end, recycle it! In the weeks after Christmas, many communities offer curbside pick-up of trees, while others offer drop-off locations or wood chipping services. Make sure you know when these services will be offered, or your tree will wind up in a landfill where even the most natural trash is unlikely to decompose.

These services will usually chop and mulch your tree so that it can be used for weed control and water conservation in public areas and parks; sunk in lakes to provide habitat for fish; or turned into fuel at biomass plants.

Be sure to remove any tinsel, lights, and ornaments. Unfortunately, trees with artificial snow or flocking can’t be mulched, so next year, make your tree more earth friendly by avoiding such decorations. » Read more

When you want to find the phone number of a local residence, where do you look for the information? Do you haul out the white pages to “let your fingers do the walking” through the entries, or do you search online using one of the internet’s free directory services?

According to banthephonebook.org, as many as 5 million trees are cut down to create the white pages phone books that are dropped on our doorsteps each year. Additionally, taxpayers spend $17 million per annum to have these books recycled.

In rebuttal, a detailed Yellow Pages’ blog demonstrates the process of making paper for the Yellow Pages industry uses mainly woodchips and saw mill byproducts as well as recycled newspaper and directories.

Regardless of which data is more accurate, when you consider that today’s consumers most likely use online directories, social networks, and mobile phone applications to find the contact information they need, banthephonebook.org some feel it simply does not make sense to have the white pages phone books automatically delivered to us every year. » Read more

Have you ever wondered why most plastics are marked with a number from 1 to 7 inside a recycling symbol? The simple answer is that each number represents the type of resin made to produce the plastic. Because each resin is different, these numbers influence how that product can be recycled, though the most popular today are clear plastic drinking bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) #1 or milkjugs and soap bottles made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE) #2 plastic. Plastics with codes #3 through #7 might be accepted as part of your recycling program, but these products are not easily recycled, and are often sorted out and incinerated. (An excellent chart explaining the differences between the types of plastics can be downloaded from earth911.com)

The first PET bottles were recycled in 1977, and since then, plastic bottle recycling has increased to more than 2.4 billion pounds annually. In fact, according to earth911.com,  more than 80 percent of communities across the nation collect and recycle plastic bottles, and in recent years, the number of U.S. plastic recycling businesses has nearly tripled. More than 1,600 businesses are now involved in recycling post-consumer plastics.

Recycling 1 ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space. Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60-watt light bulb for up to six hours. And recycling one pound of PET plastic bottles saves approximately 12,000 BTUs (British thermal unit) of heat energy–that’s enough energy to bring about eight gallons of water 180 degrees from freezing to boiling. And, producing new plastic products from recycled materials uses two-thirds less energy than is required to make products from raw materials! » Read more

I already love to eat Kettle brand chips. Ironically, I never even enjoyed potato chips until earlier this year when I absentmindedly snacked on a bag of Kettle Tuscan Three Cheese chips at a media event I was attending: From that moment on I was hooked. Since then, I’ve sampled many of the flavors in their line, always delighted by their wonderful crunch and delicious flavors.

Only recently, I happened to notice verbage on the packaging that drew my attention to the company’s sustainability efforts and was pleased to discover the company supports a variety of eco-friendly practices. In fact, green building, renewable energy, habitat restoration, recycling, and reuse make up the pillars of Kettle Foods’ environmental initiative! Awesome practices contribute to their awesome chips!

The new 73,000-square-foot Kettle Foods factory in Beloit, Wisconsin, is the first food manufacturing facility in the U.S. to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)  Gold-level certification for green building. On top, the building features 18 wind turbines that generate enough energy to produce 56,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips every year – or approximately 28,000 kilowatt hours.

The Kettle Foods headquarters in Salem, Oregon, is home to one of the largest commercial solar power arrays in the Pacific Northwest. As a producer of renewable energy, Kettle Foods’ 616 solar panels generate 120,000 kWh of electricity annually – enough to make 250,000 bags of Kettle Brand Potato Chips each year, and reduce Kettle Foods’ annual CO2 emissions by 65 tons.

When Kettle Foods’ headquarters moved to Oregon in 1999, the company set out to restore a federally designated natural wetlands on the company grounds.  Invasive non-native species including Himalayan blackberry bushes and Scotch Broom were removed and the grounds were replanted with native plants such as Aster, Camas, Red Alder, Lupine, and Sword Fern in addition to aquatic plant species such as Wapato and Marsh Pennywort which enhance biological diversity in the wetland pond. » Read more

There’s a popular adage that says something like “Printer ink is the most expensive liquid on earth.” Go ahead, Google it.

The return shows pages of results proving the theory, including one article from the Financial Times that says that HP ink cost $8000 per gallon (published in 2004). While in truth, most high-end designer perfumes actually cost more,  that’s still a lot of money for a fluid that’s relatively inexpensive to manufacture and hasn’t changed much from what the Chinese invented thousands of years ago.

The good news is that most consumers are not buying ink by the gallon. In fact, most cartridges only contain from 5 to 20 milliliters of the black stuff we rely on to feed our machines. Working backwards from $8000 per gallon, a high-yield black ink cartridge that promises 800 copies contains about $40 worth of ink. The smallest ones contain less than $10 worth of ink.

The bad news is that most ink cartridges do not tell you on the packaging how much ink is actually inside the cartridge: instead they offer suggested page output. Basically, you’re paying for a product, but there is no way to know how much you’re actually getting until you open the box and look inside, where the volume is sometimes printed on the foil wrapper

So, when you’re shopping for cereal or soda, don’t you want to compare the value of your purchase in a way that tells you if the more expensive package is actually a better value? What if you paid more for a box of cereal only to open it and find it contained less product than a similar sized box of a competitive brand? What if your toasty oats came in similar-sized boxes, and you had no way of knowing how many bowls of cereal either box provided? How could you comparison shop one brand of toasty oats between Cereal Company A and Cereal Company B without knowing what’s actually inside the box?

Printer refill cartridges are like that. I happen to own two printers: One is an HP black laser printer, which I use for day-today-printing. The other is an HP color inkjet that I use for my kid’s school projects, maps, printing web pages, and occasional photo printing. Each recommends a specific HP replacement cartridge.

I am holding a brand-new original equipment (OEM) HP Q2612A black toner box: There is nothing on the outside of this box that tells me how much I can expect this cartridge to yield, except for some small type hidden under a label (which I had to tear off) that says “For declared yield see … www.hp.com/go/pageyield.”  Because I am sitting at home while I write this, I can click on the link to discover a long ISO testing page with lots of technical language that basically says they’ve tested the cartridge according to ISO scientific methods and according to those tests, they believe the cartridge will return a specific and consistent yield. But nothing on this box allowed me to comparison-shop it against the remanufactured toner cartridges offered in the store and online. » Read more

Kathy Kelly is a 39-year-old single mother who works as a law librarian for a law firm in Erie, Pennsylvania. The industrious recycler has created a handcrafted line of bags she calls “BookBags“  using  repurposed book covers from outdated lawbooks. We found her and her fabulous bags over at Twitter.

One of her tasks at her firm Knox, McLaughlin, Gornall & Sennett is keeping the legal reference books up-to-date. As laws change, the books are constantly being replaced: Sadly, most of them have no distributional value once removed from the library shelves. As a person with a concern for the environment, she was interested in recycling the old books, but discovered it was difficult to find a recycler who would even take books, especially hard-covered books.  After a great amount of effort she was finally able to convince one of the local recycling companies to take them, but she would have to remove the covers first.

United States Code Annoted

About two years ago, Kathy returned to work after a surgery and came back to discover a giant pile of mail that included volumes of updates.  One update, the United States Code Annoted (pictured here) included nine volumes covered in gorgeous maroon leather-like material.  She knew she would have to remove the covers to recycle the paper of the book, but it still seemed like such a waste of that beautiful fabric to throw it away (not to mention, creating plenty of garbage).  For a few months, she simply collected the book covers; she didn’t know what she was going to do with them, only that she would figure something out.

One day, in one of those “eureka!” moments familiar to many inventors, Kathy envisioned a small purse her mother had given her when she was younger, and started playing with the idea. » Read more