Today’s post features guest contributor Eric Walter, who runs Black Bear Composting, an organics recycling company located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Black Bear Composting helps local business shrink their waste stream by recycling their food scraps via composting. With all of the benefits of composting commonly given, I have yet to see a story on how composting is a great way to keep … More
Lately I have been feeling like a character in one of the children’s novels I have loved and reread numerous times over the years. Maybe it’s Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, or perhaps Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? The central plot of these books features an average person transported to a fantasy world for a series of adventures each more fantastic, silly, puzzling, absurd, … More
Today we’re excited to release our new report that examines alternatives to material recovery in the US, where currently just one third of all municipal solid waste is recovered by recycling or composting. Closing the Loop: Road Map for Effective Material Value Recovery provides a detailed systems analysis of international packaging recovery systems, including successful collection, sorting, and reprocessing technologies and infrastructures, as well as … More
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, January 5, 2012 — Recognizing the limitations of the US waste management system, where only about one third of all municipal solid waste is recovered by recycling or composting, GreenBlue® has released a report that assesses a variety of material recovery systems around the world in order to inform US policies and approaches. Closing the Loop: Road Map for Effective Material Value Recovery … More
Though options for recovering food waste and compostable packaging are beginning to expand, home composting remains an easy and fun way to divert these valuable materials from landfill. Here at GreenBlue, we collect these items and I have the honor of taking them to my home compost pile (though our nine chickens get some choice tidbits). Besides the environmental benefits (our nearest landfill is over … More
Several of us just got back from one of Virginia’s premier music and art festivals, FloydFest, where I led a 32-person Green Team (in my spare time—not an official GreenBlue function!). We focused on recycling and composting, but there is so much more to it than that: waste prevention, volunteerism, education, and community building. It’s so amazing to see the heartfelt gratitude of staff, artists, … More
Since I joined GreenBlue, my mission has been to try to understand what happens to packaging when we, as consumers, are done using it. Does it get recycled? Composted? Sent to a landfill? And why? Several years later, my findings can be boiled down to the fact that the fate of packaging at end-of-life is a really complicated topic. And that if my job is … More
Design for Recovery Guidelines for Aluminum, Steel, Glass, and Paper Packaging Promote More Effective Material Recovery Systems CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, July 6, 2011 — Following two years of research into various end-of-life infrastructures and technologies, today GreenBlue® released a suite of reports that provide technical guidance on designing packaging to be compatible with common recovery methods. Design for Recovery Guidelines for Aluminum, Steel, Glass, and Paper … More
The Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC) has released a report on how packaging is handled in industrial composting facilities based on a national survey conducted this spring. More