Archive for the ‘zeroWaste’ Category

The Story of Bottled Water

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I promise that the next Urban Grind will not sell bottled water. I have cared about this for a while and it is time I got serious about it too. The whole bottled water thing really is crazy. Just the price we pay is crazy enough. But thanks (again) to Annie Leonard we have a great little animation that spells out the situation to make it easy for us to make the decision to stop drinking bottled water. I really do hope that you check out The Story of Bottled Water. I also can’t wait to see a Doco called Tapped on the same subject.

Posted in alternative media, design, environment, inspiring, movies, urban grind, zeroWaste | 1 Comment »

Christmas Shmistmus

Monday, December 7th, 2009

So most people that know me know that I am not a big fan of Christmas. For so many years it was not a great time for family as we seems to fight every year though that is much better these days. I love the holiday but I would have a holiday for your birthday if I could. I am not religious though I would be if one could truly train to be a Jedi Knight. And when it comes to gifts it was special when we were kids and our parents would have to save all year just to buy us gifts for christmas, the rest of the year was spent waiting for christmas. But now most kids including the big kid in me can have his christmas whenever he wants. And now that I like to think about the planet and how we waste I can’t these days look past the waste that Christmas can be. This is going somewhere… but before it does and while we are on the topic of waste… please, please buy locally made or from your local small business, fairtrade, eco friendly or not at all. So my point… is to show you how the whole world can reduce (read eliminate) the use of wrapping paper.

http://www.vimeo.com/2321507

Posted in design, environment, inspiring, zeroWaste | 1 Comment »

Recycle your Batteries at Urban Grind

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Did you know that over 8000 tonnes of batteries end up on Australian landfill each year? You can start recycling your batteries at Battery World today or at Urban Grind if that happens to be more convenient for you.

As far as I understand it you can recycle all batteries from watch batteries to car batteries at Battery World though Urban Grind can only really accept up to D sized batteries. So check those desk & kitchen drawers and dig out those old batteries that you just knew would have been environmentally uncool throw in the bin. We are collecting now.

I would like to thank Albion Battery World for getting us set up to collect batteries.

Oh and seriously… you should be using rechargeable batteries anyway. No excuses (that I am aware of anyway).

Posted in environment, local community, urban grind, zeroWaste | No Comments »

350.org: Because the world needs to know

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

This looks like an interesting campaign for climate change. I will reveal more details later but I do have an idea on a way that Urban Grind can participate.

350.org

Posted in alternative media, environment, inspiring, local community, politics, zeroWaste | No Comments »

An Australian Made Electric Car

Monday, May 4th, 2009

It has a 200km Range. Is 100% electric. You can plug it in at home. Zero Vehicle Emissions and it’s made in Armidale, NSW. It looks as good as any other small car though it doesn’t exactly have a small car price, but for those with the means and the desire to lower their impact on the planet and in turn be one of the early adopters that helps bring this cost down for those with less means then purchasing and Australian Made car has to be a good thing. Lots of info on the website, so check it out. evMe Website. If these guys can do it, surely Holden or Ford could do it too, but with their infrastructure they could do it for cheaper and maybe save their own sorry bottoms. Have they not heard of innovation?

Thanks to the Convenient Solutions blog for the heads up.

Posted in design, environment, local community, zeroWaste | 2 Comments »

Plastic Bottles – did you know?…

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

Wow. The plastic bottles in our oceans issue really is so much worse than I thought it could be. I imagined bottles floating around that could simply be retrieved and cleaned up. Not so. Empty bottles sink, bottle tops float, wildlife feeds the plastic to their young, fish ingest the breaking down particles and the problem is considered to already be so bad that it may never be able to be cleaned up. Now usually I try to err on the side of positive news but I had to ask myself, ‘Am I contributing to this? Is Australia?’ At first I didn’t think so, but Urban Grind sells plastic bottles. We do sell one bottle made from BioPlastics that will compost, but that is only one of many otherwise plastic bottles that won’t break down anytime soon.

At Christmas we were in Byron Bay for the day. And I swear to you that I have never seen a plastic bottle left on the beach (I may not get to the beach enough though) but on the beach at Byron it was littered with bottles. Surely this is caused by tourists but after learning what I know now about the issue it is simply not cool for it to be happening. So bottles on the beach will make it to the ocean, and as they say, ‘All drains lead to the ocean’ so littering in any sense in not acceptable.

In the short TED video above you can get a well presented overview of the situation. So what am I going to do about it? Well, first things first, I need to personally stop buying plastic. I also plan to remove plastic bottles from our shops drinks fridge by first contacting the drink companies and asking them to watch the video and let me know their position, and inform them that I am considering removing them from my fridge should they decide not to explore glass, bioplastics, or some other way of taking responsibility for the problem. I will also be contact Byron Shire Council with the same video, etc.

Please note that Urban Grind for over 7 years has always placed 100% of our plastic waste in the recycling bin. Which means that in milk bottles alone we have placed into recycling about 25,000 2lt bottles of milk. So think of it this way. Urban Grind is a little coffee shop and can produce that much milk bottle waste. I have worked in places that did not recycle their milk bottles and I still hear it from new staff about their old places of work never recycling a single bottle. Please check with your local coffee shop and find out if they recycle, and if not encourage them to do so. We all need to be considering how we are contributing to the global problem, that actually doesn’t effect us so much because most of the plastic floats away from Australia – how convenient (that’s a pun).

Posted in alternative media, customers, design, environment, urban grind, zeroWaste | No Comments »

household hazardous waste council collection service

Monday, March 2nd, 2009

In a couple of weeks the council will be offering its free household hazardous waste collection service. Household hazardous wastes include everyday products such as bleach, oven cleaners, mineral turpentine and paints that you get from the supermarket or hardware store. As the website explains these things need special care when being disposed of so if you have anything like this lying around the house now is your chance to get rid of it safely. The dates for the next collection/drop off day are below. You can also find more info on the Council Website.

March 7th
8am- 3pm
Ferny Grove Transfer Station
Upper Kedron Road, Ferny Grove.

I would also like to thank Lia Ballentine for her awesome paint can photo that I found on flickr and she so kindly let me use.

Posted in alternative media, environment, local community, zeroWaste | 1 Comment »

Lend Lease Sustainability?

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

Ok, like you the idea of a sustainable development company sounds like a very large bucket load of green washing, but they have an impressive website and they seem to be saying all of the right things, even challenging the government’s poor efforts. Apparently their Efficient Building Scheme provides an incentive for developers to care about the impact the buildings they build have on the environment. If this is true it is important. This has been a big problem in building green buildings. Developers usually just sell the building on so they don’t care what the electricity usage is going to be because they are not paying the bill.

As far as I can tell the only way to get involved is to talk about their ideas. So that it what I am doing. Do they really see the commercial benefit in being green? I hope so. I believe it is the direction of things to come and he who hits the market first has the best chance. The Efficient Building Scheme is supposed to have the potential to reduce a cities emissions by 50+% – that’s worth talking about. They are saying cities world wide. There is so much info on the site that I won’t waste your time trying to repeat any of it here. I suggest checking out this page first and scrolling to the bottom to watch the short videos: Lend Lease Sustainability Direction Detail Continued.

Could Lend Lease be one of my heroes one day? Why not?

Posted in environment, inspiring, zeroWaste | 4 Comments »

Biodiesel from used coffee grounds.

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

This is very interesting. Researchers are making biodiesel from used coffee grounds, which once used (again) can still be used for compost and (I didn’t know this) for fuel pellets. I so want to try making fuel pellets out of coffee grinds. Read more here: Coffee grounds for biodiesel

One of my customers once experimented with combining milk bottle plastic and used coffee grinds. It worked pretty well. There are resources all around us.

Posted in customers, environment, urban grind, zeroWaste | No Comments »

I would love a Peapod

Monday, October 13th, 2008

Like so many of these things we may never actually get the chance to purchase it, but I would love one of these. When are they going to realise that there is a market for these things and so many of us can’t wait. I love my little VW Golf Diesel but I would ditch it in a second for one of these Peapods, and not just because it has built in support for my iPhone.

Posted in apple, environment, zeroWaste | No Comments »

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