Archive for the ‘zeroWaste’ Category

An Australian Made Electric Car

Monday, May 4th, 2009

evme

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

Paint Cans by Lia Ballentine

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

Lend Lease SustainabilityOk, 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 »