If your New Year’s resolution involves getting and staying more organized, you might need some spiffy new bins and baskets. Crate & Barrel, a participating merchant, offers many options including these eco-friendly totes. Knowing that your baskets are made from non-toxic & renewable materials makes filling them with your stuff even better.
Eco-friendly totes in a sweater weave of twisted natural water hyacinth with a touch of rattan and a warm light brown lacquer finish. Handcrafted with sturdy metal frames, cutout handles and rounded corners. Two sizes nest when not in use.
Want to make a list of Crate & Barrel products and keep it on your desktop or personal homepage? The Crate & Barrel iCatalog holds their full product line in a compact, portable widget that lets you search for products, build lists and share your discoveries with friends.
Note: a portion of any purchase made through the iCatalog or the link in this blog post goes to support Catalog Choice.
For the New Year, San Diego is resolving to dramatically increase the amount of waste residents recycle, including advertising mail. An ordinance went into effect on January 1st and applies to virtually everyone and everything in the City. The law requires recycling of plastic, glass, paper, newspaper, metal containers and cardboard at private residences, commercial buildings, and at special events requiring a City permit. Those who ignore warnings can face fines of up to a thousand dollars. City officials hope that a recycling mandate will stretch the time San Diego can use the Miramar landfill, which is nearing capacity and slated for closure around 2017. To make recycling easy, some apartment complexes are conveniently locating recycling bins for residents, including placement next to mail boxes.
At the Colima Linda apartment complex, which got started on the program a couple of months ago, as much as 50 percent of its trash has been diverted to recycling; A good start, but not yet on target if the City is to meet and exceed its diversion goals. Currently, the State of California requires local governments to reduce waste disposed in landfills by 50 percent. In 2008, the City of San Diego achieved 64 percent diversion. City officials are striving to exceed that rate every year. This goal seems doable since about two-thirds of waste headed to the local landfill is recyclable. Go San Diego!
Better yet? Stop the waste at the source and take actions like reducing unwanted mail through Catalog Choice! We’ll soon announce our expanded service addressing other forms of advertising mail to help you and your towns and cities meet waste reduction goals.
Whenever you receive an unwanted catalog, rip off the back cover, recycle the rest and set the back cover next to your computer. Next time you go online or at least once a week, login to your Catalog Choice account and enter your opt-out request. It takes less then 30 seconds from start to finish.
If we all resolve to spend at least one minute setting our mail preferences every week, we will eliminate hundreds of pounds of unwanted mail. Be part of the solution.
When talking to the DMA and other advocates for direct mail, it is often argued that any impact caused by the harvesting of trees for advertising mail is offset by the fact new trees are planted and some of the paper comes from tree farms. I was always troubled by this argument but did not have a solid response, until now.
Part of the problem is the public misunderstanding of how forests and carbon relate. Trees are often called a “carbon sink” — implying that they will sop up carbon from the atmosphere for all eternity. This is not true: the carbon they take up when they are alive is released after they die, whether from natural causes or by the hand of man. The only true solution to achieving global “carbon balance” is to leave the fossil carbon where it is — underground.
Beyond that, planting more trees is decidedly not the same thing as saving our forests. Instead, planting trees invariably means using them as a sustainable crop, which leads not only to a continuous cycle of carbon releases, but also to the increased destruction of our natural environment.
The solution is to reduce the volume of natural resource consumption. Catalog Choice is dedicated to providing a service that allows us, as a society, to reduce the volume of unwanted mail.
This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project
initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on
handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for
digital magazines in the near future, presented by BERG.
The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which
people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading
experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up
immersive stories.
The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and
meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated
features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in
which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could
be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming.
The purpose of publishing this concept video is first and foremost to
spark a discussion around the digital reading experience in general,
and digital reading platforms in particular. Thus, we would be more
than happy to hear what you have to say regarding the concept and
ideas expressed in the video: the magazine reading experience, digital
browsing, text versus images, as well as hear about your own digital
reading experiences and thoughts. We are all ears.
Follow the discussion in the Bonnier R&D Beta Lab:
bonnier.com/en/content/digital-magazines-bonnier-mag-prototype
CleanScapes, a garbage-collection company in the Seattle area, is challenging five Seattle neighborhoods to reduce the amount of things stuffed into garbage, recycling and yard-waste bins. The winning neighborhood gets $50,000 for a project of its choosing.
“Rather than governments passing a law, we want to see what happens with a carrot,” said Chris Martin, president of CleanScapes, which took over the garbage collection in certain Seattle neighborhoods last March.
Ray Hoffman, head of Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), said that every week Seattle loads 5,100 tons of garbage onto a mile-long double-stacked train heading to a dump in Oregon 300 miles away. Recycling is taken to Allied Waste in SoDo; yard waste is trucked to Cedar Grove in Maple Valley and Marysville.
The most significant thing people can do to shrink their garbage footprint is to buy a mulching lawn mower so residents don’t fill up their yard-waste containers with grass clippings, Martin said. Another huge step would be canceling junk mail, which fills recycling bins, he said.
All the climate change chatter in Copenhagen has us wondering, how green is America, anyway? Can we make a meaningful commitment to truly address the daunting issue of global warming? Can we be a world leader? As Americans, we tend to pride ourselves on our eco-friendly lifestyles, but when it comes to the task of planet-saving, there are many countries that rank higher than the United States. We found this interesting blog on Green Diva Mom that lists the world’s most eco-friendly countries, based on several different surveys. Many European and South American countries score as some of the world’s greenest.
Take Recycled Rates for example. The Unites States does a pretty good job at 31.5% of waste recycled, but there is plenty of room for improvement. We are outranked by six countries:
Switzerland, 52%
Austria, 49.7%
Germany, 48%
Netherlands, 46%
Norway, 40%
Sweden, 34%
United States, 31.5%
Take a look at the post to view some other interesting statistics and see how the United States compares to our fellow global citizens.
On November 17, Catalog Choice moved our hosting operations. We’ve received reports from a few members that have not been able to access our service since then. So far, we’ve learned these problems are limited to members who use HughesNet (and companies owned by them) for their internet service. But there may be others who are also having problems, and we’d like to hear from you.
Are you having problems logging in to your account? Please send an email to help@catalogchoice.org. Include the following details (you can skip #3 if it’s too difficult, we understand):
1) Your internet service provider (eg, Comcast, HughesNet, DirecPC, AOL, AT&T, etc)
2) The email address used to login to your Catalog Choice account
3) Optional: Your external IP address. Open this website: http://whatismyip.com/ and copy the long number in the line that says ‘Your IP Address Is xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’
If you have had problems the past few weeks, we made a change on Friday, December 11, that might help. Please try to login again and let us know if you were successful or not.
