Environmental Enlightenment #12 (Recycle Old Shoes)

When it comes time to get rid of something used/old I am trying my hardest not to throw it away. I've been doing a lot of research on how to recycle things that I never knew could be recycled! Earlier this week the boyfriend had some old gym shoes to get rid of and my first thought was to donate them to charity. However, they were unwearable at this point (falling apart and too abused to be useful to anyone else's feet). As far as I knew there weren't any shoe recycling programs, but I decided to do a quick Google search to double check. To my surprise there is a way to recycle old gym shoes! Nike (and their sister company Converse) has a re-use a shoe program. Every part of the shoe is used. The rubber from the out-sole is used to make running tracks; the fabric from the upper-sole is used to make padding for basketball courts; and the foam from the mid-sole is used to make the springy surface of tennis courts. The materials are passed through grinders to make the raw material which is then used for the previous mentioned purposes. Yesterday I found the nearest drop-off location and took the old gym shoes into Nike to be recycled.

Renewable Energy Tour

Saturday, April 2, 2011 I embarked on a renewable energy tour in White County, IN. I had no idea what to expect, but I was mainly attending out of curiosity anyways. I live in a big city where farmers and their land are very much out of sight, out of mind and it was interesting to see what the farmers of White County were doing with their land and resources. The description of the tour according to the IEEE website is as follows:

"The tour is an all day event with the tour taking four hours having stops at a 500 Megawatt wind farm, a Algae wheel wastewater treatment plant, a Anaerobic Digester running off cattle/swine waste and other organic products to produce 3 megawatts/hour of electricity off methane gas and a visit to the Liberty Landfill for a 6.9 Megawatt biomass power generation plant."

Environmental Enlightenment #6 (Picking up litter)

Since my parents scolded a drive-by-littering I have become increasingly aware of all the trash in the streets. Add to this the fact that the snow recently melted revealing a nice coating of trash (mainly plastic bottles.) In all seriousness it makes me feel gross. It saddens me to imagine plastic bottles being tossed out of cars with the thought of...? I know that people care about their homes and personal space and it makes me very sad to think that those feelings don't extend any further than their front doors. Also, the recycling drop-off center for my neighborhood is at the end of the block. Come on people! Combining all these factors creates a perfect storm of annoyances for me. So instead of complaining, I decided to do something about it. I'm going to set aside some time each day to go for a walk (exercise, yay!) and pick up trash along the way. I'll end my walk at the recycling drop-off center and return home with any un-recyclables. Of course picking up trash involves some precautions for health reasons so I will be wearing plastic gloves. I did some research and discovered that latex is in fact biodegradable, but landfills don't necessarily create the best environment for decomposition. On the other hand (pun intended) there is a synthetic latex glove made from Nitrile which most recycling facilities are now able to recycle. I haven't decided which glove is the lesser of two evils yet, but I'm hoping to make that decision by tomorrow in order to get this show on the road!