Tag: reuse

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post by Wayne Stevenson Thomas, in San Antonio, Texas

[Editor’s note: We stayed with Wayne on our first trip to San Antonio many years ago, and have stayed in contact. I am always looking for examples of for-profit businesses that serve a greater good. If you’ve got an example and would like to guest-blog, please write to me through this site.]

Thrift Shop Interior
Thrift Shop Interior

Cliff Morgan was an executive at the local St. Vincent de Paul. They had a big operation of recycling the items they couldn’t sell or give to the poor. But he and the St. Vincent board found that the not-for-profit model didn’t allow him the flexibility he needed to operate. (Something about how all contracts or agreements had to go to the board as well as any expenditures above a fairly low number.)

So St. Vincent decided to spin off the operation into a for-profit, which Cliff owns. SA3 Community Recycling serves three communities of interest: Nonprofits who receive donations they cannot use, nonprofits who need items, and citizens (as represented by our governmental organizations).

He collects unneeded items from providing nonprofits. He pays them for clothing, shoes and bundled cardboard, generating a small revenue stream for them while allowing them to concentrate on their mission, rather than on disposing or selling unwanted material.

He contacts receiver nonprofits to provide them exactly the items they need from the stream of items he receives from the provider nonprofits. He provides exactly what they need. For instance, Dress for Success might need 5 size 16 Women’s business suits. SA3 would pull exactly that out of their stream and no more.

For the citizens as a whole, he contracts with governmental organizations to keep items out of the landfill. For instance he accepts cathode ray tube TVs from the providing nonprofits and disassembles them. He does the same with other electronics (if he doesn’t have another nonprofit that can use them.)

He generates income (as I understand it) by selling the clothing and cardboard for a bit more than he pays for it, and by selling the metal and other material captured from the electronics. He pays his staff, who do the pick-ups and supervise the volunteers who help sort the items that come through the door.

Among the nonprofits he provides with items from his stream are: Habitat for Humanity (building material), the Diaper Bank (loose and packaged diapers), Dress for Success, Spare Parts (an arts nonprofit that provides used and repurposed items to local art educators) and Samministries (household items for families leaving shelters). He also provides items as needed to several St. Vincent operations in South Texas. I believe he sincerely wants to recycle as much as he can within the community (and have connected him with several other receiver organizations).

Wayne Stevenson Thomas is a former volunteer and assistant manager at Jefferson Thrift Store in San Antonio.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

This is a reminder of two critical concepts for the coming years:

1. Money is not a goal; it is a means of accomplishing something. While having more money means you can purchase the goods or services you want, there are often other ways to accomplish the goal.

2. Buying stuff is not the only way to accomplish something.

Here’s a look at how to leverage other  methods of getting your needs met and your wants fulfilled.

Zipcar just commissioned a study on the sharing habits of Millennials, showing that they are more willing to share not just cars, but a wide range of resources, than their parents and grandparents.

That may be true of the majority culture, but there are plenty of us older folks who know a good thing when they see it. I’ve been lifelong practitioner of this sort of approach, and a public advocate all the way back to at least 1995, when I published my fourth book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist. I’m turning 55 on Saturday, and here are some among many sharing experiences I’ve had over the years:

  • As a college student in Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1973-76, I became aware of a mostly Quaker community called The Vale. Instead of everyone going out and buying a lawnmower, they pitched in and bought a communal tractor.
  • In 1990, when laser printers cost several thousand dollars, I organized a co-op and brought in a bookstore owner, a community activist, and a magazine publisher to share the costs of purchasing one (it lived at my house, since I organized it).
  • As a member of Servas since 1983 and Couchsurfing since 2009, I’ve shared my home with strangers traveling through, and received hospitality form others on three continents.
  • My neighbors, a Republican mainstream farm family, constantly drive each other’s vehicles. The question seems to be what’s the best car, truck, or tractor for the task, and not who owns it.
  • Two decades ago, I was on the board of a group called Homesharing in Hampshire County: a mainstream social service agency that matched up people with extra space in their homes (often elders in need of both companionship and home/property maintenance) with people who needed a place to live.
  • Thirty years ago, I lived in a community in West Philadelphia (a place with good public transit), where three or four cars were shared among about 120 people, as needed, and users paid a small fee per mile to cover costs. When we needed to make a supermarket run or fill our water jugs (we all hated the municipal water, so we self-bottled 50 gallons at a time at a spring in the next town), we borrowed one of the communal cars. Most of this community lived in group housing: six or eight people sharing a big old Victorian. It worked out very nicely.
  • For a decade at least, Freecycle has provided a formal structure to get rid of stuff you no longer need by passing it on to someone else, or to get something you need without having to buy it.

The article, in The Atlantic, also linked to a cool website (and concept) called Collaborative Consumption, which may be increasingly important as we try to turn the world green.

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By Posted on Posted in Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , ,

Packing waste is a scourge in our society. Filling landfills, choking birds, littering our streets, it definitely is a problem that needs to be addressed.

One way, of course, is by generating less packaging in the first place. Do companies really need the little plastic baggie inside the pouch inside the form-fitting foam insert inside the cardboard box inside the shrinkwrap inside a forest of packing peanuts inside a shipping box inside another layer of outer wrap? That kind of overpackaging is all-too-common among boxes I’ve opened. 100 years ago, many products were sold in bulk. We could certainly return to bulk packing for more things.

But another way is to deal with the packaging once it is created. As individuals, we can do a lot of this: reuse glass jars and plastic containers, recycle or compost cardboard and paper, bring our egg cartons back to the farmer, and so forth. But for a lot of the products sold through mainstream retail channels—and particularly for the less simple packing like aseptic boxes, snack chip bags, and drink pouches—we simply don’t know what do to with the packaging.

Enter TerraCycle(R). This company actually pays consumers to pack up their trash and send it off, where it gets transformed into a host of interesting products like fencing, picnic coolers, and—isn’t this cute—recycle bins. In all, the company creates 256 different products out of recycled packaging that would have (in many cases) been thrown in the landfill.

Cool, huh?

Also cool is the way the company involves schools in the collection effort.

BUT…with my particular consumption habits, the site doesn’t work for me. First of all, the company only collects 38 different types of waste, out of the thousands of possibilities. And of those 38, 13 require specific brands—not necessarily the brands I buy. I might dispose of one tube of Neosporin in a year, and that’s not worth collecting. But if I could bring all my empty tubes of toothpaste, skin cream, mentholated muscle-relief cream along with my single tube of Neosporin, that would be worth setting aside, if the drop off was convenient.

The company has made big strides since my last visit, in broadening many of the items from specific brands to generic categories taking any brand, but still…

Then there’s the matter of collection. Each of the 38 has a different set of collection sites. I can’t really see that I’m going to drive hither and yon, dropping off three wine corks here, two cereal wrappers there. And I don’t really understand the logic of having multiple collection streams for essentially the same kind of waste (e.g., a cardboard box for macaroni and cheese is handled differently form a cardboard box wrapped around a tube of Colgate toothpaste).

Using schools as an organizing force makes sense, but not all of us have school-age children. I’d love to see the company partner with landfill and transfer station sites around the country, so collection could be streamlined at the place we’re bringing our trash anyway.

And finally, while I recognize that e-mail can go astray and forms can break, it does bother me that I wrote the following and submitted it through the company’s website back on November 21. Six months later, I haven’t gotten an answer yet:

I was hoping to come to your website and determine whether there are collection points near me. I am surprised by how difficult that is–there’s no way to search by geography, only by product. And the products–so many of them tied to specific brands–don’t correspond well with my buying patterns.

Thus, even though I would be delighted to ship off my trash to you, I see no practical way to participate. I’d love for instance to be able to send you the plastic bags my home-delivery newspaper arrives in on wet days. Or sandwich baggies that are contaminated with food residue and no longer suited to direct re-use. Or the pet food bags which are paper lined with plastic.

Still, I wish them well. I’d love to come back in another six months and discover that it’s vastly easier to get rid of my junk and see it turned into great stuff.

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