Clean Sweep 2010 with my family

As you may remember, during the Earth Day weekend my family participated in our locally organized Clean Sweep 2010. In the prior years we used to go for walks in the neighborhood and collect litter whenever we felt like doing it. It was a great way to get some fresh air and do a good thing. And as our daughter got older and learned about Earth Day and taking care of Earth at school, we have decided to make our random family litter hunts more official. So I called our township hall and signed us up. They were providing garbage bags and official t-shirts in XL sizes (don’t ask me why XL).
That Sunday was one of the gloomiest days this Spring. It rained the whole morning and it was chili, wet and sticky in the afternoon. But we were determined to do it. So we got our gloves, rain gear, sweaters, blankets, garbage bags and a magic grabber tool that my husband got at the hospital after his back surgery a few weeks prior to this event. If you are planning on doing Clean Sweep with your family you HAVE to have one and I you can buy one in any drug store or on the internet. This tool came extremely handy when picking up plastic bottles from hard to reach, thick bushes or soaking wet plastic bags from the ditches, our daughter had lots of fun with it. Most of the items that ended up in our garbage bags were fast food packaging, Styrofoam cups, plastic bags and lots of plastic bottles! You wouldn’t have believed the amount of plastic bottles we found! It is disturbing to think that someone can just abandon these things in the middle of the street with no shame.
So here is what we got after two hours of walking just 1 mile distance in a nice family oriented, suburban neighborhood: two full 30 lb garbage bags! All rinsed off with a hose and sorted into recycling bins for garbage collection day.
After two hours of wet and gloomy outside we came home with red cheeks and had the most awesome Carrot Cake with Green Tea! It was all worth it!

Till next time friends,
Liana.

Recycling Rewards for your community

I have been business news junkie lately and I love “Venture” on Bloomberg TV channel. They invite many interesting, intelligent and driven people who own big and small businesses to talk about their companies and how they became successful. A few weeks ago “Venture” had an episode devoted to green businesses. They were all great companies with fresh ideas, but the one I liked the most was Recycle Bank Reward Program (RBRP). Recycle Bank is a reward program that rewards households for their recycling efforts. The RBRP is offered to households through city government and haulers who provide your community recycling services. Even though standard recycling services exist in our area I know for a fact that way too many people don’t bother to recycle for reasons such as lack of time, lack of interest or simple laziness. What RBRP does is making a boring routine more exciting and beneficial. And who doesn’t like benefits? Especially material once! Those that you can touch, smell and use to buy every day necessities. How it works: you get a recycling cart that you fill up during the week with recycling waste and on your garbage collection day you pull it out for curbside pick up. The recycling cart is embedded with an electronic chip that gets scanned by the recycling truck to determine weight of your recycled material. RecycleBank rewards you for recycling with RecycleBank Reward Points. These points are based on your personal household recycling weight and they are used to order rewards. There are hundreds of participating national brands for you to chose your rewards from!
What a great idea you say, but how does government benefit from this program, why would they care about enhancing recycling efforts? They save a ton of money from landfill diversion. Millions of dollars can be saved and used with greater benefit to the whole community and our Planet!
After watching the episode with an open mouth I ran to my laptop and found the information on how to participate in RBRP. They didn’t have to ask me twice, I typed my letters in one breath and now waiting for the response.
If you want your community to participate you can find helpful forms and information right here.



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Recycling Program at Marmalade Hills

The only thing separating a habit from a lifestyle is a little practice. Every time I do my dishes I wash every plastic container before I put it into recycling bin. It probably takes me a bit longer to do my dishes than if I would just threw everything into the garbage can. For me just one thought of burying all that plastic into the ground makes me nauseous. Washing containers and recycling is a simple routine that may seem time consuming and hard. But after some time it turns into a lifestyle. At some point you start doing it on autopilot. Every time I put out my garbage on a curb I get terrified by how much plastic we have accumulated over one week. And we are just a small family of four people! I can skip one garbage collection but I can never skip recycling pick-up, my recycling bins are always full. So there is no turning back for me – it will always take me to do my dishes a bit longer. And don’t even get me started on how much newspapers and magazines get thrown away without ever opening them. Good thing we have paper recycling container at our school. I always have at least three full paper bags each month!
After another garbage day and two more full recycling bins I though that it would be a good idea to offer 10% discount¹ for each returned Marmalade Hills’ container and/or jar². This way Marmalade Hills will contribute to keeping our Planet clean and also save you some green! This is how it will work: when you run out of your favorite lotion, body wash, body mist, facial mask, toner, body oil or scrub rinse the container, pop it in an envelope and send it back to us. We will mail/email you 10% off coupon for anything in our store! Accumulate more than one container and get larger discount! Our containers are light and compact they will perfectly fit in a large envelope and will be cheap to ship. Or bring your clean empty bottles and jars to one of our upcoming shows and get your green credit right on the spot!

Shop responsibly and be the change you wish to see in the world!

We thank you in advance for your effort!

Truly yours,
Liana.

¹ This discount can not be combined with any other offers.

² We will not reuse old containers for new products, but we will make sure that they will get recycled and not end up on a landfill.