Month: April 2011

So my sister was watching the Ellen Show on tv today and she was telling me that they had a clip on how for Earth Day Old Navy clothing stores has this program where you bring in your used flip flops and they send them to a company who converts them to rubber playground pellets which is safer than gravel and wood chips. Apparently the rubber used in flip flops is extraordinarily difficult to recycle. I went to their website to find out more about it and found they are partnered with a company called TerraCycle who are doing the recycling program. So I went to the TerraCycle website here to learn more and was very impressed by what I saw. This company takes items that are very hard to recycle suck as flip flops, drink pouches, candy wrappers, shampoo bottles and others and recycles them into consumer products like plastic fences, lunch bags and others. They have drop off places in various countries including Canada and they will give you $0.02 back per item you bring in or drop off. This is wonderful because it encourages consumers to recycle items that they would normally throw away and not only that, there is the incentive of cash for them. Then this company not only keeps these items from landfills but turns them into new consumer products. It is this form of recycling that we need to see more of; innovative ideas like this are really going to have a massive impact on the planet. This innovative new ideas for a greener future has really been catching on, last year Pepsi ran a campaign calling for ideas and offering start up money to the winners of the contest which were votes on for the public this was called the Pepsi Refresh Project and they awarded over $20,000,000 in grant money.  Pepsi is doing it again this year after last year’s massive success with “refreshing” 200 communities, 74 schools, 36 parks and involving over 24,000 volunteers in doing these “refreshments”. It is the programs like this which bring the community together that in my mind are the most successful and the most likely to have a long term positive impact. Ultimately I don’t think that people are going to change their ways very much, yes the will switch to more environmentally minded products over time but apart from that not too much is going to change. It is the creative ideas like these are what is going to make the most change in people’s lives, finding solutions to problems is what is going to be the key thing for the future, not totally changing people’s lifestyles.

Recently my friend bought his first brand new car, a 2011 Honda Fit. He got it because it is good on gas for the most part and because it gets a specific number of liters to the kilometer for fuel economy it qualified for a government rebate which made it cheaper than the competitive models. Here is the kicker though, he bought the manual transmission version but, if he were to buy the automatic transmission it doesn’t come with a spare tire. Why is this? The dealer said that the automatic transmission weighs more and if they added the spare tire too, that extra weight would push it past the limits for the government fuel economy rebate program. So here you are buying a brand new car with no spare tire, let’s just hope that you have cell service when you have a blowout in the country, he could however buy a spare for extra money from the parts department after he bought the car. This led me to thinking about the “green revolution” and if all of these products aiming to be “green” really worth buying? I was at the store the other day and I saw they were pushing shirts made of bamboo because they were sustainable and saved forests. Here is the problem with that, shirts aren’t made out of other trees, they are made out of cotton and therefore they have no affect whatsoever on deforestation. Also, cotton is a planned crop grown in fields year after year; in my mind this makes something sustainable, the cotton farmers are hardly clearing tracts of forests to plant more cotton fields. Another product I saw was Tupperware saying that it was biodegradable. That’s great but I already have Tupperware, should I go out and buy this Tupperware now because it is “green” that is just a waste of money. If I do buy it, what do I do with my Tupperware that I already have which is perfectly good? Do I throw it out? But maybe it isn’t biodegradable like this new one and that might harm the planet so I had better keep it but that will only take up cupboard space. Do you see where I’m going with this? Having “green” products are great but it is really up to the consumer to figure out if it is worth it to them to buy or are they just falling for a marketing ploy?

Well I am very happy to say that I will officially be going on exchange to the University College Dublin in the fall! I am thrilled about this for a number of reasons, the first being that an exchange is something I’ve always wanted to go on since I was in high school and found out about them. I remember ordering prospectus guides (what info packets are called in the UK) and trying to pin down which school I could go to. While I have ultimately settled on Ireland instead of England which I was looking at all those years ago I’m glad that I did. This leads to the second reason for why I’m thrilled about my exchange and that reason is because my dad is from Ireland and that makes me half Irish. I’ve always wanted to go see Ireland but I have never gotten to before so now I will get so see not only where my family is from but all of the other family that live there which I have never met. As an added bonus my family only lives about 30 minutes from the campus so I will get to see them a lot which will be very nice. At University College Dublin or UCD as it’s called I’ll be taking European Studies courses which I cannot get anywhere else, this ties great into my resource of human ecology and my region of Western Europe.  I’m just in the middle of selecting my courses now which is very exciting as there are so many I want to take and it is unfortunate that I’m limited to only four as I can see at least fifteen that peak my interest right now. The other thing I’m going is waiting for the forms to come in so I can apply for housing, I am wanting to live on campus because similar to UBC, UCD is about a 25 minute bus ride away from the city center and I don’t want to have to deal with the commute everyday like I do at UBC, also the dorms there are night and day when compared to UBC dorms! Everything is brand new having been fully renovated this year and some even offer their own private bathroom for each individual room. The only downside is that they don’t have any ovens so cooking may be a bit tricky. Anyways that’s all I’m going to say for now but keep an eye out for blog postings in the fall sent from Dublin!