Boston Bruins to Receive Merit Award from EPA

Direct from the Boston Bruins website, yesterday's honor of merit from the EPA as a team committed to bettering the environment truly is a wonderful achievement for the team. There are few events that I go to where I see, what appears to be, so much waste and to know that the Bruins are taking steps to help local people in need makes me so overjoyed to be a fan!

Here is the full text from the article (to read online please follow the link above):

BOSTON, MA – On Wednesday, May 11 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will award the Boston Bruins with the Environmental Merit Award during a special ceremony in Boston’s Faneuil Hall beginning at 1:00 p.m. The Environmental Merit Award honors individuals and groups who have shown particular ingenuity and commitment in their efforts to preserve the region's environment. Boston Bruins Foundation Director of Development Bob Sweeney will be accepting the award on behalf of the Bruins organization.

At the start of the 2010 -11 season, the Bruins joined the NHL’s green initiative and partnered with Rock and Wrap It Up! to help fight hunger throughout the United States and Canada. The Boston Bruins committed to work with Rock and Wrap it Up! to pack up all prepared but unsold concession food and give it to local shelters and places in need citywide. To date, the Bruins have donated 4,950 meals and 6,950 pounds of food to the Boston Rescue Mission. Including TD Garden’s contributions, a cumulative total of 15.5 tons of food has been donated to the Boston Rescue Mission.

The Rock and Wrap it Up! project was founded by Syd Mandelbaum, a forensic scientist who in 1991 combined his love of music with a passion for wiping out hunger by redistributing leftover food from rock concerts. The program now works with more than 150 bands, 200 schools and universities and 50 sports franchises. It has collected more than 100 million pounds of food to feed more than 200 million people.

19 environmental awards will be given to Massachusetts environmental groups, individuals, businesses, non-profit and government agencies in Boston’s Faneuil Hall as the EPA presents its annual Environmental Merit Awards for 2011.

The Merit Awards recognize valuable contributions to environmental awareness and problem solving and are a unique way that EPA can recognize individuals and groups that are making significant impacts on environmental quality in distinct ways.

For more informaton on any of the groups mentioned please visit their websites:

EPA
Boston Bruins
NHL
Rock and Wrap It Up!

Burt’s Bees Is A Zero Waste Company

This past summer the super cool company Burt’s Bees announced it was going zero waste.  They were always a company who cared about the planet (as evidenced by their commitment to natural based products) and recycled the basics -- paper, plastic, metal, glass -- but within just three short years their special task force of ECOBEES rendered their dumpsters useless.

So how on Earth did they do it?

Well it started out with six-bin waste-sorting stations being sprinkled all over their offices.  Employees were encouraged to sort it out and harness the responsibility of, well, being responsible!  In particular the company is most proud of the compost station as it has managed to keep 300 tons of material out of landfills over the past 31 months, since March 2008.

Not only have they managed to recycle or reuse the top four ‘basics’ items above, but they went that step further and now recycle every bit of their corrugated cardboard, chipboard, wood, shrink wrap and fiberboard too.

They created a way to give back to the Earth with the compost station.  In the break room employees are encouraged to grab a one time type use utensil -- they are 100% compostable and made from potatos (reusable too)!  They also found a way to extend the lifecycle of recycled waste other than as fertilizer or simply being melted down to create more of the same.    

At special waste-to-energy facilities, the items that can’t be utilized for other sources (ie. compost into soil) are used as fuel to power cement kilns.  Even after the items in question have been burned, the leftover ash is mixed in to make cinder blocks.

And oh yeah, they are also composting the waste residue left over at their water treatment facility.

The ECOBEES staged all manner of dumpster diving and bee-cycle swaps (Get it?  Bee-cycle instead of Freecycle?  Those Bees sure are a clever bunch!), and with their continued efforts who knows how far Burt’s Bees will be able to take their environmental awareness.

Thanks Burt’s Bees, it’s companies like yours that teach the rest of us that eco-responsibility can happen at work no matter how big or how small the staff or organization!  ♥love♥

Thanks to GLR friend Julie for sending over this story idea! 

Recycling Is Not A Choice!

Yesterday I went to a baby shower at a very good friend’s home. We had a fantastic time laughing and joking around and I saw some old friends that I haven’t caught up with in way too many years to count. It was a great day full of food and festivity.

At the end of the day, as the counters started to clear, one of the girls made the announcement that our friend “wasn’t planning to deal with recycling for the shower.” My jaw hit the ground as I truly understand just how easy it is to toss water bottles, cups and flatware into the sink to be rinsed.

I grabbed my own water bottle and held onto it as I said “I’ll just take mine home to recycle then.”

Yes it likely sounded very geeky to my friends that I didn’t just go with what everyone else was doing and throw it away, but everything inside of me was sad to think I would be adding to the plastic problem by throwing that bottle into the very full trash bag. So I held onto it and a new conversation began with my friend hosting the shower.

“Well I do recycle, it’s just that it’s downstairs in the garage and I didn’t want to have to deal with it today.”

Understandable, she is 7-1/2 months pregnant and probably worn out. Instead of making my friend do all that work, I reached into the trash & pulled out as many recyclables as I could find to bring them downstairs. And you know what? Two more of the gals came down with handfuls of plastic right behind me.

It’s taking a stand and making tiny steps that really count and I was happy to be the one to lead the charge yesterday! We love the environment here!