WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ARCHIVE   BACK TO ARCHIVE INDEX

10 Feb 00 - cell phones; internal reuse; forms; food donations; thesaurus ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive --------------------- >From Stephen Long, state of Massachusetts, Boston, MA: While the article below does not fully address the issue of life cycle of "disposable" cell phones, it does raise some concerns regarding both source reduction and recycling. Does anyone know if Motorola (or other manufacturers) are doing more regarding environmental (and other) concerns than the article seems to imply? E-mail: Stephen [D O T] Long [A T] state [D O T] ma [D O T] us --------------------- Excerpted from an article by Peter Howe in the business section of the 2/7/00 Boston Globe (forwarded by Stephen Long): Some day in the not unimaginably distant future, you might find yourself buying a new cell phone with a block of minutes, and when your time is up you simply throw the phone out. That's the idea behind a concept-level prototype for a disposable phone developed by engineers at Motorola, for which researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at Cambridge, MA, are contributing some crucial ideas at a new Motorola product-development lab opening this spring. The idea is to make a phone literally the size of a credit card that fits inside a 50-cent plastic holder to make it easier to handle. The card would have 12 slim round bumps making up a 1-to-# phone keypad, plus a miniature earpiece, microphone, hair-size antenna, and a processor chip. It would come loaded with as many minutes of airtime as you wanted to buy. Once the minutes were up, it might be just as easy to buy a new phone as to take it someplace to have the minutes replenished. Hopefully, you could recycle the old phone like a disposable camera. The cost of the new phone might add barely pennies to the per-minute calling fee. Among other advantages, such a system would be a huge leap of convenience over the current prepaid wireless market, which is small but rapidly growing. Texas market researchers Frost & Sullivan estimate that more than 5.3 million Americans are using prepaid wireless calling plans, accounting for nearly $2.3 billion of the industry's $51.1 billion in revenues. These are plans in which consumers buy a phone but have to pay $50 or $100 upfront for calling time before they can use it. Engineers with Motorola's Advanced Concepts Group have developed a version of the disposable cell phone. Bringing the idea to market, though, will likely require the help of people at the new Motorola consumer products research center near MIT, and the MIT Motorola Fellows program. Motorola is based in Schaumburg, Ill. The full article is at: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/038/business/A_cell_phone_so_small_you_can_just_toss_it_out+.shtml Note from Tom: I'm sure this isn't news to some of you, but websites with long addresses like the one above do not work very well with some e-mail systems. Sorry about that! Because they do work for many people's systems, however, we will continue to run long website addresses on occasion. ---------------------- >From Neil Desai, Eastern Research Group (EPA contractor), Arlington, VA, responding to the 1/31/00 request for examples of companies or organizations that have internal reuse programs: I work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's WasteWise program helpline. Here are a couple of examples from WasteWise program participants: - Seattle University. Has a swap shop which collects and sells/distributes a variety of products that students often leave behind after moving. - Public Service Electric and Gas. Has a centralized facility which collects surplus/reusable items and distributes them to facilities which need a specific item. They also have worked with vendors to prevent surplus of any particular item. - Northeast Utilities Service Company. Sponsored a corporate office clean-up day, through which employees collected hundreds of binders, trays, folders, etc., which were collected and distributed by an in-house recycled office supply "store." - Eastman Kodak. Has an internal waste exchange - and also sells usable items. - City of Gresham, Oregon. Has a swap program for office supplies. Let me know if any of these programs interest you, if you would like to get in touch with any of these organizations, or would like more examples. The examples above are more in line with the idea of internal materials exchanges. Many WasteWise partners practice internal repair/reuse of items such as pallets. Thank you. E-mail: ndesai ( AT ) erg ( DOT ) com --------------------- Link to a column by Tom Byerly in the January, 2000, issue of "Government Technology," about how government agencies can reduce paper by putting internal forms online: http://www.govtech.net/publications/gt/2000/jan/ecommercefldr/ecommerce.shtm --------------------- Excerpted from a press release from Naina Ayya, public relations coordinator for the Moscone Center convention center, San Francisco, CA: An estimated 25 tons of fresh and packaged food from the Fancy Food Show, held January 23-25, 2000, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, was donated to two local nonprofits. At this show for the specialty food business, tens of thousands of buyers see, taste, and sample more than 50,000 food products. "The amount of goods recovered for donation, in such a short timeframe, was only possible through the close collaboration of Moscone recycling staff, contractors, Local 85 teamsters, as well as the volunteers," said Julie Burford, assistant general manager for the center. "Everyone helped to load and speed delivery of these goods." "Individually wrapped cookies and candy will go to homeless people in recovery, distributed at three different sites in the city," said Judy Vaughn, of the Salvation Army in San Francisco. "Fresh produce such as gourmet cheeses will go into congregate and individually wrapped home delivery meals for seniors in the downtown area." Fresh produce went to homeless families in transitional housing, and homeless alcoholics in recovery through the meals programs, according to Vaughn. In the city's Castro district, volunteers at Under One Roof unloaded packaged goods. These items will be offered to the public at a special sale Feb. 18-21, next door to the Under One Roof store. "One hundred percent of the profit we get from selling these goods goes to our participating organizations, including the Mission Neighborhood Health Center, the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center and National AIDS Memorial Grove," said Ian MacNeil, of Under One Roof. Volunteers for the Food Donation Team at the Fancy Food Show underwent training on navigating the bustling exhibit floor during the post-show "move-out." Nearly a hundred volunteers from Under One Roof, the Salvation Army, the Air Force and area high schools participated in the effort, which was organized by the Moscone Center. When the show closed, the volunteers visited exhibitors in every aisle on the 442,000-square-foot tradeshow floor. They gathered boxes of food from exhibitors and delivered them to the centrally-located staging area where more volunteers boxed, labeled and stacked the food for delivery. Four hours later, an estimated 60 towers of food were sealed with shrink-wrap and transferred to wooden pallets for transport. Teamsters then forklifted the pallets onto trucks for delivery. "Last year, 75 tons of goods and products from events held at the Moscone Center were donated to local non-profits," Burford pointed out. This year, with one show, the center reached one third of that total. The Moscone Center is owned by the City and County of San Francisco and managed by SMG. E-mail: nayya ( AT ) moscone ( DOT ) com ---------------------- >From Margaret Nover, Pollution Prevention Program, City of Portland, OR (forwarded by Bahar Keskin): COMMON GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL VOCABULARY BEING DEVELOPED The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are collaborating to develop a multilingual global environmental thesaurus, in an effort to break down the linguistic barriers to environmental information exchange. Italy's research council, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), will be associated with the project. A plan for this global thesaurus is expected by September, 2000. The dividends would include streamlining environmental information systems, Internet web sites, databases and other electronic resources. Such a thesaurus would be highly beneficial in information searches, content cataloging and information systems design, and is expected to be invaluable to librarians, researchers, database developers, translators, policy developers and the public. Included in the new thesaurus would be terms from the EPA Terminology Reference System, the EEA Generalized Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), the UNEP EnVoc thesauri, and additional thesauri from other systems around the world. It would be accessible on the Internet, CDs and in print. The existing terminology systems are in 12 languages, and the expectation is to have the global thesaurus in many more languages. The current terminology systems are available at three Internet sites: - http://www.epa.gov/trs - http://www.mu.niedersachsen.de/cds/etc-cds_neu/software.html#GEMET - http://p5uni.ii.pw.edu.pl/infterra/ E-mail: margaret ( AT ) bes ( DOT ) ci ( DOT ) portland ( DOT ) or ( DOT ) us - end -