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13 Jun 00 - faxes; home tour; food; computers; pesticides; Value Village ** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM ** -- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition -------- Forum archive: http://www.reuses.com/nwpcarchive -------------------- >From Paul Dunn, City of Omaha (NE) Public Works Department: I have put together some information regarding unwanted advertising faxes (you do have recourse) and a legal opinion from the City of Omaha's law department regarding unwanted broadcast faxes that DON'T advertise (you don't have recourse) and will gladly copy and mail it to those who want or need it. Sorry it isn't available in electronic form, but our law department still deals in paper. E-mail: pdunn (AT) ci (DOT) omaha (DOT) ne (DOT) us -------------------- >From Tom Watson, King County Solid Waste Division, Seattle: In Bellingham, Washington, a city of about 60,000 located between Seattle and Vancouver, BC, they did a cool project this past weekend: the Used Building Materials Home Tour. It was sponsored by RE Sources, a Bellingham non-profit that operates the RE Store, used building materials stores in Bellingham and Seattle. The Washington Department of Ecology also helped plan the tour. Tickets for the tour were $5 per car, or $5 per person for a seat on a shuttle bus. The three-hour tour went to five homes in the Bellingham area to showcase the use of reused materials. The homes featured reused doors, windows, tables, cabinets, bathtubs, tile and other items. There were also more creative examples of reuse. At one home, bleacher seats from a high school gym became a beautiful, glossy blond staircase. Here's the link to an excellent article by Susan Phinney in the 6/10/00 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, describing some of the homes, the materials used in the homes, and the RE Store: http://www.seattlep-i.com/lifestyle/tour10.shtml -------------------- Excerpted from a 6/8/00 press release from the Northeast Recycling Council, Brattleboro, Vermont (forwarded by Curtis Durrant): "BioCycle Northeast Conference 2000: Focus on Food Residuals Management" will be held Aug. 28-30, 2000, in Burlington, Vermont. It is sponsored by BioCycle magazine, and co-sponsored by the Northeast Recycling Council and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This conference will highlight initiatives underway in the Northeast and nationally that result in environmentally beneficial and economically viable uses for food residuals generated by institutional, commercial and industrial operations. This will be the first time that a BioCycle conference focuses exclusively on food residuals management. "Focusing on food residuals is important for several reasons," says Elizabeth Cotsworth, director of the U.S. EPA Office of Solid Waste and a keynote speaker at the conference. "At over 21.5 million tons, they are the largest segment of the waste stream still going to disposal. Because virtually all of these materials decompose in landfills, their contribution to global warming when composted is far less than landfilling. For the same reason, food residuals are a major source of leachate formation, which can lead to groundwater contamination." "Perhaps most importantly, food is being thrown away that is still edible and could be diverted to hunger programs," Cotsworth added. "Nonedible food can be composted at a savings to local government, used as animal feed and as an industrial raw material." The registration fee for the conference is $385. For more information, write to: biocycle (AT) jgpress (DOT) net Or, see their website at: http://www.biocycle.net Click on "Conferences." -------------------- >From the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency WasteWise program listserv: EPA Region 4, in association with the Southern Waste Information Exchange (SWIX), will sponsor a Computer and Electronic Equipment Recycling and Management Workshop Aug. 7-8 in Atlanta, Georgia. The purpose of the workshop is to disseminate information and bring industry and government representatives together to discuss the development of a shared responsibility framework, policies, markets, and programs for the appropriate end-of-life management of electronic equipment. For more information, contact SWIX at (800) 441-7949. -------------------- For those of you interested in pesticide reduction, here is the link to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service page with links to many sources of information about pesticides: http://bluegoose.arw.r9.fws.gov/NWRSFiles/InternetResources/Pesticide.html -------------------- Link to an article by Nancy Kim in the 6/9/00 Puget Sound Business Journal about how TVI, the company that owns Value Village, has sold a 50 percent stake in its company to Berkshire Partners of Boston (TVI, based in the Seattle area, owns and operates 189 used clothing and housewares stores in the U.S., Canada and Australia, with sales of $287 million in 1999): http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2000/06/12/story5.html - end -