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03 Sep 04 - back-to-school; cell phones; cloth diapers; construction; hotels
** WASTE PREVENTION FORUM **
-- A project of the National Waste Prevention Coalition
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Forum archive: http://www.nwpcarchive.org
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From Donald Van Dyke, California Integrated Waste Management Board, Business
Resource Efficiency and Waste Reduction Section, Sacramento, CA:
Here is a pretty good back-to-school waste prevention primer from the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency. I would be interested to know if there are
any others. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/osw/specials/funfacts/school3.htm
E-mail: dvandyke (AT) ciwmb (DOT) ca (DOT) gov
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Excerpted from a 7/12/04 article by Jay MacDonald on the Bankrate.com
financial news service website:
NEED A CELL PHONE? CONSIDER BUYING USED
Want to equip the whole family with cell phones without going into debt?
With a little digging, you can find great deals on used cell phones with
voice mail, caller ID and call waiting, all without the things you don't
want: monthly bills, credit checks, lengthy contracts, age restrictions,
activation fees and complicated minutes plans.
Cellular providers such as AT&T Wireless, Cingular and U.S. Cellular, as
well as resellers such as TracFone, frequently run online specials on
refurbished phones as a way to boost sales, particularly of prepaid calling
plans. Granted, your used mobile phone won't have all the
up-to-the-nanosecond bells and whistles of the latest camera phones and
gaming models. But for basic calling, voice mail and even text messaging,
your used unit will be indistinguishable from the top of the line. Only you
will know that you paid little or no money for it.
Case in point: TracFone offers a reconditioned cell phone and 100 prepaid
anytime, anywhere minutes for $29.99 at its online store. Since that's the
normal retail price of 100 TracFone minutes, you in effect get the handset
for free.
"It's a value, especially if it's an emergency phone," says TracFone's
Sherri Pfefer. "There's no monthly bill, no contract, no worry. You can
activate the phone to whatever state you're going to, as long as the
technologies match." Although your refurbished TracFone comes with a 30-day
warranty instead of the usual one-year coverage, Pfefer says there's little
risk involved. "A majority of our refurbs are returns from customers back to
the retailers that then get sent here," she says. "The majority of our
phones have never been used; they were the wrong technology, they got them
as a gift, things like that."
If you're not averse to signing on for a monthly plan, AT&T Wireless
recently offered a refurbished Siemens C56 for $29.99 as part of its GoPhone
plan. Cingular and U.S. Cellular also have made reconditioned cell phones
available through their retail outlets.
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Excerpted from a 9/1/04 press release from the Rechargeable Battery
Recycling Corporation:
BATTERY GROUP OFFERS FREE CELL PHONE COLLECTION TO PUBLIC AGENCIES
The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corp. (RBRC) has announced that it will
provide cell phone collection services to communities, government agencies
and public institutions nationwide, at no charge. Cell phones will be
collected in newly designed all-in-one cell phone and battery collection
boxes.
The collected cell phones will be refurbished and resold, or recycled into
components. RBRC will donate proceeds to charitable organizations, including
the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The rechargeable batteries in the phones
will be recycled through RBRC's existing battery recycling channels. Details
are available at: http://www.call2recycle.org/pages/community/comm_home.html
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Excerpted from an article by John Reinan in the 8/28/04 Minneapolis Star
Tribune:
DISPOSABLE BUSINESS
Once a familiar sight on Twin Cities streets, the diaper-service van could
be joining the horse-drawn milk cart as an artifact of bygone days.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which had six cloth diaper services a
decade ago, is down to one. And its owner, Sandy Lundgren, isn't sure how
long she can keep going. "It's a dying business," said Lundgren, 49, who has
run Cheek to Cheek Diaper Service in north Minneapolis since 1989. "I can't
tell you how long I'll be alive."
In an area with 3 million residents - and more than 100,000 children in the
diaper demographic - only 300 families use Lundgren's service, down from 500
two years ago. The story has played out statewide. The National Association
of Diaper Services says there are only two diaper services in all of
Minnesota. The other one, Small Change Diaper Service of La Crescent, has 13
customers and survives by washing towels for the local schools, its manager
says.
Fifty years ago, when the baby boom was at its peak, there were eight cloth
diaper services in the Twin Cities, according to phone directories of the
time. But in 1961, a new product from Procter & Gamble came on the market:
Pampers, which quickly became the first widely successful disposable diaper.
Today, disposable diapers are a $4 billion business, while U.S. sales of
cloth diapers total less than $20 million a year, according to
MarketResearch.com.
Cloth made a comeback in the late '80s, when environmental groups began
raising concerns about the dangers of filling landfills with disposable
diapers. Several states considered legislation to ban disposables. During
that time, a half-dozen new diaper services opened in the Twin Cities, and
longtime market leader Crib Diaper Service saw its business triple between
1988 and 1990, former owner Douglas Flatz said. "We went from 2,000
customers to 6,000 customers in less than 24 months. We were beginning to
hurt them," Flatz said, referring to sellers of disposable diapers.
Then, he said, diaper services took a one-two punch. First came Iraq's
invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War that followed. War coverage meant less
media attention for environmental stories, Flatz said, and the issue lost
urgency for consumers. At about the same time, two widely publicized studies
- conducted by reputable researchers but funded by Procter & Gamble and the
paper industry - claimed that cloth diapers posed their own environmental
hazards. After factoring in the gasoline used by diaper-delivery trucks, the
detergent used to wash diapers and so forth, the studies concluded that it
was a toss-up as to which kind of diaper had more of an environmental
impact. Environmentally conscious consumers suddenly had an excuse to switch
to disposables.
One by one, Twin Cities diaper services began dropping off the map. In 2001,
Flatz closed Crib Diaper, which members of his family had worked for since
1945. Last year, Flatz filed for bankruptcy, citing more than $600,000 in
debt and only $5,000 in assets. In 2003, Sandy Lundgren's Cheek to Cheek
Diaper Service grossed about $225,000; this year, she expects that to drop
to $175,000. She said she's barely breaking even and has had to borrow money
from her father to cover unexpected expenses.
Making her deliveries, Lundgren stopped at the home of Annette Fink, who
started using cloth diapers after one of her children developed an allergic
reaction to disposables. "After you find out how nice it is to have those
bags of fresh cloth diapers, you'll never change," said Fink, holding baby
Patrick on her hip. "It's perfect."
The price of Lundgren's service is competitive with disposables. Her average
customer pays about $12 a week for 60 diapers, or 20 cents per diaper. At
the discount warehouse Sam's Club in Bloomington, MN, a 168-count box of
Huggies sells for $28.70, or about 17 cents per diaper.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans toss out
about 3.4 million tons of disposable diapers each year, accounting for 2.1
percent of the nation's solid-waste output. That's what keeps Lundgren going
in the face of declining demand for her service. "If people don't start
using cloth, it's going to go away," she warned. "Don't people get this?
We're filling up our landfills with diapers. At least I'll go to my grave
knowing I did something."
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Excerpted from an 8/26/04 University of Washington press release:
NEW LIFE-CYCLE ASSESSMENT SHOWS ADVANTAGES OF ENVIRONMENTALLY-PREFERABLE
HOME CONSTRUCTION
Most of the energy that goes into building U.S. homes is consumed - not by
the power tools, welding and trucking during construction - but during the
manufacture of the building materials, according to a comprehensive
life-cycle assessment comparing typical wood-, steel- and concrete-frame
homes.
Using the least energy-intensive building materials - and taking steps
toward practices such as recycling and reusing more building materials -
makes sense considering the nation's energy concerns and attendant issues of
pollution and global warming, according to a new report tallying the
environmental impact of home construction.
A summary of that report, by the Consortium for Research on Renewable
Industrial Materials, is in the June 2004 issue of the Journal of Forest
Products, which is at: http://www.corrim.org/reports/corrim_june_2004.pdf
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Link to information about the Water Conservation Hotel and Motel Program
(Water CHAMP), conducted by the Southwest Florida Water Management District,
Brooksville, FL:
http://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/watercon/waterchamp
This program promotes
reuse of towels and linens by hotel guests, rather than having them washed
every day. A press release describing the water savings from the program is
at: http://www.swfwmd.state.fl.us/news/2004/022404d.htm
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