Andrea's Everything Eco Exploration

After working almost two month with the RCA I have had to deal with almost 9000 aluminum cans, 6750 plastic bottles and 1200 juice boxes. I feel now is a good time to give a PSA. DO:  -Remove caps. This will allow the container s to dry, making them less gross -Rinse the containers! Milk jugs from January smell so rank when we try to crush them down. Pre-rinse and crush your milk jugs! -Finish your drink! (we've dealt with so much half full grossness) DON'T: -Put stuff in the containers. We've found countless cigarette butts, gross paper towels, even a razor blade. -Crush the cans. We've gotten complains that BCMB won't take them, so it'll piss the depots off. -Don't buy bottled water! Try and buy as little single use containers in general. We deal with so much, and that's not even close to how much the ABCRC warehouse (Where all your beverage containers go) sees in a day. Give us a break! The recycling system is good, but it's still using a lot of e...

I've been thinking a lot about the bigger picture. I feel that most of us are so distracted with life we never look up to see it. I've never wanted to be successful in the monetary, economic fashion. I never had an urge to own a big house down in the suburbs or drive an SUV. I got off on the idea that I could leave it all behind; that I could live life on my own terms. And every day I am making decisions that bring me closer to where I want to be. It can be really simple, like recycling and picking up litter, and it can be bigger life decisions like going plastic free or growing your own food. No matter the act, as long as it is aimed towards reducing our negative impacts on the environment around us, it won't be in vain. If more people realize that all life on this planet is equally important, we won't treat our neighbors like a perpetual garbage bin.  Nature is home to me. It is where I feel at peace, where I'm rapt with fascination and reduced to childish joy....

One day I would love to have a garden like my mom's here. My dad helped make these individual plots which yeild massive amounts of spinach, carrots peas beans and kale. Growing up with the luxury of a huge garden has taught me the importance of growing your own food, controlling how it is grown and cultivated. It helps take a load off of large scale agriculture and is a much better use of land than grass. two months later this garden now looks like this: So now that I've got my own place I decided to start my own little garden this spring. We got some seeds from the gardening store, some dirt and started planting. We started some chili plants from seed by germinating them in plastic bags and a few weeks later they've sprouted! Super excited for these but the season my be too short for fruit. Here is my sprouted celery butt I've had in a glass of water on my window sill for a few weeks. It grew some roots so I decided to plant it and see how it goes. ...

Here's a really good article about a family who only produces one quart of garbage in a year. At the bottom there's some quick tips on how to start your journey to waste-freedom! http://www.mnn.com/leaderboard/stories/this-family-produces-1-quart-of-waste-in-a-year

This past long weekend me and some friends went to Elbow falls for a day hike. We followed the river down as far as we could go, and I picked up any trash I found along the way. Most of what I picked up were single use bottled water, and beer cans. Beautiful Elbow falls. This is a bag I filled with various water bottles. 6 single use and one Nalgene bottle. Beautiful Rocky Mountain scenery. Too bad it was marred with the remnants of past hikers' garbage. A few things I pulled out of the river On the way I also found 5 doggy bags in various states of decomposition. People just leave the dog bags out in the woods because they didn't want to carry it all the way back. If that's the case why pick it up in the first place? Dog poop biodegrades. Plastic doesn't. So please, take it all the way to a garbage or don't even bother. What I pulled out of my back pack at the end of the day. 9 beverage containers, an insole (we also found a moose light fl...

So call me crazy, but I like to eat Dandelion greens. Steamed and then mixed with lemon juice and olive oil = yum! Plus it's really good for you too.  The leaves are high in vitamins A and C as well as calcium and give you more iron than spinach. Just be sure to never harvest them in areas sprayed with chemicals. Your back yard is probably the safest bet. So here's my step by step guide on harvesting preparing and cooking your dandelions: The easiest way for harvesting I've found is to insert a strong knife around the roots and try to sever the roots, leaving the clump of dandelion plant intact for easy handling. This is also handy of you want to harvest the roots too. They can be dried and made into tea which can act as a diuretic and has detox properties.  Once you've collected sufficient dandelion greens (They shrink a lot so be sure to get 2-3 times more than you think you'll need) you can start to clean them. When I harvest them I do a preliminary scr...

It's been a while since I posted but I've been pretty busy. Training week with Recycling Council of Alberta was busy and informative. We partner with Alberta Used Oil Recycling (AUOMA) and Alberta Recycling (ARMA) for education events across the province, and partner with the Beverage Container Management Board (BCMB) for some research projects across the province. So the week was full of meetings and tours of various facilities. And it was pretty eye opening. The craziest tour was of GEEP facility (Global Electric Electronic Processing) where their state of the art machinery allows them to accept any type of electronic device, ranging from computers, tvs to keyboards and toasters. It was crazy to see the immensity of the amount of 'waste' they receive. They even get brand new TVs and motor bikes that weren't sold and they have to destroy them. It definitely says something about consumerism. We're just lucky that recycling is economically viable for most product...