Walls of blue jeans, and coffee cups!

Reduce, reuse and recycle. Three ways to save ourselves! If that sounds like hyperbole, it isn’t. Natural resources are not increasing, not all of them can. The minerals we need for our things are limited. Trees can be increased. Water is fixed. If all of us want to live life the way Americans or Europeans have been living, with big homes all fitted with gadgets at every step, cars and big cars with more than one per home, use more of paper containers and throw them after single use, and so on, we will need three planets.

Instead, if we learn to reduce our consumption, reuse things and finally recycle them, there is hope still.

This wisdom is dawning in the west. Imagination is running riot in thinking of ways to reuse and recycle, even if not reduce.

For instance, think of recycled blue jeans used as insulation material in the walls of the new California Academy of Sciences! Yes, the cotton in the jeans is a good heat insulator. The academy has gone for radiant floor heating, heat recovery systems, motorized windows, photosensors, etc. It has a 2.5 acre living green roof that is home to 1.7 million plants!

Homes made of recycled coffee cups and packaging material! And floating too. And sucking in carbon dioxide on the roofs! How about that? EPS, or expanded polystyrene is one of the most tough waste materials on our planet. On average it takes up to 90 years to biodegrade a polystyrene coffee cup or hamburger shell. In this new avatar, they form excellent insulating materials. Moreover, the product is easy to recycle.

TerraCycle has been using e-waste to make urban pots. Computers and fax machines which would have landed in the landfill are now turned out as savvy pots! Handling e-waste is tough as it's like 30 different polymers together. And typically, recycling centers have trouble recycling a bunch of different polymers but TerraCycle has worked around this.

Motorola is doing its bit to tackle the massive problem of consumer e-waste with the release of the world’s first carbon neutral cellphone, the Renew W233.
The plastic used is from 100 percent recycled water bottles! By investing in renewable energy and reforestation, through its partnering with Carbonfund.org, the company offsets emissions during the manufacture, distribution and operation of the set. And the phone is totally recycleable!

Of course, here in Bangalore we have seen plastic laid on the roads alongwith the tar. Reuse of one big waste.

What do you think? Are such attempts more of hype than really tackling the problem? What can we do to reduce the burden on the planet? Any bright ideas? They could be small ones with big implications. Hint: think of the waste we most generate and then think of a reuse.