Dangerous Ideas

Everytime I move from one place to another I suddenly realize all the stuff I have to learn all over again. Recycling is one of the things I’m thinking about now that I’m living part-time in the Research Triangle Area of North Carolina (at least I’m still part-time in San Francisco!). There are so many ways to do an environmental spring cleaning in the Bay Area.

There’s of course the City of San Francisco’s disposal/recycling contractor, Sunset Scavenger (known by other names when you want other services, like shredding before recycling). The curbside recycling and composting programs make it easy to get environmentally dispose of a range of materials. The composting program is especially different from other municipalities – not only do they take yard waste, but they’ll take pretty much any organic material (including some food containers). That’s pretty great! Here in Durham, they only take yard waste – I guess I’ll have to go back to vermicomposting in the backyard. Maybe when my life is a little less hectic, though!

The City’s program is just the beginning, though … the Bay Area also has the great Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC), which not only rebuilds computers for schools and other organizations and people who need them, but can recycle things down to the material level (e.g. scrap metal). They’re a self-funded non-profit showing that green practices can make economical sense. You can see video of the ACCRC in action at the Maker Faire at Christine.net, including views of their veggie oil generator and an interview with a volunteer explaining how the recycling process works. For those in San Francisco who don’t want to travel to the East Bay to recycle their electronics, there are other options, too, like the local Goodwill, but those probably don’t come with cool veggie oil engines.

Of course, dropping stuff off is only one part of the recycling process. Places like SCRAP and Building REsources bring the process full cycle. SCRAP – the Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts – takes stuff that would normally be thrown out and resells them to people for art projects. How do they do this? No snake oil involved. ;-) They just operate on the simple principal that while an odd item alone (like a button) might seem like junk, if you put hundreds of them together, sorted by size and shape, they suddenly seem more appealing! I first visited SCRAP with other members of the Do-It-Herself Collective (one day I’ll get around to putting the archived Web site back up) – we found all kinds of uses for the materials there, including calendar making, book binding, candle making, and materials for all of our informative and promotional signs. Building REsources takes a similar approach to materials from construction and remodeling sites:

WE ARE a junkyard for the creative, a fun house for the builder, a launch pad for ideas!

I’m guessing that there are similar resources in other places, but finding them might be a challenge. Hopefully I can find a page like this for the Research Triangle Area!