With Craig Jung from StLouisGreen.com
Healthy Planet Green Living Editor
Happy October! Is there such a thing as a green Halloween? The costumes, the decorations, and the candy all provide a great opportunity to make our lives more sustainable. Tell us how you plan to reduce, reuse, and recycle this Halloween at www.facebook.com/stlouisgreen. The holidays are just around the corner. Have you started getting out your winter decorations yet? Soon we will all be plugging in those strings of holiday lights and seeing how many of them survived another year. If some of them don’t work, that’s actually good news for us at St. Louis Green because we want those lights for our Holiday Light Recycling Drive starting November 13th! We are teaming up with Operation Food Search to make this the biggest and best Holiday Light Recycling Drive yet, with a portion of the proceeds donated to a program to feed hungry kids on the weekends. We do this to keep these recyclable materials out of the landfills, and this year we need your help to reach our goal of recycling 50,000 pounds of holiday lights! We tried to make it easy and convenient with 200 drop-off locations in the St. Louis area. Find the closest drop-off location at www.stlouisgreen.com. If you would like to provide a drop-off location at your work or school, let us know soon!It’s football time in St. Louis and the Rams need your support. This year, instead of watching the game on TV, see the game live at the stadium for free! When you volunteer to collect recyclables from fans during the game as part of the Rams Green Team, you get to be part of a fun group and do some good for your team. Email lboaz@rams.nfl.com to check for available dates!
Speaking of sports teams keeping waste out of landfills, the St. Louis Cardinals had a very successful year donating food to Operation Food Search. Instead of putting leftover edible food in the trash, the Cardinals donated thousands of pounds of prepared food to be given to the hungry.
As useful as foam packing peanuts are, sadly there are a lot of environmental problems with the polystyrene they are made of, especially during the manufacturing process, when used to hold hot food, and after disposal. The least we can do is recycle those Styrofoam food containers and foam packing peanuts. Did you know that at any time you can bring in this material to Kirkwood Recycling? They are open 24 hours a day and 7 days a week! Help Kirkwood Recycling contain the chaos by dropping off the peanuts in a bag or a box.
In October, we also have Food Day 2011, the Greening Midwest Communities conference, and many other events. For information on upcoming green events, check out www.StLouisGreen.com.