M&C Summer 2009: A compostable successable

Milque & Cookies was this past Friday at 9pm and was a resounding success.

Phi Tau took a departure from the normal schedule of Saturday at 8pm due to Sophomore Family Weekend and thus had to forge ahead and bake like crazy on Thursday night. Everything came together marvelously well and a good time was had by all. I mean, who doesn’t want to stuff themselves with milk and tasty, sugary, yummy cookies?

Because I’d acquired compostable cups, we were able to put out compost bins instead of trash cans:

Watch for Cyclests [sic]

Yeah, I don’t know what they are, either, but some of my bike-commuting friends suggested that they might be a mythical type of biker, an uber-cyclist, if you will.

I took a couple of quick photos on my way home at night. The atmosphere was foggy, so I couldn’t use a flash, and when I came back the next day the road crew had unhelpfully corrected the sign. Bother!

Recycling and Composting at Phi Tau

Phi Tau does an amazing job recycling and composting as much as possible. There has been a long line of dedicated recycling chairs/sustainability coordinators over the years, and the current officer, Ashley Morishige, has continued to expand and improve the system.

Recycling and composting in any situation can take time and energy, but recycling and composting at a fraternity can be an especially big challenge! Thankfully, Phi Tau has amazing support from the FO&M people that pick up all of the trash, recycling, compost, and bulk trash.

I’ve assembled a gallery of photos on my Zooomr account which you can view in blog format here.

Here’s a view of the outside bins:

Industrial Kitchen Toys

I have just come into the ownership of two awesome kitchen toys. Both of them came from the kitchen of a summer camp who, I can only imagine, needed to clear out some old equipment.

The first item is The Eagle, a powerful, hand-cranked kitchen slicer:

This bad boy was made by The Eagle Tool & Machine Company, Inc. based in Springfield, Ohio. The company is still around under that name and now has a website.

Phi Tau to have 100% Compostable Milque & Cookies!

I’m really pleased to note that for the first time ever, Phi Tau’s summer Milque & Cookies event will be 100% post-consumer compostable. (Milque & Cookies is a termly event in which the brothers bake a couple thousand cookies and serve them alongside an ice-cream-and-milk concoction)

For a few years Phi Tau has done a great job of recycling and composting as much as possible during baking and other prep for the event. During the event itself, milk jugs and plastic ice cream containers are recycled, and the waxy-paper ice cream cream tubs are composted.

Unfortunately, it’s been cumbersome to have one bin for plastic cups and another for cookies and paper towels and nigh impossible to get all of the students to properly sort their waste. But this term I’ve helped the brothers find a source for biodegradable plastic cups, so Phi Tau will be able to set out one bin and compost everything!

The compostable cups are currently quite a bit more expensive than the “dinosaur plastic” cups, and concerns have been raised about the use of GM corn and large quantities of pesticides in their creation. I’m currently working with a group of people at Dartmouth to try to find the most sustainable cup possible, but in the meantime it’s great to take this first little step toward using compostable cups.

I’ll make a post after the event with pictures and all that sexy jazz. In the meantime, feel free to add a comment with a guess of how many pounds of compost we’ll generate.

–Q

BlitzMail flashback…

I was looking up some articles on The Dartmouth when I ran across an article from 1995 about BlitzMail.

The article was humorous in nature, but some piece of it really showed how active development was at that time:

But, with the passage of time, many integral aspects of Dartmouth have changed, the most basic of which involve Kiewit’s bi-annual updates of our beloved BlitzMail. We now have campus-wide bulletins, unlimited nickname space, blind carbon copies, address books and instantaneous delivery. As fond as I am of the original grind-it-out BlitzMail system, I have gradually become accustomed to the technological wizardry that has accompanied my four-year stint at Dartmouth.

Oh BlitzMail, you have your quirks, but you were amazingly good at what you did, especially during the time you were under active development. You will be missed.

–Q

It’s not a myth: You can recycle plastics #1-7 at Dartmouth

A couple of years ago I emailed the College’s Sustainability Coordinator, Jim Merkel, and asked him about plastic recycling. I’d heard conflicting rules about what could go into the recycling bins, but I figured that he would know what the latest rules were for plastic recycling. When Jim told me that Dartmouth recycles all plastics from #1 – #7, I couldn’t believe him. I emailed him back to confirm what he’d said, and he reiterated the fact that I could recycle plastics from #1 (PETE) to #7 (OTHER) in a single bin. We could even comingle the plastics with aluminum cans.

Most curbside recycling programs only take #1 and #2 (HDPE) plastic bottles and jugs. For Dartmouth to provide recycling of not only different container shapes, such as berry clamshells and tubs, but also of plastics #3 – #7 is really amazing. Although I wanted to believe that Dartmouth had found a recycler to take these materials, I still had my doubts. Dartmouth has had issues in the past with recycling being collected and then just trashed, so I always remained a little wary about the whole process.

This past week I was able to communicate with the people that handle all of Dartmouth’s plastic recycling and I must say that I now feel much more confident about the program and much more comfortable telling people to go ahead and recycle as much plastic as possible. So here it is:

If you work/live at Dartmouth (not DHMC, see below), you can and should put plastic items marked with a #1 – #7 in the recycling bin.

Consider the medium when using URLs

I was shopping at the local food coop last week and saw a sign that said “Take an online sustainability survey and be entered into a raffle to win a free green home makeover!”

Well sure, why not? I guess I could use a little greening of my home, or I could hand the prize off to a friend. So I picked up one of the paper slips containing the information, shoved it into my wallet, and continued with my regularly scheduled shopping trip.

As I was cleaning receipts out of my wallet this morning, I rediscovered the piece of paper. It had a short, well-written message asking people to “[T]ake a moment to fill out this survey to benefit sustainability research,” and listed a url on surveymonkey.com. Simple enough.

A little problem: the url is 68 characters long and includes a 30-digit uid containing the chars [a-zA-Z0-9_]:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xfGOwGwNz9CKRjd2_2fjBKUg_3d_3d

Vermont at Dawn

I took these pictures just as the sun was coming up over the mountains one day earlier this month. I probably should have been asleep, but I just had to stop and get these photos. The light was absolutely perfect!

(click the photo for the rest of the set)

Green Cleaning at DHMC

This past Friday Ashley the Younger and I had an opportunity to meet with Jay Welenc, Operations Manager of Housekeeping Services at DHMC. Ashley and I got a lot of good tips about green cleaning products and learned some ways to make our cleaning more effective. We even got to see DHMC’s ActiveIon space-age “activated water” spray bottle.

Ashley and I have been working on moving Phi Tau away from unsustainable, harsh chemical cleaning products and towards green cleaning products. We’ve been trying to find sources for products and figure out which products are most effective. Central Stores carries some environmentally-friendly products, but doesn’t offer consultation on which products work well and why we should use them.

While researching products online I remembered seeing a presentation by DHMC Housekeeping talking about the new sustainable and green cleaning products the Hospital is using. With such a strong interest in green products, I was sure that the Housekeeping department would be able to help us out.