By Laura Turner Seydel

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just released its most recent waste and recycling facts and figures, and reported that in 2010 Americans generated about 250 million tons of waste. Break it down and that means you personally throw away 4.43 pounds of refuse each day.  However, of that 250 million tons of waste, we recycled 85 million tons, for a national recycling rate of 34 percent.

The Tellus Institute (tellus.org), a non-profit research institute focused on environmental and social challenges, sees a need for improvement. In their report “More Jobs, Less Pollution: Growing the Recycling Economy,” they summarized that if we could increase the national recycling rate to 75 percent by the year 2030, our planet would see a monumental decrease in pollution and a much needed improvement in public health. Carbon dioxide emissions would be reduced by 276 million metric tons, the equivalent of taking 50 million cars off the road, and create more than 1.5 million jobs nationwide. Both would have a major impact on our overall economy.

Reaching this 75 percent recycling rate is easier for some states than others, specifically the 10 states who support the Container Deposit Law. These states, including Connecticut, California, and Vermont, provide a small monetary incentive to return beverage bottles and cans for recycling. Since Georgia is not one of these states, we have to work harder to do our part. Luckily, we are blessed with many in town organizations, like Georgia Recycling Coalition (georgiarecycles.org), Keep Atlanta Beautiful (keepatlantabeautiful.org) and Atlanta Recycles (atlantarecycles.com), who are each dedicated to educating, motivating, and inspiring us to do our part. From monthly newsletters to hosting electronics recycling drop-offs, these organizations have become instrumental in helping our community citizens become more avid and responsible recyclers.

In your day-to-day, think about the products you consume and how you can get creative to reduce, reuse or recycle to minimize your overall personal waste stream. Refrain from using one-use, throwaway plastic items, like drinking straws. Did you know that Americans throw away 500 million straws a day? That’s enough to fill 127 school buses, so you can imagine their impact alone on our landfills (bestrawfree.org).  Also, make sure you use reusable shopping bags whenever possible, use reusable glass food storage containers instead of disposable containers when storing leftovers, and simply place a recycling bin next to your trashcan to remind you to think twice before throwing something away. With our powers combined, we can make a difference for our community, state, and planet.

For more eco-living tips and news, visit lauraseydel.com.

By Han Vance

In a city built originally as a multi-directional train terminus, it is fitting that a typical day in his life begins and ends riding the rails. No matter the hour, Angel Poventud remains on-call for duty. A mere two hours after the call comes in he finds himself steering tons of steel to safety as a CSX freight train conductor.

Approximately 14 hours and many miles later, he is free.

After recovering from work or on those days his professional services are not needed, Poventud hears the call of duty to be of service to his adopted city. Poventud moved to Atlanta from Miami in 1998 amidst the post-Olympic wave of population boom. Always interested in transportation, before working on the railroad Angel was a baggage handler at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

In 2004, a developer tore down Poventud ‘s residence near Piedmont Park to make way for condo construction. From that moment forward, Poventud vowed to get informed about the powers that be and projects around him. His civic interest raised, Poventud began to seek out meetings about the progress of the city. An organization called U.L.I., the Urban Land Institute, hosted a general information meeting about a project called the Atlanta BeltLine at Atlantic Station. Poventud attended and his love affair began.

The well-documented BeltLine project consists of 22-miles of old rail corridor encircling the city and connects 45 distinct neighborhoods via future trails, greenspace and transit. The BeltLine would get a boosted funding timeline if the regional T-SPLOST (Transportation Special Local Optional Sales Tax) is passed by voters throughout the ten-county region on July 31.

INtown spoke with Poventud about his involvement with the project at an art opening at Carroll Street Cafe’ in the Cabbagetown neighborhood.

Talk about your personal experience with the BeltLine project.

I came into the project from 60,000 feet in the air rather than being asked in, so my thinking has always been how is this going to benefit the city and how is it going to benefit the country. The establishment saw me as too much of a radical, but I was always physically on the BeltLine, so they couldn’t just ignore me. That’s just who I am; it isn’t conventional. I recently bought a house on the BeltLine in Adair Park.

What are your favorite elements of the project?

The connectivity. Our street grid isn’t very friendly – it’s for cars, but not pedestrians and bikes. The BeltLine will make the grid more friendly in an explorative way.

What are your frustrations with the project?

Lack of communication with the public. The real message is not the dog and pony shows for the delivery of the project. The message is the project itself. The process and the people are the story, not the ribbon cuttings. Those are just political events.

How has winning the Cox Conserves Hero award helped?

I won the award in 2010 as a volunteer for nonprofit Trees Atlanta and was able to give them that big check for $5,000, after planting trees all over the city for them for years. It gave me more regional recognition, so I have more of an audience to be an advocate for the causes I care about like the BeltLine.

Finally, let’s hear a list of your BeltLine activities, official or unofficial.

Clean ups, walking tours, bike tours, advocacy. Attending all the meetings. I’m an official member of the speakers’ bureau.

For more about the BeltLine, visit BeltLine.org.

Contributor Han Vance is an Atlanta-based writer and former regional transportation manager. His forthcoming California travel narrative memoir is Golden State Genius and his website is hanvance.com.

After the joint kickoff event, the five AUC institutions will begin an eight-week competition against each other and more than 600 other colleges and universities nationwide and in Canada to see which campus can reduce, reuse and recycle the most waste. The eight-week tournament is preceded by two pre-season reporting weeks that began Jan. 22. Schools will be ranked in eight categories, including the largest amount of total recyclables, the least amount of trash per capita, and the highest recycling rate. Top schools in each category earn “bragging rights,” while the winners of each are recognized with an award made of recycled glass. For more about RecycleMani, visit this link.

By Sally Sears

A dozen adults wielding blue-handled swing blades caught drivers’ eyes on Lindbergh Drive on a recent Sunday morning.

Honks and cheers joined the crackle of yanking honeysuckle vines and kudzu as volunteers cleared a new hiking trail along a meadow at the foot of Midtown Atlanta. A whining chain saw bit into privet and mimosa. And a special, hush- hush secret weapon in a Pepsi bottle should keep them from coming back.

I dropped an armload of invasive mimosa branches long enough to show a neighbor and her two dogs where the trail head leads to the creek and a good half mile loop of gentle walking. She couldn’t believe it. Neither could the Green Team from the Georgia Conservancy.

“I can’t believe this is right here, in plain sight, and I’ve never noticed it,” said from Leah Barnett, the conservancy’s community outreach coordinator. That admission cost her a nickel. I’m collecting from everybody who says they had no idea Atlanta had so much gorgeous creek land in hiding.

The neighborhood and the South Fork Conservancy won a grant from Atlanta’s Sustainability Office to reveal the beauty hidden by decades of inattention to this parcel of land. The Love Your Block folks liked our idea of sprucing up the view from Lindbergh Drive, near the I-85 overpass, and encouraging people to walk along the public land through the meadow.

First we parked on the street at Armand Road, and walked across the bridge over the North Fork of Peachtree Creek. The creek bubbled clear that morning, and we all took in the view of the Midtown skyline. It shone like Oz. Below us, a line of green marked the creek bank. The open meadow is full of native grasses. It’s easy to ignore the sound of the I-85 traffic, especially when we dropped down into the meadow itself.

We tugged mulch out of a giant pile, crafted trails and created a 25 foot circle at the head of a circular route around the meadow and creek. One day, a bench and signs here will help direct walkers along the trail, and show how this creek meets the South Fork and forms Peachtree Creek itself, Atlanta’s most important waterway.

The Lindridge Martin Manor Neighborhood Association says more public green space is their first priority. Environmental Chairman Rich Sussman pulls volunteers from three nearby neighborhoods to help. This day, though, he followed the chain saw. South Fork Conservancy Chairman Bob Kerr aimed at privet in the trail. One was chewed to a point by beavers from the creek. Carefully, Bob sliced. Then Rich Sussman took the Pepsi bottle and gently daubed its sponge-topped contents on the stump. It won’t unduly harm creeks, but it’s potent against invasives. I drove all over Atlanta looking for that particular 20 ounce plastic bottle. Not in a million years would I put poison in a Coke bottle.

Who owns it? The City of Atlanta and Georgia DOT. Officials with both are intrigued by the idea of trails connecting green space along the creeks, and working hard on the details. More information at the website southforkconservancy.org.

By Julia Turner

Currently, Georgia law does not ban landfill disposal of e-waste – computers, printers, televisions, etc. – coming from residential sources.  although some landfills will not accept them. The improper disposal of these items, which contains such toxic substances as lead and mercury, may have serious implications on public health and the health of our environment.

The Keep Atlanta Beautiful Community Recycling Center (KCRC) has opened in the Old Fourth Ward community to help combat the problem. Frequent recyclers might remember that KAB was originally collecting e-waste at the Grady High School parking on Saturdays. The popularity of the event, meant the program would have to find a space of its own.

Luckily, around this time the recycling manager from Atlanta Public Schools joined the KAB advisory board for the program and was able to find a new location to set up the center: Walden Middle School. The school, located at 320 Irwin Street, is no longer in use, which has made all the difference on drop-off days, especially now that the center accepts a wider range of items for recycling.

The Community Recycling Center now accepts paper and post consumer polystyrene, commonly known as Styrofoam, at its new location in the O4W. Global Document Shredding is handling the paper shredding, Dart Container Corporation collects the Styrofoam drop-offs and Creative Recycling Solutions, an EPA certified recycling company which collects the e-waste, recycles nearly 10,000 pounds per month of obsolete computers, monitors, handheld devices, TVs and more at the monthly event.

This month, the center will be collecting old phonebooks as part of AT&T’s Project ReDirectory and is now accepting old paint, which will be reconstituted and used by KAB to use for graffiti clean-up and cover at local parks.

Collection days are now every second Saturday of the month from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. More information can be found at keepatlantabeautiful.org.

By Bethany Clark

More people than ever are concerned about how things affect the environment. As the holiday season approaches, one of the environmental questions on many people’s minds is whether buying and decorating a real tree during Christmas does harm to our forests. Trees Atlanta would like to offer you some information on this matter, so that you can decide whether to celebrate with a real tree or an artificial one.

You may be surprised to hear this, but Trees Atlanta supports using real Christmas trees instead of artificial ones. Once your shock and awe is over, read on to learn why.

The main benefit to an artificial tree is that, in best case scenarios, you buy it once and reuse it annually. This one attribute makes people think it is a better choice to make than buying a real tree; after all, no real trees have been harmed in your holiday celebration. But there are other factors to consider, the main being that real Christmas trees are a renewable resource. Artificial trees are simply not.

The majority of real Christmas trees sold today are specifically planted and grown for the Christmas holidays on farms. They are meant to be harvested in the same way that crops like potatoes, pumpkins, and squash are cultivated and harvested. After the season, 2-3 seedlings are planted to replace each harvested tree. Each acre on these farms can hold more than 1,000 trees, and there are more than 500,000 acres in production across North America, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture.

Farms that grow real Christmas trees provide wildlife habitat, control soil erosion, are beautiful to look at, and produce a crop when the soil might not be ideal for other crops. And after the holidays, many communities collect the used Christmas trees and recycle them.

Here are some fun facts about Christmas trees, courtesy of the National Christmas Tree Association:

• There are approximately 30-35 million real Christmas trees sold in North America every year. Christmas tree farmers plant more than 60 million new seedlings post-harvest.
• It can take up to 15 years to grow a tree of average retail sale height (6 feet), but the average growing time is seven years.
• Real Christmas trees are a renewable, recyclable resource.
• Artificial trees contain non-biodegradable plastics. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, 80 percent of artificial trees are manufactured in and shipped from China.
• North American Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states and Canada. The top Christmas tree production states are Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Washington.
• The top selling Christmas trees are balsam fir, Douglas-fir, Fraser fir, noble fir, Scotch pine, Virginia pine, and white pine.
• There are more than 4,000 local Christmas tree recycling programs throughout the United States. Many communities have a “curbside pickup” for Christmas trees after the holiday, which brings the trees to a recycling program, not a landfill.

The above reasons weigh into Trees Atlanta’s support of using real Christmas trees during the holiday season. Once the season is over, choosing to “treecycle” your tree provides material for industries that can give the tree a second life. There are several types of large-scale uses to which old Christmas trees can contribute, among them are wood chipping, erosion prevention and land stabilization, fish habitat, and river delta sedimentation management.

As you see, these uses range from highly-useful environmental factors (like erosion prevention) to things that we humans enjoy (like hiking trails). Artificial trees, unfortunately, cannot help with any of this.

Still wavering? Ok, here’s a happy medium: if you wish to celebrate Christmas with a tree, get a real Christmas tree, and then come plant with Trees Atlanta.You can join one of our volunteer projects and help us plant 50 trees at once, thereby offsetting any Christmas tree guilt. (The exercise will also work off any holiday calories, too!)

You can also choose to participate in Trees Atlanta’s “Living Christmas Tree” program. We sell living trees, still in a pot (and yes, you will have to water them), that can be brought into your home, decorated, and then planted afterward in your yard. You can also elect to return the tree to Trees Atlanta after the holidays are over and we will plant it elsewhere in the city. Enjoy your options, and have happy, safe holidays!

By Laura Turner Seydel

As we deck the walls with twinkle lights, wrap oodles of presents, and plan our festive holiday parties, it is important that we are conscious of our impact on our planet during these merry times. Did you know that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans throw away an extra million tons of garbage each week?

Get a head start on your New Year’s resolutions by pledging to do you part to keep our landfills free of extra refuse by reducing, reusing and recycling as much holiday merriment as possible to ensure many happy holidays to come.

On average, each holiday season we dispose of 8,000 tons of wrapping paper, 38,00 miles of ribbon and almost 2 billion greeting cards. Kick off your eco-holiday by prepping your home with a herbie curbie sized recycling bin to recycle these items, as well as the bottles, cans, corrugated cardboard and other recyclable items that are bound to accumulate (for a list of approved items or to get a recycling bin, visit atlantaga.gov).

You can also cut back on wrapping waste by getting creative. Around our house we love wrapping presents with the comic section of the newspaper, pages from magazines and even old maps from past road trips.  We also save holiday greeting cards and “upcycle” them to become tags for our gifts. And why not make the packaging part of the gift? Wrap presents with a colorful scarf, holiday sweater or a cool keepsake cigar box.

Another big landfill culprit is food waste, as each holiday season 28 billion pounds of edible food are thrown away (that’s 100 pounds per person!).  Reduce this number by donating leftover holiday meals and food items to a local soup kitchen or adding them to your compost bin (if you don’t already have one, you can get one from Farmer D at farmerd.com). By composting food residuals, including used coffee grounds and flowers, not only will you be helping our landfills, but also creating nutrient rich compost, which you can later use in your flower or edible garden.

Recycling efforts shouldn’t end after you have decked the halls, trimmed the tree and taken down the LED twinkle lights (they use 80 percent less energy than traditional incandescent lights!).  In Atlanta there are many options to recycle your Christmas tree, old batteries and broken strand lights. At Earth 911 (earth911.org) you can search for drop off locations.

This year, create traditions that incorporate these eco-friendly practices so that each year you and your family can do your part to keep the planet healthy and happy!

For more eco-living tips, visit lauraseydel.com.

Green carpet arrivals include Media Mogul, Ted Turner, 26-time Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter Alison Krauss, Gala Co-Chairs Laura Turner Seydel and Elizabeth DuPree Lynch and Captain Planet Foundation Interim Executive Director Christina Stevens. Presenting sponsors include: Turner Foundation, Cartoon Network, Coca-Cola Company, Georgia Power, JST Foundation, Pratt 100% Recycled and Xfinity.

Host Committee co-chairs include: Derek Jacoby, Ira Blumenthal, Beth Kytle, and Lewis Perkins. and their committee members include: Ginair & George McKerrow, Dr. Randy Rudderman & Jennifer Jiunta, Angela & Rhett Turner, Jennie & Peek Garlington, and Beau Turner. Patron Committee co-chairs are Barbara Pyle and Joanne Chesler Gross. The event auction chair is Phaedra Parks from The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

Guests will mingle with high-profile celebrities and civic leaders, enjoy a musical performance from 26-time Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter Alison Krauss, bid on live and silent auction items featuring one-of-a-kind trips and eco-luxury experiences, enjoy premium cocktails, and dinner by Wolfgang Puck. The event will also feature Captain Planet’s “Superhero for Earth Awards” given to individuals who help inform the public about eco education, sustainability and being responsible stewards of the environment. Dr. Sylvia Earle, dubbed “the Sturgeon General” for her world-renowned oceanography work will be in attendance to receive the CPF Exemplar Award.

For more than 20 years, the Captain Planet Foundation has brought together public agencies, non-profit organizations, corporations, and foundations to help youth develop into environmental stewards – active individuals who participate, nationally and internationally, in projects that benefit their health, schools and communities.

For more information and to purchase tickets,  visit www.thepowerisyours.org.