Why reuse when you can refuse!?!

It's become very trendy to bring your resuable shopping bags with you to the market. And everyone is capitalizing on it. These bags are available everywhere. But plastic shopping bags are still leaving stores in droves. Reusablebags.com estimates that worldwide 500 billion plastic bags are used annually, 100 billion of which are attributed to the U.S. It's ok to use plastic bags as long as you recycle or reuse them right? What if you learned that most of the bags that are collected in store for recycling never actually get recycled? Would that change your plastic bag consumption?

Here's Green Dailys case for skipping the plastic shopping bags and committing to BYOB ( Bring Your Own Bag) on your next shopping trip.

**Less than 1% of plastic bags are recycled each year and it costs more to recycle a plastic bag than to make a new one.

**According to San Francisco's Department on the Environment, it costs $4,000 to process and recycle one ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold for $32.

**Plastic bags account for more than 10% of debris washed up on the U.S. coastline, according to the National Marine Debris Monitoring Programming.









PLASTIC PLANET: THE CURSE OF THE CARRIER BAG

Petica | MySpace Video

Why your lunch is bad for the planet

The purpose of convenience items is to save resources like time and energy. It seems like everything is disposable these days. Paper plates, paper towels, plastic cups, platstic utensils and that's just your lunch! If not recycled all of these items end up in landfills. Convenience is a short term benefit with a devastating impact.


Consider these not so fun facts about school lunch in America:

Close to 2.7 billion juice boxes end up in landfills every year. (Container Recycling Institute)

Each child who brings a brown-bag lunch to school every day will generate 67 pounds of waste by the end of the school year - that's 18,760 pounds of lunch waste for an average-sized school! (EPA)

According to the 2004 U.S. Census data, there are 36.4 million elementary school-age children and 16.8 million high school-age children. If every child adopted a waste-free lunch (including finishing all of their food), we could divert more than 3.5 billion pounds of trash from our landfills each year.

Each year the U.S. consumes over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps. (EPA)

Lunchtime trash is second only to office paper as the leading source of school waste. (Green Teacher Magazine, Fall 2004)

A disposable lunch costs $4.02 per day, versus $2.65 for a waste-free lunch. That translates to a savings of about $246.60 per child per year. wastefreelunches.org




Here is the challenge: Give up some of your precious time and energy and inconvenience yourself for the sake of the planet. Opt for reuseable products and skip the disposables.

Adding another "R" to the list

Retro! Hop on this super sweet chopper and take a leisurely cruise down memory lane. Complete with rainbow chain guard & and tricked out spokes. Save some money on gas, get some exercise and there's room for a friend on the comfy banana seat. It's enough to make the all kids in the neighborhood go green ( with envy that is!). Come on down to the TOCO SHOP and take this baby for a test drive before it slips away.

New content coming soon

Welcome to the TOCO SHOP BLOG. Check back for up to date info on what's happening at the shop and resources for incorporating the 3 R's in to your daily life. More to come, see you soon!