A recycling challenge: bike helmets

So I went to my local REI the other day to pick up the new rain pants and bike helmet I'd ordered -- a fancy new MIPS helmet (Matt had convinced me that it was time to get a new one that better protected my witty cranium). On the bike ride over, I got to thinking about how I buy myself a new bike helmet about every year or so, and how I've been learning along with my students how challenging it is to dispose of some materials. I have a pretty good idea of what can be recycled curbside in DC; clothing I don't wear any more ends up at a clothing swap or Goodwill; I bring my compost to the farmers market now; and I've even gotten Matt to start saving plastic bags beyond reuse to take to the plastic bag recycling bin at the grocery store. But what the heck can I do with old bike helmets? I have gone through a lot of them over the past ten years, and I hope to be biking for many more years to come.

You probably know, readers, that if you are in a crash in which your bike helmet makes contact with anything substantial, you need to replace it asap. Some of you might not know that bike helmets become less effective over time -- even without daily/regular usage, the helmet materials become less effective in just a few years, and should be replaced. So most people should be replacing bicycle helmets every 1-3 years. But for all I could find on the all-knowing Internet, there does not seem to be a place to send old helmets for recycling. Even REI -- one of the most environmentally conscious companies I know -- doesn't recycle them or offer a solution to the problem. I know this because I asked at customer service when I was picking up my new helmet. (They did recycle the cardboard box the new one came in, at least.)

The next day, at a World Food Day event I was at in Anacostia -- I wore my new helmet on the ride there and was still noodling on this problem on the ride over -- I got to talking with some folks about this conundrum and one of them told me they'd read an article recently about meal worms that eat Styrofoam. What?! I came home and looked that up later, of course. Maybe a stepping stone would be for REI and other sellers of bicycle helmets to have bins of these meal worms, Yeah, that'll happen.... but it still doesn't account for the outer hard plastic part or the straps.

Here is my challenge for you, readers: FIND a friend or relative who is an engineer. Encourage them to invent a SAFE-BUT-RECYCLABLE bicycle helmet.
The person who comes up with a solution will make millions. They should remember us little people when they do. All I ask for is a lifetime supply of these helmets. And maybe a few weeks a year at their apartment in Paris... because if I became a millionaire I would of course have an apartment in Paris to visit from time to time and would let friends stay there.

Use Less Plastic

Anyone who has been to my apartment or my classroom has a pretty good idea how I feel about plastic. I am perhaps an old lady before my time, compulsively washing and rewashing ziploc bags and drip drying produce bags that show up from time to time for reuse until they are no longer functional (at which point I trek to my local Giant* to recycle them, along with other plastic bags and the odd bit of saran wrap). I've had the same roll of plastic wrap in my kitchen since I moved from my old apartment in Columbia Heights nearly five years ago. I give stern looks to friends and loved ones who don't use cloth shopping bags... and I really try not to do the same to strangers in line at my local Whole Foods or the farmers market, but sometimes I can't help myself. Don't even get me started on how often I have washed and reused old yogurt containers....

But it's not just me, I swear! It's reinforced by the company I keep. My students in the Student Sustainability Corps -- an opt-in, after school program for kids in grades 3-8 -- are just as adamant about responsible use and disposal of plastic. I credit that largely to my friend and co-conspirator in all things sustainability, Karin, who also teaches at the school. Once kids learned about where their plastic utensils were coming from earlier this year -- how plastic forks they had been using in the cafeteria every day were made and transported, how long they were used for, and where they often ended up -- they FREAKED OUT. And came up with some brilliant solutions, including Finger Food Fridays: having foods in the cafeteria that don't even require utensils at all! This simple, replicable idea caught the eye of some pretty big muckety mucks in city government, who recently awarded them a city-wide award:

But they didn't stop there. These bright and determined young people kept on thinking about things any kid or school could do to reduce their use of plastic. They created and posted signage to encourage their peers to be mindful about their plastic utensil usage and consider reusable water bottles, researched compostable utensils, and even brainstormed ways to create a reusable lunch kit (cloth napkin made out of an old tshirt + a small, metal fork and spoon). They took their ideas to the annual Anacostia Environmental Youth Summit... and won first place for their idea to improve the local watershed by reducing plastic's entry into it in the first place. They came home with a check for $1,000 to implement a watershed-improving project of their choice. Reusable lunch kits, here we come!

I'm so proud of these kiddos. Now let me ask you:  what are YOU doing to improve our local watershed?

*An aside on Whole Foods: don't take your plastic bags there for recycling. I've informally audited their bins over the course of a handful of months and I can tell you unequivocally that the people who shop there apparently can't be bothered to put their TRASH in the clearly labeled TRASH BIN nor their COMPOST in the clearly labeled COMPOST BIN in the P Street store. The also-clearly-marked RECYCLING BIN is a disaster. Maybe they pay some poor worker to go through each bagful afterwards, but I doubt it. While I can't seem to help myself fishing trash and food waste out of the recycling bins in my school's cafeteria, I draw the line at doing the same at a grocery store. So I bike eight blocks in the other direction specifically to Giant so I can drop off my plastic bags for recycling in their PLASTIC BAGS ONLY bin, which, incidentally, does not have TRASH or COMPOST in it. Thank you, Giant Food. :)

Make it the easier way

I love Portland. I'd heard quite a bit about the green city's devotion to all things sustainable before my arrival, and the rumors were confirmed during the 3 1/2 days I spent there. It was by far the most bikeable city I've encountered so far. It turns out, with the on-road bike routes and bike paths -- even designated lanes across most of the city's bridges! -- and racks scattered throughout all quadrants of the city, it is often faster and easier to cycle somewhere than to drive. Though currently only 1% of the city's transportation budget is devoted to cycling, it is a percentage the mayor's office is looking to boost in coming years, I learned from Amy, the advisor to the mayor on sustainability policy. During a chat and tour of the City Hall vegetable garden this past Wednesday, Amy told me about the city's green roofing requirements for newly constructed buildings and green roof retrofitting for many existing structures. I learned, too, of city government's investigation into the purchase of facilities to handle city-wide curbside compost pick-up. I didn't get the sense that there was much by way of residential recycling programs, which seems strange for so green a city in so many other ways. (Portland could take a few notes from Seattle and Olympia on that note; Seattle and Olympia could in turn take notes on the nicer weather here in Oregon.)

People seem to want to do the right thing here, but the trick is to make the "right" way the easier way. I have to admit that when I moved to Brooklyn a few years back, I was as much excited by the comprehensive city recycling program as I was about becoming a public school teacher, but the criteria for recycling was quite complicated. There were elaborate charts and color-coded bags. My landlord once chided me for not using the prescripted twine to tie my neatly stacked piles of old NY Times. We could have been fined. (This was mere months before the city suspended its recycling program for the meticulously rinsed and sorted plastics and glassware. I almost cried. Fortunately for New Yorkers, who generate a heck of a lot of trash, the program was restarted within a year.) Anyway, I get Amy's point and I agree with her: policies and processes need to be in place to make it easier for people to do things more sustainably. If it's too much extra work, most people, including the parents of certain food-minded cycling bloggers, won't do it.

The same goes for buying food: it needs to be relatively easy to support local, sustainable producers. While in town, I also had the pleasure of speaking with a few folks working at New Seasons, a local chain of grocery stores in Portland with a focus on local and organic products. It was something between a co-op and a Whole Foods, both in terms of products and pricing. I spoke first with Joey in the produce dept who told me of the cooperative nature between the 8-store-strong grocer and local farms. It's a delicate balance, I learned, to maintain a base of organic produce that is local and of a great enough variety to retain a steady customer base. I found myself seeking out primarily local produce, but the fresh ginger from Peru and the coriander from California also made it into my shopping cart. "People want to buy locally and seasonally these days," the produce manager pointed out, "But they also want things that don't grow in the region. We are still committed to local and organic as much as possible and we have strong ties to local farms." It's a challenge to maintain the quality and local connections at this scale, but New Seasons seems to be doing a pretty good job. I skipped the dairy section -- I didn't trust that I would be able to resist spending a pile of money on raw sheep's milk cheeses -- and next wandered over to the meat section, where I learned from Charlie that most of New Seasons' connections to local meat, poultry, and seafood farms are extensions from when the chain was a co-op, and all of the items they carry come from Oregon, Washington, and northern California. This is not somewhere I would have trouble shopping, though I'd have to live in Portland to do so -- the chain is determined not to expand to other parts of the country, though they do offer consultations on their business model to interested folks.

I spent my final afternoon and evening in Portland chatting and working alongside Abby of the awesome Abby's Table. The former personal chef had gone to a prestigious culinary school in New York and had worked for years concocting tasty, healthy meals for wealthy folks coping with serious medical conditions. Hence she does a lot of gluten- and dairy-free cooking as well as work with macrobiotics and raw food. (The raw crackers we nibbled on as we cooked and sipped kambucha were just scrumptious.) She'd moved to Portland fairly recently and had been on the lookout for an industrial kitchen out of which she could cater, host weekly communal dinners, and teach. "I realized that what I really wanted to do was empower people to find and prepare healthy food for themselves," Abby confided as we chopped leeks and pureed raw chocolate pudding. "It is possible to find fresh, healthy stuff to eat all year, but a lot of people don't know where to start. That's part of why I offer classes, to help show people the joy of cooking and eating. Sometimes they'll discover a new food at the market or they'll buy one of my sauces and get really excited to try a new recipe. They become more connected to their food."

Once they understand how easy it is to make delicious food, it opens up a whole new world. Abby belongs to a group of food specialists who teach courses for the Urban Growth Bounty series, an Oregon-based initiative that offers classes on everything from raising chickens and bees in your back yard to urban farming to cheesemaking and preserving tomatoes. The classes themselves range from about $15-40 -- a pretty accessible price -- though the series had ended for the year by the time Ollie and I rolled into town so I didn't have a chance to attend one. Now, if that isn't an example of the local policies making it easy to be active participants in sustainable city living, I don't know what is.

Local flavor

When they learned I would be heading through Chicago for a few days, a number of friends suggested that I check out City Farm. As I departed the Grant Park community garden on Friday morning, a couple of the Growing Power staff I'd been chatting with also urged me to check out the unusual space. So on Friday afternoon and for a good bit of Saturday, I did. Wow.

Ollie and I made our way down from where we were staying with friends in Lincoln Park to the relatively rundown Cabrini-Green neighborhood where the urban farm was located. (It's actually one of three sites, and the group is hoping to expand to acquire a few more plots through partnerships with the city as well as private institutions boasting unused green space.) Rows of tall tomato plants, lettuce beds, and trays of basil plants greeted Ollie and I upon our arrival, as did Dan, one of the farm's "three and a half" paid employees. As we strolled about the land which is just shy of an acre in size, Dan gathered some of the unfit-for-sale tomatoes for the compost pile and gave me a bit of background on the operation that brings in around $60K each year in produce sales -- enough to pay the aforementioned three and a half employees. The exceptional quality of the produce makes it appealing to local chefs. And the street cred the upscale restaurants enjoy by virtue of supporting local growers is evident in the way menus prominently feature the names of farms and local, seasonal ingredients. It's a win-win situation, and the first truly economically sustainable small-scale organic farm operation I have come across.

This does not mean that there isn't significant room for improvement in the system, I thought as I weeded radish beds with a few local volunteers on Saturday afternoon. What about supplying fresh produce to, say, the people who live in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood? Can folks across the street from the farm afford $8 per pound for purslane (considered a weed by most rural farmers!) or $4.50 per pound for heirloom tomatoes? Dan admitted to a nagging feeling along these lines, a sense of food injustice. Sometimes the garden vittles are sold on a sliding scale, he told me, but we both felt there should be more.

It may not be ideal, but it's a start, and City Farm is constantly evolving. The 10-year-old program supports itself financially and offers opportunities to educate cityfolk about organic agriculture. City Farm is an outgrowth of The Resource Center, a Chicago-based not-for-profit that builds communities and fosters partnerships between the city's "haves" and its "have-nots." I later learned about the center's Perishable Food Recovery Program which brings together groups like Whole Foods and local food pantries and soup kitchens to minimize the amount of food that is wasted -- day-old bread, bruised fruit, slightly dented canned goods -- by efficiently redistributing it to places that will effectively use the food quickly. Very cool. (Seems like a no-brainer to me, but I seem to have a number of friends who are public defenders or in law school these days, and from hanging around these characters I suspect the reason such programs are not more widespread is due to fear of legal culpability that food recycling might elicit in our modern, lawsuit-happy society.) The Resource Center runs composting and industrial recycling programs, too. In fact, all of the equipment from the hoop houses (mobile mini greenhouses) to the fences to an old tractor trailer on the edge of the City Farm site are reclaimed (recycled) materials. Waste not, want not, truly.

As fate would have it, I happen to be staying with a group of friends that includes a local chef whose restaurant buys their produce from local farmers, and last night Derrick was telling me about the cafe's delectable menu that changes weekly based on what is locally available. This afternoon, a few of us made our way to the amazing Lula Cafe for brunch and feasted on an amazing array of seasonal goodies, including fried green tomato eggs florentine with mustard hollandaise (with heirloom tomatoes from City Farm), french toast with local peaches, and a watermelon and cantelope salad with fried feta, mint, and purslane (!). It was divine when washed down with a blackberry bellini (made with fresh berry compote). I don't eat out often these days, but I couldn't resist. I'm supporting the local economy, right?

Ollie and I are slated to move northward tomorrow morning, but Chicago has definitely caught our attention -- a major blip on the sustainable food radar. And now that I have at long last discovered a great salsa club as well, I may be back...indefinitely....


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