Recycling Paint From Old To New

When you think of using recycled paint, you get the picture of the last time you mixed paint together and got a really muddy gray. Recycled paint? you say. No way.


Recycled paint is now on the radar and shows just how times have changed. So, take a deep breath and remain open minded as you will soon see that the muddy gray you remember is no longer the only outcome, not at all.

The reason recycled paint has come to the front is because more than 74 million gallons of paint are sold in California alone, each year. That is a lot of paint, but the problem comes in because not all of it is used.

Paint is considered a hazardous waste and the leftover paint from your project either sits in your garage or you bring it to the HHW facilities (household hazardous waste) set up by your local government.

Because this collection program only receives a small amount of the leftover paint, it becomes very expensive to run. So a program that has proven to be successful in Oregon is being adopted for California.

Paint Care will take “architectural paint” which is defined as interior and exterior architectural coatings sold in 5 gallon containers or less for commercial and residential use. It does not include aerosols or paint purchased for industrial or equipment manufacturer use. http://www.usgbc-ncc.org/

Starting in July, the number of collection sites will increase with a goal in mind that you, the consumer can bring back your leftover paint to the store where you bought it.

That means no more stored leftover paint in your garage and gives the retailer a chance to become good product stewards by closing the loop.

Purchasing recycled paint

As manufacturers of recycled paint, Amazon and Visions Paint Recycling carefully inspect and sort the leftover paint that they receive before processing it. They are able to create a pretty stunning result of beautiful recycled paints available for purchase.

It’s a far cry from our failed efforts of muddled gray.  It’s really quite remarkable and about 25 percent less expensive, too!  Click here to see color charts.

Oh, and the leftover paint that they can’t recycle into new paint is put towards making a cement additive. The additive is used in place of shale, clay, limestone and other materials that would have otherwise been mined.

Create Eco Friendly Eco Living Holiday Delight

Creating eco-friendly eco-living holiday delight is an opportunity to have a wonderful and memorable holidays that lives well beyond the season.


Designing our holidays to be eco-friendly is not a restrictive guideline, but rather, gives us a chance to open up our creativity channel and let the ideas flow.

Eco-thinking our holiday regime offers us an opportunity to share a deeper level of appreciation for our friends, family and other living things.

So, how do we create eco-friendly, eco-living holiday delight? By understanding what questions to ask and learning what to look for in making choices.

Instead of ringing in the environmental disaster we now create throughout our holiday season, we need to rethink how to create delight.

Your Decorating Fashion: Things to consider before buy

Here are some questions I always encourage people to think about before they buy anything.  Decorating for an eco friendly holidays is a good place to start.

Where 'stuff' comes from? How is it made? Where does it go when we’re done with it?

Do we cut down mountains, forests or dig deep into the earth for the resource? Do we make a lot of pollution manufacturing the product? Does it go to landfill and take thousands of years to decompose, if at all? Does it pollute our air and waterways?

Just as businesses have life cycles, materials and products have life cycles. For instance, in business, there’s the introduction stage, the growth stage, the maturity stage and the decline stage.

For materials and products, the introduction stage would be getting the raw materials or natural resources. The growth stage would be the manufacturing or processing of these materials. The growth stage could be the distribution. The maturity stage could be the use and repair of these materials. And, finally, the disposal would be the decline stage.

We can ask these questions of our retailer or supplier. They often know or they often offer to find out and are willing to get back to you as part of their customer service.

If we just ask those questions and evaluate what we are buying, we can make an enormous impact on the environment, on our wallet, on the amount of stuff in our garages.

Cradle to Cradle

Cradle to Cradle, often referred to as C2C, promotes designing things in such a way that we don’t have to manage waste. Before Cradle to Cradle, we manufactured materials on a one-way path: from producer to consumer to landfill.

Currently, our systems intervene in this process but what we end up doing is making less bad materials and slowing down the process of these things going into landfill.

Cradle to Cradle is a design manifesto to create materials that actually become nutrients themselves to the earth, and therefore, there is not waste.

Materials would cycle through either a biological metabolism or a technical metabolism.

The biological cycle would support the earth, i.e., growth, decay and rebirth. There would be no waste. Waste would equal food or nourishment for the earth.

The technical cycle is a closed-loop system where the high-tech ingredients would continuously circulate, i.e., production, recovery, reuse.

This idea totally changes how we look at things.

William McDonough says, and I’m quoting, “Instead of asking, “How do I meet today’s environmental standards, designers are asking “How might I create more habitat, more health, more clean water, more prosperity, more delight?”

For Eco Friendly Holiday Decorating Tips, check out my BlogTalkRadio interview.  You will enjoy listening to it because we had a great time doing it!

8 Ways To Celebrate Green Lifestyles

I just read a wonderful article in one of my favorite industry trade rags. Where I get emotional, they stay calm and perfectly articulate my feelings that are bubbling under the lid I’m desparately trying to keep on and level.

Adding a bit of humor allows the smile to break through which turns into a pretty good gaffaw and before you know it, I’m on the floor rolling. And, of course, I have to share. For instance, take a look at this.

“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment; it’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.” None other than Dan Quayle.

Okay, maybe you’re not rolling. I guess you had to be there, but I do know you’re shaking your head in disbelief. My belief is that we will have a lot of those moments to come in the next couple of years.

The article goes on to give some really encouraging statistics of just how much earth we truly are saving. For those bent on wholesale destruction, a look at these tidbits and one can see that this ship is waaaaaay too big to turn around now.

Some day, we will be thanked for that.

Now, on to share these encouraging bits of news with you. Below are excerpts taken from Keri Luly’s article for Interiors Sources. You can read the full article by following this Wonderfully Positively Green link.
PROTECTING THE WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST RAINFOREST

• The Congo Basin Forest Partnership—made up of heads of state, conservation organizations, local citizens, and donor organizations— recently celebrated 10 years of hard work against difficult obstacles, such as war and illegal poaching. The Basin's 3.7 million square kilometers contains 400 mammal species and more than 10,000 plant species (one-third of which are found nowhere else). Additionally, the forest stores an estimated 46 billion metric tons of carbon. The Partnership's accomplishments include:

o 34 protected areas; 61 community-based natural resource management areas; and 34 extractive resource areas zoned for conservation management, covering 126 million acres (more than one-third of the Basin forests).

o More than 11.5 million acres of forest certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).

o More than 5,000 local people trained in conservation, land use planning and related conservation capacities.

o An overall rate of deforestation estimated to be a relatively low 0.17 percent (one-third of Brazil's rate and one-tenth of Indonesia's).

o Improving survival rates of some endangered species, in spite of illegal poaching. E.g., the population of mountain gorillas is up 17 percent over a census taken 20 years ago.

In addition, as of September 2010, there are 134.34 million hectares of FSC-certified forests in the world, and in May 2010, Canada's Boreal Forest pledged to certify 72 million hectares (75 percent of Canada's forestland).

REBUILDING OF OCEAN FISH POPULATIONS

When fully implemented, the two principles of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act are successful in restoring the fish stocks that Americans depend on for food and economic well-being. The principles seem basic—don't overfish and rebuild populations that are depleted—but there are constant efforts to weaken them. Successes include several popular, but vanishing fish3.

• Recovered: the Atlantic Scallop, the Mid-Atlantic Bluefish, and the Pacific Lingcod.

• Recovering: the Mid-Atlantic Summer Flounder (expected to recover fully before 2013) and the Gulf Red Snapper.

Work underway could triple the economic value of many U.S. fisheries by adding 500,000 jobs and generating $31 billion in sales.

REWARDING ENVIRONMENTAL HEROES

In April of this year, the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world's largest prize for grassroots environmentalists, honored six new recipients. The $150,000 prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment—often at great personal risk. In many places, such activism can result in imprisonment and even death. The prize was launched 20 years ago on philanthropist Richard Goldman's 70th birthday, and each year, six new recipients are announced (representing the six inhabited continental regions of the world).

The recognition has led to other successes for the recipients. E.g., one later became the first environmentalist to win a Nobel Peace Prize and another, a former rubber tapper, became his country's Minister of the Environment. Reading their stories, and those of their predecessors, will give you renewed hope in humankind.

PARTNERING TO PROTECT ESTUARIES

Estuaries are areas where freshwater from rivers mixes with saltwater from oceans, and they are among the most biologically productive places on Earth. They provide fish and wildlife habitat and sustain billions of dollars' worth of commercial fisheries, recreational fisheries, and tourism. Estuaries are threatened largely because they are considered desirable places to live.

The National Estuaries Partnership6 has created 28 long-term partnerships of government, businesses, local citizens, and academia, using consensus building and educational outreach to build solutions. These groups have protected and restored more than 1 million acres of habitat (approximately the size of the state of Rhode Island) since 2000.

GREENING OUR LIFESTYLES

The most plentiful, positive green news must surely be in our built environment. A brownfield site in a poor Boston neighborhood is being redeveloped as a LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) pilot project; while on the opposite coast, a car-oriented San Francisco commercial site is using LEED-ND to transform into a mixed-use, pedestrian focused infill.

Looking indoors, consider the abundance of lower VOC products in the market. It is now, finally, possible to go to home improvement stores in small towns and find low VOC paints, adhesives, and other materials. And consider lighting. LED light bulbs (if Energy Star qualified) use 75 percent less energy and last 35-50 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Pretty amazing, but the side effect could be the elimination of a small source of green humor: How many life-cycle assessors does it take to change a light bulb? Two—one to change it and one to change it back after more data comes in.

Speaking of consumer goods, even small town grocery stores are featuring organic food. Excessive, non-recyclable packaging is still a big problem with our food supply, but I'm happy to report that some French champagne makers have redesigned their bottles to make them lighter, reducing the CO2 from transporting them by 200,000 metric tons per year.

Thank you, Keri. I always learn something new from your articles.

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