Going Green

Hallmark is going green... or at least in the process. Today I attended a meeting at work outlining a new "zero-waste" program that will be implemented and tested on one of the floors I work on. I was ridiculously (and nerdily) excited about this. One area of Hallmark's campus has been in the zero-waste business since the beginning of the year, now it's time to start implementing it throughout the rest of the company. Basically waste is broken down into several components: 1) Paper recycling 2) Aluminum can & plastic bottle recycling 3) Composting 4) Burning (with state of the are filtration systems) 5) Trash

Clearly, my area already participates in the first two recycling initiatives, but I'm super excited about the possibility of the composting and creating burned waste into energy for the company. The composting program is awesome, it is not your regular residential composting, but a industrial-level compositing. Meaning they accept all food waste, including meat bones, chewing gum, wax paper, frozen dinner boxes, etc. Because it's industrial grade composting the heat is much greater and you can compost things like meat bones, where I can't do that in my balcony bin. The cafeteria has been using this system for at least three years behind the scenes, reducing our landfill contributions immensely.

Do you know what's even cooler? The city of San Fran, (side note: Neil this is an abbrev for San Francisco) now requires all of their residents to compost their food waste, otherwise they will be fined! It's a curbside composting program, just like recycling. Amazing!


p.s. I bought myself some craspedia the other day at the wholesale florist on my way to work... it smells funny... like Fall and wet leaves... with bugs in them.