Household Hazardous Waste Depots in Ottawa

The City of Ottawa will be having a one day collection depot of all your Household Hazardouse Waste (HHW) on Sunday May 10th from 9AM to 4PM.The depot will beat the Trail Waste Facility, 4475 Trail Road, off Moodie Drive, south of Fallowfield Road. Household Hazardouse Waste should not be thrown out with the rest of your garbage. You shouldn’t have bought it in the first place, but that’s another story. HHW consists of:

aerosol containers barbecue starters camping propane cylinders disinfectants energy efficient light bulbs fluorescent light bulbs fire extinguishers fungicides furniture stripper herbicides insecticides

mercury switches mercury thermometers needles and syringes oil based paints oven cleaner pesticides pool chemicals stains turpentine window cleaner wood preservatives

For other waste products like some paints, motor oil, electronics, batteries can be taken to your nearest garage, electronics store or used goods store or a hardware store, or yours truly. If you can’t make it out to one of these depots and don’t want to pollute the very river we get our drinking water from head over to greenkufi.ca and contact us under local services about picking up your household waste and taking it to the depot.

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Where Our Garbage Ends Up – the (not so) Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Remains of an Albatross chick showing plastic it had likely been fed by its parents. Likely suffocated or starved because it could not expel the plastic.

This is merely one example of the plight of the natural world at the hands of what man has earned. At the cost of fauna and flora, ecosystems, and the health and integrity of the entire planet we’ve chosen the “convenience” of simply tossing out things we no longer need. While the sad reality is that we never needed them in the first place.

We lead such a horrible consumerist lifestyle that we are blinded by how much garbage we are literally feeding the planet whence we become board of our gadgets and our belongings. We end up creating such a horrible mess, leaching toxins, and killing wildlife, while we live our oblivious lives, ignorant of the giant impact we have on the planet. I’m talking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which really is not a great thing at all. It’s horrible.

Simply and quite frighteningly, every little bit of garbage we either intentionally dump in the ocean, or that “un-intentionally” reach there from our littering the lands and waterways get drawn into the North Pacific Gyre. This gyre, like any other, is simply a vortex, a whirl-pool, in the ocean caused by the cyclical ocean currents, wind, and the rotation of the Earth.

North Pacific Gyre - Now a vortex of garbage.

More after the break including a beautiful picture of a Laysan Albatross Chick>>>

Where Do Your Gadgets Go?

A couple of entries ago I wrote about a then newly released eco-friendly MacBook Air for my fellow tech enthusiasts out there. The new MacBook Air, boasted a new standard of tech eco-friendliness beyond the energy-wise approach by building the MacBook Air with less toxic components, and reducing harmful chemicals.

Not that you are ready to throw out your brand new MacBook Air, but here’s a quick slide show of what’s happening with yesterday’s nasty waste today.

“And do not cause ruin on the Earth after it has been ordered, but call on Him with fear and longing: for the Mercy of Allah is (always) near to those who do good. ” – Qura’an – Al-A’raaf 7:56

Environmentally Elegent Tech – A Greener Apple

The new MacBook Air has a few environmental tricks up it’s very slim sleeve. I know I haven’t spoken, on this blog, about tech from an environmental point of view. But it should be know that I am a gizmofreak. Steve Jobs Keynote at macWorld 2008 just ended with some awesome news for environmentally minded technofreaks. To begin you need to know a bit of background about the hazards of technology. No, I don’t mean the dangers of using your cellphone while driving. I’m talking about the environmental hazards that are associated with the components of the various electronic equipment and gadgets that we use on a daily basis.
Besides the space that all these gadgets (and their packaging) take up in landfills and garbage dumps, there are a plethora of chemical hazards to be concerned about. For instance, some materials that go into the making of electronics, and pose a major environmental hazardous are as follows:
Arsenic, Beryllium, Cadmium, Copper, Lead, Mercury, Nickel, Zinc, PCVs and PCBs.
Some may argue that these materials are extracted from the environment in the first place, so why are they hazardous when we dump it back in? It has to do with the form in which they are present. Most of these chemicals are trapped in rocks and in a different chemical form that is not harmful to the environment or human health. Once we extract these chemicals and process them they become highly toxic to wildlife and humans. Once our 20inch CRT monitors, and our once latest-cellphone-on-the-market are no longer our favorite possession, and are condemned to the junk pile these chemicals begin to leach out of the electronics. Everything from the plastic casing and glass, to the circuit boards contain these chemicals. Some leach at a higher rate than others, but the end result is the same. These chemicals are leached into soils, water reservoirs; taken up by wildlife, plants; biomagnified through the food web, and then bioaccumulated into our diets.
It’s not a pretty sight. But it’s not all gloom and doom just yet. We can still do things about it. There are a number of e-waste recycling programs where they will reuse certain components of your discarded electronics and safely dispose of other parts.

The other option is to opt for an environmentally sound piece of beautiful engineering in the hottest outfit in town. Here I’ll let you know about some of the outstanding features of the MacBook Air. A totally wireless laptop in Mac’s line of outstanding laptops. By totally wireless, I mean totally wireless including the use of optical drive through remote drive. It also boasts, and I mean boasts in every sense of the word, to be the thinnest laptop ever made. Compared to the previous title holder the Sony TZ series, which is between 0.8 inches at the front to 1.2 inches at the hinge. The MacBook Air, current title holder, measures in at a phenomenal 0.16 inches to 0.76 inches The thickest point being thinner than the thinnest point of the competition.

Here’s where this Apple turns its greenest. The aluminum casing is fully recyclable. This is great because the aluminum we get comes from tropical soils, and is becoming scarce. It is also “the first” to use a mercury-free LCD display with arsenic free-glass. The circuit boards are BFR- and PVC-free. To top it off, and intuitively so, the packaging uses 56% less materials than their sister macbook products.

Now that’s a piece of hardware I’d gladly carry around with a happy environmental conscience. But a sore pocket at $1,799US. Check out the MacWorld website for more details about the MacBook Air.

Keep the peace,

Photos are form http://live.gizmodo.com/