Plastic is plaguing our environment. It comes in all sizes and forms, but the smallest types are called microplastic. Microplastic is defined as “extremely small pieces of plastic debris in the environment resulting from the disposal and breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste.” (US Department of Commerce)

We know that microplastic comes from various sources such as large plastic debris that breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. Microbeads are a type of microplastic that is very tiny polyethylene plastic manufactured for beauty and health products as an exfoliant. Microbeads are so small that they easily pass through water filtration systems and end up in the ocean, causing a potential threat to ocean life.

The issues with microbeads aren’t new. These products have been appearing in beauty products for over fifty years now, due to natural ingredients being replaced with plastic. The issue with microbeads is still relatively unknown. It wasn’t until 2012 that consumers and companies began to learn about the dangers of microbeads. There currently is not a lot of information on microplastics or how they impact the environment but hopefully that can change with the rise of awareness around this issue. With Former President Barack Obama signing the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which effectively banned plastic microbeads in cosmetics and personal care products, we can expect to see a decline in microplastic damaging our environment.

US Department of Commerce, N. O. and A. A. (n.d.). What are microplastics? Retrieved March 26, 2018, from https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/microplastics.html

Clean Fairfax is committed to the 5 R’s of sustainability — refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle and rot. Each method has its own purpose and place in the sustainability toolkit. Together, they comprise a way of living that is increasingly being referred to as “zero waste.”  Ideally, zero waste means not creating any waste at all, but more practically, zero waste is a lifestyle in which one adopts steps toward reducing personal waste and minimizing environmental impact. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve a truly zero waste lifestyle, but it’s the effort that makes someone a zero waste aficionado.

Are you interested in joining the zero waste movement? There’s a ton of information on the subject — some of it good and some not so good. We recommend you begin with Reddit’s ZeroWaste sub-reddit. This community is 55,000 people strong and covers just about everything under the umbrella of sustainability. Looking for a one-stop-shop? ZeroWaste’s How Do I Get Started will show you the ropes. Good luck!

In 2018, people understand the need to recycle. We understand that sustainability is important and that rapid change is needed, but little headway has been made. Why is change so difficult? Why do we still litter and refuse to recycle?

The HuffPost explores this phenomenon in the article “The Psychology Behind Why People Don’t Recycle”. In this article, Brian Iacoviello, an assistant psychiatry professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City states, “Recycling is a behavior, much like exercising or eating healthily, people often engage in this behavior less than they should”.

According to a 2011 Ipsos Public Affairs survey, “only half of adults recycle every day, a third tend to recycle less frequently, while 13% admit that they never recycle”. Although there are barriers to recycling in various communities and among different demographics, it doesn’t explain why people don’t make a stronger effort to recycle. Let’s explore a few common reasons for not recycling, and discuss remedies for said attitudes:

“It’s not accessible or it’s inconvenient”

Recycling doesn’t require too much time. We all live busy lives but taking the time to recycle can help make a change. Fairfax County provides a straightforward system for recycling pick up.

Some local governments don’t have a pick up for recycling. We encourage you to talk with your local government to see if a recycling program can be started. You can also research outside programs to see if there is a recycling program in your area.

“I’m not sure what to recycle”

This can be tricky for certain products that don’t fit into a certain category. Fairfax County provides a fantastic guide to figure out what should be recycled and what should be put into the trash. (http://www.fairfaxva.gov/government/public-works/operations-division/refuse-recycling/recycling-guide)

As you recycle, make sure that the products you are recycling are clean and without food residue. Products that aren’t sufficiently clean take more energy to recycle. 

“It won’t make a difference”

Recycling has been proven to save energy, reduce landfills, preserve resources, protect wildlife and help with climate change issues. By taking a brief moment out of your day to recycle, you are making a difference in the world.

You don’t have to make a drastic change in your life to help our planet. Being a little more environmentally cautious can make a drastic change in our environment and our everyday life.

On a crisp Wednesday morning, Clean Fairfax schlepped into the District of Columbia to learn more about sustainable food production systems at the 2018 Food Tank Summit. Food Tank, a think tank that focuses on all things food, hosts several conferences around the country each year and welcomes leading thinkers on food systems issues to lead fruitful discussions (pardon the pun.) We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and were glad to network with like-minded individuals and organizations! Here follow a few highlights:

Founding Farmers’ Co-Founder Wants You To Skip The Straw

Dan Simons of Founding Farmers, the ever-popular DMV restaurant chain, described straw use as “totally bonkers” and told the crowd to “stop sucking,” referring to the trending sustainability hashtag #stopsucking. Founding Farms, a Certified Green Restaurant, now uses paper straws and skips straws altogether whenever possible. Several Founding Farmers locations are LEED Certified and the food itself is quality. Props to Founding Farms for being a community leader in sustainability! Clean Fairfax urges you to stop su… ahem, just skip the straw #skipthestraw.

Hungry Harvest Loves Ugly Food

Food waste was a big issue at the summit. According to the NRDC, up to 40% of all food is wasted from end to end. Hungry Harvest, founded by a University of Maryland graduate, seeks to help solve this problem. During discussion breaks, they displayed a myriad of “ugly” fruits and vegetables, most of which weren’t ugly at all. This organization saves local produce that isn’t deemed fit for the supermarket for strictly aesthetic reasons, packages it in a box and delivers it directly to consumers’ doors much like a CSA (sign up here if interested). This significantly decreases the amount of food that’s thrown away simply for imperfections, which decreases the amount of food that ends up in landfills, which in turn decreases the amount of greenhouse gas that eventually enter the atmosphere! According to Hungry Harvest, “we’ve rescued over 5 million pounds of food from going to waste & provided access to over 700,000 pounds of fruits & veggies to those who are food insecure.” Hungry Harvest accepts SNAP benefits and offers produce at a wonderfully discounted rate. Good on you, HH!

Farming Is For City Slickers

The Young Farmers Coalition, an alliance of young farmers, ranchers and consumers, repeatedly stressed a statistic from a survey of their membership, which found that 75% of young farmers didn’t grow up on the farm. Indeed, the younger generation of farmers come from a diverse set of backgrounds, and not all of them relocated to rural areas to take up the occupation. Washington DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland are becoming hotbeds for urban and suburban farming, and if you’re interested, there are a plethora of organizations that educate the public about farming and take volunteers! The University of DC runs an expanding network of urban and rooftop gardens, including the three acre East Capitol Urban Farm. The university also regularly teaches courses on urban agriculture. Common Good City Farm in Le Droit Park provides much needed fresh produce to its neighborhood and educates thousands of citizens a year about healthy lifestyles. If farming sounds appealing to you, contact us and we can point you in the right direction!

Summits like these are important to further conversation and connect the dots. Conservation takes many forms, and agriculture plays a massive role in our lives and our ability to live sustainably. Keep talking to your neighbors about these issues, and remember that food comes from the ground, not from the market, and certainly not from a plastic package!

Do you like fresh vegetables? Do you like to support local farmers? Sign up for a local CSA program! Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs are simple: members pay a set weekly or monthly fee in advance for shares of a local farm’s produce, which is delivered to your door or a nearby pick-up location. It’s basically a more sustainable version of Blue Apron!

Below we’ve listed five local CSAs that serve Fairfax County. You can find additional CSAs using this interactive map of CSA programs in the DC Metro area that Washington Post put together. Note that it was created in 2015 so it may not be completely up-to-date.

4P Foods

Vegetables sourced from various local farms in the DMV. Sign up here.

Star Hollow Farm

Vegetables sourced from farm in Three Springs, PA (100 miles from DMV). Sign up here.

From The Farmer

Vegetables sourced from various local farms in the DMV. Includes easy to use app. Sign up here.

Shallowbrooke Farm

Vegetables sourced from farm in Boyce, VA. Sign up here.

Potomac Vegetable Farms

Vegetables sourced from farms in Vienna and Purcellville, VA. Sign up here.

There’s no getting around it: shopping for food in an ethical and sustainable manner is difficult. The information needed to do so can be hard to find, and is in many cases unknowable to a non-expert. Transparency is not a main prerogative for most products offered in groceries or restaurants. Far from it — products claiming to be organic or healthy are often that in name only.

Enter: HowGood, Happy Cow and Seafood Watch.

Continuing a recent series of posts on technology and sustainability (see earlier posts here and here), the Clean Fairfax blog will explore several mobile applications that can help you shop for food in a more sustainable manner!

HowGood

HowGood is a rating system and app that helps shoppers understand growing guidelines, processing practices and company conduct behind each product. Walk into any HowGood affiliated store (Giant Food is currently the only partner in Fairfax County — with more coming soon) and pay attention to the labels. Many products will have HowGood “Good” “Great” or “Best” ratings on their tags, relating to their overall sustainability scores. How are these ratings created? HowGood collects comprehensive information on products from the USDA, Fair Trade USA, Rainforest Alliance and 350 other sources, and rates according to 70 different indicators. Using your phone, you can also scan any barcode in the store and view a breakdown of a product’s rating, or better yet you can map out your entire grocery list using the app. The days of wondering if that box of granola is actually organic or sustainable are over!

Happy Cow

A go-to app for vegetarians and vegans, Happy Cow is Yelp for sustainable dining and grocery shopping. The concept is simple: vegetarians want to know which restaurants are truly amenable to their green lifestyles, and just as importantly, they want to know which restaurants have the best food. Download, search, enjoy. Enough said!

Seafood Watch

Much to the chagrin of conservation groups, it seems that anything goes out on the open seas. Unsustainable fishing practices are unfortunately still commonplace today, literally leading to classic cases of tragedy of the commons. In response to overfishing, Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch is taking a novel approach to this issue by helping consumers and businesses make better seafood choices for a healthy ocean. The Seafood Watch app keeps consumers informed about the latest recommendations on which fisheries are currently sustainable. More on Seafood Watch’s recommendations:

Buy “Best Choice” recommendations first, they’re well managed and caught or farmed in ways that cause little harm to habitats or other wildlife. You can also buy “Good Alternative” recommendations but be aware there are concerns with how they’re caught or farmed. Don’t buy “Avoid” recommendations because they’re overfished or caught or farmed in ways that harm other marine life or the environment. — Seafood Watch

For example, Seafood Watch currently suggests that Virginians buy farmed Arctic Char and Tilapia, but urges residents to avoid imported Mahi Mahi and Bluefin Tuna. See a fish that sounds delicious on a menu or at the fishmonger? You can search specific fish on the app to see if it’s a sustainable choice.

Increasingly, there are less and less excuses not to shop for food in an ethical way. Step up!

The kids are running around the neighborhood playing Pokémon Go with their phones again. It’s great that they’re out of the house getting exercise, but you wish that they could funnel their enthusiasm into something a bit more… constructive. Well, we’ve got a creative solution to your concerns!

iNaturalist is a phone app that essentially allows kids (and adults) to play a real-life version of Pokémon! In the most general sense, iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. The app is simple: take a photo of any kind of flora or fauna with your phone, and the app will help identify the organism and geo-tag the information so scientists can better understand the local ecosystem.

This app is ideal for anyone interested in the environment. See a funky-looking spider on the jungle gym but have no clue what it is? Snap a pic, upload it to iNaturalist and the app will quickly identify that arachnid and save it to your profile! See a vibrant flower on your hike in Sky Meadows State Park? iNaturalist can help with that!

The designers of iNaturalist have created an app that can inspire a love of nature that could last a lifetime. Download it today and take your kid out to catch real-life Pokémon!

Clean Fairfax Council would like to welcome its newest team member, Sam Raasch! Sam is a northern Virginian, born and raised, and a graduate of the Schreyer Honors College at Penn State University. He is passionate about science communication and engaging the public in conservation efforts. Before landing at Clean Fairfax, Sam worked in various natural resource conservation roles at Virginia Tech, New York University, World Resources Institute and the US Forest Service.

But more importantly, Sam is an associate of the infamous Litterati. What’s the Litterati, you may ask? Why, it’s a mobile app that uses crowdsourcing to identify, map, and collect the litter we pick up as a community. It’s a simple but formidable concept that can change the way litter reduction is researched and resolved.

Any time Sam sees a piece of trash, he opens the Litterati app, snaps a quick photo, and the app applies a GPS coordinate, classifies the type of trash and uploads it to a map. Why is this useful? First and foremost, Sam finally has an easy, effective way to alert authorities about local litter hotspots, and consequently, local authorities better understand their municipality’s waste management needs. Furthermore, the data can be used to put pressure on businesses that are not focused on sustainability! Perhaps Sam’s favorite taco shop gives far too many hot sauce packets per order and the packets are ending up in the local stream. Sam’s a nice guy but he might be forced to use his finely tuned Litterati skills of persuasion to show them, using the app, that their sauce packets are ending up in the wrong places!

Litterati is one of the most recent efforts to crowd-source data collection for science, but we’ve seen several other great examples of technology that inspires conservation. The app iNaturalist, essentially a real-life version of Pokemon Go, allows citizens to take photos of local flora and fauna and share the data with scientists. In 2012, 150 tons of plastic pellets spilled from a container ship directly off the shores of Hong Kong during a severe typhoon. A citizen then created a geo-tagging app to track the various locations of the spill, and residents used the app to begin the cleanup effort.

If you’re interested in being part of litter reduction in Fairfax County but don’t have the time to organize a stream cleanup, download Litterati (https://www.litterati.org/)! Help our county clean itself, one photo at a time.

P.S. — Litterati is currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to continue improving the app.

While much of our attention has been on the environmental toll of single-use plastics, glass recycling is also an important part of the solid waste management picture. As the Fairfax County Department of Public Works and Environmental Services points out, glass is produced by sand, the most consumed natural resource after air and water.

Recycling glass reduces the need to buy or mine more gravel and sand.

Recycling glass in Fairfax County where we have single-stream recycling, meaning that all recyclables can go into one bin, should be a “no brainer.” There is, however, more to glass recycling than meets the eye.  There are two options for what to do with glass that both residential and commercial establishments can consider.

The first option is to recycle the glass into the curbside recycle bin. A few words of caution here: While all colors of bottles and jars are accepted, and metal lids and paper labels can be left on, windows, mirrors, and glass and pottery dishes cannot be put in the regular recycle bin. Windows and mirrors should be taken to the I-66 Transfer Station or I-95 Landfill Complex for disposal.  Contrary to popular belief, broken glass can be put into the recycling bin.

There is a second option for recycling glass that keeps this resource local: Fairfax County is hoping to encourage glass recycling with a new pilot program designed to turn glass into gravel and sand that can be used locally. Source- or color-separated glass can be brought to the I-66 Transfer Station or the I-95 Landfill Complex where special machinery has been installed. The end products can be used in landscaping, construction projects, and even remanufactured into new glass.

Commercial establishments currently are required only to recycle their cardboard. Consider the number of bottles thrown away by a typical restaurant that serves alcohol— think beer, wine, and liquor bottles. By partnering with the County, glass becomes a valuable local resource.

America Recycles Day is November 15. Do the right thing: recycle your glass and encourage your local restaurants to do the same!

We’ve all been there: We get home from work and see cardboard boxes amassed in front of our door, often with the familiar “smiling” arrow pointing from the A to the Z in “Amazon.” Some are enormous and others more brick-sized. We vaguely recall the late night shopping binge a few days back.

Or we are cleaning up that pile of empty pizza boxes left from last night’s party. Or that cereal box left with three remaining flakes on the breakfast table. Or pondering the giant box left over from the new appliance delivery. And, of course, if you have moved recently, a herd of empty boxes awaits you.

So what can you do with all that cardboard?

The first stop is to see if you can reuse the cardboard for shipping or storage, to line garden beds and prevent weeds, or even to create a fun playhouse for your child or pet. Or, this time of year, cardboard boxes make great costumes that can often be recycled afterwards.

If it can’t be reused, you can do your part to support environmental sustainability and put it in the recycling bin. According to Earth911, recycling cardboard uses only 75% of the energy used to make new cardboard. It also lessens the emission of sulfur dioxide produced when making pulp from trees. Finally, it saves trees—about 17 trees for every ton. (EPA)

Proper Cardboard Recycling:

Any type of cardboard can be recycled: cereal boxes, packaging boxes, frozen food boxes, egg cartons, shoe boxes, pizza boxes that are fairly clean (see below), milk cartons (rinsed out), and even the cardboard backing on plastic “blister” packs

Collapse the box:  Boxes that aren’t fully flattened are much more difficult to transport and present problems for mechanisms in the cardboard recycling process.

Don’t worry about the tape: It is helpful if you can remove the tape, but according to Recycle Works, the recycling process of corrugated boxes involves churning it up with water to make a slurry. In this process, tape and paper labels will rise to the top and be skimmed off before the final product is sent to final buyers.

Only recycle cardboard that is clean: A small amount of food residue is acceptable, but large amounts of grease or cheese left in a pizza box, for example, can cause problems at the processing center.

Another option is to avoid cardboard in the first place and use a reusable. For example, the average move uses about 60 cardboard boxes. Companies that provide reusable moving boxes in this area include Bungobox and Lend a Box.  For an interesting take on the value of reusable moving boxes, check out http://coastalvanlines.com/reusable-moving-boxes-alternative-cardboard-moving-boxes/

Recycling cardboard is a great way to go green without much effort!

America Recycles Day is November 15 this year. Do your part!