“What’s ‘landfill’ mean?” person #1 asked person #2 as they walked past a set of three labeled disposal containers. She was holding something she needed to throw away.

“I don’t know,” person #2 replied. “Just throw it in recycling.”

Did you just gasp as loudly as I did?

Let’s start here, with a definition of landfill. According to dictionary.com, a landfill is a “low area of land that is built up from deposits of solid refuse in layers covered by soil.” According to me, Courtney Holden, a landfill is a stinky expanse of garbage that goes on and on and on.

And it’s important that we all know the difference because throwing garbage into the recycling bin can actually do a lot of damage. Don’t believe me? Take a tour through the Boulder County Recycling Center (don’t worry, you don’t have to leave your chair) by checking out this video: Single Stream Recycling at the Boulder County Material Recovery Facility (MRF).

Boulder Community Computers' Eric Jackson | Photo: Mark Leffingwell, Camera

Great idea (and they were the hosts of the most recent Green Drinks). Eric Jackson fired up Boulder Community Computers, a nonprofit that aims to get working computers into the hands of people who need them — and to help people earn said computers. From the Camera:

Jackson, a longtime computer hobbyist, set up Boulder Community Computers, a nonprofit on Pearl Street that accepts donations of old computers, then offers low-income people the opportunity to earn one. People who are working to earn machines learn basic computer skills and help refurbish the old computers.

“Our mission is to bridge the digital divide,” Jackson said. “For me, it’s not about computers, it’s about enhancing other parts of people’s lives.”

Boulder Community Computers also helps solve a second problem: the difficulty of disposing of e-waste, which is often dumped in developing countries where the heavy metals can contaminate local communities.

Somebody from Boulder Community Computers (maybe Jackson?) also hung around in the comments of that story, so check out the comments for even more information.

E-waste is really, really gnarly, and if you don’t know much about it, watch this thing 60 Minutes did on it.

Tour de Fat 2010 is coming up! | flickr user ret0dd

Need more stuff to look forward to this summer? How about an annual bike, beer and recycling party? The Colorado stops on the 2010 Tour de Fat are mighty far away (Sept. 4 in Fort Collins, Sept. 11 in Denver), but that doesn’t mean you can’t start brainstorming your wacky outfit for it — or start building your crazy bike, if that’s more your speed.

Tour de Fat encourages everyone to embrace their inner-cyclist and ride the streets as a cohesive carnival of creativity. Each show begins with a costumed bike parade that stops traffic and turns heads along the way. (Costumes are highly encouraged!)

Tour de Fat seeks to leave as small an environmental imprint as possible and composts and recycles waste from each tour stop. The waste diversion rate for 2009 was 94 percent.

Tour de Fat is free to participants, but beer and merchandise proceeds go to local cycling non-profits. So far, Tour de Fat events have raised more than $1.25 million for philanthropy.

All musical acts perform on a solar-powered stage with decorations made from recycled materials, trucks and transport use biofuel sourced from recycled waste oils, and all vendors operate off the grid.

This is a pro-bike celebration, not an anti-car rally…non-cyclists are more than welcome to join the festivities.

via BeerAdvocate!

A couple of CU seniors get serious about smashing down cardboard boxes at a recycling dumpster on campus | Daily Camera

The University of Colorado is making changes to its recycling program that will make participation twice as easy. (Actually, 2.5 times as easy, if you’re a math person.)

Now, recycling locations around CU still have five bins — which to a lot of us Boulderites seems, well, pretty old school. (Read more about they city’s single-stream recycling on BigGreenBoulder.) The  plan, according to an article in the Daily Camera, is to implement “dual-stream” recycling, which would cut the number of bins to two: one for paper and one for pretty much everything else.

Read more about it at DailyCamera.com.

Mama's Little Yella Pils | flickr user walkn

… author Lloyd Alter takes a wrong step when he writes:

“Nobody a mile north or south of the American border touches the stuff in cans, it just doesn’t taste as good.”

This is wrong. Cans now hold some of the best beers in the world, or at least some of my favorites. And unlike 75 years ago, beer cans today are made with a water-based internal coating that keeps the aluminum from ever touching liquid, so if your beer tastes like tin foil, it’s probably just a crappy beer.

Damn skippy! Tasty canned beer, we salute you!

Hop on over to the blog in question to let ‘em know about your favorite protected-from-the-evil-day-star beer.

Treehugger’s point, though, is totally valid: we’re just not very good at using refillable containers here.

A kindergartner at Heatherwood Elementary school in Boulder drops her banana peel into the compost bin during lunch time | Daily Camera

About 50 percent of Boulder’s waste is being diverted from landfills, and instead, it’s getting recycled and composted.

Beginning last January, Boulder made curbside composting and single-stream recycling — where you can mix cans, bottles and paper together — available to everyone in the city.

From the Daily Camera:

From January to August this year — the period of time for the city’s study — Boulder residents composted 1,987 tons of yard waste and table scraps, while recycling 4,997 tons of paper, plastic and glass.

Combined, the efforts represent about half of the 14,000-or-so tons of material disposed of by residents during those eight months.

Kara Mertz, Boulder’s local environmental action manager, said it’s a huge achievement for a city that seeks to become “zero-waste.”

“We’re halfway there,” she said of the residential efforts.

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, or learn about what can and can’t be recycled and composted at BigGreenBoulder.

Discarded glass piles up at the landfill in Cheyenne, Wyo. The city continues to struggle to find a market for the jars and bottles it collects for recycling. (AP Photo/Mead Gruver)

Giant mounds of glass bottles are building up at Western landfills, where cities and counties are stockpiling them until they can find someone willing to recycle them.

Even though glass should be the ideal recyclable — you can melt it down and reuse it an infinite number of times without affecting the quality of the glass — the market for used bottles is tough, in part because the raw material needed to make new glass, sand, is dirt cheap.

From the Associated Press:

CHEYENNE, Wyo, — After working out at a gym, Amy Mahaffy dropped off a half-dozen glass jars in a city recycling container before heading home.The containers however won’t end up being recycled any time soon. Their destination: A mound of glass at the city landfill, an ever-growing monument to the difficulty many communities across the country face in finding a market for a commodity that’s too cheap for its own good.

”We are stockpiling it in a desperate search for a market,” landfill foreman Monty Landers said.

Cheyenne hasn’t recycled the glass it collects — 9 tons a week — for years. Instead, the city has been putting it in the landfill, using it to surround the concrete-walled wells that pump toxic fluids out of the dump.

The same is happening with glass bottles at sites in New Mexico, Oregon and Idaho. Read the full story by the Associated Press, or keep reading to learn more about the challenges of selling Boulder County’s recycling.

Jose Zubia sorts through material passing by on a conveyor belt at the Boulder County Recycling Center in Boulder in 2007.

When you toss your glass bottles (or aluminum cans or plastic containers or newspapers) in a recycling bin in Boulder County, it still gets recycled. But the economics aren’t what they used to be.

From the Daily Camera last November, just after the economy crashed:

In mid-October, the price Eco-Cycle could get for a ton of plastic milk jugs plummeted from $800 a ton to $200 a ton. Plastic raw material made from soda bottles dropped from $400 a ton to $40 a ton. And to get rid of the oddball plastics (numbers 3 through 7), Eco-Cycle now has to pay someone $60 a ton just to haul the stuff away.

“Basically, the global financial meltdown has hit the recycling industry,” said Eric Lombardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle. “This is as steep and as deep as I’ve seen it in my 25 years — we’re hanging on by our fingernails.”

… China is the major driver in the global market price for recycled materials, buying old plastic, paper and aluminum from Americans, forging the material into more consumer goods, and then selling it back to the United States. Now, with a slow-down in demand, the Chinese have put away their checkbooks.

“The Chinese have been like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up all these recyclables for the last 10 years at a price no one else could match,” Lombardi said. “Now, they’re turning off their machines.”

Read the full story at DailyCamera.com, check out the details of what you can recycle in Boulder County of visit the Eco-Cycle Web site.