by Brenna Toman
​Magazines, scissors, glue, and a toothpick. That is all you (or your kid!) need to make surprisingly upscale looking paper beads out of any old magazine page. In the past few weeks, I have helped over 150 3rd and 4th graders from Barre City Elementary to create unique presents out of discarded materials.

The Barre City art program is no stranger to using found and repurposed materials in its art projects. You can’t miss the bright spiraling bottle cap art posted up on the hallways or the cascading, water-colored plastic bottle chandelier hanging from the stage in the auditorium. Nevertheless, the students were awestruck at the transformation of strips of paper to hard, glossy beads.

The impact goes further than repurposing one magazine page before it gets recycled. Handmade gifts require no money, enabling all students to participate at home. Rethinking trash lengthens its lifespan. Using found objects to create useful and meaningful objects is both an art and a habit. Students who can master this will be well equipped in a future tight on resources.
Want to give it a try? Make your own by following these directions.

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We like wrapping paper, it's aesethically expressive and sometimes an extension of the gift or of the sentiment behind it. Yet, it's discouraging to think that something used for such a short time as gift wrap, that once its ripped off the present, it's sent to a landfill to sit forever. Short useful lifespan only to be a wasted resource in the landfill? Where's the fun in that?

Reusable or Recyclable Wrapping:
Reusable or recyclable wrapping paper is easy!

• Paper shopping bag, cut it open and flat, cut to size and wrap gift
• Cloth bag, piece of cloth. Tie with a piece of twine that can be composted
• Old maps, children's drawings, old newspapers
• More tips here...

Zero Waste Decorations
Instead of plastic or tinsel to decorate your home for the holidays and end up in the landfill or taking up space on a shelf in your home, use natural decorations.
Use materials that can rot or be recycled.
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• Pine boughs and branches and pine cones smell fresh, strings of cranberries and popcorn are colorful and organic. Mini squash and gourds left over from the garden or farmer's market. All can be composted or piled outside to rot.
• Oranges, sliced thin and dried in the oven, can be hung up as ornaments and that look beautiful with light coming through them.
• Make paper snowflakes or paper chains, both creative crafts to enjoy with kids.

 ​Bring broken strings of lights to the ARCC in Barre to be recycled, along with batteries and 40 plus other materials.

Tips for Going Green This Holiday
1. Use reusable bags when shopping for food, decorations, gifts, or anything. Keep them visible in your car or in the purse you carry so you don't forget them when you shop.

2. For parties, meals and gatherings, use reusable utensils and dishes. Give guests leftovers or save them for lunch the next day. Compost what you don't eat or look for a food scrap drop-off site near you.

3. Buy local when shopping for gifts this season. Support your downtown businesses!

4. Use or purchase LED lights. LEDs use 80% less electricity than incandensent bulbs.

​5. Worldwide, more than 15 billion batteries are produced and sold each year. Buy rechargable batteries instead of single use. Both can be recycled at the end of life, but the rechargables last a lot longer.

I carry in my wallet a couple of “coffee cards,” carrying credit at different local and chain coffee shops.  Next to the ubiquitous Starbuck’s card is my sadly neglected Costa Coffee card, well-used in my days as a resident of the UK.  (No, not London, but a little Buckinghamshire farm town all too similar to Cabot – where I live – and the rural town members of the District.)

I still read the UK press, and ran across an eye-opener: Costa – with walk-in shops EVERYWHERE in the UK – is partnering with a resource recovery firm to recycle any “paper” take-away coffee cup – no matter the brand(!!) Experts estimate that only 1 in 400 take-away coffee cups are recycled in the UK because they are made of a difficult-to-recycle mix of paper and plastic.  Most of the remainder, of course, goes to the land fill.  Costa has a waste-handling partner whose model is “circular”; that is, turning used materials back into valuable resources. They say “Traditional ways of working need to give way to new and more dynamic operations and business models. This will include increased collaboration across industry, commerce and the public sector and a rethink of how products are manufactured and sold in order to create new efficiencies.”

​My personal goal is to NOT purchase goods in personal use quantities, or those with one-time use packaging, or those made of difficult-to-recycle mixes of materials. But what I’d really like to see is more producers and retailers thinking “circular” and developing material flows that are more collaborative and efficient from the consumer perspective. You probably live in Vermont if you’re reading this, so you can count the number of green take-away coffee cups most of our retailers offer. How many millions of these could go the way of the circular Costa cups, if our producers and retailers worked together? If the Vermont Coffee Company, Green Mountain Coffee, Keurig and the other familiar names are working on this, I’d love to hear about it.
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​Read about Costa's coffee cup recylcing program here. 
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​This blog post brought to you by Bruce Westcott, the CVSWMD General Manager.