2006 Earth Day Celebration!
“Sustainability: Food for Thought”
Saturday, April 22nd  •  11 a.m.–5 p.m. • EWEB’s River Edge Plaza

Activities include:
• Main Stage. There will be entertainment and music throughout the day.
• Earth Action Arena. Booths and displays will highlight actions we can take to keep our environment clean and healthy for all species and the Earth.
• Film & Lecture Series. Be inspired and informed. Exact schedule TBA.
• Procession of All Species. Dress as your favorite animal, plant, bird, or bug and march harmoniously through the festival site.
• Prizes & Freebies! Ready-to-plant trees, a composter, and much, much more.
• Seed & Plant Swap. Bring your favorite seeds, plant cuttings, or divisions to share and be prepared to take some new ones home. Exact time TBA.
• Local food samples and directories provided by the Lane County Food Coalition.
• Free tour of EPUD’s Methane Power Plant at the landfill. Buses leave at 12:30P.M.

Free and fun for the family! Visit www.earthdayeugene.com for more information or call Jo Rodgers at BRING (746-3023).

Local Foods: A Great Way to Reduce Your Waste Line
Want to reduce your waste line? Make buying locally grown or locally produced foods a priority. Buying locally reduces waste and resource use. Local foods don’t have to travel far, greatly reducing the environmental impact of shipping the food long distances. That means less use of fossil fuel, less greenhouse gas emissions, smog, acid rain…y’know, that kind of nasty stuff. Not only will you have less garbage and recycling to handle due to less packaging, you may be surprised by how much tastier local food can be. For one thing, it hasn’t sat in a truck for a week or longer before you eat it! Fruits and vegetables picked ripe and eaten soon after harvest give you the benefit of added flavor and nutrition.

Local foods can be found year round, but vegetables and fruits are especially abundant at this time of year. You can find them in farmers’ markets, produce stands (ask the seller where the produce comes from, to be sure), or through a “CSA” subscription (see box at right). Many stores, including natural food stores and some supermarkets, stock local produce – and just by asking management where their produce comes from reinforces that customers care about local foods. You can cut packaging waste even more by bringing your own bags from home (cloth or used plastic or paper ones).

So…eat your (local) fruits and veggies! Shake that bulk (in packaging, at least).
Cut out the fat (petroleum oil, that is). Help out a neighbor (or at least your closest farmer).

Your waste line (and maybe even your waist line) will benefit and you’ll feel good from your conscience on out. And while you’re at it, why stop with local food? Buying any local product—whether it’s clothing, art, office supplies, or furniture—will all slim down your waste line in no time and give a boost to our local economy!

To find out even more reasons to go local, check out these resources:
Lane County Food Coalition, <www.lanefood.org> • Food Routes, <www.foodroutes.org/localfood>

That’s My Farmer
Support and Celebrate CSA farms!
April 4th, 6:30-8:30pm, at the First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St., Eugene. Now in its seventh season, “That’s My Farmer” involves 14 local farms and 17 faith groups from across the spiritual spectrum. The suggested donation at the door ($5-10) will go toward helping low-income families purchase a CSA subscription. There will be door prizes, homemade ice cream, and a chance to hear from the farmers themselves about what their livelihood means to them. For more information about the event, contact John Pitney at 541-463-0437.

Congratulations to the Winners from the Good Earth Show Drawing!
Leann Svarverud, Ron Pike, and Don Bishoff were the three lucky winners from our drawing at the Good Earth Show. We gave away two $50 gift certificates for BRING’s ReUse Warehouse and an Earth Machine Composter. If you weren’t one of the lucky three, don’t let that stop you from becoming the proud owner of that “special something” only BRING has or from getting your very own Earth Machine Composter (see back page for more information). Thanks to all of you who stopped by our booth. Look for us at the Fall Home & Garden Show.

A New Way to Search the Internet and Help BRING
Make a penny for BRING every time you do an internet search using GoodSearch. GoodSearch <www.goodsearch.com> is a web search page powered by Yahoo! It allows you to designate your favorite charity (we hope it’s BRING) which will then receive one cent for every search you do. If just 100 people, doing two searches a day were to do this, BRING would get $730 a year! So please check it out, tell your friends, and make it your default web search page. Makes cents to us!

BRING’s Organic Farmer Goes Back to Vermont
Whether they work in the warehouse, deconstruction, Glenwood, or in the office, BRING’s staff are an interesting bunch. Take, for example, Rob Rock who worked for BRING over the winter on the deconstruction and warehouse crews. He left in March to be back for the beginning of Vermont’s farming season. Rob will be working at Intervale (a 300-acre series of farms along the river near downtown Burlington) for his third season.

Donors to the General Operating Fund Last Quarter
Gary & Jill McKenney
Pamela Miller & Dan Mulholland
Diane Peterson
Rexius Forest By-Products
Lois Ann Skinner
Willamette Valley Hardy Plant Society

Thank You!

Newsletter mailing help: Sidney Buffington, Kent & Aruna Calvin, Christine Cassagnau, Teresa Ennis, Mary Elizabeth Glenn, Sarah Grimm, Chris Horton, Teresa Mast, Laura Ohanian, Ted Purdy, Nancy Stark, Carol Stineman, Mark Williams, Erika Willis, and Nancy Zimmerman.

Good Earth Home Show volunteers: Kent & Aruna Calvin, Ruby Colette, Eric Daws, Patricia Donahue, Claire Dross, Rita Fiedler, Forest, Mary Elizabeth Glenn, BJ Hurwich, Ruby Larson, Ken Maddox, Laura Smith, April Snell, Annie Vrijmoet, Nelli Williams, Nancy Zimmermann.

Thanks to Berg Productions for donating an extra large booth to BRING at the Good Earth Home Show; Kimberlee Wollter, Flying D Enterprises, Carol Stineman and Greg Howarth for providing off-site internet access; Living Tree Paper Co. for 100% recycled paper; Charlie Fleishman for being our masterful webmaster; Hallis, CPA, for financial advice; Nora Hagerty for designing this newsletter.

Thank you for helping us build the Planet Improvement Center

New & Renewing Capital Campaign Donors
(December 15, 2005 – March 15, 2006)

RESTORERS ($50,000+)
Don & Dolly Woolley

REBUILDERS ($10,000+)
Chambers Family Foundation
Siuslaw Financial Group
TBG Architects & Planners Inc.

REDUCERS ($5,000+)
Balzhiser & Hubbard Engineers
Evelyn Anderton & Janet Anderson
Bill & Lynn Buskirk
Pacific Continental Bank

REUSERS ($1,000+)
Tom Agamenoni
Marvin & Joan Cypress
Ann & David Fidanque
Scott Hovis & Noreen Franz-Hovis
Gail Newton
Deborah Noble
Carla Orcutt
PFS Med, Inc.
Floyd & Suzi Prozanski
Roger Schaljo
Rick Varnum & Denise Jessup

RECYCLERS (UP TO $999)
Dave Ackerman
Dorothy Anderson
M. Steven Baker
Tom & Patti Barkin
Enga Bloom
Deb Brewer
Brookrod
Mary McCauley Burrows
George & Brenda Clarke
Nicole, Kevin & Kari Clarke
Jim & Dottie Dougher, in memory of Alice Soderwall
Sherri & Keith Dow
Linda Eaton
Karin Edla
Audrey Erickson
Diane Etzwiler & Rob Thallon
Don & Laurel Fisher
Judy Gault
Hannah & Daniel Goldrich  
Pete Gribskov & Laurie Swanson Gribskov
Sarah Grimm
Margaret Guitteau
Terrell Halaska, in honor of Chris Halaska
Indra & Stanley Hayworth
Sloan Heermance
Zoia Horn & Dean Galloway
Don Jefferis
Martin Jones & Gayle Landt
Kayla & Stephen Kairis
Joan Kelly
Neil Kelly Company
Eunice Kjaer
Ann Kneeland
Sabin Lamson & Bev Holman
Michelle Lodjic
Nena Lovinger
Lynne C. Lucas
Linsey, Jesse & Michael McLennan
Mary Anne McMurren & Jeff Sprague in honor of Nancy & Jerry Hamren
Mary Anne McMurren & Jeff Sprague in memory of Barbara Walton
Pamela Miller & Dan Mulholland
Michael Mooser
Eleanor Mulder
Newman’s Fish Company Inc.
Alice Parman
Pam Perryman
Kathy & Ken Persinger
Susan Polchert & Steve McGirr
Nicolas Porter
RAAT Enterprises
Larry Robidoux & Thelma Soderquist
Thomas & Linda Roe
M. N. Rogers
Candice Rohr
Donna Rose
Dick & Jeanne Roy
Cathy Russell & Mel Mann
Jane Scheidecker, in honor of Mel Bankoff
Naomi, Areyna & Skyler Schmidt
Nathaniel Teich
Sue Thompson
Devon Trottier & Perry Burdon
Dee & Dave Tvedt
Eli & Jennifer Volem
David West
Weyerhaeuser Company
Lee Zwagerman

(Click here for complete Donor List)

Planet Improvement Center Construction Moving into High Gear
Finally! The essential infrastructure for our new home is in place. Getting the utilities installed, the parking lot rebuilt and the storm-water system completed was quite a process. Now it’s time to start the major construction. This spring and summer, three new steel buildings purchased with a grant from Lane County Economic Development funds will go up. We chose steel because it’s cost effective and easy to recycle at the end of its useful life. These buildings will provide some of the features so conspicuously absent in our current home: a big, covered, lit space where our customers can shop for used materials in reasonable comfort, a covered materials receiving space, and a customer check out and service area. Two existing buildings will be remodeled alongside the new construction. With this work complete, we’ll have the lion’s share of what we need for us to move to our new home!

Help BRING in the Future—THIS YEAR!
With construction in full swing at the new site, the heat is on to finish fundraising for our first phase of the project. Only $200,000 to go, and BRING will be operating at our new home. With your help, we will move this year!

Help make the match! This is a great time to give. Your donation will be doubled by a $150,000 challenge grant from the M. J. Murdock Charitable Trust. To date, we have raised $100,245 towards the match. Completing this important match insures that construction will continue on schedule throughout the summer.

The campaign has raised $1.4 million to date, and we are heartened by the generous grassroots support of our community. We invite you to add your name to our list of 619 donors, and help us BRING in the Future.

Here’s how you can help:
• Make a cash donation. Mark your donation “capital campaign.”

• Pledge a gift over 2-3 years. Pledged funds count toward the Murdock match.

• Make a secure credit card donation online. Designate “capital campaign.”

• Make a gift of stock. Call BRING for assistance.

• Make a regular monthly donation. You can make automatic payments from your credit card or bank account. Call BRING for details.

• Help us meet other people who might join you in supporting this project.

• Host a house party. You invite the guests, we make the pitch.

• Use GoodSearch.com as your default web search tool. Every search BRINGs in a cent! See article above.

Take a Tour
BRING is now offering tours of our new site, so you can see first-hand the progress we’ve made and hear about our vision for the new Planet Improvement Center. Invite your friends, or make it a fun and educational field trip for your group or organization. Please call 746-3023 for tour information.

Project Manager Hired
Moving BRING from its home of 35 years is no small undertaking. Besides the actual construction, there are dozens of details and logistical issues to work through. The Planet Improvement Center is not a conventional building project. Lots of the materials are used. Volunteers are doing part of the work. There are green building projects, art projects and other educational features to plan and build. And then there’s the actual move to arrange. To get from A to B, we’ve hired a project manager, Carol Stineman, to help us. Carol was born and raised in Seattle, got her degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington (yup, she’s a Husky.), and worked for 16 years in the pulp and paper industry. She’s a Master Recycler with a passion for the “R’s”—reduce, rethink, repair, recycle, recover, remanufacture, etc. She has a field office at the new site and would be glad to show you around if you’d like a tour.

Compost
Food waste accounts for 16% of the material being sent to the landfill (2002 DEQ Solid Waste Composition Study). Not only does this mean that a lot of worms are going hungry, it also means that valuable nutrients that could be re-circulated instead contribute to landfill leachate (which costs the County a lot of money to contain and control). Yard debris and other recyclable materials are also needlessly being sent to the landfill. What’s the answer? Compost!

Not sure how to compost? Many resources are available, including free demonstrations. See below for the spring schedule. Not able to compost where you live? Ask a neighbor with a garden if they could use additional material for their compost pile. Yard debris can be taken to commercial venues that compost (e.g., Rexius, Lane Forest Products, GreenCo.). For more information, call the Composting Hotline at 541-682-7320 or 541-682-5542. On-line, visit the City of Eugene’s website <www.eugenerecycles.org>.

Electronic & Hazardous Waste, Including Batteries
Electronics, hazardous waste, and all batteries except newer alkaline ones are dangerous in the landfill. See “Cell Phones & PDAs,” “Computers & Peripherals,” “Hazardous Waste,” and “Batteries” online listings for information on safe disposal options for these items.

For information on rural disposal and recycling sites, hazardous waste and paint disposal, or other Lane County
Solid Waste Department issues and services, call 682-4119.

Drum Roll… Introducing Peter Reppe
This is the inaugural issue of two new features of the Used News: “Eco-Tips for Reducing Your Footprint”* and “Ask the Eco-Meister.” Both features rely on the expertise and wit of Peter Reppe. Peter is an Energy Analyst at SOLARC Architecture/Engineering, Inc. and holds a Master’s in Natural Resource Policy from the University of Michigan along with an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from a university in Leipzig, Germany. In the past, he has been a sustainable building coordinator and instructor at Lost Valley Education Center, a sustainability specialist, an environmental studies instructor, and even a car mechanic. Today, he moves up the ranks to become “Eco-Meister,” here to answer your questions and share his wisdom. Peter also serves on BRING’s board of directors.

* “Your Footprint” refers to your ecological footprint, the amount of land and water needed to support your individual lifestyle in terms of what you use and discard in your day-to-day activities. For example, the type of food you eat, how much you drive and fly, how much garbage your household throws away, etc. Visit <www.myfootprint.org> to calculate your footprint.

Hi, my name is Peter Reppe.

Back when I grew up in Dresden, in what was formerly East Germany, not wasting things was basic to people’s lives. Kept alive both by old European tradition and an “abundance of shortages” under the communist government, the “no waste” view penetrated every aspect of life, from one’s personal lifestyle to that of society in general. Enter the energy crisis in the 1970s, with all its public education programs, and you can imagine how the “energy zealot” in me came into being.

However, having been raised in a rather “typical” western culture, as surprising as that may sound, a healthy (?) dose of competitiveness became deeply engrained in my being as well. This competitiveness had a positive side-effect, turning any kind of efficiency effort into a game. I definitely get a kick out of optimizing all kinds of processes, whether it’s making use of every bit of wood when building a shelf, packing the trunk of a car or a backpack with the least amount of wasted space, or optimizing logistics around errands. If money can also be saved, then so much the better.

What might be seen as a burden to many people feels like a fun pastime to me. Just ask my partner how often the first words out of my mouth in the morning contain a description of another efficiency measure for the house. For years now, I’ve truly been enjoying (while others shake their heads) riding my bike daily to work, rain or shine, fine-tuning the programmable thermostat, only needing to empty my trash once a month, and seeing my monthly electricity bill come in at $12 using 100% EWEB wind power. Nice!

I am excited that I will now be writing two new features for Used News. I believe it’s up to every one of us to become educated on how our daily activities affect the world around us. The first feature, “Eco-Tips for Reducing Your Footprint”, will include tips that go beyond what’s already available in the “50 things you can do to…” book series. I will also debunk many of the urban legends that I have encountered over the years, such as, “Doesn’t it take more energy to heat up the house in the morning than just keeping it warm all night?”

A second, related column, “Ask the Eco-Meister”, will provide answers to everyday environmental conundrums that you, Dear Readers, might have. They could range from questions on transportation, shopping, and other lifestyle issues to questions about the embodied energy of solar electric systems. I can’t wait to hear from you! Please send your questions to me at <info@bringrecycling.org> and hopefully my answers will help you sleep soundly again, and help you establish your priorities for further greening your life. Stay tuned.—Peter Reppe, BRING Board Member, Eco-Meister

Ask the ECO-MEISTER

Dear Eco-Meister,
I’ve finally managed to teach my boyfriend to recycle, but he balks at giving cans and jars just a quick rinse in cold water. He insists on putting all his recyclable containers in the dishwasher! He says it doesn’t make any difference and the stuff needs to be really, really clean. Does it? I don't want to waste resources. Must I dump my boyfriend or is he trainable?
Signed,
Eco-Girl

Dear Eco-Girl,
Yes, washing recyclables squeaky clean in hot water or running them through a dishwasher wastes energy and water. Dumping your boyfriend may indeed be one thing you do want to dump. However, in the spirit of compassion and forgiveness, give the guy some more time to show he can be as eco-groovy as you are. If he continues to waste water and energy, let him know that he is wasting your time and will end up on the curb with the recyclables.—The Eco-Meister

Eco-Tip for Reducing Your Footprint: Save thousands of dollars, stay healthy, and become a role model by commuting to work by bike. DAILY. Compare the costs of rain gear, bike maintenance, and the occasional car rental to that of a new or used car. Now enjoy the prospect of saving a few grand. You could take that vacation you’ve always wanted! Eco-Tip for Reducing Your Footprint: About 7 times more energy goes into the production of food (growing, processing, packaging, shipping, marketing, etc.) compared to its own energy content. Eating foods grown closer to home means a lot less energy spent just to transport it.

School Grants for Waste Reduction
Lane County Waste Management Division and the City of Eugene Solid Waste and Recycling program have teamed up to offer the 2006-07 K-12 Waste Reduction Grant Program. Ten $400 grants are available to schools in Lane County for the purpose of implementing or improving school waste reduction programs. Schools will receive priority funding if they are currently an Oregon Green School. Visit <www.oregongreenschools.org> to learn more about the Oregon Green School program.
The K-12 Waste Reduction Grant can be used to assist any waste reduction project. It could be incentives for a student recycling team, equipment for utilizing one-sided paper, or classroom bins for better recycling capture. It could be dishwashing equipment, durable cups or silverware, a rechargeable battery system, or funding for the proper disposal of computers or science/art chemicals. One school purchased Zero Waste Lunch kits for students and worm bins; another used the funds to pay field trip transportation, yet another used funds to pay for a recycling assembly performance.

The deadline for turning in an application is September 30, 2006. For highest likelihood of a successful grant, submit your proposal for review and consultation at least two weeks prior to the deadline. Also feel free to consult with grant administrators for ideas and advice about your project. For an application and information, contact or visit the website of grant administrators: City of Eugene schools, contact Anne Donahue 682-5542, <www.eugenerecycles.org>. Lane County schools outside the city of Eugene, contact Sarah Grimm, 682-2059, <www.lanecounty.org/PW_WMD_Recycle/default.htm>.

Curious about what recycling looks like in a different country? If you were in China, you’d see something like this emblem on the bottom of your # 4 plastic containers and packaging.

Wanted: Student Art for the 2007 BRING Calendar
K-12 students in Lane County can submit art for consideration in next year’s popular RecycleArt calendar. This calendar is meant to inspire the 10,000 community members who use the calendar to reduce, reuse, recycle, and/or compost.

3 Guidelines for Art
• Black ink on white paper
• 8 1/2" x 11" paper in the “landscape” direction
• Student’s name, grade, school, and teacher written in pencil on the back

Send entries by May 1st, 2006 to:
BRING Recycling
P.O. Box 885
Eugene, OR 97440
- or -
via courier:
BRING c/o Lane ESD
attn: Lori Wollenweber
Please note: art becomes BRING property. Some entries may be publicly displayed.

As always, BRING’s education program offers free resources to Lane County residents. Tours, classroom visits, craft kits, lesson plans, and more. Contact Jo Rodgers, Education Coordinator, at (541) 746-3023 or jor@bringrecycling.org. BRING is here to help!

The Recovery Rate of Our Humanity
What’s so difficult about taking the steps from recycling to reuse to waste reduction to full-scale sustainability is that ultimately people are asked to look at their world with a different perspective. Recycling is for many a slight adjustment in behavior—stuff one bin rather than another—but these next steps call for us to adjust our fundamental world view, and that can be so disturbing for people that most won’t go there unless forced by grave necessity.

The American lifestyle is distorted by unnecessary comforts that add nothing to our deeper happiness and well being. We assume that these creature comforts represent a superior lifestyle and, unless coerced by events, never think to interrupt or question their pursuit. We are taught to consume, whether or not there’s real need, so it’s no wonder that as the world approaches cataclysmic change, we’re mollified when told we can drive our way out of disaster in a new Prius or Insight, or think that the harm from our over-consumption of material goods is erased when we put things into the recycling bin. Not that I’m knocking better technology. All I’m saying is that consumerism is a dual-edged sword. If we continue to add motor vehicles, even Priuses, without surcease, eventually the greed of our lifestyle nullifies the benefits of our technology and we’re right back in the same boat, if we ever even got out. One has to wonder if our search for the holy grail of sustainable technologies, ones that can substitute seamlessly for present technologies in mass production in a macro-economy, is merely a dodge created to avoid facing the real issue confronting us: modern life. Can we really mass-produce our way to sustainability?

Perhaps nothing is more of a metaphor for this problem today than plastic. Plastic is the poster child for the mass-produced, disposable, consumerist society. Its wonderful qualities compound our ease, but carry a menacing backside wielding crippling results. On the one hand, plastic is inexpensive, durable, lightweight, mutable, and, in all honesty, we’ve probably only begun to scratch the surface of its potential. But lurking behind that is the unpleasantness that has real costs for one and all. Big Oil, dioxin, phthalates, pollution, and cancer clusters: this is the other terminology of plastic that goes unrecognized by the marketplace. Making plastic from corn and the advance to “biodegradable” plastic does not make the process safer nor eliminate the problems, and might even make the problems more complex and inscrutable. And it again begs the question: is it possible to mass produce our way out of our predicament?

The late Nobel Laureate for Economics, E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) wrote, “The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.” In other words, the trade-off for cheap goods and a comfortable lifestyle is violence, pollution, environmental degradation, and self-mortification. Schumacher in his theories was concerned with the quality of a person’s productive life rather than his/her life as a consumer of manufactured goods, a radical departure from prevailing economic measure, but one that might better the chances of avoiding the trade-off he described. His economic philosophy was steeped in humanism and prized personal fulfillment over economic growth. He saw work as a path to reaching human potentials. Writing with surprising prescience in the 1970s, Schumacher was addressing the crux of the issue, thinking ahead of his time, to the steps beyond recycling, when he wrote:

“I think we can already see the conflict of attitudes which will decide our future. On the one side, I see the people who think they can cope with our threefold crisis* by the methods current, only more so; I call them the people of the forward stampede. On the other side, there are people in search of a new life-style, who seek to return to certain basic truths about man and his world; I call them home-comers. Let us admit that the people of the forward stampede, like the devil, have all the best tunes or at least the most popular and familiar tunes. You cannot stand still, they say; standing still means going down; you must go forward; there is nothing wrong with modern technology except that it is as yet incomplete; let us complete it. … There are no insoluble problems. The slogans of the people of the forward stampede burst into the newspaper headlines every day with the message, “a breakthrough a day keeps the crisis at bay.”

And what about the other side? This is made up of people who are deeply convinced that technological development has taken a wrong turn and needs to be redirected. The term “home-comer” has, of course, a religious connotation. For it takes a good deal of courage to say “no” to the fashions and fascinations of the age and to question the presuppositions of a civilization which appears destined to conquer the whole world; the requisite strength can be derived only from deep convictions. If it were derived from nothing more than fear of the future, it would be likely to disappear at the decisive moment. The genuine “home-comer” does not have the best tunes, but he has the most exalted text…”

Schumacher continues by explaining what he sees as the essential differences in viewpoint defining the two groups:

The home-comers base themselves upon a different picture of man from that which motivates the people of the forward stampede. It would be very superficial to say that the latter believe in “growth” while the former do not. In a sense, everybody believes in growth, and rightly so, because growth is an essential feature of life. The whole point, however, is to give to the idea of growth a qualitative determination; for there are always many things that ought to be growing and many things that ought to be diminishing.

In other words, not everything should be growing, some things, like oil-dependent inventions, should decrease.

Equally, it would be very superficial to say that the home-comers do not believe in progress, which also can be said to be an essential feature of all life. The whole point is to determine what constitutes progress. And the home-comers believe that the direction which modern technology has taken and is continuing to pursue—towards ever-greater size, ever-higher speeds, and ever-increased violence, in defiance of all laws of natural harmony—is the opposite of progress. Hence the call for taking stock and finding a new orientation. The stocktaking indicates that we are destroying our very basis of existence, and the reorientation is based on remembering what human life is really about.

In the last two sentences, Schumacher hits the nail on the head. We need to rethink what we are doing: recognize that our behavior is (self-) destructive, and; reorient our activities in accordance with a remembered intention.

The Laureate concludes:

I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation? We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worthwhile: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.

When we are told that necessary changes will be disruptive to the economy—an allegation, which is totally unsupported by facts— fear is being used to manipulate opinion. We need to overcome our fear of change. It may well be at this time that the most forward thinkers are those whose inventions and conventions do not make us richer in material goods or speed up the pace of our accomplishments. It may be time now for us to become richer in other ways and to appreciate the time it takes to attain those riches.

*Schumacher saw the “threefold crisis” as:
1) human nature revolting against inhuman technological, organizational, and political patterns; 2) the partial breakdown of the living environment which supports human life; and, 3) the increasing scarcity of nonrenewable resources, particularly fossil fuels.—David Wollner, BRING’s Business Manager & Morals Booster

Plastic Recycling Clarification
In the last newsletter, we listed the plastics that Weyerhaeuser’s recycling program is willing to take. Please note that these materials need to go directly to Weyerhaeuser’s facility at EcoSort, located next door to the Glenwood Central Receiving Station (a.k.a “the dump”) at 3425 E. 17th, off Glenwood Blvd. As you drive on East 17th, it is on the left just before entering the gates at the dump. There is a covered dropsite in the parking lot. You’ll see bins marked for various types of plastic, including one bin simply labeled “Plastic” where you can put all the oddball items.

Plastic recycling options

• Glenwood Central Receiving Station, 3100 East 17th: Accepts plastic film and bags, plastic plant pots and trays and bottles, tubs and jars (#1-#7, no #6 polystyrene, no lids).

• Curbside Recycling programs: Accept bottles, tubs and jars (#1-#7, no #6 polystyrene, no lids).

• Weyerhaeuser Recycling at EcoSort: Accepts toys, CD cases, tarps, chairs, buckets, Rubbermaid products and many other plastic items that cannot be recycled elsewhere. For more information, call Lorena Young, 541-744-4119.

Visit this BRING page to learn more about where, what, and how to recycle just about everything or give us a call at 541-746-3023, Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.
Remember, it’s Reduce, Reuse…then Recycle.

Spring Compost Schedule
Get your garden season off to a great start by learning how to compost like a pro. Learn the who, what, where, and how of composting from a certified OSU/Lane County Extension Service Compost Specialist. There are four opportunities this spring — three at the Grassroots Garden (one of three plots used by FOOD for Lane County to grow organic food and help others learn how) and one at the River House (run by the City of Eugene).

Aluminum siding Aluminum windows,   Bathroom cabinets Bathroom sinks, tubs   Bed frames Bicycles   Bike parts Cabinet structures   Canning jars Cabinet doors   Doors- interior/exterior Door handles   Electrical boxes Electric fixtures   Fiberglass siding, Flower pots   Garage Doors Galvanized siding,   Gutters Glass cutting services   Hardware Heating elements Kitchen cabinets Kitchen sinks, misc.		Lumber Light fixtures   Lawn mowers Mirrors   Metal doors Paneling,   Piping-metal and PVC Plate glass   Plumbing and accessories Pick up services   Screens Screen doors   Shelves, Sinks, Sky lights   Shower stalls, Stove parts   Tools, Tables, Tubs Tires, Trinkets   Utility sinks Unusual antiques   Windows, Windows and more Windows
		Stock changes daily  If we don’t have it today, we’ll probably have it tomorrow.   OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK Hours vary seasonally—call 746-3023 86641 Franklin Blvd—Across I-5 from LCC Don’t Dump it, Donate it! Save Money and the Earth, shop BRING first.