Getting Earth-friendly. Are you ready Hawaii?
On July 1st, Hawaii will be the first state to prohibit businesses from using one-time use plastic bags and non-recyclable paper bags solely for the use of transporting merchandise, beating California whose ban has been put on hold. Hooray! It’s good to be number one.
At HomeWorld, we’ve been practicing earth-friendly habits for a more than a decade.
For our customers, we sell reusable Envirosax at our stores.
Envirosax bags are lightweight, waterproof, and easily folds to fit in any purse. One Envirosax bag potentially replaces 5,000 one-time use plastic bags over its lifetime!*
As a company, we recycle our packing material including cardboard and styrofoam.
Cardboard boxes are flared and bundled into bails for recycling. Photo courtesy of Mark Kantor.
According to our Division Manager of Operations Mark Kantor, our company recycles cardboard weekly at our warehouse. The cardboard (mostly from our furniture manufacturers) is bundled into bails which are shipped to China and recycled to create post-consumer recycled paper products.
Once a week, Pacific Allied picks up the cardboard and ships it to China where it is recycled into everyday paper products such as cups and plates. Photo courtesy of Mark Kantor.
Our styrofoam is processed and picked up once a month in bags weighing approximately 750 pounds. “If we did not do this process of densifying the styrofoam, we would be sending about two 40-foot containers weekly to the landfill,” says Mark. The by-product is shipped to China were it is re-used in products such as crown moulding, insulation, and other building materials.
In 2008, our company was the first in Hawaii to invest in a styrofoam densifier saving our landfill from container loads of waste. Photo courtesy of Mark Kantor.
Styrofoam in its raw form is made mostly of air. It is melted down to reduce its size and recycled into usable building material. Photo courtesy of Mark Kantor.
Recycling is our social responsibility. Are you ready for the plastic bag ban? How do you reduce, recycle, and reuse?
*source: envirosax.com
About Terri Dux
Bringing together stories, rooms, life. 