Dont be a Tosser

By day Josh Rachlis is a quiet copy writer at a Canadian ad firm– by night he becomes “Enviroman”, a super human rapper/artist dedicated to getting the green word out. While most of us spend our spare time watching TV, listening to music or reading, Josh spends his down time making films, writing songs and stories. But not on just any topic. The self professed “green guy” or environmental comedian is creating art to encourage people to recycle. Just a regular guy (with clearly lots of time on his hands), he decided to combine his concern for the environment and love of entertaining. The result is comedic approach of getting people to think green by way of YouTube videos. The Canadian rappers’ latest video sensation is a song dedicated to Laurie David, producer of An Inconvenient Truth and ex-wife of Larry David, creator of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. While his main goal is winning Laurie’s hand in marriage, Josh is also clearly letting people know - it isn’t hip to be a Tosser.

Enjoy all of Josh's videos on his YouTube channel.

If you have your own recycling video send along and we’ll post it.

No need to adjust your computer screen. The counter at the bottom of the site which calculates the number of empty beverage containers ending up in Alberta Landfills is correct. It may seem like there's a computer glitch -- the number is so high and rises so quickly, it can't be correct. But that's how many empties have been tossed in our province since March 2. In the end, over 378,908,185 end up in Alberta landfills a year. That's about twelve a second, 24 hours a day.

On the plus side, every minute 3,729 beverage containers are recycled in Alberta. In 2007, the weight diverted from landfills through container recycling was 64,719 metric tons, or almost 142 million pounds. That's a lot, enough to fill 6 Calgary towers. In Alberta alone if the aluminum cans that were recycled were laid end to end, they would easily circle the Earth. Not bad.

So you might think, "I'm just throwing out one empty beverage container, what difference does that make". Look to the counter below -- it adds up. Because landfills are tucked away it's a problem we tend not to see. The millions of empty beverage containers that are thrown in the garbage take up valuable landfill space, break down and end up in the groundwater and take a whopping 1,000 years or more to biodegrade. All that can be avoided if you simply stop being a Tosser. Keep your empty beverage container out of the garbage, and always recycle. Let's see if we can slow down that counter.

Here's one guy who certainly isn't a tosser. British environmentalist David de Rothschild has been collecting thousands of plastic bottles to build a boat. De Rothschild is planning an 11,000-mile voyage to Australia on the Plastiki, a vessel built entirely of recycled plastic. He actually needs 12,000 plastic bottles to build the 60 foot catamaran. In Alberta, it would only take him about 17 minutes to collect that many, as 12 beverage containers end up in our landfills every second.

De Rothchild is taking on this adventure in the hopes of raising awareness of plastic bottle recycling. It's a worthy cause and a good example of some of the many uses of recycled bottles. Okay, so not everyone has the time and money to build a boat like this, or sail it to Australia for that matter, but by keeping empty containers out of the garbage, you are helping to make other products, like kayaks, clothing and building materials, not to mention saving space in our landfills.

Read the whole article at the Globe and Mail.