BEIJING, Nov. 25 -- Entering Jiang Meigui's home, you cannot miss the colorful tote bags piled in the corner. Jiang is not a fashionable collector of bags but a recycling activist. All the carry-all bags are made of hard-to-recycle milk and juice boxes.
Jiang, 55, is a volunteer official in her community and environmental protection is her passion. Since July 2005 she has been collecting empty Tetra Pak (a brand of package) milk boxes (950ml) and soft drink bottles since she heard that Tetra Pak had a recycling program to reuse the boxes.
Jiang and her friends washed and collected more than 3,000 boxes with the help of her friends, but they found that program had been discontinued, she said.
"It was a headache to deal with the boxes," she says. "You cannot just pile them there."
That summer Jiang put her boxes to good use. She started handicraft classes to teach children how to make use of the boxes. They made hats, boots, aprons and paper "mobile phones."
"They are very good materials," says Jiang. "The paper is thick, water-proof, easy to shape, and extremely good looking. Kids love that."
And since then, Jiang convinced about 50 retired ladies to collect Tetra Pak boxes for environmental protection. They called themselves the Residents Consciousness Committee, now the Green Housewife Association.
"Making a Tetra Pak box is very expensive, it's almost 60 percent of the cost of the drink," says Jiang. "It uses not only paper but also metallic foil. Throwing it away is such a waste."
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In Japanese schools, the kids wash out and fold flat their milk cartons. They hang to dry on plastic trees. They must be re-used somehow, for the wax and paper. New cartons? The Japanese school lunch system is very efficient in general, too. Everyone eats the same meal, prepared in the same school district central food processing building. Plastic trays, bowls are stacked and sent back for washing after every meal. This is much more energy efficient than everyone's mom or dad cooking a solo meal at home for their kid. Brings the cost down too--lunch was approx $2/day there for everyone circa 2005. And you would hope to be a smaller class to get bigger servings.
