Goal For The Green

About a year ago, Kent Basson, started OddShoeFinder.com, which allows users to buy and sell their mismatched pairs of shoes. It is aimed at people such as polio survivors who must buy a different pair of shoes for each foot due to severely mismatched feet. A few months after starting the site, he was
contacted by several people about accepting large batches of new name brand single shoes.

He started the site after his sister had an injury (due largely to neuropathy from diabetes) that resulted in her having to wear two different sized shoes. He saw that her options were few unless she wanted to spend a lot of money,or go to Nordstrom.  She still lives in their hometown in Alabama, which is far from a Nordstrom.

Kent ended up with over 11,000 shoes that were otherwise heading for a landfill. “We sorted and posted all the shoes we could as mismatched pairs. Rather than buying two pairs of shoes at retail prices, users of the site can buy a pair of shoes that was headed to the landfill for $10-20/pair.”

“We also found a use for boots for which we did not find matches. Construction workers wear boots in two different brands and styles when they pour concrete so that they don’t ruin their good boots,” Kent said.

A lot of perfectly able people also need mismatched shoes.  It is far more common than ever imagined, although most people just buy the larger pair and deal with it unless the difference is extreme. People born with clubfoot are also likely to need mismatched shoes.

He has also rescued quite a few matching pairs from among the thousands, so people who don’t have the problem of mismatched feet also use the site. He has 3000 skates (inline and ice) and cleats arriving next week, so the hope is that lots of people without serious disabilities will use the site as well.

This is not only a great way to save shoes from ending up in a landfill, but also makes filling this need alot easier, and far more affordable.  What a great way to go green and save some green too!

As of today, San Francisco is banning plastic bags, and the Whole Food Markets are requesting their customers to bring their own bags.  The choice will be paper in both places.

When it comes to cost, it is much cheaper to produce a plastic bag over a paper one. The drawback is, plastic is a petroleum product.  However, it only takes approximately .003%of oil per barrell to produce alot of plastic bags.  At least 100,000 birds and marine life die each year because of the plastic that liters our beaches and other public places. This could be one of the reasons for the choice of paper over plastic in the San Francisco area.

Paper bag producton takes one 20 year old tree and four times the energy to produce 700 bags.  In 1999, America cut down 14 million trees to produce 10 billion paper bags, and that was just for that year.  The impact on our forests is mind boggling.  The forests are a major absorber of green house gases.  When we cut them down, and then use clean water and chemicals to produce the pulp to manufacture paper bags, we create more greenhouse gases.  The sad thing is there is not enough forest areas left to absorb the pollutants. It doesn’t stop there, hence, not enough trees to help with run-off from heavy rain.  So, we’ve seen more severe flooding in recent years.

The problem is, while it takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic, only 1-3% of plastic bags are recycled. Paper on the other hand, is recycled at a rate of 10-15 %  more often, and it is compostable. Plastic is not.

Nothing completely degrades anymore in our modern landfills.  This is because of the lack of water, light, oxygen and other elments that are necessary to complete the degradation process.  The end result is, paper really doesn’t brake down any faster than plastic in a landfill. It also takes up more space than plastic.  The goal should be to keep both of these products from ever reaching a land fill.  The bottom line is, we may all need to get used to BYOB – bring you own bag.

Written in association with plastic disposal experts