There are activities for almost every day of the month. Check out the listings on Sustainable Bainbridge's Earth Month page.

Play Earth Month bingo (print from this link) to see how many healthy planet practices you can incorporate into your daily routine.

This Earth Month -- and all year long -- an easy and helpful action you can take for our environment is picking up litter. Thanks to our partners at Kitsap Adopt-a-Spot and Bainbridge Disposal, there are free litter clean-up bags at Bainbridge Disposal (at Coppertop) that can also be disposed of for free! Find out how here. And if you need to borrow a grabber, contact Zero Waste.

Socks

Bay Hay and Feed is collecting socks during the month of April. Bring in any kind of clean socks, singles or pairs, with holes or not. Sponsored by Denver-based SmartWool, the socks will be sent off to Material Return to be deconstructed and turned into new goods, all within a 75-mile radius of North Carolina

2021's sock take-back collection kept over 12,000 pounds of material out of landfills, and together with North Carolina-based Material Return, Smartwool turned that waste into the Second Cut K9 Camp Cushion.

Disks

Instead of having to wait for a BI Styrofoam collection to turn them in, you can now bring your CD and DVD disks -- encased or not (paper removed) -- to the Zero Waste collection box at the Marge Williams Center, 221 Winslow Way West.

If your amount exceeds the box's capacity, please set them beside the box and notify Diane immediately so she can pick them up.

The following places will reuse particular sizes and shapes of plastic plant pots. Parenthetically, they may also accept other associated items.

Recycling option:

Home Depot - Any size pots and trays

Kitsap County will host another Styrofoam and mattress recycling collection event for Kitsap County households, in partnership with DTG Recycle, on Saturday, April 15, 11am-3pm, at the Kitsap Fairgrounds. Try to carpool your neighborhood's stockpile, if you can.

As always, make sure there are no stickers or tape on the your clean foam. Go here for what is accepted. Styro recycling is free; mattresses and box springs (must be dry) are $10 each.

Though a couple of months out, start setting aside your big scrap metal and old tires for this tire and scrap metal recycling collection event, open to households only, at the Kitsap Fairgrounds on Saturday, June 10, 9am-3pm. Go here for tire limitations and types of scrap metal accepted.

The exact date is not quite official, but start gathering the following chemicals to drop off at the annual north-end Kitsap household hazardous waste collection, this year in June in Poulsbo*:

Paint is part of the collection, but because of Washington state's EPR (extended producer responsibility) law that passed in 2019, which requires paint manufacturers to take responsibility for their product when consumers are ready to discard it, there is now year-round paint disposal at Peninsula Paint Company on Hildebrand. Go here to see what kind of paint products are accepted.

* The county's year-round household hazardous waste collection facility is open Thursday-Saturday, 10am-4pm, at 5551 SW Imperial Way, Bremerton (near the airport).

EPR legislation makes it possible for consumers to responsibly and easily discard some of their more hazardous or problematic purchases. It also facilitates reuse, refurbishment and recycling of those materials.

Additionally, city and county governments that would normally be on the hook for the cost of disposal are no longer, as the cost burden has been shifted back to the manufacturer. In some cases, the manufacturer builds that cost into the product price; in others, there is an overt charge upon purchase (e.g., 95 cents for a 1-2 gallon can of paint). This past year, Kitsap County saved $150,000 in disposal costs because of the state's Paint Care program.

Washington state was among the first states to enact an electronics EPR law, known as E-cycle WA, which is why you can take your old computers, monitors, laptops, tvs, e-readers and portable dvd players for free drop-off at the Bainbridge Disposal transfer station. Another state EPR program takes back mercury-containing lights at these locations.

Zero Waste will once again have a booth at the Bainbridge Farmers Market on the first Saturday of each month (except in July, when it’s the 3^rd Saturday).

Just like last year, we will be collecting your hand-sized or smaller bits of scrap metal. Collect jar tops, nails, old keys, bent paper clips, etc., and bring to the booth.

Every week the FM ZW Green Team will be making sure that the market’s compost collection can is contaminant-free. If you’d like to be on a once-a-month rotation or ask more about it, please send Diane an email. The time commitment is approximately once a month from 11:30am-2:00pm.

Experience wonderfully creative upcycled outfits by local adult and teen designers outdoors along the trails of IslandWood and/or indoors at the runway show. Tickets are now on sale for the seventh annual ReFashion Show on Sunday, May 21, 1-3pm (Fashion in the Forest-tickets unlimited) and/or 3:15-4pm (Rock the Runway-tickets limited).

As usual, there is Audience Award voting, plus a bag/purse swap and a sneaker reuse/recycling fundraiser.

HeyDay Fund

 Health department guidelines require ready-to-eat food (granola, fruit, nuts, candy, and many spices) be dispensed in a gravity-fed container for refills. Due to space constraints at the Bainbridge market, the bulk bins do not meet these requirements and reusable containers from home cannot be allowed at this time. They are exploring options to provide a zero-waste solution while keeping the community's health and safety a top priority.

Ms. Diane Bedell's third grade students at Blakely Elementary studied the sea and thought about how to be good stewards of it. After deciding that plastic was a huge problem, they took a look at how much single-use plastic was showing up in their own lunchroom every day.

After doing a waste audit to figure out that Blakely Bulldogs were throwing away 613 pieces of single-use plastic each day (photo right), or over 100,000 each school year, they created a PowerPoint for their classmates and the new food services director, Elaine Krogfoss.

Elaine was very impressed by the students' research and audits, and she made the following changes almost immediately:

Elaine is using Blakely as a pilot and hopes to roll out these changes to every school next year.

If you have not received the above materials, please contact Diane Landry, who is distributing these MF toolkits to Bainbridge Island condominium and apartment community leads on behalf of Kitsap County Solid Waste.

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