The Green Bin Share Project

This year, I had been working on a personal project called The Green Bin Share Project with a small grant from the Small Grant Neighbourhood Project which is funded by the Vancouver Foundation.

Here's the animation I made to promote my sharing initiative:

The Green Bin Share Project encourages neighbours to share their city green bins, by letting others know with a green ribbon tied to the lid of their bins.

 

Simply put, in Vancouver multi-unit buildings like apartments, condos and townhouses do not yet have green bin service like those in houses and duplexes. So, to bridge this gap, The Green Bin Share Project encourages neighbours to share their city green bins by tying a green ribbon to the lid of their green bins to let others know they have room to spare. Eventually, multi-unit dwellers will get private green bin services but until then, the Green Bin Share Project allows everyone to start diverting their food scraps out of the landfill now, so that this lifestyle change can be practiced long before Vancouver's organic waste ban in 2015.

 

I also designed the print material that was to be distributed in the participating neighbourhoods. We had green ribbons, postcards, stickers and posters (poster designed by my friend Celia).

I created the project with scalability in mind, so that anyone who wanted to do this project in their neighbourhood could easily start by requesting a free DIY toolkit from our website, or by getting their own green ribbons or green fabric from a craft store.

This toolkit was mailed out by request to the Marpole area.

These are the Bin Buddies. I drew them half rotten, after hearing a complaint (from my Zero Waste workshops I attended at SPEC BC) that many composting advertisements show perfectly good, whole fruits and vegetables being thrown away which is misleading and wasteful.

It's been very rewarding to see some green ribbons in the participating neighbourhoods. Now, I don't have to drive to the farmer's market every weekend to compost my food scraps!

Please visit www.greenbinshareproject.com for much more info and updates! There, you can watch the animation, read the blog and request a free DIY toolkit.