Although attendees of Great Britain’s famed Glastonbury Music Festival have long since returned to the comfort of their own homes following this year’s June 27 closing date, their presence lingered on the 600-acre Worthy Farm in the form of heaps upon heaps of cast-aside waste. Compared to last year’s 1,650 tons of discarded material (including 6,538 sleeping bags; 5,572 tents; 3,321 airbeds; 2,220 camping chairs; and 400 gazebos) — requiring a team of 1,200 volunteers and 500 paid staff one full month to sort through and clean up — 2010 was actually considered a success story thanks to Glastonbury’s “Please Take it Home” and “Love the Farm, Leave No Trace” campaigns.

Granted, it’s not easy to convince 175,000 attendees to clean up after themselves. Festival officials are admittedly pleased that this year’s staff of 900 was able to restore the farm to its pre-concert condition in just two weeks, noting that guilting people into doing the right apparently works, but there are also a whole host of eco-measures at play. As if covering the grounds with 15,000+ clearly labeled recycling bins (either for wet/dry recyclables, non-recyclables or e-waste) isn’t impressive enough, the Glastonbury Festival also employs “green police” to enforce their zero waste aspirations. They’ve also made the following eco-commitments in recent years:

• 100% unbleached cotton program bags are distributed to all attendees.
• All food purchases come with compostable cups and plates and/or wood cutlery made from locally sourced, sustainably harvested trees or Forest Stewardship Certified wood whenever possible.
• Food vendors must compost all remaining food waste, and organic material is then transported to a facility located just 5 miles away.
• Coffee, tea and sugar are exclusively fair trade.
• Concertgoers can purchase T-shirts dyed with vegetable-based pigments and printed with non-PVC inks.
• The festival uses renewable power sources such as “Orion” solar generators and wind as well as low-energy LED solutions to power lights and sound.
• Following each annual event, festival organizers plant native trees and hedges around the site to boost the biodiversity of the environment.

Still, attendees pitch and/or abandon some crazy stuff, no matter what sustainable policies are exercised. Following the conclusion of Glastonbury 2008, officials calculated that they recovered 400 tons of wood; 193 tons of compostable material; 66 tons of scrap metal; 54 tons of cans and plastic bottles; 41.76 tons of cardboard; 11.2 tons of discarded tents, clothing and sleeping bags; 10 tons of dense plastic; 9.12 tons of glass; 0.264 tons of batteries; and 0.25 tons of plastic sheeting! While workers were able to recycle an impressive 863.32 tons (48%) of the material left behind, the sheer manpower necessary to pull it all off was in and of itself incredibly energy intensive. In yet another effort to cultivate greener habits, concertgoers are now urged to purchase good-quality tents designed to be used throughout their lifetime (rather than just as a one-time, disposable item).

What really happens to the human mind when music, alcohol and the summer solstice mix? Is it really possible that the heady combination triggers a temporary lapse in sanity, compelling people to treat concert grounds as an out-of-site, out-of-mind dumping zone? Fortunately, Glastonbury is one festival that refuses to accept these unfortunate consequences lying down, instead addressing this cultural anomaly through a comprehensive collection of eco-initiatives that set the bar high for other outdoor events. Whether you’re a greenie or not, that should definitely be music to your ears.

The Grand Canyon is easily one of the most beautiful places on earth. As you drive up the highway to the South Rim, you begin to see glimpses of the red, brown and green hues of the canyon walls and you quickly realize that this is why you are making eco-friendly choices in your life — to preserve nature. The National Park Service is doing its part to help keep the Grand Canyon a beautiful place and has instituted a comprehensive recycling program.

Park visitors are greeted with recycling stations along the trails, lookout points, hotels and other areas throughout the park. The Grand Canyon hosts millions of visitors each year, and with millions of visitors comes millions of pounds of waste. Thankfully, the recycling program is diverting some of this waste from landfills and even putting it to good use within the park itself.

The Grand Canyon recycling program includes waste from park visitors as well as waste generated through park operations. The program recycles a variety of products, including glass, aluminum, cardboard, paper, plastic, motor oil and even antifreeze. Some of the collected material is sent to external recycling centers, while other material is recycled and reused on site. One example is glass; glass that is collected in Grand Canyon recycling bins is crushed up, combined with other ingredients and turned into asphalt.

While the National Park Service has led the recycling drive within the park, Grand Canyon Village residents also have a say. The recycling program at the Grand Canyon Post Office came about after an area resident chimed in on the facility’s lack of one. Rosie McGee works in the park and noticed postal patrons carelessly throwing away envelopes and junk mail. This inspired her to do something, so she began a letter-writing campaign.

McGee soon learned that there was a recycling pilot program within the U.S. Postal Service but the Grand Canyon branch wasn’t a part of this pilot program. After discovering this, McGee began a second campaign encouraging those in power to put the National Park Service locations, including the Grand Canyon, at the top of the pilot program list. Within three days, recycling boxes showed up inside the Grand Canyon’s post office.

Park visitors, the National Park Service, employees within the park and even local residents embrace the Grand Canyon recycling program. With this many people behind the program, it has no choice but to succeed and grow, and that is exactly what it is doing.

Twins’ stadium sustainability rewarded

Two million gallons of water are being saved annually through the RWRS. The system helped the ballpark to qualify for LEED certification. The 40,000-seat ballpark has only been open for a few short months, but is setting the bar high for rainwater recycling. The Twins and Pentair have made promoting the awareness of water scarcity a priority, according to an official statement made to WaterWorld. Information aimed at educating the public about water conservation methods is available throughout the park.

Large water reuse cisterns are buried below Target Field. Image courtesy of Pentair.

Decoding the RWRS

In order to recycle and reuse enough water to cut down stadium usage by 50%, the measures to achieve the goal might seem drastic to some. Not to Pentair, which has signed a multi-year sponsorship agreement, making it “The Official Sustainable Water Provider” for the Minnesota Twins organization and Target Field.

What does Pentair technology do? It purifies rain water to a level equal to or better than municipal tap water standards. According to WaterWorld, the system is designed to allow the Twins to recycle and conserve water used to wash down the lower decks of the stadium and irrigate the ball field. Off the field, administrative offices and training rooms have Everpure tap filtered water to reduce the use of plastic bottled drinking water. Small differences add up.

Will the long-term reuse and recycling of deck and office water consistently add up to a 50% water use reduction? A few years of keeping score will tell if the Twins are winners.

It was recently announced that New York City is launching one of the biggest textile recycling programs in the entire country, with the goal of making it nearly as easy to donate clothes as it is to throw them away. Woohoo!

Starting in September, Big Apple residents will be able to drop off clothing, shoes and textiles at some 50 strategically placed bins in high-traffic areas of the city. The bins, which will be maintained by a yet-to-be-chosen nonprofit group, will accept not only wearable clothing items, but also items that are not suitable for resale, like smelly old shoes and ripped T-shirts. Goodwill Industries, one organization vying for the 10- to 15-year contract with the city, and New Jersey-based textile recycling company Wearable Collections have both said they find ways to recycle even the most tattered of items into things like rags for the automotive industry and insulation.

If you’ve ever stepped foot on New York City soil (or… ahem… asphalt), you know exactly why this program is such a big deal. Almost no one here owns a car, so schlepping cumbersome bags of clothes to a donation site like Goodwill or the Salvation Army is a serious ordeal. People here move a lot — switching apartments every year is not uncommon — and space is famously at a premium, so a program like this may be more important in New York City than anywhere else.

As it turns out, though, getting people to recycle clothing and textiles is a problem nationwide. According to the EPA, Americans throw away an average of nearly 10 pounds of unwanted clothing each year; in New York alone, some 190,000 tons of textiles entered the city’s landfills in 2008. And, a recent Goodwill Industries survey found that more than half of people who donate clothing say they wouldn’t go more than 10 minutes out of their way to make a donation.

It is safe to say many New Yorkers are looking forward to this new program. Still, some are willing to go more than 10 minutes out of their way to drop off a bag of sweaters, but the less of an ordeal the whole process is the better!

Johnson had what he called a “green rider.” This document was put into the mix to promote green action and direction. Many venues had basic elements of recycling, but most lacked a serious plan. This document explained further than just putting some paper into a specific waste can — it helped people think about water usage, better light bulbs, effective ways to communicate your green plans and an overall vision of where to be and how to get there. We at United Concerts (owner and operator of the USANA Amphitheatre) took this and ran with it.

USANA Amphitheatre, West Valley City, UT

The first steps were difficult, as people were not completely behind plans to put green ideas into action, and some of these concepts were going to cost a substantial amount of money. We decided a starting point would be to enlist a college and have them work with us to create our first plans.

USANA Amphitheatre's Green Team

Utah Valley University (formally Utah Valley State College) took us under its wing, and one of the earth studies classes used the USANA Amphitheatre Green Project as its course curriculum. The biggest item that was established early on was a green team — a group of people that attended every show as ambassadors of recycling. Another item that was enacted the first year was putting out recycle bins next to our waste bins. The third critical piece was the recycler that came forward, Dunn Recycling. Pat Dunn came with a passion in his heart and transferred that to our green team, inspiring them to get out there and communicate the importance of recycling and reducing waste.

Every year, we have tried to make more changes, and we are currently running a solid green venue. We have moved on to work with Rocky Mountain Recycling and we were awarded the “Greenest Show in Utah” in 2009. The venue’s 2009 statistics from our green programs are:

10.01 tons of recycled material saves…

• 170 trees
• 3,804 gallons of oil
• 33.0 cubic yards of landfill space
• 40,040 kilowatts of energy
• 70,070 gallons of water
• 2,193 gallons of gasoline
• 641% energy savings
• 581% water savings
• 600.6 pounds less of air pollution

We are a long way from being perfectly green, but we are trying very hard to reduce what is used and create awareness that being green is worth every penny. Thanks to Rocky Mountain Recycling for really taking us to the next level.

Lastly, this brings me to our mission: promote waste reduction, reuse what is available and empower the public to make an impact for green.

Chris Abbott is Director of Ticketing Operations and Marketing at United Concerts. USANA Amphitheatre is the premier summer concert venue in the Salt Lake City metro area, located southwest of the city in West Valley City, UT. See the venue’s green page for more information.

What Om Garden is doing

Staffers are proud to recount the steps Om Garden takes for the environment. For one, employees sport 100% organic cotton uniforms, which means the cotton crops are grown without pesticides and toxins. They clean with eco-friendly cleaners, and in the bathrooms you will find only 100% post-consumer recycled paper towels and toilet paper. Food is served in a biodegradable, plastic-like container made from 100% cornstarch that begins decomposing in just 50 days. The restaurant also recycles and composts its food scraps. (I can only imagine how much waste restaurants accrue from food scraps alone!)

Plans for the future

Down the road, Om Garden wishes to upgrade its space in accordance with LEED certifications. Some of the changes the owners long to implement include using milk-based paints with no VOCs, installing compact fluorescent light bulbs and placing “smart” light bulbs in the restrooms that turn off when vacant. They also plan to use a greywater system to recycle water from the sinks to use in the toilets, which will reduce the restaurant’s water consumption by one-third each year. Another cool item on the to-do list is to recycle heat from the restaurant’s ovens to heat the water heater and air heating units.

The Rainbow Roll

On top of all that, the owners want to use hybrid vehicles for food delivery, hold a free weekly workshop to inspire children in the community to recycle and eat organic food, and donate to local environmental causes.

A note about the food

Not only is Om Garden all vegan, but the restaurant concept also includes only “living food.” This means they don’t cook anything over 118º F, and they don’t cook fruits, vegetables or grains at all.

Patrons love the Rainbow Roll, with carrot, mango, beet, baby greens, avocado, cashew pâté and figs with balsamic syrup wrapped in seaweed. The Peace Pizza is also tasty, with mushroom, tomato, sun-dried tomato, pesto, black olives and cashew cheese.

Eating here is like casting a vote for a healthy life and a healthy plant. When in Miami, eat green at Om Garden.

Gasometers occupy a unique place in the urban and cultural landscape. In cities around the world, these circular structures loom large, imposing remnants of a fast-fading — perhaps already past — industrial age. In many places, they lie deflated or disused, emptied of the gas they once housed — a skeletal frame the only trace of the figure they once cut. In Vienna, however, things are different.

Image: Andreas Pöschek

Built as part of the city’s gasworks in the dying years of the 19th century, then used until 1984 after the switch from town gas to natural gas, which saw them shut down and forsaken, four of these former gas containers still stand tall today. Here in the Austrian capital, these behemoths of a bygone era present not a sorry profile, but rise up in all their past glory — repurposed for contemporary times.

Gasometer C. Image: Andreas Pöschek

Saved from the wrecking ball by their status as historical landmarks — their red-brick exterior walls preserved — Vienna’s restored gasometers are clearly recognizable as what they once were. Multi-level zones for living (top floors), working (middle floors) and entertainment and shopping (ground) are found within the cylindrical structures that once housed the city’s gas supply.

Image: Dezidor

Once, these massive round buildings were used as storage tanks for the gas that was dry distilled from coal before being distributed into the city gas network — first for street lamps, then, by 1910, for cooking and heating in homes. Now they serve as spaces for apartments, offices and malls — the latter connected to the upper levels by skybridges; a sign of the shift from the consumption of fossil fuels to the consumption of commodities, although not all the commercial areas are used.

Image: Vienna Museum

When they were completed in 1899, Vienna’s telescopic gasometers were the largest in all of Europe, each with a volume of some 90,000 m³, seated in a water basin and enclosed by a brickwork façade. Their scale is still impressive in the cityscape, each one towering 70 meters tall and measuring 60 meters across.

Image: Der Falk Von Freyburg

There are interesting parallels between the turn-of-the-century birth and rebirth of Vienna’s gasworks. Both were the result of design contests: In 1892, Schimming, an engineer from Berlin, won the pitch to build the structures; while in 1995, another architectural competition was launched calling for ideas in favor of new uses for the grand yet retired and abandoned structures.

Gasometer B. Image: Danny Hennesy

By 2001, four architects had seen their ideas realized for their different interpretations of the gasometers, from Jean Nouvel’s translucent roof, which plays with reflections, refractions and transparencies of the old and the new (Gasometer A), to Manfred Wehdorn’s indoor garden and eco-friendly-designed terraced structure (Gasometer C). The old had been instilled with a new lease of life.

Gasometer B. Image: Pudpuduk

During the process of remodeling and revitalizing these relics of industrial society, the gasometers were completely gutted, so only the brick exterior and parts of the roof were left fully intact. Yet the reuse of the existing buildings’ encircling façades was nevertheless something of a design coup. With total demolition sidestepped, the resulting waste generated by razing the gasometers to the ground was minimized — while these icons of industrial architecture looked on.

Gasometer B. Image: Andreas Poeschek

While the grunt of physical labor set to the tune of clanging machines can no longer be heard in Vienna’s Gasometer City, these days the solidarity of working men has given way to a different sense of identity. A village feel is said to prevail in this city within a city, a spirit of community evident both among the 1,500 people who live here and online at the Gasometer Community.

Gasometer D. Image: Andreas Poeschek

In neither their past nor present incarnations have these gas containers been empty vessels. They have been brimful of energy — or at least its potential. And, the structures, which were featured as a location in James Bond movie The Living Daylights, are set to die another day.

Sources: 1, 2, 3

Place Houses, LLC’s work is popping up around the Puget Sound in the United States with Seattle, not surprisingly, becoming the Petri dish of this new-age approach to housing construction. As explained on the company’s website, the answer to the question, “What is a Place house?” is, “top quality, architect-designed houses, a type of pre-fab” that offers “a streamlined hassle-free process.”

Photo courtesy of Place Houses, LLC

Characterized by strong lines, an eye-catching blend of exterior cladding and materials that bring interest to the façade from all sides, an endless color pallet to choose from and sustainable motifs such as the porous driveway pictured here, Place Houses can be designed to fit within any urban, suburban or rural setting while standing out stylistically. Or, put more simply by the company:

Stylish without being elitist; whimsical but reflective; and above all, simple, timeless and affordable, Place Houses are designed to fit wherever you need one — be it on a small lot on the city, or on an acreage with a view.

Like most businesses in the Northwest, the approach to the product has environmentally friendly implications. According to the company website, all homes constructed are done so to the rigorous standards of Built Green, meaning that great efforts are endured to conserve and manage water, energy and materials while, “mitigating the impact of construction, maintenance, and operation of a building through its lifecycle.” Some green features include wiring for solar-powered electricity and hot water heating, Energy Star-rated appliances, sustainable finishing material such as bamboo and cork, low-flow fixtures, and design that maximizes natural ventilation and day lighting. Place Houses even gives the option of making your house super green. To find out how and to learn about more green features, go here.

The style of these homes is certainly what stands out most to the passersby, but where Place Houses is perhaps most visionary is in the home-buying process. Like purchasing a new car, the process of purchasing a Place house offers a variety of options to make the final product uniquely tailored to the buyer, while still offering direction and a limited amount of choices in a surprisingly fun and simple process. For instance, four sizes are available: tiny, small, medium and large — great options with limited choices! In fact, the whole process is designed to take less than one year. The company website offers a succinct description on the process as well:

Pick what you want in one meeting, then put your feet up and wait while we take care of the rest. We can even recommend realtors and lenders if you need assistance finding a site or securing financing.

In essence, Place Homes aims to offer the simplicity of tract housing by providing simplified options while still allotting for the design and attention to detail that, until now, only came with custom-built homes. Place Homes strives to become a homebuilding company that allows for the personal touch of custom-built homes without the hefty price tag that correlates. For the time being, Place Houses are only available in the Pacific Northwest, but with such style attention to eco-friendly factors, they will be popping up near you soon.

Hopefully we won't be seeing this H&M jumper in a landfill any time soon.

Here’s an interesting story that would have been pretty easy to miss if you don’t live in New York City: Earlier this year, someone tipped The New York Times off to the fact that mega retailer H&M regularly dumped bags upon bags of unworn clothing behind its massive 34th Street store. But these weren’t items the store had bagged to be donated or recycled. Employees had been ordered to destroy the garments with box cutters to ensure the stuff went nowhere but the trash.

Then another person discovered even more bags of clothes just a few doors down, on 35th Street, this time marked for sale at Walmart. All of those clothes had been destroyed with hole-punching machines.

This was just before Christmas.

As you can imagine, the Times story didn’t sit well with New Yorkers, or people elsewhere in the country for that matter, who rightly argued that H&M was doing a great disservice to a) the city’s homeless population, and b) the nation’s landfills. (FYI: We don’t have a lot of space here, so trash from New York gets trucked and shipped all over the country.)

The good news is that H&M quickly bowed to media pressure and agreed to make sure its unsold clothes are donated to charity. (The company said that was their official policy all along… ) Walmart also quickly got its PR machine in motion and said it was “investigating” the incident and would make sure in the future garments are recycled or donated.

It still troubles me though that it took a muckraker at the Times to call the companies out on these practices. How long had this kind of thing been going on, and how widespread was/is the practice around the world? How much of the planet’s landfills consist of clothing that could have been worn by someone who needed it? I’m not even sure I want to know the answers to those questions. Because I have a feeling they aren’t good.

This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where broken hulks and smoldering wrecks grow out of the mud flats, into ridges and hills and grotesque steel gardens. Occasionally a tired tanker crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest. Immediately the ash-gray men move dimly, crumbling through powdery air, and swarm up with leaden spades to stir an impenetrable cloud.

Armed with little more than bare hands and rudimentary tools, these workers cleave and rip and carve the ghostly hulls of oceangoing vessels. The ships come from all over the world — Russia, China, Holland, even the U.S. — eventually washing up on the shores of Chittagong to be gradually dismantled, piece by painstaking piece.

This stretch of beach, thick with the acrid fumes of burning steel and paint, has established itself as one of the world’s primary sites for the recycling of large commercial ships, including oil tankers. Low labor costs and lax environmental regulations have seen similar sites spring up across the subcontinent — in Alang, Karachi and even as far afield as Aliaga in Turkey.

This is the darker side of recycling, far removed from a pleasant culture of diligent reuse and inspired repurposing. The reality of recycling in Chittagong is a hellish cauldron of fire, smoke and beating sun, closer to scavenging than recovery. Recycling here is not an ethical option; it is a grim imperative, ensuring survival.

“What else I can do other than risking my life to work in this place? I have a family to feed back home and this is the best job that I could find. But, I know I can die anytime or get badly injured. And then there will be nobody to take care of me.”

The risk of injury or death is extreme. Every year, thousands are maimed or crippled for life — little surprise given the working conditions in the yard. Workers scale rickety rope ladders to sheer iron railings, weighty clumps of steel and debris fall through the air, toxic vapors fill the atmosphere and powerful welding equipment is routinely operated without proper eye protection. All this for wages as low as 100 taka a day (around $1.50).

The harvest reaped from these gigantic wrecks provides one of Bangladesh’s primary sources of metal and is a valuable source of revenue for the local economy. Currently, the cost of breaking large ships in developed countries (including removing deadly asbestos linings), along with potentially expensive insurance and health risks, has rendered ship breaking no longer economically viable in many parts of the world.

In more developed countries, the process of removing metal for scrap often costs more than the eventual sale value of the scrap itself. Yet in countries like Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, shipyards operate without the risk of injury claims or the expense of properly equipped and trained workers, making the process altogether more lucrative — if no less stomach churning.

These moving images were taken by Saiful Huq, the latest in a long line of talented Bangladeshi photographers documenting the living and working conditions of their homeland. Saiful claims that from his “very first days as a photographer” he wanted to tell stories. These ghostly shots do just that, but it’s not a story that makes for comfortable viewing — especially for those who reside in the countries manufacturing the ships that find their way to Chittagong.

Bangladesh’s ship breaking industry feeds 3 million people a year and provides the bulk of the metal making up new additions to the nation’s infrastructure. However, as Saiful so succinctly points out, “the magnificent buildings, bridges and flyovers of tomorrow are being built with iron from these yards… but the people who make it possible, risking their own lives for $2 a day, will never be in those skyscrapers.”

The ethical concerns that surround ship breaking yards across the Indian subcontinent are complex and intersecting. On the one hand, they provide a ready source of employment and income for thousands of workers and their families, as well as fueling the economy of several burgeoning nations. Yet unfortunately, such employment, opportunity and growth do not equal prosperity. Pitifully low wages, as well as the risk of injury and harm, are very pressing realities; is there not a sense in which the nations sending their ships to these yards are adopting a damaging, “out of sight, out of mind” policy? This policy is not far from feeding scraps to a dog to dispose of them.

Whatever our personal perspective, we’d do well to remember that recycling is not always the principled lifestyle we envisage it to be. For some, recycling is a necessity, a means to feeding and clothing their families, and one that makes good use of the detritus of developed countries, preventing waste; but we should ask ourselves, what price are we prepared to pay for a greener world?

Many thanks to Saiful Huq for allowing us to use his beautiful photo set, “Life in the Ship Breaking Yard.” If you’d like to see the full set of these wonderful images, as well as Saiful Huq’s other work, visit his site here.

What am I going to do for Earth Day this year? Well, for one, I will be working at a local art gallery (my part-time job). I will greet customers with a “Happy Earth Day!” One piece in the gallery, painted by Los Angeles-based artist Sasso, is titled “Green House Effect”, which can easily be a conversation piece any day, but especially on Earth Day.

Miami's Bayfront Park is the perfect place to relax and enjoy the environment.

At the gallery, I will keep the AC off and use a fan to cool the space. This change will save about 4 kWh a day, according to Florida Power & Light Company’s energy calculator.

Once I get off work, I will spend some time outside. Whether I go for a run, walk to my nearby park or cuddle up on my balcony with a book, I think the main point of Earth Day is to reconnect with the earth, and staying outside will keep my mind in the right place.

I’m going to keep my computer off (yikes!) all day. According to the energy calculator, my computer uses 62 kWh of power per month. One day without my computer will save about 2 kWh.

Can I survive a day without Twitter, Facebook, Hulu or 1-800-RECYCLING? Probably so, although I admit it will be difficult. I will pick up my current book club book and drift away into the story.

I’m going to clean out the old clothes in my closet that I don’t wear anymore. (I have been wanting to buy new clothes, but because of money, space and guilt, I haven’t done so in a while.)

Then on Saturday, April 24, I’ll walk to Miami’s Bayfront Park for the Miami Goin’ Green Earthday Festival, where I’ll participate in a citywide clothing swap. There will also be electronic recyclers at the festival, so I’ll bring my old cell phone to recycle, since it has taken up space in my drawer since February. I’m also looking forward to the festival’s seminars, particularly the Green & Local Food: Sprouts 101 talk by health counselor Rachel Katz.

What are your Earth Day plans, 1-800-RECYCLING readers?

Miami

On Saturday, April 24, 2010, Miamians can attend Bayfront Park’s free Goin’ Green Earth Day Festival. There will be a free bike valet at the festival, or you can take the Metromover, downtown Miami’s free public people mover, and exit at the stop right at Bayfront Park. Pack up your unwanted clothes and lug them to the park for a giant clothing swap. Recyclers will be on site, so you can also bring old electronics to recycle, as well as sensitive documents to shred and recycle. At the Eco-Tent, workshops and seminars will cover topics such as green parenting, local food, making your own cleaning products and green mobility in Miami. Bring the kids! The event will also feature a solar-powered Nintendo Wii and a “mad science” lab for the younger greenies. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

To the west in Doral, you can attend the fourth annual Hispanic Earth Day Celebration on April 22, 2010, starting at 8 p.m. The festival will feature Latin music, sustainable and green products, raffles and prizes and talks about green issues and their possible solutions. The event is organized by Common Ground for Conservation and will be held in Doral’s Solare Garden.

Fort Lauderdale

Doral's Solare Garden hosts the Hispanic Earth Day Celebration.

Broward County residents can spend Saturday, April 24, 2010 at the Community Fair, organized by Children’s Services Council. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., volunteers will give away freebies such as bicycle helmets, seedlings, refreshments, coloring books and more. The radio station 103.5 The Beat will be on site, and visitors will see a special performance by Earthman.

West Palm Beach

On April 22, 2010, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., West Palm Beach residents can reap the benefits of the annual Earth Day event hosted by Palm Beach State College. This year’s event theme is One Random Act of Green. The fair will feature music, organic food, environmental exhibits and earth awareness activities. You can also catch a movie here; organizers will show Food, Inc. and An Inconvenient Truth between 2 and 6 p.m.

Juno Beach

Green-minded citizens of Juno Beach are attending Loggerhead Marinelife Center’s Recycling is an Art event. Local students and artists will undergo a friendly competition painting recycling containers. The painting race starts on Earth Day, and participants have until Saturday, April 24, 2010 to finish their recycling-bin masterpieces. On Saturday, local radio station Gater 98.7 will have its beach clean-up while the recycling bins are being judged. Winners will be announced at 1 p.m. on Saturday, and later the recycling bins will be distributed throughout Palm Beach County.

Punta Gorda

This year, Punta Gorda will celebrate Earth Day with its third annual celebration. The Yoga Sanctuary and the Punta Gorda Chamber of Commerce are hosting the event on April 22, 2010, from 5 to 8 p.m. at Laishley Park. Bring a towel or yoga mat and stretch your limbs outdoors with other yogis. The event will feature environmentally friendly vendors that will show visitors “10 ways to go green,” and children can visit the kid’s tent for kid’s yoga, environmental tips and games, water conservation and trivia. Live music, spa treatments, henna artists and a meeting of green-minded individuals should make this Earth Day celebration a fine event. Any donations from the event will go to the Charlotte Harbor Environmental Center.