The initiative will help provide education and job training in Haiti.
All those printer cartridges from HP that usually cost an arm and leg will start helping to do some good in the world beyond your prints of kitten photos. During an event at its headquarters, HP announced that it is using recycled plastic from Haiti to manufacture select cartridges.
The initiative will help create jobs in Haiti and provide educational opportunities and scholarships for children. More importantly, its goal is to get the kids who are collecting recycled bottles out of landfills and into schools. Plus, it helps support their parents and other adults with safety and job training. The partnership will also help provide medical care.
HP is teaming up with Thread, a company that already uses recycled bottles from Haiti and Honduras to create clothes. The fabric it produces is used by Timberland and Kenneth Cole. In addition to cleaning up the world and helping create a job market, Thread is trying to reduce child labor by creating an environment that employs older family members. Part of that includes starting a coalition that HP is part of.
The First Mile coalition which includes HP, Thread, Timberland, Team Tassy and ACOP helps get kids in school in addition to offering employment opportunities for adults and medical care. Of course, it also reduces the amount of plastic bottles that end up in landfills and in our oceans. So maybe paying those high ink prices is worth it.
vendredi 16 juin 2017
mercredi 14 juin 2017
300 unique New Orleans moments: More than 10,000 Haitian immigrants find refuge in New Orleans in 1809
Advocate Staff Report JUN 13, 2017 - 6:00 AM (0)
LSU Museum of Art celebrates Haitian culture through art exhibit _lowres
Advocate staff photo by ROBIN MILLER --
The interwoven history of St. Domingue, now Haiti, and New Orleans predates the founding of city. Haiti was the jumping off point for Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville when in 1698 he traveled to the Gulf Coast to establish a settlement.
But it was a century later that Haiti and Haitians had a true impact on New Orleans. In 1791 as slaves started revolting in Haiti, whites and free blacks flocked to New Orleans where they influenced, among other things, the rebuilding of the city after the fire of 1794 with their Creole cottages and another infrastructure.
Though the Spanish governor and later American officials tried to stem the flow of Haitian immigrants over concerns of spreading discontent and revolution, the efforts were futile. In 1809, New Orleans’ population was doubled by an influx of about 10,000 of Haitians by way of Cuba — including 3,100 free persons of African descents. These free men and women of color grew an already large population of free persons of color in the city.
And together, the Haitian Creoles and the original French Creoles continued to build a largely French society, even as the United States took over the territory.
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/tricentennial/article_e8f6b294-417c-11e7-9744-43f8454a0c6f.html
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| Jean-Baptiste Jean's 1976 painting, 'Market,' is part of the LSU Museum of Art's exhibit, 'The Carnival, the City and the Sea Haitian Art from the Perry Smith Collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.' The exhibit runs through March 20. |
Advocate staff photo by ROBIN MILLER --
The interwoven history of St. Domingue, now Haiti, and New Orleans predates the founding of city. Haiti was the jumping off point for Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville when in 1698 he traveled to the Gulf Coast to establish a settlement.
But it was a century later that Haiti and Haitians had a true impact on New Orleans. In 1791 as slaves started revolting in Haiti, whites and free blacks flocked to New Orleans where they influenced, among other things, the rebuilding of the city after the fire of 1794 with their Creole cottages and another infrastructure.
And together, the Haitian Creoles and the original French Creoles continued to build a largely French society, even as the United States took over the territory.
http://www.theadvocate.com/new_orleans/entertainment_life/tricentennial/article_e8f6b294-417c-11e7-9744-43f8454a0c6f.html
lundi 12 juin 2017
Ocean plastics from Haiti’s beaches turned into laptop packaging
By Anita Makri
What if pieces of plastic strewn across the world’s beaches ended up in brand new computer boxes, not floating in the middle of the ocean or lodged inside seabirds?
That’s what computer company Dell has set out to do, testing a supply chain that sees litter picked up from Haiti’s beaches and worked into recycled packaging.
Anyone now buying the XPS 13 2-in-1 laptop can expect to find the machine sitting on a tray that’s 25 per cent ocean plastic – complete with an image of a whale and a link that leads to information about marine litter.
More than 5 trillion pieces of plastic float in the world’s oceans, breaking into smaller pieces and sinking to the ocean floor or hurting animals that get entangled in bags or eat pieces with sharp edges.
Dell estimates that its programme, a first for the industry, will take around 8000 kilograms of plastic out of oceans this year.
“We’ll be using 8 tonnes of ocean plastics, and we will be scaling in the coming years,” says Louise Koch, Dell’s corporate sustainability lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who presented the initiative at last week’s World Circular Economy Forum in Helsinki, Finland.
Up to 40 per cent of plastic litter dumped on land enters the oceans each year, estimated to amount to between 4 million and 12 million metric tons in 2010.
The UN, which last week held its first conference focused on oceans, has praised Dell for the initiative. But not everyone is convinced it will make a real difference.
“Most marine debris does not reach the oceans via beaches,” says Emma Priestland, marine litter policy officer at the NGO Seas at Risk. It gets in mainly through rivers, landfills near the coast, or the shipping and fishing industry, she says. “What is on those beaches has most likely been washed up there,” says Priestland. “Recycling it will be difficult and energy-intensive.”
Mine Banu Tekman at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, agrees that the impact is likely to be small, but says it is a great initiative for raising awareness.
It will take a large number of companies getting involved in this type of recycling to see a benefit for the environment, says Francois Galgani, an expert on plastics pollution at French institute IFREMER.
Cleaning up the beaches Koch admits that Dell has yet to measure how energy-efficient the process is, but says the carbon footprint is bound to be smaller than using virgin plastics. And stopping plastics from washing into the ocean can make a difference, she says.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cleaning up beaches helps cut down on the tiny pieces floating in oceans, because it plugs one big source of ocean pollution.
Dell makes sure that the plastic coming from Haiti is properly sorted so it’s the right quality and does not contain toxic substances. It does this by collaborating with informal workers who already make a living by sorting through waste and selling it to local middlemen.
“We work with them and train them on how to distinguish between different kinds of plastics,” Koch says. “So we are actually contributing to creating jobs, which I think is fantastic.”
But creating jobs risks perpetuating the problem, according to Ann Dom, deputy director of Seas at Risk. Despite Dell’s good intentions, she argues that the focus should be on avoiding the use of plastic in the first place. This can be done, she says, by promoting a circular economy with products that are designed in an eco-friendly and resource-efficient way, and are repairable and shareable, without the need for wasteful packaging.
Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2134334-ocean-plastics-from-haitis-beaches-turned-into-laptop-packaging/
That’s what computer company Dell has set out to do, testing a supply chain that sees litter picked up from Haiti’s beaches and worked into recycled packaging.
Anyone now buying the XPS 13 2-in-1 laptop can expect to find the machine sitting on a tray that’s 25 per cent ocean plastic – complete with an image of a whale and a link that leads to information about marine litter.
More than 5 trillion pieces of plastic float in the world’s oceans, breaking into smaller pieces and sinking to the ocean floor or hurting animals that get entangled in bags or eat pieces with sharp edges.
Dell estimates that its programme, a first for the industry, will take around 8000 kilograms of plastic out of oceans this year.
“We’ll be using 8 tonnes of ocean plastics, and we will be scaling in the coming years,” says Louise Koch, Dell’s corporate sustainability lead for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, who presented the initiative at last week’s World Circular Economy Forum in Helsinki, Finland.
Up to 40 per cent of plastic litter dumped on land enters the oceans each year, estimated to amount to between 4 million and 12 million metric tons in 2010.
The UN, which last week held its first conference focused on oceans, has praised Dell for the initiative. But not everyone is convinced it will make a real difference.
“Most marine debris does not reach the oceans via beaches,” says Emma Priestland, marine litter policy officer at the NGO Seas at Risk. It gets in mainly through rivers, landfills near the coast, or the shipping and fishing industry, she says. “What is on those beaches has most likely been washed up there,” says Priestland. “Recycling it will be difficult and energy-intensive.”
Mine Banu Tekman at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany, agrees that the impact is likely to be small, but says it is a great initiative for raising awareness.
It will take a large number of companies getting involved in this type of recycling to see a benefit for the environment, says Francois Galgani, an expert on plastics pollution at French institute IFREMER.
Cleaning up the beaches Koch admits that Dell has yet to measure how energy-efficient the process is, but says the carbon footprint is bound to be smaller than using virgin plastics. And stopping plastics from washing into the ocean can make a difference, she says.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, cleaning up beaches helps cut down on the tiny pieces floating in oceans, because it plugs one big source of ocean pollution.
Dell makes sure that the plastic coming from Haiti is properly sorted so it’s the right quality and does not contain toxic substances. It does this by collaborating with informal workers who already make a living by sorting through waste and selling it to local middlemen.
“We work with them and train them on how to distinguish between different kinds of plastics,” Koch says. “So we are actually contributing to creating jobs, which I think is fantastic.”
But creating jobs risks perpetuating the problem, according to Ann Dom, deputy director of Seas at Risk. Despite Dell’s good intentions, she argues that the focus should be on avoiding the use of plastic in the first place. This can be done, she says, by promoting a circular economy with products that are designed in an eco-friendly and resource-efficient way, and are repairable and shareable, without the need for wasteful packaging.
Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2134334-ocean-plastics-from-haitis-beaches-turned-into-laptop-packaging/
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