Sustainable Futures: Recycling Glass & Rehabilitating People
When President Obama talks about creating more and more green jobs, he often mentions the solar panel industry and the wind power industry. But there are plenty of green industries and green jobs around that fall under the radar. Take, for example, Sustainable Futures in Boise, Idaho. It’s a non-profit organization that offers green job vocational training to the jailed or paroled female inmates from Idaho’s Department of Corrections.
The company’s motto – close the loop, open the circle – encompasses the ideas of both recycling products and rehabilitating people. Nothing is thrown away – not the glass and not the people.
Sustainable Futures focus is on reducing glass waste by harvesting, cleaning, sorting and reusing wine bottles. Some are redistributed to local wineries, while others are transformed into decorative glassware that’s resold to restaurants and retailers. Broken glass is utilized for recycled glass countertops.
Like the wine bottles they work with, the female inmates who participate in the Sustainable Futures program are also transformed. Mostly uneducated and unskilled, these women develop the skills that let them turn trash into treasure. And while they are creating these treasures during their 12-week Sustainable Future’s program, they are also learning life skills and tools that will help them when released from prison back into society.
Sustainable Futures, which is a perfect working model of what green jobs should be about, is only a local concern at the moment. Here’s hoping that it will soon be replicated around the country and the world.
Image: Robert S. Donovan
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1 Comment
June 28th, 2009 at 8:21 am
I pressure-can my garden each year in infinitely recyclable jars made just for that purpose. I want to put my urban counterparts on notice here. The fuel required to make the jars you are obliged by situational necessity to toss, does not go unnoticed in a world rapidly running out of Oil! Your way of life may soon become obsolete due to its high oil consumption, just in getting food to you! Urbanites will pay first and dearest in the crunch soon upon us all, and we, the village and country dwellers will certainly try to help, and even overlook the American “Entitlement” syndrome, but sooner or later you lazy, convenience fattened, citified folk are going to have to work just as hard as we the survivors in the country-side to get along, or you will perish by the wayside of a rapidly changing society! Already, the McMansions in the ‘burbs have been attacked, and the urban pod is next on the block! We pipe you in food, power, clothes and luxuries and you exhale garbage that destroys our farmland! Assholes! Get out and scratch some earth, learn to grow something, feed yourselves! The corporate owned, unfeeling, union and gangster infested “Factory Farms’ are a single ‘ % ‘ point away from capital migration at any time, even to the Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong markets! and only a computer keyboard away nowadays! and with a flourishing Asia, your future prospects depending on capital in America look hungry to say the least! Better get farming Yankee Doodle! the crunch, the great repuglican depression and its monstrous paradigm shifts is far from over for you! P.S. GM (China) gained 32% last year while capital migration to Asia closed GM (U.S.A.) smoke that in your “Made in China” bong, Urbanite!
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