Pristine Planet held an event co-sponsored by the Placer County Office of Economic Development to promote Placer County green business. The event was held at the wonderful Placer Arts gallery.

We wanted to find out a bit more about plastic bags, and in particular the plastic shopping bag used at grocery stores and other shops. Here are a few quick facts (see below for details, sources, and calculations):

Pristine Planet is proud to sponsor the 2012 Marine Mammal Center's Run for the Seals!

Most pencils are made out of wood and graphite and since wood is used we wanted to find out how many trees it took each year to make pencils, especially since there are really cool pencils made out of recycled materials notably newspaper.

Using governmental and industry sources we calculate that at least 50 million plastic bottles are thrown away (not recycled) every day in the U.S.. Laid end to end, these bottles would stretch from San Francisco to New York city and back again. This is how we arrived at this number.

A few years ago I was helping my cousin build a deck in his backyard. Why I don't know. I've never done anything like that before, but I was actually quite surprised by how much I enjoyed the manual labor and using the power tools. One of the most interesting things about his deck is that he was building it from Trex. Trex is a plastic lumber that is almost 100% recycled plastic. I didn't know what it would be like to work with this kind of material. Whether we would need special tools, nails etc. From what I remember we used all the regular tools, and I became quite proficient at routing the plastic boards so they would fit together well.