So just what was the brilliant idea Max came up with? Wallack invented a “Home Dome,” a structure made of plastic bags filled with Styrofoam packing peanuts, designed to serve as a temporary shelter for homeless people and disaster victims. It also would help relieve landfill growth. Max was awarded a $10,000 prize provided by the Intel Foundation, but said: “I don’t really care about the money. I care about helping people.”

What an awesome idea, and — what’s more — it isn’t even his first. According to the article, Wallack has been making waves since the ripe old age of six, with an invention contest win that landed him a trip to Chicago. It can only get bigger and better for this kid. Let’s hope he keeps his sights trained on saving the world.

I read an interesting blog from this weekend, about a challenge that — ideally — shouldn’t be any sort of challenge whatsoever. Can you go one day, three days, or even one week without accruing any new disposable plastic? Author and blogger Trudi Morgan-Cole caught wind of just such a challenge (albeit informal) on CBC Radio One’s The Current and decided not only to attempt participation, but to blog her experiences and results.

DAY ONE: Friday, July 11 — Good start. Forestalled the check-out guy from giving me a bag at Shopper’s Drug Mart, and remembered to bring my own mug when I met Tina for coffee at Starbucks. In the afternoon, the kids and their friends went to Needs and came home with Slushees in big ugly plastic cups. I wondered if I should count those but decided I couldn’t be entirely responsible for their choices. It’s not like I would have chosen to buy Slushees!! With that rationalization made, I was guilt-free until after supper, when I went to Needs to pick up a few last-minute supplies for the weekend — milk, chocolate bars, and marshmallows. Curses! Marshmallows come in a plastic bag!! I brought my own shopping bag to Needs, but I couldn’t get marshmallows without their little plastic bag.

Things do get off to a rocky start…

We stop at Subway for subs on the way to the beach. Jason and Emma come out of Subway swinging our four paper-wrapped subs stuck into — curses, foiled again!! — two plastic bags. I think Subway could easily switch to paper bags, but I don’t know how they’d react to people bringing in their own grocery bags to carry subs out in.

Would they? No one at Subway seems to mind when I carry my five-dollar foot-long out in my hands, and as far as alternative bags go I think we all know the equal perils of paper. So then is the sandwich store plastic bag an unavoidable casualty, or is this instance more a case of reusable bag shyness? It’s something to think about.

How does Ms. Morgan-Cole fare by the end of the week? Does she relapse hopelessly, or does she prevail and edge ever closer to a plastic-free existence? And how many lessons do we learn about life and ourselves along the way? Read on here, if you’re interested. If anything, it’s quite the accurate portrait of everyday struggles and the obstacles stacked against us at every turn.

Image via Flickr!

What would it look like if 504 plastic bags – one per student at Madison’s grades K-6 Central Avenue School – were tied together and stretched out across the school’s lawn? That’s what kindergartners through sixth graders at the school decided to discover on the morning of Monday, April 14, in honor of Earth Day.

With the help of the school’s Green Group club, the students made chains of plastic bags in their classrooms, and then gathered outside to tie them together.

The result: The bags stretched from the front door of the school to Central Avenue, and back – two and one-half times.

“This is how little things add up,” Principal Philip Kennedy told the assembled students.

Principal Kennedy followed up the lesson with a listed sermon of why plastic bags are a danger to the environment and how the correct answer to “paper or plastic?” is “neither,” but the message was abundantly clear from the start: one little plastic bag may seem inconsequential, but all little things add up and can become overwhelming astonishingly fast. (Because, really, what are five hundred bags? Fifty families’ grocery lists, at best?) The principal also stressed the importance and usefulness of reusable bags for grocery shopping, a concept that some children seemed already familiar with and eager to implement:

“My mother sometimes forgets to bring our reusable bags to the store,” allowed student Libby Johnson, a member of the school’s Green Group.

“But I’m going to remind her now.”

As icing on the environmental cake, Whole Foods Market stepped in and donated five hundred reusable shopping bags to Central Avenue School, one for every student and just a bit of an upgrade from the ones with which they walked in.