Is this cool or what? I’ve been trying to decide what to post today. What is the best way to mark the culmination of Earth Week? Instead of re-inventing the wheel with “365 Ways to Observe Earth Day,” I decided instead to recycle with a nod to activities I’ve enjoyed blogging about over the past few months. Enjoy!
If you’re a new visitor, we had a blast and lots of eco-friendly ideas during the Carbon Fast for Lent
I’ve also been blogging intermittently about Fun with Recycling
I thought of titling the post “Green Those Pearly Whites,” but even I have my limits! I was GoodSearching for toothbrushes with replaceable heads (re-use the handle, so only the head gets thrown away) when I stumbled upon an About.com post that opened up a whole new world of eco-friendly toothbrushes. (I’m a geek — I love this stuff.) Did you know you can buy a toothbrush made from recycled Stonyfield yogurt cups? Who knew? (I don’t typically like to plug specific brands, but this was too neat to keep to myself.)
I’m still looking for one with replacement heads, but this is pretty cool too. The company, Recycline, also offers replaceable razors with recycled handles. Thank goodness someone is making good use of all my yogurt containers!
Today’s mitzvah: Thousands of lbs. of toothbrushes wind up in landfills each year. Consider a recycled or recyclable toothbrush (check out Larry West’s About.com post for several options).
I’ve been blogging about Earth Day all week, without a peep about the ocean! Well that needs to change. Oceana is a fairly new nonprofit that combines public policy advocacy, science and economics, legal action, grassroots mobilization, and public education. They do good work, and you can help with a free click-to-give over on Care2’s Ocean site. How simple is that?
Today’s mitzvah: Visit Care 2’s Race for the Oceans and click the yellow box under the dolphin. Sponsors will make a small donation to Oceana, at no cost to you. To learn more about their cool work, visit their web site at Oceana.org.
We’ve signed up for green power, switched our lightbulbs, given up plastic bags, and I convinced my students not to use cover sheets for the rest of their assignments this semester (big classes; it adds up). And now that the weather is finally nicer, I'm shifting some public transit trips to foot power, quite happily. But I’ve been looking the other way when it comes to 90% of our recycling each week: soda cans and bottles, and those little plastic yogurt cups. I know, I know: I should kick the diet soda habit altogether. I did, though, think I had found a more earth friendly solution, in a home-based make your own soda gadget. But the gizmo uses polycarbonate bottles, which have been receiving so much press this week as Canada moves to ban the chemical P.B.A. in products that come into contact with food or beverages. (Popular bottle maker Nalgene today also announced plans to stop manufacturing polycarbonate bottles.) So for now, I guess I’m sticking with the recyclable bottle status quo.
Yogurt appears to hold out more promise. I remembered babysitting in high school for a family that had a little 6-cup yogurt maker, so I knew such things existed at least in the past. It turns out they survived the 70s, enjoyed a revival of sorts in the excitement about thin French women, and if one hunts it’s possible to find devices that use glass cups, which avoids the whole PBA problem. As reluctant as I am to add even a small appliance in the kitchen . . . we really do go through a lot of yogurt. Even though the recycling that services my building does take the little cups, it’s an awful lot of waste. I think homemade yogurt will also be healthier, although as the diet soda paragraph suggests, health isn’t always a selling point at Chez Daily Mitzvah.
Today’s mitzvah: What’s your environmental blind spot, the area that’s stubbornly un-greening the works? Consider tackling it for Earth Day.
Nah, it’s not me, I just like the photo! I click on a free “save the rainforest” link every day, but forests in the U.S. are being felled as well, and for an easily avoidable reason: packaging for the country’s insatiable appetite for fast food. The Petition Site is hosting “Stop the 11 Fast Food Junkies,” in conjunction with the Asheville, NC based Dogwood Alliance. According to the latter, in 2007:
the average American ate fast food 150 times, and generated 300 pounds of packaging waste
Americans used 15 billion disposable hot beverage cups
32 percent of the U.S. domestic waste stream consisted of containers and packaging
Less packaging, more post-consumer recycled content, ensuring the paper for all these wrappers and other logo-driven packaging isn’t drawn from endangered forests — the Dogwood Alliance is pressuring fast-food purveyors to address all these issues. Their special focus is southern U.S. forests which are being heavily tapped for burger wrappers and other paper-based packaging, most of which goes straight into landfills.
Today’s mitzvah: Use the that freest of all weapons, your signature, to help put pressure on the big fast food chains to reduce and improve their paper-based packaging, to help preserve southern forests.
If you live in the Midwest and have old TVs, cell phones, broken VCRs (my contribution this year, since mine just bit the dust) — or expired medications — check this out. It’s a good alternative to flushing medications and messing up the water supply, or trashing old electronics and gadgets, which fill up landfills and often have toxic components.
The Great Lakes link includes a list of collection areas. If you live elsewhere in the U.S., check here for your region.
After I added the most recent post — really just minutes later — I read a New York Times article “Fuel Choices, Food Crises, and Finger Pointing.” Soaring world food prices, a grain shortage, and poor people pushed toward starvation — according to the article, plant-based biofuels may be the culprit. As countries rush to embrace biofuels in response to price-, environment-, and supply-based oil crises, the world’s poor may be paying the real price.
A perfect time to post on new corn-based products, eh? I felt so discouraged all day. After a lot of thought, here’s what I’ve taken way from this — none of it earth-shattering, but a reality check-in for me. First, consumption is a problem. Plant-based fuels (or switching from plastics to corn resin for disposable items) doesn’t address larger problems of too many cars and too much disposable stuff. Second, Newton’s third law of physics: for every action there’s an equal an opposite reaction. If more corn and grain is diverted to non-food uses, that means less grain available to feed people. Beyond Newton — the solutions that look like such a good idea today may (or more likely shall) have unintended consequences tomorrow. Maybe I’m just channeling my inner Pollyanna, but it seems like the response is to acknowledge there will be set-backs and disappointments, yet not stop trying. This is the only planet we get; might as well keep plugging away to take care of it.
Today’s mitzvah: stay hopeful. And for something practical: pop over to The Hunger Site, where sponsors will contribute food as a free thank you for your click.
I’ve faced the fact that I will never be No Impact Man (or even Low Impact Woman). I like to shop. But if one must buy things, I’ve been collecting links about consumer items that are not just recyclable but can literally be given back to the earth.
Cargo Cosmetic’s Plant Love lipstick line, which I haven’t tried, is either a great gimmick or an example of unusually responsible consuming. The lipstick comes in special cardboard packaging imbued with wildflower seeds. Instead of just throwing away the package, it can be moistened and planted, with wldflowers to follow. The lipstick tubes are also unusual: made with corn-based plastic they’re supposed to biodegrade completely within 80 days when exposed to sufficient heat and sun. (FYI, this won’t happen in a landfill — a reality check for all the biodegradable products, since landfills are airtight and stuff hangs around forever.) To complete the trifecta, Cargo donates $2 from every PlantLove lipstick purchase to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. The lipstick is available at several Nonprofit Shopping Mall vendors, including Amazon and Sephora, both of which will donate approx. 2% of your purchase price to a nonprofit of your choice when you use this link.
On a recent trip to the co-op I stumbled upon a resuable personal water bottle that also uses this corn-based technology. EnviroProduct’s Corn Resin Bottle is a resuable water bottle with a small screw-in carbon filter, so one can use regular tap water for DIY bottled water. The bottle is recomended for up to 90 uses, after which it is also guaranteed to decompose in 80 days in “commercial compost,” which would mean not in the regular landfill-bound trash.
Since any reason to plug The Lost Albatross is a good thing, blogger Emily posted a comment during the Carbon Fast for Lent mentioning BioBags, which are cool corn-based trashbags, as an alternative to the usual plastic trashcan liners. (BioBag also offers corn-based bags for cat litter liners and for cleaning up doggie waste.)
Today’s mitzvah: If you’re going to buy something anyway, why not make it plantable or disappear-able?
Since we all know I am lost without a theme . . . Earth Day is coming (April 22)! My university has proclaimed April 14–22 April as Earth Week, and who am I to argue. Welcome to an impromptu Earth Week here on the blog too.
To get us started, the trio people either love or hate, Blue Man Group! They’re supporting the very good web site www.stopglobalwarming.org, with a higher quality version of their video “Earth to America,” which I’ve YouTubed low-res, below.
Today’s mitzvah: What exceptionally cool idea do you have for Earth Day?
Is this cool or what? I’ve been trying to decide what to post today. What is the best way to mark the culmination of Earth Week? Instead of re-inventing the wheel with “365 Ways to Observe Earth Day,” I decided instead to recycle with a nod to activities I’ve enjoyed blogging about over the past few months. Enjoy!
