Conflicting scientists, greenwashing corporations, self-congratulatory conspicuous consumers of green products… I think the noise to signal ratio is getting a little out of whack. I have less direct connection to nature than I used to. As a child, I used to go fishing along a tributary of the Musquodoboit River. In the spring, green was everywhere. There were fiddlehead ferns emerging from sun speckled patched on the thick blanket of moss that lined the forest floor. There was the dark green of fir boughs.
When I grew up, I worked in the lumber industry to support my young family. The huge sawmill was fed a steady diet of wilderness and it grew as the wilderness shrank. I had already left the country when the sawmill shut down due to a perfect storm of financial factors. I felt sorry for all those who lost their jobs, but I was also kind of happy to imagine the forest having a chance to catch it’s breath. I was wrong about that. The greenwashing steamroller is cruising through my childhood home in the form of a multi-national company harvesting biomass. It’s not green and it’s not pretty. I applaud environmentalists that choose to devote their lives to trying to save wilderness areas from being consumed. I have had the pleasure of meeting and working with people who are passionate about sustainable forestry. These people are green.
Am I green? I’m having a hard time answering that question. I try to consume less. I do what I can to avoid polluting. I devote time and energy to creating this blog that is devoted to one focused issue. Sometimes I worry that I should be taking some sort of stand or shifting my focus to an issue that needs more attention. Other bloggers are doing a better job of bringing attention to the issue of plastic waste. My choice of location feels green to me in some ways but not in others. There are local vegetables available year round, but my drinking water comes from a desalination plant that burns fossil fuels. I can live car free, but friends and family have to fly on an airplane to visit me. Right now, I think that the greenest thing I can do is to teach my children to think in terms of sustainability.
This BBC video provides a look at the plastic items found in stomachs of albatrosses, ingested from the Pacific ocean. The organized collection of objects looks a lot like the stuff that I found on the shores of the Mediterranean. Cheap disposable plastic consumer goods are a worldwide phenomenon. The baby albatross has become the poster child for their consequence. They starve to death because their parents mistakenly feed them plastic objects. This tragedy is easy for people to grasp and it is heart wrenching for animal lovers. There are plenty of other species who suffer. Plastic breaks down in the ocean and in some areas the tiny bits of plastic outnumber plankton. Animals that have evolved to feed on plankton are eating mostly plastic. Toxins contained in and absorbed by this plastic enter the food chain.
I am somewhat romantic. Really, I am. I just don’t tend to equate romanticism with gift giving. Valentine’s Day will always have an element of meh for me thanks to the conspiracy between card manufacturers and elementary school teachers. I know that I am a bit of an exception in this regard, so I am offering this gift suggestion for the people that want to give a heart-shaped consumer good to their sweetie.
The folks at Wrapsacks have a Valentine’s package featured on their site that includes 2 reusable shopping totes that zip up into a heart-shaped pouch as well as 1 medium fabric gift bag. I have been using their shopping totes for the last 3 months and they are awesome. They have handles that are long enough to put over your shoulder but they are sized so that they aren’t too close to the ground if you choose to hold them in your hand. The handle material goes all the way down the sides of the bag so they aren’t the weakest part of the bag. I’ve had cheaper bags lose their handles after a few months of carrying stuff.
*Wrapsacks provided me with free bags for the purposes of review. I don’t typically ask for or receive review products because of my remote location.
The majority of cotton swabs these days are made using plastic for the stick. The packaging is also usually plastic. If you are looking for a greener alternative, I saw some organic cotton swabs with paper sticks and cardboard packaging at The Body Shop.
I did a bit of research on cotton swabs after noticing them washing up on the beach. I was not surprised to learn that the most common use for these things is to stick them in our ears. I was slightly surprised to read that medical professionals are telling us to stop that. If people listened to medical advice, this particular bit of plastic waste could be reduced by over 50%.
As far as all the other uses for cotton swabs goes, consider alternatives like toilet paper, tissues, or cotton balls. I stopped buying cotton swabs for the family ages ago and my makeup wearing daughters have adjusted somehow.
I bought potatoes in a big jute bag this morning. In retrospect, the greener choice may have been filling up a shopping bag with local potatoes. I am faced with shopping on a tighter budget these days and these seemed like a good value. There are lots of blog posts floating around about how to live green and frugal at the same time. Making greener choices and saving money at the same time can be a bit of a juggling act. The commercial food industry sees green as a value added part of their business. If money was not an issue for me I would be paying the premium for organic food all the time. Put your hand up if money is not an issue.
Here are some suggestions that might help the planet and your bank balance:
Minimize food waste through careful planning and list making. When perishable items do go bad, make a note to buy less the next time. Shopping at markets where you can pick over the produce yourself will reduce the amount of waste that you deal with at home.
Comparison shopping isn’t all about price. Find out which vendors carry local produce. Sometimes a compromise between distance and price is in order. For instance, we buy Sicilian oranges this time of year even though there are local ones available. The distance is just around the 100km mark and they get pretty cheap in the middle of the season.
Plan your meals around seasonal produce. As much as we love strawberries, we are willing to forgo the joy for ten months out of the year to save money and fossil fuels.
You can reduce the amount of pesticides you consume by choosing varieties of produce that are not subjected to as much of it in conventional agriculture. Sadly, potatoes are on the list of 12 foods to avoid if you are worried about pesticides.
Prepare the bulk of your meals at home from scratch.
Eat less meat. If you love meat and you have a handful of tried and true meat heavy meals that you don’t want to give up a good way to accomplish this is to commit yourself to a Meatless Monday. We haven’t done that, but we typically have more than one meatless day. High protein produce is less expensive and better for the environment than meat. During our year in Bizerte, we developed a taste for chickpea sandwiches.
I am not a zealot when it comes to buying ecologically responsible food. Our first priority is to provide a balanced diet for my family. I do make a conscious effort to keep my eye our for ways to do that in ways that are both cheaper and greener.
This post hasn’t had a lot to do with reducing plastic waste. When it comes to food I look for every affordable plastic free option and when there are none I consider whether that item is important enough to compromise. The best example I can think of where I spend extra to avoid plastic packaging is with pasta. Barilla, the BEST PASTA IN THE WORLD, is available in boxes. The less expensive alternatives are in plastic bags.
The swirling mass of plastic waste in the North Pacific is no laughing matter but Colbert manages to sieve out a few nuggets of humour as he discusses the issue with Captain Charles Moore
There were a lot of posters being put up in Gozo last month – promoting everything from live nativity reenactments to The Penis Monologues. Many of them are attached to the metal utility poles with plastic zip ties. Long after the events are forgotten and the posters have fallen victim to wind and rain, those plastic straps remain.
They do photo-degrade after many months to the point where they break and become litter. In all likelihood some of them find their way to sea.
Most communities have some kind of postering by-law. Here is the Toronto Postering By-Law as an example. They don’t allow the use of zip ties, but they don’t expressly prohibit them either. I have been in only a handful of large cities in the past decade and my impression is that paste is a pretty common method of securing posters. Staples on wooden utility poles can quickly accumulate and become a dangerous eyesore. Using wheat paste is a better choice than staples or clear plastic tape.
Putting up posters is a resource intensive way to promote a cause or event but since it is inexpensive compared to buying time on radio or TV, it is an overused tactic. Word of mouth and social media marketing can probably do more to generate interest.
I recently received two beautiful cotton batik reusable shopping bags from Wrapsacks.com. These bags fold and zip into a compact size. I like the way that the outside of the storage pouch doubles as a reinforced bottom for the bag. I am happy to finally have a grocery bag with shoulder length straps. Upon closer examination, I noticed that the strap material goes all the way down the sides of the bag and into the reinforced bottom. This should make them a lot more durable than the cheap bags that I bought on the street in Bizerte. The cheap bags have mostly held up for more than a year, but there have been two handle failures. One failure was the result of very heavy groceries and the other bag got caught in a bus door with me still standing on the sidewalk.
Catherine loves the ‘Marrakesh’ design (shown above). When I added this brand of bags to my reusable bag roundup earlier this month, I mentioned the wide variety of designs. Most of the designs are what I would describe as pretty. They were smart to include a design that’s not pretty and, strangely enough, it’s my favorite. The ‘Pedal Power’ pattern has black block printed bicycles and bicycle chains over a background of earthy oranges and browns. It would be perfect for anybody who drives their bike to the farmer’s market.
Michael Miner, the co-creator of Wrapsacks, regularly visits the production facility in Indonesia where the bags are ethically produced. While he was there recently, he took some stunning photographs of the batik dyeing process. I love the fact that they are still using the power of the sun as a dye fixative.
It’s a nice coincidence that I received these free review samples right before leaving for Gozo, where the plastic shopping bag has just recently become the target of some regulation. They had tried a small bag tax years ago, but retailers were willing to absorb the cost rather than inconvenience customers who were set in their ways. Now they charge 0.18 Euros.
Despite my good intentions and my preaching to the children about the evils of plastic, we have accumulated a handful of DVD cases over the past couple of years. I am dwelling on them now because I am busy packing and I need to jettison anything we can do without. I struck upon the idea of giving our empty cases to a local rental place with the idea that he can use them rather than buying new ones. This strategy wouldn’t work in the Blockbuster part of the world. Here on the frontier, it’s more of a DVD-R rental business model…
The DVD-R store was closed when I walked down the street. The weather’s nice so I just put my little stack of empty cases plus 4 DVDs that had no English audio on the doorstep with a little note that said ‘Gratuit’ The cases are the exact type that he uses for his display , so I think they will get used rather than thrown in the garbage.
Reuse is always better than recycling. Reducing is even better. I don’t watch very many movies and I hardly ever buy them in the form of DVDs. Renting movies should be an action that uses less plastic than buying. Unfortunately, many people have helped make places like Blockbuster spread because we all want to be able to watch a movie the moment that it is released. You do the math. Big video rental stores buy huge quantities of plastic DVDs and packaging so they can guarantee that it is available whenever you want it. The aftermath of this is that those physical products are greatly devalued after a few weeks. How many people are going to get duplicate DVDs from cheap friends for Christmas this year?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for the providers of entertainment media to have a master copy and reproduction rights in each location? What about switching to some kind of digital file that cannot be copied? Every loyal customer could have a purpose specific flash drive that they bring to the rental store. When you pay to rent a new movie, they remove the ones that you have rented previously. I would love to get some feedback about this idea. Maybe it’s already happening. Maybe there is some fatal flaw in my logic. Let me know.
