Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

I just read a post on Eco Child’s Play about tests that show measurable amounts of BPA leaching from “BPA Free” baby bottles.

This is a frightening development for people who have been buying and using BPA Free plastic products. Recent studies has caused some concern that very low levels of this chemical can cause adverse effects in babies and young children. This is what caused consumers and in some cases governments to demand BPA free alternatives to polycarbonate. Breast feeding and/or glass baby bottles are worth considering. A lot of babies are going to grow up before there is a definitive study on whether there is an acceptable level of dietary BPA.

 Retweet This Post

Is burning plastic waste a viable solution?

I am putting this question out there, even though the idea doesn’t sit that well with me. This post sat as an unfinished draft from February until today.

Some scientists at Penn State have taken the idea and come up with some prototypes. These machines take non-recyclable plastic waste like plastic mulch film and irrigation tape and extrude and slice them into nuggets that can be added to the mix used at existing coal fired generators. They have also designed burners for applications like heating greenhouses.

Plastic was blended 5 and 10 percent by calorific content with coal. Dirty mulch film and drip irrigation tape from three States was made into Plastofuel™. It was then sliced into small pieces, then burned with the coal in a stoker simulator. Air emissions and burn quality were closely monitored. Test results were encouraging.

This idea is being put into practice to heat greenhouses in Pennsylvania. The research tested dioxin output from the process and it was well within EPA limits. I am concerned that any number of other toxins could be released into the air by this process.

I have had some time to think about this idea and I have thought of many reasons why it isn’t a good idea. The tidiest argument is that it’s application will not have any real impact on plastic litter in the environment. It will always be more cost effective to source agricultural plastic waste and pre-consumer waste than to collect or purchase actual litter.

Note: The emissions tests for this stuff was funded by the American Plastics Council, now called the American Chemistry Council.

 Retweet This Post

Your makeup case is probably not a place where you can make a big reduction in plastic waste. If you were to make a pile with all the plastic cosmetic containers that Tammy Fae Baker emptied during her life, it might be smaller than some of the piles of weekly plastic waste featured on the FakePlasticFish Show Us Your Plastic Trash challenge. I do think it is important to be mindful with all consumption, small changes can add up. Packaging isn’t the only environmental issue, the substances that we put on our faces are washed down the drain and/or tossed in the trash at the end of the day.

I am going to feel hypocritical as I write this post. I am raising two teenage daughters and the only advice that I ever give them is “You’re not going anywhere until you take some of that makeup off!”

Ok, I also advise them against using really cheap makeup that is likely to contain bad chemicals. I also make the suggestion that they go without makeup more often.

Since I can’t claim to ‘walk the walk’ with regard to environmentally conscious cosmetics and I am not that qualified to ‘talk the talk’, I will simply summarize the Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle options.

Reduce is EASY. Don’t wear makeup. If that’s too much to ask, just try to wear it less. If you already have a big pair of sunglasses, wear them instead of makeup for your weekend coffee run or for those mornings when you are just going to chauffeur your kids and the head home. One very extreme option is to get the tattoos that are commonly referred to as permanent makeup . I do not recommend it. I have heard a rumor that Sarah Palin has permanent makeup. If that was true, I would have to admit that it is possible to have it done convincingly and with some degree of class. Even so, the pigments might not look right when you have aged and they might look dated even sooner.

Reuse doesn’t really apply to makeup. If you think of a way that it does, please comment. You can potentially reuse the cosmetic containers for various odd crafty projects. I guess that’s better for the environment than throwing them in the garbage. If you think you might want to make your own cosmetics, you can save old containers to refill. You can make green choices for ingredients when you make your own makeup.

Recycling plastic and glass cosmetics containers was a problem, and a few businesses have offered a solution. Origins is one such company. They accept bottles, jars and tubes from all cosmetic brands as long as they are empty. Polypropylene (#5) plastics are common in cosmetic packaging and many municipal recycling programs don’t accept them. If you don’t live near an Origins shop, check with other chain stores about recycling programs.

Photo Credit: QueerCatKitten

 Retweet This Post

There is a tremendous survival advantage to being fussy about water. There are a number of protozoa, bacteria and parasites that can potentially inhabit drinking water and people are dying every day from them.

When people in developed nations buy a plastic bottle of water the key motivations are convenience and security. The processing and containment of the water in a sealed bottle gives the perception of purity.

Advertisers do what they can to reinforce that perception. The perception flies in the face of facts. Tap water is safe to drink. An environmental working group tested water in 2004 and found that over 90% of the sources were in compliance with EPA standards. If you are not confident in your town’s water, you can request a copy of their annual water quality report. They are required by federal law to provide this to you on request.

Comparing tap water to bottled water enters apple/orange territory because they are regulated by two completely separate government agencies. The EPA keeps an eye on tap water while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the watch dog for bottled water. I was surprised to read that it is permissible for bottled water to contain trace amounts of E. coli or fecal coliform. The EPA has zero tolerance for E. coli. I have some education in microbiology and food sciences and I have to wonder if the EPA has a different definition of nothing.(update: After posting this, someone left a comment letting me know that the FDA has finally made a substantial change *PDF in relation to coliform testing and elimination in bottled water.)

The source for many brands of bottled water is, as you may have heard, tap water. Commercial filtering of this tap water reduces impurities. Many sources of safe tap water don’t taste that great. I have sampled water with of tastes like sodium, sulfur compounds, calcium, and of course chlorine.

If you want to stop buying bottled water, but you just can’t bring yourself to drink straight from the tap, I have a few suggestions. The very first thing that you should do is to determine whether the water is in fact safe to drink. You can get the municipal report, but I would also suggest getting a sample direct from your tap for testing. There may be companies or agencies that will do this for you free of charge. If your tap water if safe to drink, the next step is to see if you can get used to the taste. I grew up on a farm in the country with delicious well water. I always had to get used to anything else when I left home. If you find it gross, try refrigerating it for an hour or more in a glass pitcher.

I use a Brita pitcher to improve the taste of the water that comes from the tap here in Tunisia. I did try it unfiltered straight from the tap and I also tried boiling it. Boiled water is not very palatable. Refrigerating it improved it marginally.

Brita water filters are not available in local stores. I picked one up in Italy this past winter. My water has a very detectable chlorine odor. The Brita reduced this quite a bit. Before we picked up the Brita, we had been drinking bottled water for a few months. The accumulation of plastic bottles was killing my soul. With the family drinking about 1.5 liters a day, we are reducing our plastic waste by 5 bottles per day with the Brita. I love my Brita, but it is plastic and it is an expense. I suggest you try to get used to your tap water first. If you have small children, be sure to test your tap water for lead. Children are much more sensitive to lead contamination than adults.

How the Brita® Pitcher Filter works

As you’ll see below, the process may sound complicated, but it’s really quite simple. All it takes to create fresher, great-tasting water are three separate filtration processes packed into every Brita® Pitcher filter.

• A sieve and bottom filter mesh screen out larger particulate matter from the water
• Activated carbon granules act like a sponge, sucking up Chlorine (taste and odor)
• An Ion Exchange Resin acts like a magnet to attract and hold the impurities Copper, Mercury, Cadmium and Zinc, at the molecular level

How the Brita® Faucet Filter works

• An added layer around the filter traps large particulate matter from the water
• Activated powdered carbon acts like a sponge, sucking up Chlorine (taste and odor and Benzene)
• A zeolite acts like a magnet attracting Lead

 Retweet This Post

What does this guy think of my efforts to reduce plastic waste?

I was walking down a hill in a part of town that was evidently far outside of the ‘Zone Touristic’ and I saw this guy pulling his cart up the hill. I used basic sign language to ask if it was ok to take his picture. Later, I crossed the street to thank him and give him a dinar. I don’t ask people involved questions about their business in this country. In part it is because we have a shared second language and my fluency is lacking. Add to that the fact that a minority of the people here aren’t fluent in French either.

The real issue is social. I empathize with these guys and imagine being very annoyed by a foreigner, who I would perceive to be rich and privileged, asking me for details about my hard fought existence. When I was in my 20s, I had a job as part of the landscaping crew at an international airport. One day, a Japanese tourist stopped for a few moments to take pictures of me digging a trench. He was a gardening enthusiast and he asked me about the specifics of the task. I was, specifically, burying an extension cord for a temporary traffic sign. He was disappointed in the answer and I didn’t feel like I got any benefit from the interaction either.

Even if it was possible for me to have a free flowing conversation with a bottle collector in a developing country, I am not sure what questions to ask. I could ask how long he works each day. I could ask him if he earns enough money to provide for his needs. I could ask him if he is choosing this work over any social programs that would also provide for his needs. I could ask him if he gets any satisfaction from removing litter from the environment (my impression is that dumpsters are the preferred source of bottles).

Since I can’t ask or answer these questions, I will have to add some value to this post by linking to what other people have written on the subject.

Here is a unique perspective from a Chinese blogger who is spending time in Europe. Qian Qin was surprised to see bottle collectors in Berlin and he decided to do the math. He determined that they were rivaling local waiters in potential earnings. There is a 25 cent deposit in Germany. This means that most people don’t trash their bottles, but you can always count on a few.

A Canadian commenting on Qian Qin’s post said that the refund is only 0.5 cents there. It’s more than that in some provinces. When I was working in a big factory in 2001, there were two older employees that had a turf war about the empty pop cans in the numerous lunchrooms around the property. They felt that it was worthwhile to spend their breaks from $10-17/hr jobs to collect cans. The shopping cart guys in the cities mostly seemed a little crazy.

Here in northern Africa, they bottle collectors don’t look crazy, for the most part. They are typically old enough to not have kids to feed.

John Romankiewicz wrote a post about recyclable collectors in Beijing. There are an estimated 160,000 people gathering all kinds of discarded materials in that city. The global economic crisis hit their bottom line hard, as I suspect it did to people in this business almost everywhere.

With so many poor people relying on our culture of waste, I worry about the consequences of the efforts of people like me to reduce that waste. The hard fact is, things has to change.

 Retweet This Post

The Columbus Washboard Company has an awesome website. It makes me happy. There is only one aspect of their business that makes me sad. They are the ONLY washboard manufacturing company left in the USA.

Clothes washing is a chore that is automated for the vast majority of people living in America and other developed countries. For many people, going green in the laundry room means buying big appliances that use less water and electricity than their old ones. They might also choose soaps or detergents that pollute less and come in sustainable packaging. Washing all your clothing by hand sounds like absolute madness.

When we moved to a developing country, we were a bit surprised to find that our options for furnished accommodation did not include washing machines. We were very surprised to find that it is in fact humanly possible to do all your laundry by hand. When we decided that we staying long term, we bought a twin tub washer spinner. It is, unfortunately, a very big hunk of plastic (I never claimed to be perfect). I am able to effectively reuse gray water from the laundry for toilet flushing and watering the garden (non-food).

I had my eyes peeled for a washboard during the weeks that we were hand washing. There was still a washboard in use when I was growing up. It was mostly for socks. My mom insisted on us washing our own stinky sports socks. Washboards are popular with the Amish and with soldiers. If you are planning to make some changes in your laundry procedure for the sake of the environment, give the old scrub board some consideration. Automatic washing machines don’t do anything magical, they just move your clothes around in some soapy water, remove the soapy water, rinse and repeat. Washboards are obviously labor intensive, but you could consider the chore to be part of your fitness regime. There’s probably a piece of equipment at the gym that simulates the main action required to wash socks on a washboard. I don’t know if it targets your abs.

Washboards work well with bar soap. Some people are moving to laundry soap in bar form to avoid excess packaging.

A lot of other household tools and gadgets disappeared for good when the avocado colored appliances landed on our planet back in the 70s. The washboard managed to hang on partly because it was in demand for alternate uses like musical percussion and decoration. It is also really useful.

Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker

Update: The question of drying clothes came up in the comment section and I mentioned wringers. I realized later that many people aren’t backwoodsy and ancient like me so they might wonder what I am talking about. Here is a photo, I am pretty sure they aren’t due for a comeback.

 Retweet This Post

Plastic patio chairs are ubiquitous where I am living. My rented flat comes complete with five of them. If I were furnishing a place of my own, I would splurge on well designed and constructed wooden chairs.

“Portland Chair
Made from 70% Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified Eucalyptus Cladocalyx, a Teak-like hardwood harvested from a plantation in South Africa. The folding chairs are sturdy and ergonomically designed allowing you to truly relax.”

Plastic chairs suck, and not just because they are non-biodegradable and made out a fossil fuels. They make horrible noises when you are scooting them around. They form a vapor barrier for your butt. If you ever do something to cause one of the legs to bend too much, the structural integrity is gone and the chair become a veritable death trap. They blow away in strong winds….

…Ok, I just did a quick focus group and I was confronted with the argument that plastic chairs actually don’t suck. They are sturdy. They are weatherproof. They are cheap. If one blows away in a storm, you are likely to find it still in one piece next door.

Plastic chairs are sold at prices that are almost surreal in their cheapness. We had a short discussion about the true cost of a plastic chair. My wife made my brain hurt by suggesting that we should be paying the future price of the oil that goes into making the chair. The present price of oil doesn’t accurately reflect its finite supply. The environmental costs are pretty hard to quantify.

 Retweet This Post

CBS took a moment away from reporting about how much media coverage Michael Jackson’s death is receiving to talk about bottled water and the people who are not in favor of it. They mention phthalates and they mention the price difference between bottle and tap, but they don’t mention plastic.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Drinking water from plastic water bottles when your local tap water is safe and healthy is a big waste of money and resources.

 Retweet This Post

I have never actually watched this movie. At this point it is quite possible that I never will. Nonetheless I am glad that it was made.

I think I have read a fairly broad swath of the source materials for this movie. I have watched the more recent animation describing the tipping point concept. I believe that human activity does impact the climate.

Here is an interesting paragraph from Roger Ebert:

Gore says that although there is “100 percent agreement” among scientists, a database search of newspaper and magazine articles shows that 57 percent question the fact of global warming, while 43 percent support it. These figures are the result, he says, of a disinformation campaign started in the 1990s by the energy industries to “reposition global warming as a debate.” It is the same strategy used for years by the defenders of tobacco. My father was a Luckys smoker who died of lung cancer in 1960, and 20 years later it was still “debatable” that there was a link between smoking and lung cancer. Now we are talking about the death of the future, starting in the lives of those now living.

The importance of other issues has occasionally made me question the importance of having a blog about reducing plastic waste. I have read comments from people suggesting that tiny green choices like buying a canvas shopping bag relieve average consumers (or more importantly producers of waste in all its forms) of their guilt and allow them to continue living in a grossly unsustainable fashion thinking that they are doing their bit to ’save the planet’.

I stopped at the curb to let a car pass before crossing the street today. This car had one of those fancy advertising graphic finishes (these are plastic BTW). It was advertising the local brand of bottled water and the French words on the doors said that you should drink at least 1.5 liters per day. They sell water in 1.5 liter containers. There are 90,000 people living in this town. I tried to picture 90,000 water bottles. The 5 bottles that I am NOT buying every day don’t really make much of a difference. I guess writing about them can only increase their impact.

 Retweet This Post

I have to confess that I have never thrown a party for dozens of people. I am an introvert. If I were to wake up as an entirely different person and decide to have a big bash for all of the acquaintances that I would call my friends, I would try to figure out an alternative to the disposable plastic beer glass.

Disposable plastic beer glasses are recommended by many authorities on serving alcohol at large parties…

…You need to invest in some plastic beer cups. The investment is relatively cheap. You can get a large stack of plastic beer cups for about the same price you are going to pay for a bottle of dish detergent to clean all those glasses.

The savings in time is astronomically higher. Instead of washing and drying all those glasses, just pull out a black plastic bag, sweep them all into it, and you’re done.

I think the most obvious alternative to plastic beer glasses is to have your guests drink straight from returnable glass bottles. The only drawback that I can see with this is the safety issue. I attended an Agricultural College in Canada. I saw a lot of beer drinking at pubs and events. Most of these events did not involve disposable cups and I can only remember a handful of bottle related injuries. One or two of them were very memorable.

A slightly more inventive alternative would be to ask your guests to bring their own drinking vessel. Those wacky medieval recreationists do that all the time.

Serving beer from plastic laundry detergent jugs is a step in the wrong direction. Don’t do it.

If your party is commemorating something important, you could shell out for keepsake glassware. If you bring home a beer glass or champagne flute from someone’s special day, don’t have it sitting on your windowsill filled with plant cuttings that you are trying to root when they visit you after the divorce. I’m just sayin’.

 Retweet This Post