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Crocs are made from ethylene vinyl acetate. That should be enough to make me hate them, but footwear is complicated. Traditional materials like leather cause pollution during processing. Shoes are often made in sweatshops. The list goes on, it’s hard to get a guilt free shoe if you are a conscious shopper. I have been buying second hand as a way to dilute my responsibility, but that isn’t a sustainable strategy for everybody.

I don’t own any Crocs. The first time I noticed a guy wearing them was in 2003 on the packaging line at JustUs! Coffee. They were on the guy that had a thrift store shirt that said ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ but with ‘Don’t’ crossed out. Edgy.

I just heard that Crocs, Inc is on the ropes financially. Part of the problem is that they made a durable product for a finite market. The original models are one piece of molded plastic. From an environmental standpoint, they are better than a lot of conventional shoes because they can be recycled easily and cost effectively. If they had become even more popular than they did, I would expect to see drop boxes outside of stores for worn out Crocs. I don’t have any statistics for recycling rates for Crocs. I am guessing that a lot of them are taking up space in the backs of closets and that plenty of pairs are also in landfills and in the environment. If Crocs had promoted its product as the ideal recyclable shoe, they might have sold better. Shoe companies that do promote green models often use recycled materials.

I cannot find any information that would indicate that Crocs highlighted recycling or that they facilitated it. Treehugger put in their two cents back when the trend was at its height. Some key points they made were that they are lightweight and made in an efficient way. A big drawback that Treehugger noted was the over consumption of Crocs resulting from their trendiness and cheapness. In addition to the 8 million real Crocs per year, counterfeiters were adding plenty of plastic shoes as well. Crocs is or has been fighting 11 different companies who allegedly infringed on their proprietary process. I am pretty sure the items in my photo are Crocoffs.

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We give our children a small weekly allowance because we want them to learn some valuable lessons about money. Corporations provide them with goods and services, but they aren’t all that interested in teaching my children valuable lessons.

We do impose some limits on what our kids buy for a number of reasons such as safety and nutrition, but we try not to be so strict as to diminish the idea that the money is for their discretionary spending. They listen to me give a speech every time they come in the house with a plastic soft drink bottle. I am an accomplished public speaker, but they seem to see this as negative reinforcement nonetheless. They opt for glass bottles or cans more often than not.

Other than the plastic bottles, I mostly let things slide. There are a few things that bother me.

Kinder Surprises are my enemy #1 when it comes to junk food. Thankfully, my kids have outgrown them. Kinder makes a candy bar without the surprise. It comes in a plastic wrapper inside which there are two fingers of candy in their own individual plastic wrappers.

Individual serving cakes are another pet peeve. My teenage son considers one cake to be 1/2 a serving.

The brand name imported candy bars are bad value and they probably have a bigger environmental cost than the locally manufactured treats.

Giving the kids and allowance and having them be less environmentally responsible than me is a situation that I am going to just live with. If I felt like something had to be done, there are a few options.

I could spend some of my own money to stock the cupboards with fair trade organic chocolate bars in foil wrappers, home baked cakes and soft drinks in returnable bottles. I don’t know what the kids would buy if all their sugar cravings were being met in house.

I already make a point of providing a big cooked breakfast on a regular basis. French toast made from local bread and eggs comes plastic free. I make a topping from local seasonal fruit cooked in a pan with sugar that I buy by the kg without packaging. Sending the kids to school stuffed to the gills with carbs and protein might prevent the purchase of a few items of plastic packaged junk food.

A simple option to reduce the environmental impact of my kids’ allowance would be to reduce or eliminate the allowance itself. This would be a microcosm of what some people were saying about the economic crisis when it hit. Having less money to spend should always translate to less waste.

A very difficult option would be to dictate what the kids could and could not purchase. This would make allowance pointless. It wouldn’t make me very popular either.

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I was happy to see this big bin installed on the public beach access this summer. A lot of water bottles that may have otherwise ended up in the sea are placed in it. At the same time it serves as a daily reminder to me that collecting and recycling plastics is a costly and inefficient process. My blog is supposed to focus on the first ‘R’, Reduction. I have reduced my own consumption of plastic water bottles as much as possible by drinking filtered tap water.

Here are a few quotes that I have found, both optimistic and pessimistic about recycling plastic…

Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse.
- Gary Hirshberg

Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.
- South Lakeland Recycling

I am not sure how they got these numbers. The fact that a lot of plastic is transported for huge distances leads me to doubt the figure.

The majority of the plastics we recycle, regardless of type, end up in China, where worker safety standards are virtually nonexistent and materials are processed under dirty, primitive conditions…
- Mindfully.org

Recycling one ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Earth911

These quotes are starting to look like ‘tweets’. Maybe I will recycle them

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I am not an expert on this subject, please do yourself a favor and seek out people who are. I just wanted to point out that a great way to cut down on food packaging is to have the food sitting on the vine or under the ground just outside your backdoor.

I wrote about gardening with less plastic two summers ago. Not much has changed since then, apart from backyard gardening becoming super cool and important thanks to people like Michelle Obama.

I didn’t grow these tomatoes myself. The landlord that I had back in Gozo gave them to us and we dried them in the sun with lots of salt. They make great additions to salads or pizza.

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I was back on Gozo last week. It was great to be back there. I think I will always consider it to be one of my favorite places to live. Unfortunately, visiting involved drinking water out of plastic bottles

The summer heat resulted in my family drinking a lot of water. I didn’t count the bottles, there were a few in the rented flat when we arrived and the flattened bottles filled two large paper shopping bags when we tidied up at the end of our stay.

The tap water there is distastefully high in sodium. If I was a local green activist, I wouldn’t ask them to improve on this, since the water comes from a diesel powered desalination plant. It removes enough salt to meet the standard for safe drinking water.

When we were living on Gozo, we opted for a purified water delivery service that used refillable 20 liter jugs. Homeowners on Gozo often choose to install inline filtration systems to provide drinking water. Neither of those options are practical for a one week vacation.

I wrote about my setbacks and victories related to drinking water back in February. When I am visiting places in the future I think I will spend some time searching for accommodations that have some kind of water filtration. I have stayed at a hostel in Florence that had a drinking water dispenser. I’m not a big fan a posh hotels and I suspect that they wouldn’t go that route as it would cut into their sales of $5.95 plastic bottles of water. Beth Terry recently blogged about her switch from a hotel to a hostel after BlogHer, she is a very entertaining writer.

Proximity is important in my travel decisions for economic and ecological reasons. If I lived near a selection of destinations with tasty tap water, this problem would be solved.

A travel filter is another possible solution. There was no way that I was entrusting my Brita to the baggage handlers on my recent trip.

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