Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

Use Less Plastic from TakePart on Vimeo.

This cause is really starting to gain some attention. There is now a big flashy site called Save My Oceans with a page devoted to the issue of plastic waste. I would love to see some statistics later on to see how much real reduction results from all of our efforts.

Glass Orange Juicer

Originally uploaded by AnnaAniston

You see a lot of fancy gadgets out there for making juice. The famous one is called the POWER Juicer. I use a basic glass orange juicer and it’s a pretty good workout for my forearms and wrists when I make lemonade for a family of five. I bought mine for a Euro.

Proponents of big expensive machines will say that they need it to make juice out of carrots and other hard and less than juicy produce. I am pretty sure you could eat the carrots raw in less time than it would take to clean your POWER juicer. Nutritionists will tell you that whole fruits and vegetables are better than juice. I will tell you that expensive hard to clean juice making appliances are a waste of money and resources.

I read somewhere recently that the US Army is the biggest polluter in the world. That is quite a bummer. But I decided to think about the military industrial complex as a huge untapped resource. If some amazing change in human nature and human society brought a lasting end to large scale conflict, we would have a lot of really neat stuff to reuse. 2,475,967 footlockers for starters. They would be great for container planting of vegetables. Maybe combat helmets are up to DOT standards for use by bicycle commuters.  I don’t really have any brilliant ideas.  I just know that resources are being created and used up in unfathomable quantities and the world isn’t getting any less fucked up.

Back in 2008, I spent far too much time doing research for an elaborate joke about Dennis Kucinich being a ventriloquist’s dummy.  I was surprised to find out that there was a post war boom in dummy manufacturing that was spurred on by a glut in surplus materials.  If we could somehow manage to put an end to the making of war, we would have a similar glut of material, maybe even bigger.  Who knows what cottage industries might spring up to make use if it.  Some materials could be repurposed for alternative energy projects.

Buying flowers for your Mother on Mother’s Day is pretty much a default behavior for many North Americans. I grew up in a rural area and I used to go out into the forest and find some mayflowers. When I was an adult living away from home, I would sometimes buy a hanging plant or a shrub. Cut flowers such as roses are the preferred option for many consumers and their demand fuels a big multi-national industry.

I was surprised to find out that over 75 percent of the 4 billion cut flower stems purchased in the U.S. come from Colombia and Ecuador. The conventional cut flower industry is far from green. It’s a very chemical intensive form of agriculture. There is of course lots of plastic involved in the production and packaging.

“I remember when it was all dotted with family farms, and now the Sabana is blanketed in one vast plastic sheet.”- Carolina DelGado from Jobs with Justice

The industry is using up vast tracks of land that was once used for subsistence agriculture and researchers have found pesticide contamination at soil depths of 300 meters. So much toxins are put into the soil ecosystem that it simply can’t all be broken down.

The post harvest treatment often uses chemicals that are banned in the US.

There is of course a huge amount of fossil fuel burned in order to transport these flowers to the recipient. Along the way they get fumigated by order of the USDA and they also usually get more plastic packaging. The worst part of it all for me is that they serve such a small purpose. They are pretty, but they die after just a few days.

Buying American grown living plants is clearly a better alternative to cut flowers. The product pictured in this post is from GivingPlants.com. They offer fast delivery of living plants that will keep on reminding your mom how much you care for years to come.

New sports shoes from German manufacturer Puma will soon be shipped in a reusable bag made from recycled plastic. There is still a piece of cardboard inside, but it is easier to recycle and uses less resources than the traditional shoebox.

I hope this will put reusable bags in the hands of consumers that will actually use them in place of disposable bags.

I needed to buy new shoes for my kids last week and I was disheartened to find that they were in a clear plastic bag inside a shoebox. I can reuse or recycle the bags but they seemed really unnecessary.

Source : http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/13/puma.bag.design.sustainability/index.html

Not so Dry…

Originally uploaded by mhiggins7055

Canada Dry crate floating in a farmer’s water reservoir. Soft drinks used to be sold mostly in refillable glass here until EU directives required the government to allow people to sell them in plastic bottles. The old system was seen as trade protection I guess. Local bottling in reusable glass made sense to me but only a few years later it accounts for just a fraction of the market.