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.
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
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.
When I lived in Canada, I had the basic power tools required by the unwritten laws that men live by. There were already big box stores in my neck of the woods when I moved out on my own, so I was able to pick up some pretty affordable tools. They had plastic bodies and plastic handles. Some of them came with plastic carrying cases.
The affordability of the power tools marketed to the average homeowner is reflected in their quality. I can remember having my Makita drill break when I was foolishly trying to put screws through a piece of Larch without drilling any pilot holes. I kept the non-functioning drill for a few years because the company provides free labor on repairs once a year at its factory outlet. I never got around to taking it. I don’t know if I would have been able to find Makita in the giant industrial park anyway.
I love the idea of tool libraries for a number of reasons. I like anything that reduces the consumption of cheap consumer items that will not last and that will head to a landfill. I like the idea of homeowners having access to good tools.
If you have a handyman on your Christmas shopping list, think twice before you buy them a tool that is not built to last a lifetime. Also, check to see if there is a tool library or even a tool rental shop in your area. I just realized that gift certificates from an equipment rental business would make a great gift for DIY people.
I am reusing a statement made by Jason Sweeney as my title for this post. Those three words have sent my mind in a hundred different directions thinking about what impact the human pursuit of perfection has on this planet. Most of it isn’t good, some of it is involves plastic.
The concept was still rattling around in my head when I went to the kitchen this morning to make the kids some French toast with cooked fruit topping. The apples that I bought on Friday are not perfect. They look like the apples that I used to scrounge from abandoned homesteads in Canada. They taste delicious.
Consumers in the developed world supposedly want perfect apples. The customer is always right, and those customers get pesticides, genetic engineering and lots of protective packaging.
