Plasticless recently got a mention in the online version of one of India’s biggest environmental magazines. I think that’s pretty cool. There are a lot of others bloggers doing a great job of covering the basics and fighting the battles with regard to plastic waste. One thing that makes my take on things a bit different is that I have been spending several years living in developing and less developed countries. I have lived among people who consume less than the average American. At the same time I have witnessed the degree to which many people aspire to the kind of consumerism that goes on in America and the rest of the developed world. I also got to see a range of attitudes about waste management from citizens and government. The guilt trips and social trends that bloggers in places like California use to try and effect change do not translate well to the developing world. I like to read publications like Down to Earth because they are written from the perspective of people who live and work in the developing world. Regional governments in India have recently been coming out with very strict plastic bag bans. It will be interesting to see how the society adjusts to this.
I would like to drink more tap water because it’s less expensive and it doesn’t require any packaging. Unfortunately, the public water supply here on Gozo is quite high in sodium. The most extensive information that I could find regarding water quality in Gozo is ten years old. It states that 84.2% of samples exceeded the parameters set for sodium content by an EU directive. There was also this explanation:
This substance occurs naturally
in water. Standard set due to
unacceptable taste. It is
considered to be primarily
attributed to the islands’
hydrogeological characteristics
and environmental conditions.
My taste buds tell me that the salt is still there. We used a Brita filter pitcher when we lived in Tunisia. It effectively improved the taste of the tap water and gave us peace of mind with regard to all the unhealthy stuff that these filters can remove. Those are Lead, Mercury, Benzene, Cadmium, Copper and Zinc and more. It doesn’t remove Sodium. It doesn’t claim to. Since we already had the Brita we tried it anyway. Sure enough, the Gozo water filtered with a simple gravity fed Brita filter is still just as salty.
The easy choice for tasty drinking water is to buy it in 2 liter recyclable plastic bottles. That was our short term way to survive while we arranged for the next best thing – 19 liter returnable plastic bottles delivered by a company that uses RO filtration and UV sterilization to make the public water palatable. The cost is about the same as the water in recyclable plastic with the main advantages being that bottles are reused and of course that they are delivered to our door. A third choice that might have some cost savings is to buy a counter-top filtration system. They cost hundreds of euros but should in theory pay for themselves. We can’t justify the investment because we expect to be relocating before the ROI would kick in.
There are a few ways that we consume the tap water. With of our baking and stove top cooking we use tap water whenever water is in the recipe. The tap water makes a great lemonade with the locally grown lemons that are a reasonable euro1.50 per kg. We make tea with tap water. Many other strategies that people use for making use of bad tasting water are too unhealthy. I have no plans of drinking the Kool-aid.
Do you have tap water that doesn’t taste good? If so, do you have any interesting ways to alter it to make it more palatable?
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.
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.
I have been thinking about writing this post ever since my aborted attempt at repairing some USB headphones this weekend. I am very frustrated with the fact that almost all consumer electronics are designed to break. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint, but it is pretty much the opposite of green.
I try to reduce the amount of waste resulting from my use of technology. I buy fewer mobile phones than the average consumer. The industry has successfully created a 24 month replacement cycle. Many technophiles and early adopters buy even more often. My family of 5 makes do with three phones and one of them is 5 years old.
We don’t have a television set or a DVD player. Pretty much every device or peripheral that we have has legitimate work or educational purpose. I get really frustrated when an item like a computer mouse or a set of headphones stops working after only a year or two. I get extra frustrated when the item was a ‘better quality’ model. The head set that broke this month was purchased for the purpose of teleconferencing, recording tutorials and other work related stuff. They looked durable and they cost more than twice as much as the cheapest alternative. When I disassembled the volume control I found that the impression of durability was an illusion.
It’s not like it’s impossible to make durable electronics. I have a transcription pedal that appears to be built to last forever. When I was a teenager several of my friends had guitar effects pedals that you could probably throw against a wall without causing damage. Manufacturers of these specialty products are competing for a very finite number of customers who. This might account for the build quality. I’m not so sure about that though.
Last year I spent a few months toying with the idea of making field recordings on world music and creating a website where people could provide a fair payment directly to the musicians. There are several different companies selling affordable mobile digital audio recording equipment. I did a lot of research because I couldn’t afford to buy something that wouldn’t be adequate for my needs. The online reviews have lead me to believe that every make and model has issues with build quality and reliability. I felt like there was a good chance that I could spend hundreds of dollars, including a hefty shipping cost, only to find that my device was defective. The frustration with this issue played a part in stalling the whole project
Anyway, the point of this post is this… I think there are enough conscious consumers to represent a market for durable green electronics. If you needed a new computer mouse (for the nth time in your life) and there was a mouse in the store that was designed to last forever, would you buy it? What if there was a mobile phone that was built to last forever? Would you be willing to pass up the early adoption rush that Apple et al. cash in on for the rest of your life? There are several consumer electronic items that are not going to change that much with regard to function for the rest of our lives. I would like to see a market develop for truly durable items and I think the products could be legitimately advertised as ‘green.’
If you think there is already a supply for this hypothetical demand, please comment with links to the products.
There now that that’s over with you will understand why I was looking for a more sustainable option for lighting the burner of the gas range. By the way, nobody calls it a gas range here in Gozo. Cooker is the most common term and hob is often used to describe the top burner.
I am not a fan of plastic lighters. They are a pretty common site on the beach and elsewhere in the environment. Matches aren’t necessarily a green solution. I decided to try out the flint and steel option. A torch striker cost me €2.33 and it unfortunately came in a little plastic bag. It took a little while to get the hang of it but as you can see in this poorly lit video, it works.
If I didn’t have the disposable lighter that was already here when I moved in, I could light candles with a piece of spaghetti ignited with the stove. I got that tip from the comments on the FakePlasticFish when Beth Terry was debating matches versus lighters.
Before I can really recommend the torch striker as a good alternative, I have to see how long a flint lasts and how the replacements are packaged. I will update this post when I run out of flint.
Solar power is the most inherently interesting ‘green’ technology. The internet is buzzing with marketers trying to sell information products about solar power. There are also countless electronics companies selling solar powered gadgets and solar chargers for gadgets. I have an interest in solar power and an aversion to gadgets. I really hate solar powered gadgets that are designed primarily to sell.
If you are interested in reducing your plastic waste, don’t buy a solar powered gadget, at least not until they get serious about making them truly useful and efficient. Amazon reviews are a good place to find an honest assessment of any given gadget. I have looked at solar laptop chargers and so far nobody has hit the right balance of power, portability and affordability.
Residential solar panels are serious business. These days various government incentives are boosting demand for them. This is driving the costs down. It is also driving production that might not be environmentally responsible. If you want to be as green as possible, you need to do some research and find out which type of panel has the least negative impact on the environment. Some of the cheapest panels are made in countries with a poor environmental track record. The production of solar cells typically involves a lot of toxic metals. It also involves a lot of water and energy use. Researchers in environmental science have done the work of comparing the environmental costs of a range of different solar panels. Here is a PDF with their results. That research is a couple of years old, so there is a chance that newer technologies are even better.
One important consideration when calculating the environmental cost of residential solar panels is the fact that the technology can potentially replace a system that involves long distance transmission. Transmitting electricity over distance is inefficient and it uses mined metals and plastic insulation.
One of the most offensive forms of environmental damage that I have ever seen involved electrical transmission lines. When I lived in a rural area of Canada I found a spot in the forest where some criminals had burned the plastic off a pile of stolen copper wiring. Copper had value as a material for recycling. Plastic doesn’t.
Buying LED light bulbs might be a better investment in green energy tech than solar panels for most people.
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.
