Eco Women: Protectors of the Planet!

Entries from February 2010

Recycled Lumber

February 26, 2010 · 6 Comments

My husband is handy and he loves to be green so he has built me a lot of garden furniture and home furniture (including a headboard and some benches out of a torn down picket fence) — what a way to use recycled lumber.

Take a peek at what you can do with used, thrown-away, wood.


Think what you can do if you put your head, heart, and hands into it. Maybe you could be building headboards and garden benches out of recycled lumber. Or, if you have some other ideas, please share them in the comments section.

Categories: 3 Rs · house stuff · living green on a budget

More reasons to cut back on your plastic

February 25, 2010 · 1 Comment

Recycla has been thinking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch lately.  Ugh.  The thought of all that plastic muck out there causes her no end of worry.

Unfortunately, Recycla has a new worry to add to her list — though it has not received nearly as much attention as its infamous cousin in the Pacific, the North Atlantic Ocean also has its very own enormous patch of swirling plastic soup.

In fact, Recycla was disheartened to learn recently that the world’s oceans contain FIVE large swirling plastic patches.

Yes, fellow Eco Warriors, there are five garbage patches that we need to be aware of.  Recycla had no idea.

Quoting from the 5Gyres website:

Around the world, plastic pollution has become a growing plague, clogging our waterways, damaging marine ecosystems, and entering the marine food web. Much of the plastic trash we generate on land flows into our oceans through storm drains and watersheds. It falls from garbage and container trucks, spills out of trashcans, or is tossed carelessly.

In the ocean, some of these plastics — Polycarbonate, Polystrene, and PETE — sink, while LDPE, HDPE, Polypropylene, and foamed plastics float on the ocean’s surface. Sunlight and wave action cause these floating plastics to fragment, breaking into increasingly smaller particles, but never completely disappearing — at least on any documented time scale. This plastic pollution is becoming a hazard for marine wildlife, and ultimately for us.

While the world’s scientists grapple with the problem of how to deal with all that plastic-y mess, what can you be doing on a daily basis?  That’s easy, cut back on your plastic use.  You know the drill — drink from a reusable water bottle, take your reusable bags to the grocery store, and generally reduce your plastic use wherever you can. Sure, you might be able to recycle the plastic later, but wouldn’t it be great if you never had it to begin with?

All of these actions, while seemingly small, WILL make a difference.

Tell the Eco Women:  Have you made any efforts to reduce your plastic consumption?  What has worked for you?  Where do you need a little help?

Finally, special birthday wishes go out to Enviro Girl from the rest of the Eco Women!  Have a great day whilst saving the planet!!!

Image credit courtesy of 5Gyres.

Categories: issues

Suck it!

February 24, 2010 · 1 Comment

Enviro Girl and her family don’t eat out much, but when they do, they go to a locally owned family restaurant.  When the craving for a burger and fries hits, they go to a locally owned chain of burger joints, and only patronize Culver’s or  McDonald’s when in dire straits while on the road to visit relatives in another state.  Part of their virtue in this matter has to do with the distance they have to travel–the nearest fast food restaurant (unless you count a Subway in a local convenience store) is 10 minutes away by car.  By the time the Momvan gets loaded and driven, Enviro Girl can slap together sandwiches or pasta.

When they do go out to eat on that rare occasion,  Enviro Girl is astonished by the amount of waste generated by take-out food.  Individually wrapped portions, condiment packets, stacks of paper napkins and straws get loaded onto their tray–in paper BAGS no less, even though they’re eating in and the tray seems sufficient to move their food from counter to table.  The health factor of eating fast food is bad enough, but the pile of garbage left behind after a meal is indisputably problematic.  And then there’s the matter of the plastic toys double-wrapped in plastic that get tossed into her kids’ meals.

Enviro Girl has learned that you can request “No toy” with a happy meal–you just say, “No toy.”  You also save .50-.75 per meal because that toy costs extra, even though the menu doesn’t tell you that.  She skips straws and cup lids, opting to fill cups and drink straight from them like she does at home.   These are small choices, but they do add up–imagine if every parent buying a kids’ meal at a fast food restaurant said, “No toy.”  There’d be nothing to sell at rummage sales!

Seriously, eating fast food generates a LOT of waste.  Sitting down in a restaurant generates a paper napkin and maybe a straw, depending on your drinking preference.  Enviro Girl usually needs the napkins, but opts out of the straw and you can too–here’s how:

You can buy your own straw–or a family four-pack–from GlassDharma, never needing to use another plastic disposable straw again!  GlassDharma’s handmade in the U.S.A. glass drinking straws come in a range of sizes, from chubby and stout for the toddler set to tall and slightly bended for the iced-tea-by-the-pool set.  By using a glass drinking straw, you eliminate waste in landfills (think of how those straws and cup lids add up–if McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, Subway, Wendy’s and Culver’s serve up millions of beverages each week, you can bet those orders resulted in a lot of straws ditched into the garbage.

The other advantage of glass drinking straws includes avoiding the toxins that leach out of plastic.  If reducing plastic is important to you, opting out of  a plastic straw is an easy place to target.  Like the plastic shopping bag, plastic straws could become the exception, not the rule, if consumers gave this issue a little thought.  GlassDharma’s straws are durable, dishwasher & microwave safe, and come with a pretty hefty guarantee.

Enviro Girl encourages you to check out GlassDharma’s site–the family four-pack of drinking straws with a scrubbing brush costs $23, and the way Enviro Girl’s kids like to drink out of straws, that’s money well spent in her opinion.   But if buying your own reusable glass straw doesn’t appeal, Enviro Girl encourages you to just “Say No” to the straw.  And while you’re at it, take a pass on the plastic lid, too!

Categories: 3 Rs · food
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Eco Entertaining

February 23, 2010 · 7 Comments

Recycla and her family hosted an Italian-themed dinner for nearly 30 people this past weekend.  Now, lest you think that this was a stuffy, adults-only affair, believe Recycla when she tells you that easily half of the people in her house were under the age of 12 and that the evening was actually quite casual and laid-back.

Recycla and her husband host several large parties and assorted medium-sized gatherings every year, including a Cinco de Mayo party for Recycla’s 40th birthday last year, an annual Oktoberfest every fall, cookouts in the summer, and more.

Recycla and her husband have been making a point to cut back on waste at these events, including not buying bottled water and juice boxes for their guests to drink — opting instead for pitchers of water and large bottles of juice.

[In case you're wondering about the other, ahem, beverages, Recycla's husband has a permanent keg fridge down in his Man Cave, so there are no beer cans or bottles to recycle either.]

But where Recycla has fallen down on the job — and by that she means utterly failed as an Eco Warrior — is in the area of disposable dishes, cups, and utensils.  Yes, it’s true, Recycla’s guests used disposable plastic cups and utensils and paper plates and napkins.  Recycla didn’t even think about it in advance — she just walked into her pantry and pulled out her supplies of paper and plastic disposable stuff.

It wasn’t until after the party, when Recycla and her husband were cleaning up, that it really hit them just how wasteful the evening had been.

Recycla’s family of four normally produces only one or two 13-gallon bags of trash each week.  However, in just one evening, they filled an additional 1.5 bags of garbage.  This was stuff that’s going to get hauled to a landfill and then sit there for a l-o-n-g time.  And Recycla is horrified by this.

Recycla and her husband talked about it and decided that, if they are to continue to host large gatherings of people, they need to do a much better job with dishes, cups, and utensils.

As it happens, the family has a large-ish  kitchen (the cooking/food prep area is approximately 14′ x 14′) with plenty of storage (lots of cabinets and a walk-in pantry).  They decided to start visiting thrift stores to stock up on used dishes, utensils, and glasses.  Since the family already has 12 place settings of white Italian pottery, the plan is to find more white dishes, so that things will more or less match.

While Recycla was out running errands yesterday, she realized that she would be driving by the Goodwill store and decided to pop in.  Jackpot! Recycla found 8 dinner plates and 12 dessert plates — all for 25 cents each!  The dishes are an eclectic mix of fine china, English stoneware, and other assorted white dishes.  Recycla also found two wine glasses, which is good because her guests were drinking some fine Italian wines in not-so-fine plastic cups this past weekend.

Recycla is excited about her finds and is looking forward to hitting another thrift shop soon and expanding her new collection of mis-matched dishes and more.

Recycla recognizes that this plan won’t work for everyone.  Certainly, in her old house, she would never have had the space to store a few dozen place settings of dishes and glassware.  However, she felt it was important to confess her eco sins so that readers of this blog will understand that even the Eco Women make mistakes in their daily attempts to save Planet Earth.

Tell the Eco Women:  Do you like to entertain?  If so, what is your favorite kind of gathering?

All photos found via Yahoo Images.

Categories: 3 Rs · food · house stuff

BPA Risks in Cash Register Receipts

February 22, 2010 · 8 Comments

Recently the Eco Women passed around an article about BPA (bisphenol-A) coating receipt paper.  Enviro Girl just happens to sleep with be married to a guy who’s part-owner of a company that makes cash register receipts (among other things).  Together they did a little research and this is what they learned:

1.  There are two types of paper used in cash register receipts:  bond which is plain paper like what you write on and thermal-coated which is coated with a chemical that reveals marks when struck–this is the more popular type of receipt paper because it doesn’t require ink–the cash register merely bangs the information onto the receipt and the thermal coating reacts to the impact and heat, creating the images on the paper.

2.  BPA was created to coat plastic in 1939.  BPA is used to stabilize the chemicals on thermal-coated paper so the receipt paper doesn’t take on every mark from every single thing touching it, and it better preserves the marks on the paper.

3.  BPA has been totally banned in Japan because of health concerns.

4.  Thermal coating is what makes those receipts slippery and difficult to write on with a pen.

5.  BPA is much more unstable when used on paper than it is on plastics (see Science News to learn more).

6.  BPA’s use in plastics is to prevent the chemicals from becoming brittle and degrading (as the chemicals in plastic are wont to do).

7.  The major health concern with BPA is that it has been linked to cancers and other diseases, it disrupts estrogen levels.  The chemical BPA leaches out of the plastics it is used in (generally Plastic No. 7 has BPA) when the plastic becomes unstable because of heat or breaking apart.  TIME magazine published this report, which Enviro Girl deems mainstream enough to link to in this post for readers who wish to know more about the studies regarding the health risks with BPA.

8.  Last week the FDA backpedaled on its stance on exposure to BPA being dangerous. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gives the entire story here.   Coincidentally, this switch in position followed meetings between the EPA and heavy-hitting lobbyists from the chemical industry.

Records show that six representatives of the American Chemistry Council were at the meeting. So was a lobbyist for SABIC Innovative Plastics, a Saudi Arabian company and one of the world’s leading BPA makers.

Minutes of the meeting show that the industry lobbyists presented a letter from Cal Dooley, president and chief executive officer of their group, saying that the government’s designation of a “chemical of concern” would have a negative impact on his industry’s sales.

Dooley asked that government regulators give chemical companies early notice on any plans to regulate the chemicals before telling the public. Dooley’s letter addresses the negative financial impact on all chemicals when they are subjected to government regulation, and he held out BPA as having been especially affected.

Read the entire article about the EPA’s meetings with made BPA slip from its position as Chemical Public Enemy #1.

9.  The only provider of BPA-free thermal coated cash register receipt paper is Appleton Paper.  Because Japan had banned BPA, the company decided to go with a different chemical coating.  They were concerned both about the health risks to their employees who would handle BPA-coated paper all day long in their mill and consumers.

10.  BPA is less expensive to use than the chemical that Appleton Paper is using to thermal-coat paper.  This is the primary reason BPA is used in receipt paper:  the final product costs less than a safer product.

So what’s an eco-warrior to do about BPA on receipts?  If you own a business, you can switch to a different type of register paper.  If you work at a business, you can explain your concerns to the owner.  You can opt out of receipts as a consumer OR request a receipt printed on bond paper to insure your safety.  The people most harmed by BPA in receipts are those people touching it frequently–not the occasional shopper, but retail workers and people working at paper mills producing thermal coated paper.

The jury is still officially “out” on the issue of BPA, but rest assured, you are coming into contact with it every time you touch a cash register receipt.  BPA isn’t just found in plastics.

Categories: issues
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Captain Compost’s “To Read” list!

February 19, 2010 · 3 Comments

Captain Compost is learning more and more about her food and where it comes from and how it affects our planet.  Watching Food, Inc. was eye opening and now she has a long list of books to read to find out more!

She just started reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and is finding it fascinating.  She also has a few other books on her reading list for this summer and wanted to share so all you Eco~Warriors out there can bone up on where your food is really coming from and what it’s really doing to our planet.  Check them out:

Michael Pollan’s newest book: Food Rules sounds fascinating, as well as In Defense of Food.  CC added them both to her PBS wish list!

Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is next on Captain Compost’s reading list.

While doing some research, CC discovered another interesting looking book: Confessions of an Eco~Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of my Stuff which sounds fascinating as well as Sleeping Naked is Green: How and Eco~Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days.

This book looks fun, too: Don’t Throw It, Grow it!  68 Windowsill Plants from Kitchen Scraps.  CC will be adding that to her “To Read” list, too!

Captain Compost is wondering if you have read any good Green books lately?  What’s on your “To Read” list for this year?

Categories: books

Go on a carbon fast

February 18, 2010 · 2 Comments

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, which was the beginning of  Lent — a time period of 40 days during which many Christian cultures give up something until Easter comes.

In Britain, bishops are encouraging folks to do something different to observe the season: go on a carbon fast.

For years, Recycla saw Lent as a time to give up something, such as chocolate or chocolate or possibly even chocolate.

[Side note:  The one year Recycla successfully gave up chocolate for Lent was her last year of college.  On Easter morning, her then-boyfriend/now-husband gave her an engagement ring AND a chocolate bar.  Obviously, successfully giving up chocolate for Lent has some sort of magical properties, as Recycla had been not-so-subtly hinting for that ring for months.]

Whether you normally recognize Lent or not, this is an excellent opportunity to try something new, such as giving up meat on Mondays or giving up driving one day a week.

Other ideas:

These are but just a few suggestions.  The possibilities are endless.

Tell the Eco Women:  Are you giving up anything for Lent?

Categories: 3 Rs · eco holidays · issues

Trashy Updates

February 17, 2010 · 4 Comments

A few weeks ago, Enviro Girl posted about the trash collection in her town and how recycling is getting short shrift.  Since then, she has talked to town board members and learned the following:

1.  Money is earmarked for recycling bins of comparable size to the garbage bins provided for each household in their town.

2.  The town is waiting to order the recycling bins with another community so that it costs less.  As with many things, the bigger the order, the less per bin the town will pay, and they can share shipping costs with another community, too.  So the interminable wait for recycling bins will save taxpayers money–a significant amount.

3.  The town’s garbage bins that each household received last year are “recycled.”  They are another town’s garbage bins that our town bought for half the price of new bins.  Kind of weird to think of a garbage bin being “recycled” but there you go.

Enviro Girl has written her town board members commending them for having recycling bins coming to their community and urging them to make this happen sooner, not later.  Until those bins show up, she’s making do with an old metal trash can she formerly used for feed corn to hold her recycling on the curb.  It’s less likely to get run over and torn apart than a plastic bin–she appropriated an empty plastic container for the feed corn. The plastic container will keep mice out of the feed corn and won’t get run over or suffer any other damages in her garage.

She’s also writing an editorial for the local paper to encourage residents to recycle more and trash less into landfills while they wait for their recycling bins to arrive.  Yesterday she pushed her garbage bin up her quarter-mile driveway–it had been over a month since she’d last done so.  At last it was full and the trip was worth the effort.  She hopes to see the day when her neighbors are throwing things away at a similar pace as her family.

Reader, can you think of any other action Enviro Girl can take in the meantime?  How are you reducing trash at your house?

Categories: 3 Rs · issues
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Going for the green

February 16, 2010 · 1 Comment

How many of you Eco Warriors are watching the Olympics this week?

Recycla and her family have been enthralled, from the very first moment of the opening ceremony.

And, of course, every evening, the family has been glued to their TV to see what happened during that day’s competitions.

One thing that Recycla has learned in the course of her TV-viewing is just how green the 2010 Winter Olympics are trying to be.  The Olympics are inherently wasteful, with a large number of people converging in one geographic area and using a lot of resources in a short amount of time; however, the Vancouver planning committee has actively sought ways to reduce the Winter  Games’ carbon footprint.  This goes beyond having a large number of recycling and compost bins in the different venues.

For example, did you know that the medals contain recycled materials?  It’s true.  Each of the medals contains a small amount of consumer electronics waste — such as from old TVs and computers — that would have otherwise gone into landfills.  How cool is that?

But that’s just one of many examples of just how green the Vancouver Olympics are.  Here are some others:

  • Many buildings in the Olympic Village are LEED certified, plus most venues have reduced carbon footprints (as compared to other similar venues).
  • When planning the games and the infrastructure needed to host so many people, the Vancouver Olympics committee installed systems that reused waste heat, irrigated with captured rainwater, and composted wood waste.
  • As for travel around the games, there is a fleet of hydrogen-powered buses instead of gas-guzzling ones.  There is also a “no idling” policy in effect at the games.

While Recycla recognizes that the Olympics are still a drain on Mother Nature’s resources in the Vancouver area, she commends the planning committee for their diligence in trying to reduce the overall impact as much as possible.

If watching the world’s greatest athletes ski, skate, slide, and more has inspired you to get out in the snow yourself, check out this article on 10 eco-friendly ski resorts.

Tell the Eco Women:  What’s your favorite Olympic sport?

Categories: green around the world · travel

Eggs: Know Your Chicken Farmer

February 15, 2010 · 2 Comments

The more Enviro Girl learns about her food, the more she shops with caution.  Hearing of ammonia-laden beef used in restaurants, Enviro Girl has sworn off Big Macs and Whoppers.  Long ago the truth about chicken nuggets made that “convenience food” disappear from her family’s menu.  But what about eggs?  A great source of protein, Enviro Girl’s family will eat a dozen or more a week between breakfast sandwiches and baked goods.  Mr. D likes his scrambled or hard-boiled, Enviro Girl prefers her yolk runny for dipping toast into.  For years Enviro Girl bought the store brand eggs without compunction.

Then she joined a CSA and started buying farm fresh eggs produced by the free-roaming chickens her children happily chased each week when she dropped by the farm to pick up her share.  These chickens looked healthy and perky, their feathers gleamed in the sunshine, they pecked greedily at the ground for bugs and seeds.  Enviro Girl saw the barn where they lived–complete with little doors for them to come and go as they liked.  The babies were soft and delicately formed, weighing a couple ounces in the palm of her hand.  She knew the farmers used no pesticides, herbicides or chemical fertilizers on their property and these chickens were smaller than the deformed and frozen large-breasted Tyson chickens for sale in the local grocery store.  (Enviro Girl still cannot see a chicken breast and not conjure up images of Pamela Anderson.)  They looked…well…normal.

Buying the eggs from these chickens cost about three times what the store brand eggs cost in town, but they were bigger, had a longer shelf life and tasted better.  Enviro Girl checked around and learned that these free range organic eggs aren’t necessarily more nutritious, but they do not contain any trace amounts of harmful chemicals used in factory farms that do end up in eggs.  According to The Learning Channel, buying these expensive eggs were just more beneficial to the environment than to Enviro Girl’s health.  The Christian Science Monitor gives a pretty bleak picture of the egg industry–the cruelty to chickens, including pumping them full of antibiotics and clipping their beaks, makes those cheap store-bought eggs seem as horrible as cheap tennis shoes manufactured by enslaved Chinese children.  And “cage free” is no guarantee that the chickens lead a reasonable existance–”cage free” can merely mean thousands of chickens packed together in warehouse-sized barns where their waste pollutes land, air and water in surrounding areas.  The Humane Society of the United States gives even more graphic detail about the treatment of laying hens on its website, but not the most graphic–there were plenty of web sites full of images, but Enviro Girl didn’t feel they were always the most credible resources on this topic.

There is a clear link between our protein-heavy diet and the toll it takes on the environment, and while Enviro Girl is an omnivore, she eats animals and their byproducts with a conscience.  Switching to local eggs produced at local farms where Enviro Girl can attest firsthand to the treatment of the chickens makes Enviro Girl feel good.  She knows the chickens aren’t mistreated and they aren’t contributing to pollution either.  The eggs taste delicious and the little extra she spends … well, that’s just an ethical decision on her part.  Ethical for the environment and ethical for animals.

Categories: food · issues
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