Yahoo Images

And then Recycla looked at the calendar and realized that Memorial Day weekend is a little over a week away and that the pools will be opening then. She made a note to herself to stock up on sunblock, lots of it.

Luckily, the Environmental Working Group has come out with their 2012 report on sunscreens, including the best ones and the Hall of Shame.  Recycla was surprised to see a couple of organic and “natural” brands make the shame list and also learned that spray sunscreens are not ideal. Her family usually buys Alba Botanicals and Neutrogena sunscreens.

The important thing to remember is that you want to avoid certain ingredients, including oxybenzone. For more information, click here for different articles on ingredients to avoid, skin cancer, and more.

In addition to using the right sunblock, don’t forget the following tips:

• Try to stay out of the sun from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
• If you are outside, wear clothing and a hat that will help block the sun’s rays.
• Always wear sunscreen, even on overcast days.
• Apply sunscreen 15-30 minutes before going out.
• Use enough sunscreen to fill a shot glass and coat your body in a thick layer.

For more information and tips, click here.

For years, Recycla was great about protecting her children, but not herself, but she’s finally getting smart about applying sunscreen every day.  She’s in her 40s and is hearing stories from her friends about their trips to the dermatologist to deal with sun-related issues, and she’d like to avoid those same problems.

So be safe this summer and make sure that everyone in your household is wearing sunscreen when you go out!

The Eco Women are not employed by any of the companies mentioned, nor were they asked to review any products. 

Sun, dirt, water. You know you want your garden to get at least 8 hours of sunshine.  You hook up sprinklers or find rain barrels to keep your plants watered. But what about the dirt? What can you do to provide the best nutrients for healthy roots and plants in your garden?

First, test your soil. It’s easy–many colleges, universities and county seats have soil testing labs where you can drop off a sample from your garden and have it analyzed for pH and nutrients. Soil testing ranges from $8-$25 depending on where you live, and doing so can give you a LOT of information about how to fertilize and enrich your soil for maximum gardening benefits. Most labs will offer suggestions for improving your soil, too.

Second, if you garden near a roadside, you should get your soil tested for lead. Lead was added to fuel until 1990, leaving a heavy residue from exhaust concentrated beside roadways. If you’re stuck against a street, it’s best to use raised beds or containers to grow your vegetables and avoid lead contamination. Lead is heavy and concentrates in an area and several studies in other countries have shown the extent of roadside contamination from auto exhaust. And tires are made with lead wheel weights for balancing. These lead weights often fall off and end up in roadside ditches–leaving lines of lead contamination criss-crossing our country. (On a happy note, Congress is working on banning the use of lead in wheel weights, thus eliminating this source of lead contamination.)

Third, don’t blindly spend money on that Evil Blue Chemical (AKA “MiracleGro”) or any other over-the-counter-fertilizer to make your tomatoes bodaceous this season. The best and least expensive soil additive? Compost. Any decomposed natural substance will make your soil more nutritious for plant growth, hold moisture better and allow for the best air circulation for root growth. Compost will add structure to sandy soil and break up heavy clay. Compost does NOT smell and is NOT toxic–it’s dark, crumbly and earthy-smelling. If you aren’t into making your own compost, you can buy it nearly anywhere these days.  If you prefer a liquid fertilizer, you can purchase compost tea at most greenhouses or garden centers.

Fourth, all gardens benefit from the addition of worm poop. Worm poop (AKA “Worm Castings”) provide the very best fertilizer for plants. Rich in nitrate nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, worm poop is the digested dead plant matter that worms eat. Worm poop as fertilizer does NOT smell, will NOT burn out your plants and will NOT harm anyone since it’s totally nontoxic.

Finally, the easiest way to amend your soil and retain moisture around your plants is to mulch.  Enviro Girl spreads grass clippings raked off her lawn on her garden’s surface, tenderly nestling it around the base of her tomato and pepper plants, between the rows of beans and peas.  When the growing season ends, Enviro Girl leaves the grass clippings in her garden and tills what’s left into the soil the following spring.  What results is loose, rich, wonderful dirt that will feed the roots of plants that will feed her family.

There are a lot of nice ways to honor mothers without breaking the bank or creating a lot of waste. Here are some ideas that are environmentally friendly and/or support local businesses:

A pale pink climbing rose given to Recycla by Enviro Girl three years ago as a housewarming gift.

If you are planning to go out to lunch or brunch on Mother’s Day, skip the chain restaurant and instead choose one that’s locally-owned. Bonus points if the restaurant serves local foods.

Instead of buying cut flowers, how about buying your mother a plant for her garden? Some of Recycla’s favorites include roses, irises, peonies, and lavender. Expand on the gift by offering to do the planting yourself!

If garden plants won’t work, what about an inside plant? Or, do you have any options for buying locally-grown flowers? The farmers’ market in Recycla’s town has a vendor who grows gorgeous flowers and sells them every weekend from April until the fall. A stunning bouquet usually costs around $10-15.

How about a beautiful cloth shopping bag or a colorful French market basket?  These would be great for your mother when she goes to the market, picks up books at the library, or is running errands.  It’s likely you could find baskets and cloth shopping bags made locally, but if you can’t, check Etsy for loads of options.

Or how about a gift of an experience, such as tickets to a concert, play, opera, or some other show?

Take a photo of you with your mother, the whole family, or some combination thereof. If you give her a gift of an experience, get someone to snap a photo of you there, so you’ll have the combined gifts of a happy memory and a photo.

These are just a few ideas to help you get started. The important thing is to let your mother or the woman who is mothering your children know that she is loved and appreciated — not just on the second Sunday of May, but every day!

Tell the Eco Women: How will you be spending Mother’s Day?

The proposed plan would do away with traditional dumpsters, residents would buy bags for their garbage, at $2.40 a bag, garbage collectors will only pick up the official city bags each week.  The logic behind this trash reduction plan is that people will want to save money by buying fewer bags, which would encourage less trash disposal and reduce landfill/collection costs.  Like tollways for drivers, paying by the bag puts the expense more directly on people using garbage collection and landfill space.  It’s sort of like “pay as you go,” but “pay as you throw.”  It equitably spreads the cost around to everyone living in Neenah, not just property owners.   Right now, the owner of a $150,000 home pays about $130 a year for garbage removal.   If that person throws out one bag a week, it would cost about $125. Two bags would cost $250 yearly.

Enviro Girl likes this plan because it directly taxes consumption as opposed to property taxes that have no bearing on how much garbage a household generates.  Enviro Girl demonstrated last week how her family throws away about  1 tall kitchen garbage bag per week, yet they live on 60 acres.  Is it fair for her to contribute more to garbage collection/landfill taxes than people living on a city lot throwing away three times as much garbage each week?

Fees make people aware of their behavior–just as with shopping bags (when charged for shopping bags, people will use fewer bags than if they’re offered a rebate for bringing their own bag).  She also likes the fact that this plan assesses the cost of garbage more directly to people using collection services.  Want to save money?  Throw away less stuff.  The incentives are inherent in the proposed plan.

Yet Enviro Girl lives in the country and every year she finds trash that people dump on her property because they don’t want to pay to dispose of their old tires or electronics properly.  There is a legitimate fear that people will dump their trash on other people’s property just to save money.

Enviro Girl will be curious to see if this innovative plan will become the rule in Neenah. Meanwhile, she applauds their creativity in addressing the problem of too much garbage consuming too many of our resources.

Tell the Eco Women:  What do you think of the Neenah Plan to Pay As You Throw?  Can it work?  Or will people cling to their trashy habits and reject the idea?

Eco-Lassie loves to find new uses for household items, and when she was cleaning out a closet recently, she came across a can of hair spray. Now the last time Eco Lassie used hair spray was for her a wedding in 2005–when an updo needed to be tamed. But here was a perfectly good, almost full can of hair spray. Surely there had to be more uses for it.

Eco Lassie had heard it said by her southern neighbors that you can use good old-fashioned hair spray to remove chewing gum. Really. Spray it right on and harden a glob of that goo, then scrape it away with a knife from material or carpets.

This doesn’t happen often enough in Eco Lassie’s house, but when she does bother to shine her leather loafers, she just found out that a light coat of hair spray for the finishing touch will keep that shine lasting even longer.

And while you’ve got that rag and spray out, you can also use it on machine-washable fabrics to get out that lip gloss stain from your honey’s favorite white shirt after date night. Saturate the smudge with your handy dandy hair spray and rub it in, then machine wash to remove the last hint of color and extra spray.But that’s not all your stiff stuff will do: if you’ll bother to spritz the toes of freshly-washed pantyhose, you’ll add life to each pair because the polymers used in making hair spray will help to prevent the stockings from running.

The next time you clean out your closet, stop and do a bit of research before tossing that item you thought you had no use for — chances are, someone else has been there done that, and there are all sorts of ways to recycle common, everyday items you run across.

AP photo

Seattle officials are considering reducing weekly trash pickups to every other week. This would save the city around $6 million annually, as well as reduce truck traffic in neighborhoods. The initiative could potentially keep an additional 1,400 tons of waste out landfills every year, as well as help push the city towards a 60% recycling rate. At this point, approximately 53% of Seattle’s trash is recycled.

While this idea is still in the early theoretical phases, it could be tested in a limited number of homes this summer. Concerns that need to be allayed include whether or not trash cans will develop odors from being full for so long and if vermin will proliferate in these conditions.

While Recycla likes the idea in theory and knows that her family could easily get by on just two trash pick-ups a month, she knows this change could be difficult for other families.

What do you think, fellow Eco Warriors? Could you manage with just two trash collections a month? If not, where do you think you could make improvements to get you to that goal?

Thus far, they’re way below the 7 pound daily average.  The other piece of this exploration is what, exactly, we throw away.  To learn more about this, Enviro Girl has been tracking what goes into the wastebasket at her house.  Over the weekend her family threw away:

3 milk tabs, 7 q-tips, 2 wax paper wrappers from sticks of butter, 1 wrapper from a block of cream cheese, a mesh bag from a pound of apples, a bag from some chips, sandwich crusts, 3 plastic spoons & plastic cups (from a treat at Sunday School), 3 twist ties, 3 stickers from apples, a bit of foil from some cheese, 4 packages, 2 greasy napkins, a bag from some pretzels, several candy wrappers, wrapper from a tea bag, top from a can of concentrated juice, plastic bag from seed starter soil, the wrapper from a sleeve of crackers.

The tall kitchen garbage bag isn’t full yet.

Adding to their collective garbage count, however, are 5 plastic shopping bags full of trash.  Over the weekend they fanned out over their property (which includes 1/3 mile along a county highway) and cleaned up litter.  This litter included cans, bottles, plastic bags, cigarette butts, a mangled pair of surgical scissors, candy wrappers, snack wrappers, newspapers and broken bits of plastic.

Even when adding other people’s trash to their household count, Enviro Girl’s family came up far below the 7 pound/person daily average.

By tracking her household’s trash, Enviro Girl has learned it’s primarily comprised of food packaging.  Even though her family diligently recycles plastic, glass, metal, paper and cardboard, they generate a significant amount of trash through snack food packaging.  The only way to further reduce the amount of garbage they send to the local landfill would be to change their diet.

When Enviro Girl considers how people might reduce their garbage as a general rule, she comes up with a couple solutions:

*Municipalities could charge by weight, which might encourage more recycling.

* Smaller garbage containers might encourage people to throw away less–kind of like how smaller plates make people take smaller servings of food.  We have super-sized our trash containers, and Enviro Girl believes it dulls our perception of how much waste we generate.

Tell the Eco Women:  how do you think Americans could be encouraged to throw away less garbage each week?

1 package from coffee grounds, 2 milk caps, 2 broken Nerf bullets, sandwich crust, 2 napkins, a bag from a box of cereal, 2 Twinkie wrappers, a straw (from Enviro Girl’s night out at book club–she had a Naughty Frappe and that required a straw!), a chips bag (which she used in lieu of asking for a to-go box for the half of her sandwich she hadn’t finished eating) and 1 pair of Latex gloves from Enviro Girl’s shift in the school cafeteria.  She also disposed of a skull from some fresh animal carcass–Enviro Girl doesn’t want the dog messing with it since it costs $40 to give the mutt a bath, so she wrapped the skull in a plastic bag and tossed it in her dumpster outside.  Sans skull, her kitchen wastebasket still doesn’t register on the bathroom scale.

The leading source of household waste continues to be from food packaging and Enviro Girl is curious to see if her family’s weekend activities significantly alter the contents of their kitchen wastebasket.

Stay tuned–and keep your own trash tales coming in the comment box!

Instead of trying to come up with some great BIG idea to make a difference, the Green Queen says think small. If we all do a little, it will do a lot. And, there are a lot of little things we can do that will make a BIG difference. Like:

1) Turn off the water while you brush your teeth. Get your toothbrush wet and the paste but then reach up and turn off the water while you scrub those bicuspids. There’s no use in letting the water run…that’s just wasteful.
2) Turn off the water while you lather your legs. If you are going to take the time to shave your legs, lather up but make sure the water is turned off while you do it. There’s no benefit to having the water running while you’re lathering.
3) When you’re sudsing up in the shower, turn off the water. You can work up better suds if you get the soap wet and then rub-a-dub-dub without any excess water.

These three little things might sound silly but it will save water and the planet at the same time.

It’s the little things in life that make the most difference. Remember…the things that make an impression on you–they might not be BIG things but they stick with you. It’s the same with being sustainable. If you make a small effort to change the things you do everyday, it will make a BIG difference in the end.

So, think SMALL and it will make a BIG difference. And, the Green Queen hopes you have a funtabulous weekend trying to think of ways you can use a little less water.

1/4 peanut butter & jelly sandwich, 12 yogurt tubes, 3 greasy napkins, 3 candy wrappers, 2 pair latex gloves (from school cafeteria–Enviro Girl threw them away there, but still counts them as her trash), 1 pretzel package, 1 q-tip, 1 seal from peanut butter jar and lid, packaging from raw chicken breasts & thighs, 1 miscellaneous wrapper, 2 stickers from apples, 1/4 Nutella sandwich, 1 lid from jar of Nutella, 1 seal from jar of Nutella, a wad if used duct tape, some crumbs and pencil shavings.  (How are you so accurate, Enviro Girl?  She’s writing down each item on the back of an old envelope before she throws it in the bin.)

So far the majority of her household waste is still food packaging.  While considering the issue of trash, Enviro Girl tries to imagine generating more and struggles to comprehend how her lifestyle would change.  She thinks about her neighbors whose household consists of 2 people, no pets, children and grandchildren living in other households–they generate a large dumpster full of garbage every week.  It strikes her how much of her household trash is generated through consumption–in her family’s case, food, but what other consumption adds to people’s waste?  It’s tempting to dive into her neighbor’s dumpster and try to figure it out…

Keep the comments coming–the Eco Women like reading your trash inventory and how you deal with your waste in various parts of the world!