Have a Green Thanksgiving - Don't Gobble!

Thanksgiving is almost upon us.  It is a time of celebration and thanks, but easily becomes wasteful.  Reduce the amount of waste you produce from your holiday meal by not using disposable  dishes, napkins, or cutlery.  What better time to use your good dishes and linens? If you have a big crowd coming over and do not have enough dishes for everyone, ask someone to bring more dishes as their contribution.  We Americans waste 25% of our food on an everyday basis.  It's even worse at Thanksgiving!  Plan ways to reduce food waste by freezing, composting, reusing.  Send doggie bags home with guests.  Seventeen percent of the material that goes to the landfill is food waste.  

Recycle all the paper, glass, cans, and plastic that are left after the meal is cooked and eaten.  Compost the food scraps. Tell your guests that you expect recycling to be done and provide convenient labelled bins for everything.

Buy and eat locally grown food.  It is fresher and tastes better.  Less energy is used to get it to your table plus it contributes to your local economy.  By the time Thanksgiving comes around, many local farmers’ markets have gone, but you can still find local food at grocery and health food stores.

Make your meal as organic as possible.  Organic turkeys can be pricey but worth it.  If you cannot afford one, buy a regular turkey and let the rest of the meal be organic.    Visit Local Harvest  or Eat Well  to find organic products that are close to home.  Just enter your zip code and the product you want to find.

Reduce global warming and reduce your auto emissions by staying off the busy highway this year. If you must go over the river and through the woods to be with friends or family, purchase carbon credits to cover the amount of greenhouse gases emitted due to travel.  This involves a donation to a project that reduces CO2  production in one location (like a wind farm in Indiana) to offset the CO2 produced in another location, like your home or office.  Check out this website for a good explanation.

Be a good example for your guests by modeling green living practices. Show your family and friends that living sustainably is the right thing to do everyday as well as holidays.

Cigarette Butts are Plastic!

Cigarette filters are made from cellulose acetate , a type of plastic.  There are about 12,000 thin fibers of this material in each filter.  The purpose of the filter is to stop particulates and tobacco from entering the mouth.  Depending on environmental conditions, a filter takes from 1-15 years to degrade.

Cigarette butts are the most common form of plastic litter on beaches.  Like other types of plastic they make their way into the ocean and have been found in the stomachs of sea turtles, fish, birds, and whales.  Not only are they ugly litter but the toxic residue in them is damaging to the animals.

I often see smokers casually flick their burning cigarette butts out of a car window or into an area where others are standing.  I really do not understand how they can do this without giving it a second thought.  It is litter, sometimes dangerous litter. Smokers who do this do not fully understand the damage they are doing.  A friend of mine stopped throwing cigarette butts out as litter when he realized the impact it could have.  He was at a stop light behind another car when he flicked his butt out of the window.  It went straight up and fell on the car in front of him, landing on the driver’s side window ledge, still smoking.  My friend was embarrassed and got out of his car, walked up to the other car, apologized, and picked up his cigarette butt.  Hopefully, he stopped littering with his cigarettes.

Most cigarette litterers never look at what they are doing.  Approximately 90,000 forest fires per year are started by tossed cigarettes.  Cigarette induced fires cause hundreds of deaths in the U.S. each year.  Children pick them up and put them in their mouths ingesting the toxic compounds in them.  When my son was a toddler, I had to watch him like a hawk because he would pick up every cigarette butt he saw.

Billions of cigarette butts are carelessly throw out as litter everyday.  They end up on our sidewalks, beaches, nature trails, gardens, and other public places. I found the butt in the photograph at Arches National Park at the North Window Arch, an iconic rock formation in the western U.S. How could someone be so disrespectful and careless? Seeing it motivated me to write this blog.

October's Stupid Plastic Crap

This month’s stupid plastic crap is vibrating mascara.  Yes - it vibrates.  Not  only is the mascara tube made of plastic, but it has a battery that is guaranteed to last 130 applications.  Then what?  It will be in a landfill for centuries.  Lancome has one for $34.00 and Maybelline has one for $15.00.  I think both are pricey..  It vibrates 7,000 times per minute and is advertised as the ultimate beauty tool.

I have nothing against mascara. I have some myself.  The issue is not just that this is a completely wasteful product.  It is also that cosmetics like mascara are the most unregulated products in our lives.  We put personal care products on every inch of our bodies. Cosmetic manufacturers may use any ingredient without approval from the FDA.  Many of the ingredients that are in these products are suspect in contributing to asthma, early onset of puberty in girls, feminization of boys,  cancer, as well as other problems. Cosmetic companies maintain that none of their ingredients are health risks because of the small amount that is used in each product. They may be right – we just do not know for sure. Keep in mind that we put these products on our skin, in our eyes, in our vaginas, on our lips. This is what makes them personal! We use many of these products everyday. How do the chemicals in multiple products interact? That issue is a big unknown.

If you want to know how your mascara is rated, go to Skin Deep, a website by the Environmental Working Group, that scientifically tests personal care products and rates their safety.  I looked up the mascara with the best rating which is 2 out of 10, 100% Pure Ultra Lengthening Fruit Pigmented Mascara. (Ten is the worst.)  I have Ecco Bella Botanicals which is rated 3 out of 10.  The big four chemicals that you have to avoid in cosmetics are fragrances, phthalates, parabens, and Triclosan.

Check your brand out on Skin Deep.  After all, you put it very close to your eyes.  It can be risky.  Buy beauty products that have little or no plastic packaging.  Be good to yourself and the earth. 

Download Your Music and Forego the Plastic Packaging

I  added another way (#13) to reduce plastic use to my current list:  Download your music rather than buying it in a plastic jewel case.  I have an iPod and it is very easy to download tunes to your computer and from there to your iPod or other MP3 player. It is almost too easy! I do not know why it took me so long to try it.  Downloading an album is cheaper that buying at a retail store also.  It costs about $9.00 per album.

When my husband and I traveled by car on vacation, the trip each way was about 20 hours.  We depended on our iPod to pass the time and to entertain us.  Unfortunately, my 8 year old iPod died on the return trip.  It made a horrible scraping noise and got really hot.  We are fairly certain that the hard drive had given up the ghost.  Since we were to be on the road for 2 more days, we decided to stop in Santa Fe and buy a new one.  Once we got home I checked the web to see how to dispose of a dead iPod.  There are sites that will pay you for your old MP3 player.  They even send you a box to mail it to them.  They then evaluate it and send you a check.  You  can also donate your old cell phone, PDA, digital camera, or iPod to be recycled to benefit a charity.

The Apple website has an impressive report on the environmental impact of all their products.  They describe what is behind their environmental footprint.  For example, the manufacturing process produces 38% of their carbon emissions. They explain how they deal with each step from extraction of raw materials to product assembly.    Transportation (5%), product use (53%), recycling (1%), and facilities (3%) are explained also.  I am usually rather quick to suspect corporate greenwashing , but I have to admit that I was impressed with Apple’s attitude regarding their impact on the  environment.  Apple will take all brands of electronics for recycling.  You can take it to an Apple store or mail it to them.  Whatever you decide to do just do not send your old electronics to the landfill.

Global Warming and Plastic

                                                                       (photo by Joel Paschal)
I am writing this blog entry to participate in Blog Action Day, Oct. 15, 2009 .  Today more than 7,000 bloggers from more than 126 countries are blogging about global warming.  Everyone is to blog about global warming from their particular point of view or passion. “It's the world's biggest blogger outreach campaign to get the blogging community to focus on social issues for a day.” Since my blog is about reducing the use of single use plastics, I am writing about how plastics contribute to global warming.

Greenhouse gases are vital to life on Earth.  Life as we know it would not be here without them.  These gases in the atmosphere are transparent to sunlight but keep heat in.   It is similar to what happens when light passes through your car windshield and is converted to heat.  Your windshield keeps the heat in but allows the light to pass in or out.  As you know, the temperature in your car goes up quickly.  Your car windshield is acting like greenhouse gases.  The problem is that human activity is producing so much CO2 and other greenhouse gases that the earth’s atmosphere is heating up too fast.  This is global warming.  It has many aspects and causes, but I want to concentrate on how plastics contribute to this problem.

Some people have suggested that this time in human history will be called The Age of Plastic.  Plastics are a relatively new substance and have been very successful, to say the least.  They are light and versatile and have been used in many life-saving ways.  They are mostly made from petroleum and natural gas which are non-renewable sources.  They do not biodegrade in the environment, meaning there is no microorganism that consumes them.  They do photodegrade, meaning they become brittle when exposed to light.  They slowly break into smaller and smaller pieces but are still chemically plastic.

The manufacture of plastics uses a lot of energy and resources.  More than 90% of the impact of a plastic bottle or plastic bag happens during the manufacturing process and that impact includes burning fossil fuels and releasing pollutants. For what - a short useful life, maybe only minutes, then centuries in a landfill.  Landfills are the largest man-made source of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 70 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.   If the plastic does not go to a landfill it may be incinerated which produces more greenhouse gases. The rest of the discarded plastic becomes litter or is down cycled into a new type of plastic.

One of the many abuses that we are inflicting on the oceans is the direct or indirect dumping of plastic trash in them.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a huge area of the North Pacific where plastic debris is circulating with the currents, permanently circulating where it interferes with the food chain.  As pieces of plastic photodegrade, they become so small that filter feeders consume them.  Then these pieces work their way up the food chain into fish that we humans consume. Tiny particles of plastic act like sponges that attract toxins, such as DDT, that also are passed up the food chain.  Larger pieces of plastic like rogue fishing nets ensnare animals and destroy coral reefs.  Fishing line, plastic bags and six-pack rings also harm ocean creatures.  Floating pieces of plastic become encrusted with organisms and act like small mobile ecosystems causing exotic species to move into new areas.  Plastic does not belong in our oceans and we are only beginning to understand the detrimental impact it produces.

The oceans play a major role in determining our climate and weather.  They store heat much better than air.  This heat helps energize storms like typhoons and hurricane and it creates ocean currents.  Much of our oxygen comes from marine photosynthetic phytoplankton.  In the same process, these organisms take in CO2 and store it.  Oceans provide a large part of our food. Even though they cover 71% of the planet, they are fragile and can take only so much abuse.

What can you do?  Reduce your use of disposable plastic.
1.  Do use reusable shopping bags instead of disposable ones.
2.  Do not use bottled water.  Use a stainless steel water bottle and look for beverages in glass or aluminum.
3.  Buy products that are packaged in no plastic.  Buy in bulk when possible.
4.  Eat at restaurants that use non-plastic utensils and dishes.  Bring your own container for left-overs.