Plastic bags again

Jen x over at the Daily Mitzvah is also cutting down on her plastic bag usage as a part of her Carbon Fast for Lent. Basically, she finds one small thing to do each day during lent to reduce her carbon footprint. Genius, right? The lapsed Catholic in me is kicking myself for not thinking of it first.

Some of the other daily Lenten tips include taking shorter showers, switching to green power, and unplugging the cell charger. All good ideas. It is highly recommended you check it out.

Update: As Jen noted in the comments, the Carbon Fast for Lent idea came originally from Tearfund, based in the UK.

Pollution means execution

The Electric Company's blissed out funky tunes never fail to make spelling and environmentalism fun.

Yesterday I did something I hate. I went grocery shopping and forgot to bring my reusable bags. So I ended up coming home with 4 double-bags of groceries and a very surly attitude. Ugh.

My good friend Michael brought to my attention a so-called trash vortex floating in the Pacific Ocean. Greenpeace has this neato animator that shows how all that swampy, disgusting muck of our own filth gets from the shores of California and Japan to the middle of the ocean over time. It's not just plastic bags that we're choking the ocean with, but they're a big part.

Reusablebags.com has a few pages full of scary facts about plastic bag usage.

Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food web when animals accidentally ingest.

Yikes!

Luckily, I live in NYC, where the City Council recently passed a bill requiring stores to recycle plastic bags. Don't live near a recycling facility? Well, for one, get some reusable bags and don't be dumb like me and forget them when you go shopping. Reusablebags.com even has a cool one that folds into itself and can fit in your purse so you never forget.

If you've already got some plastic bags at home that you can't stand to throw away, a quick google search of "reuse plastic bags" will not disappoint. The first link on the page is for a ThriftyFun (since 1997!) post with tons of reader tips and ideas. Some are good:

"Plastic grocery bags act as a protective cushion when packing dishes or breakables."

"The little plastic grocery bags we get are useful the little ones when teaching them to help clean up a room. They are also good for the little garbage cans in our bathrooms."

Some are gross:

"An emergency pair of plastic pants to put over your baby's diaper."

"I kill two birds with one stone. We have not solved two problems in decades: Dog waste problems in urban areas and grocery bag problems. My pooper scooper has a collapsible frame structure which springs open any grocery bag instantly, and it catches dog feces before it hits the ground. If all dog owners reuse grocery bags for 68 million dogs in the US, they might need more bags."

So don't be a wastoid. You have a lot of options and with your participation, we can stamp out pollution.

R-E-C-Y-C-L-E

I just had to share this video, even though it's totally bootleg and filmed from a camcorder in front of a TV. I loved Rocko's Modern Life when I was a kid.

So I work in an office building in midtown Manhattan and we don't recycle. I hate it. Think about it: what is the majority of garbage created in an office building? PAPER! Easily recyclable paper! I asked the building manager and he said there is no program in place. So I emailed accounts payable, just to be sure that we're not paying for a program that we're not using.

I often work until 7 or 8 in the evening, so I'm here when the cleaning lady comes and I can verify that all the garbage, even the recyclables goes in the same trash bag. I'm not ok with this.

So I'm going to see if I can start a recycling program for my building. It's 2007! Shouldn't this be mandatory? Updates on my progress to follow.

And now that song is going to be stuck in my head all day.

Toss our throw-away culture

Check this article from the Toronto Star. It's worth a full read. Reporter Tyler Hamilton cuts right to our wasteful lunch habits in the first paragraph. Plastic utensils, styrofoam to-go boxes, paper bags all languishing in the garbage, destined for the landfil because we're too lazy to pack our lunch.

Since I work in Manhattan, I started bringing my lunch because I was hemorrhaging cash by buying everyday. Now I get the added bonus of producing less waste with my PBJ along with the $10/day saved.

But it's not just lunch leftovers that are causing our landfils to overflow. It's pretty much everything we buy. Think about it - is all that flashy packaging really necessary? NO. So it's worth it to write a letter or call the companies that you purchase from regularly and complain about the packaging. Chances are, all that plastic and styrofoam is costing them a lot of money as well. As Hamilton puts it, "Kids toys are the worst – an endless struggle with plastic film, polystyrene foam and plastic ties, all tightly glued, stapled and knotted to a recyclable cardboard structure that's so mangled in the end it never reaches a blue box." He even goes one step further to suggest that legislation to limit the percentage of packaging in product volume should be considered. And I think that's awesome.

If you're looking for something to write your representative about, why not start with this?

The idea of limited energy

In my job, I have to read a LOT - magazines, newspapers, online news services - you name it. It's actually what helped me decide to begin this blog and try to change the way I live my life because for the first time, I was spending a significant amount of time every day learning about what's going on in the world. And while I definitely do recommend getting a subscription to a newsweekly like Time or Newsweek and catching the evening news when you get the chance, no one should have to spend as much time as I do with mass media. Yowza.

ANYWAY, in my daily media deluge, I came across this article on MSN. It's a pretty straightforward way for people (especially the car-owning, suburban type) to use less energy. Here is an excerpt:

"I’ve found it helpful to think of my energy use like I think of money — there’s a limited amount of it, and I have to plan how I’m going to use it. Should I mow the lawn this week? Maybe it can wait until next week. How can I make my trip to town go as far as possible? Budget your energy and see how well you’ve done at the end of the week. It’s best to judge by kilowatts used and gallons of gasoline consumed. At the beginning of the week check the meter and your gasoline gauge and then record the use from there."

I've never really thought about it like this before, but I guess I've been doing little things like this for a while. It started in college, when I had like no money and needed to make everythink last longer. My old rule of washing my jeans after each wearing was quickly forgotten and I started using the same drinking glass all day long (rinsing after each use, obvs) instead of getting a new one each time I got thirsty.

The section on sharing is a particularly good one. Get more done in less time by relying on friends and neighbors. When I had a car, I crammed my friends inside for a grocery store/beer run and we all got what we needed. When I no longer had a car, my friends returned the favor.

It's not so hard to make nice with our planet. One little change precedes the next, at least that's the hope anyway.