Tell Dell to Ditch the PVC

Polyvinyl chloride—it’s in so many things that we bring into our homes, you’d think it would be a safe ingredient. From shower curtains to water hoses, toys to even school supplies, it’s certainly everywhere—but it’s far from harmless. You may already be aware of the dangers of PVC, but just in case you aren’t, here are a few of its effects:
  • Its composition is carcinogenic, explosive, and highly toxic
  • Its production releases harmful chemicals into our environment; in fact, it is known as the most environmentally toxic plastic
  • It creates dioxins, the most harmful chemicals known on Earth, when burned
  • Known as “the poison plastic,” PVC
  • PVC released in the air, ground, water, and homes has been linked to causing cancer, hormonal disruption, immune system problems, and more

It’s not a very nice plastic!

The thing is, it’s not even necessary in most products. We can make them without PVC! One product that especially does not require PVC is the computer. After being pressured by consumers for safer, healthier computers and other gadgets, the electronics industry has been working on stopping the use of PVC—as well as other harmful chemicals—from their products. Brominated flame retardants (BFRs) are another unnecessary yet often used chemical being phased out. BFRs are also highly toxic, and have been building up in the bodies of animals and humans more increasingly every year, since most products—from clothing to bed sheets to furniture—contain them. Like PVC, BFRs harm the environment and cause many adverse health defects.

One computer company, however, simply refuses to make any progress. Dell has been actually backtracking on its promises to stop using PVC and BFRs in its products. Even though most of Dell’s competitors have been happy to embark on a path toward cleaner, safer, more healthy computers that have less effect on people and the environment, Dell seems to think that it’s perfectly okay to continue polluting both the planet and our bodies with its merchandise.

Please tell Dell CEO Mike Dell to keep his word and phase out the use of these harmful chemicals today. You can also call him at 800-293-3942. Be sure to ask for someone about phasing out toxic chemicals.

Until Dell does get on the wagon toward safer, healthier products, please consider boycotting them as well. There is no need to put yourself or your family at risk—not to mention many other people when Dell products are both created and disposed of—when so many safer alternatives exist.

The Most Important Film You’ll See This Year

A third of our world’s resources have been wiped out in the past three decades. In the U.S. less than 4% of our original forests are left—and 40% of our waterways are not unfit for drinking. And while we only have 5% of the world’s population in the U.S., we use 30% of the world’s resources—and creating 30% of the world’s waste. 80% of the plant’s forests are gone—and in the Amazon rainforest alone, we cut down 2,000 trees a minute.

And that’s only the tip of the iceburg.

If you think these statistics are disheartening at best, you are right. I just finished watching The Story of Stuff, created and narrated by Annie Leonard. This twenty-minute video is essential for any consumer—particularly anyone living in the United States—to watch.

Every day, I am asked to buy more stuff. If I pledge a boycott of a product or—gasp!—a company, I’m always met with hostility from otherwise kind people. “You have to support those jobs!” they tell me, or, “You have to support the economy!”

What about our own lives? What about our health and the health of our planet? As Leonard’s video shows, if we continue using at the rate we are right now, we will run out of resources and—well, I suppose we’ll simply die.

Please watch The Story of Stuff today. As scary as the numbers are, Leonard is very entertaining and easy to follow, and the animated drawings used to depict our bleak situation are as well. It’s essential that we know not only about the resources and animals we are depleting, but also about the people in the third world—thousands of whom have to move every day simply because we tear up their land, destroy their communities through pollution and deforestation, and make them desperate for work after we take their livelihood.

We need to realize that our purchases are not giving people jobs—they are instead allowing people to live without enough money to pay their bills, without healthcare from the employers that refuse to pay it, and keeping them in poverty. We are also keeping third world children in poverty, working in unsafe mines where they get sick and die.

From our contaminated, cancer-causing pillows to toxic breast milk, polluting factories and waste incinerators, businesses purposely making new things obsolete as soon as we buy them to governments allowing them to do so—something’s got to give. That something, of course, is us. We need to really look at our stuff and wonder, “Do I really need this?” The answer is usually no.

Why We Must Ban Plastic Bags

Often when we look at environmental problems, the scale seems so large and the hurdles so massive that we are led to believe that the goal of protecting the environment is an insurmountable task; however, there are many very simple and easy steps that we can take that will have a huge impact on the health of the planet. Eliminating plastic bags is one such essential step.

Why We Must Ban Plastic Bags

We see them everywhere and tend to encounter them on a day to day basis giving plastic bags little, if any, thought; however, these seemingly harmless apparitions in our global culture are destroying the planet. Consider a few of these alarming facts:

  • Over 100,000 sea turtles and millions of other marine life and sea birds are killed every single year for a death toll reaching the billion mark because of discarded plastic bags that end up in waters around the world.
  • Plastic bags are furthering the fossil fuel crisis and it currently requires between 60 to 100 million barrels of oil to produce these bags every year.
  • Each year in the United States, Americans toss out over 100 billion plastic bags which litter parks, collect in landfills, and kill sea life.
  • Of the billions of bags produced every year, less than 1% are ever recycled.
  • Standard plastic shopping bags that you tend to toss out daily, are not biodegradable which means that hundreds of years from now they will still be polluting the planet and killing wildlife; and the more we produce, the bigger the problem gets.
  • Some of the inks and dyes used on plastic shopping bags can contain lead which is toxic to human life and many other animals.
  • In urban areas, plastic bags clog drains along city streets contributing to flooding during storms.

Why Taxing Plastic Bags Won't Work:

It has been suggested, mostly by those with a vested interested in keeping plastic bags, ie Big Oil, that a small tax could be placed on bags instead of banning them. The problem with this is simply that it simply does not work. Similar taxes were suggested on items in the past, such as cigarettes, since they pose such a great harm; however, rising costs have done little to curb smoking and society is still dealing with the negative effects of that blunder. Further, even if this did eventually work at some point in the long run, how many billions of barrels of oil will it take before then? How many more sea turtles will die? How much more space on our planet will our landfills consume because of these useless, and needless polluters that serve no other purpose than to put even more money into the pockets of the same oil companies that are responsible for destroying our planet with greenhouse gases and disasters such as the current crisis in the Gulf of Mexico?

The Simple Solution:

As big as this problem is, the solution is extremely simple one- don't use plastic bags. Environmentally friendly (and durable) totes exist for sometimes mere pennies. Store them in your purse or car when you go shopping so you never again have to worry about “paper or plastic”. Banning plastic bags is one of the easiest things that we can do for the planet. In fact, if plastic shopping bags were banned in a developed country, like the UK for example, it would be the equivalent of taking over 18,000 automobiles off of the road every single year.

Some cities and states like California are taking steps to ban plastic bags but we need to press ahead and make this a total, world wide ban.  With virtually no change to anyone's lifestyle required in order to have such a huge positive impact on our environment, the real question here is why would we not ban plastic bags given how vital this issue is for our own health and survival and the future of our environment for generations to come?  Just say "NO" to plastic bags!

The Shrink-Wrapped Life

This just in, dee dee doo dee dee doo (that's news teletype noises, for you kids out there), today is No Plastic Day!  I often get an eye rolling kind of reaction from people when I rail against plastic.  So today sounds like a good day to explain, WHY no plastic?

First of all, I fully acknowledge that plastic has its place in the world.  No one wants to switch to glass IV bottles, or computer keyboards made out of cast iron.  There are some applications for which plastic is the only reasonable solution.  And if we could cut back our plastic consumption to JUST those situations, the world would be a much better place.

However, plastic has insinuated itself into every corner of our lives.  And it has infiltrated our existence so stealthily that most people don't even notice plastic.  It's like we have a blind spot where plastic is concerned.  I took a No Waste Challenge back in 2009, and it really opened my eyes to all the plastic I encounter on a daily basis.

There are four basic problems with plastic.  These problems in and of themselves aren't too big.  But they are magnified by the sheer volume of plastic in our lives.

HEALTH
Plastic which touches food is a big problem.  Plastics contain Bisphenol-A, which is known to be an endocrine disruptor.  BPA can leech into the water in that bottled water, and into your canned goods.  (Most people don't realize that all cans nowadays have a thin coating of BPA plastic inside.)

OIL
Plastic is a petroleum product.  You know how outraged you are about the Louisiana oil spill?  It's there in part because of your ceaseless appetite for plastic.  Look around you right now and count all the plastic you can spot.  It's all made from oil.

As hard as we're all trying to save gas, the gas that goes into your car is only part of the story.  Is it really appropriate to be using oil to make all that stupid plastic?

WASTE  
I figure about 75% of our daily plastic encounters are with single-use plastic.  Someone dredged oil out of the ground, shipped it to a refinery, shipped it to a processing plant, ran a whole entire factory, and shipped it out to the stores.  All that transportation back and forth, the energy used by the plants, the sheer manpower involved - all for something you unwrap and throw away.  It's staggering!

I'm against single-use items as a matter of principle.  And guess what?  Most single-use items are made from plastic.

END GAME
Plastic recycles poorly, when it can be recycled at all.  Recycling plastic requires a huge industry that emits so much toxic waste, you wouldn't believe it.  Better, I should think, to avoid using it in the first place.  (Everyone only remembers the last of the three Rs.  The first two are Reduce and Reuse.)

Plastic fills up landfills in a hurry, and never breaks down.  Plastic escapes from landfills and garbage cans and blows about.  It fetches up in the canopies of trees, and tumbles into the ocean, where it chokes sea life.

Eco-Friendly Gifts

GOOD has a great article on "How To Give Gifts With Less Waste."  This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart, and to my extended family, so I read it with interest.  It's a great primer, but I think many people want to push that envelope a little bit farther.

The most eco-friendly gift is no gift at all.  Think about it; does anyone really NEED that gift?  We like them, sure, but half the time it's going to go to waste somehow anyway.  The book doesn't get read; the slippers don't fit.

For a long time, every year at Christmas, my extended family gave a few more gifts than the year before.  We're talking three siblings (my father among them), their spouses, and two kids (myself and my cousin).  We finally agreed as a group that the war of escalation had to come to a halt on the year when all of our pets gave gifts to all the other pets.  I mean, honestly!  That was definitely a wake-up call.  I myself remember staying up late one night to address gift tags.  "To Buffy from Ernie," "To Oscar From Ernie," and so on.  It was pretty ridiculous.

We then entered a phase of pretending that we wouldn't exchange gifts.  But then inevitably someone broke down at the last minute, bought a gift, and started the whole cascade.  Thanks, Aunt L!  Now I gotta go shopping!

About three years ago we finally settled on a compromise.  The ceiling price for a gift is $20.  Everyone gets either Christmas tree decorations, or food stuff.  I don't do a tree, so I opt for the food.  Last year I came home from the family get-together with a box of scone mix, a pound of Starbucks coffee, and a wee bottle of 100% genuine Vermont maple syrup.  The next day's breakfast was OUTSTANDING.  I was incredibly happy with this.

As for the secondary holidays and such, we have pretty much managed to cut gifts out of the mix entirely.  Birthdays, graduations, "hostess gifts" for the random family dinner, for the most part these have been replaced either by cards or by a phone call and an explanation that "cards are kinda dumb anyway."  

It has taken a long time to get to this point, and that's with the complete buy-in of everyone involved.  I imagine it would be a lot more daunting for a family where not everyone's on board!  

For those family members who insist on exchanging gifts, I definitely recommend food.  You don't have to make it yourself, either.  The gift of a pound of good coffee, a really fancy chocolate bar, a special small-batch artisan sauce - these things are always appreciated.  They can be packaged with minimal waste, and they will actually go to use.  (Unlike that porcelain elephant you got for Christmas last year.)

Another great option is Etsy, for all your handcrafted needs.  I have my eye on the Handmade Soaps category, and I'm planning to buy some fantastic handmade soaps for everyone for Christmas.  Those Etsy sellers have got it going ON!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Michele Ferretti

Take The Five Degree AC Challenge!

We're in the shoulder season now, the time when most of us have little to no climate control required in our homes.  In the north, it's not cold enough to warrant turning up the heat.  And in the south and east, it's not hot enough to turn on the AC.  

But what does that really mean?  I recently read an interesting article at the Powell's blog about how our bodies adapt to temperatures.  I can say "it's not hot enough in the south to turn on the AC," but I just checked weather.com. and right now it's 89 degrees in Orlando, FL.  I live in a cool climate, and the thought of 89 degrees makes me wilt at the thinking of it.

By the same token, I'm sure someone in Orlando would be horrified to learn that as I write this, it's 62 degrees here at my desk.  And I'm perfectly comfortable.  In fact, it's warmed up a few degrees - it was only 58 inside when I woke up this morning - and the sun is out, and I know it's going to warm up a little bit more later this afternoon.  

Are that Orlando person and I from a different species?  Of course not.  It's just that they have adapted to a warm climate, and I have adapted to a cool one.  In fact, the human body adapts fairly well to a wide range of temperatures, from below zero to triple digits, without too much trouble.  

This winter I was determined to cut my heating costs.  I severely restricted my temperature control efforts, and as a result I cut my costs by half.  Half!  And the big shock is that I wasn't made greatly uncomfortable.  You do adapt, and that's what sweaters are for.

Now that it's summer, I delight in the opportunity to open my windows and let the outdoors take care of my temperature control.  My home is well shaded by three giant cedar trees, so it stays cool in here even during that one week of unbearably high temperatures.  (Last summer it hit 95!  The horror!)

Now it's time for our warm-weather readers to step up to the plate.  Whatever your AC rules were last year, bump them up by five degrees.  That's all I did to cut my heating bill in half last winter - instead of 65, my rule was 60.  You can easily tolerate an extra five degrees.  There's no need to suffer!  No one's handing out awards for the person who sweats the most.  (Just bragging rights!)

A mere five degrees can make a staggering difference in your electricity bill, and in your carbon footprint as well.  The electricity you save by adjusting the AC five degrees warmer is incredible!  

Aside from saving the planet and your power bill, Cox's blog post details several ways in which it can help improve your health.  Our systems are more robust when we have to handle a wide range of temperatures, and air conditioning can lead to a lot of subtle physical problems, from increased allergies to obesity.

I'm passing the ball to you, Hot Parts Of The Country!  I took the five degree challenge - I think you can hack it, too!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user YPMiley

May is Clean Air Month

Did you know that nearly 60% of Americans live in areas where their health is jeopardized just by the air they breathe? And the air in your home is generally two to three times more polluted than the air outside! With numbers like that, it’s almost hard to give a damn whether or not you’re buying organic or keeping flame retardants out of the house, isn’t it? But there are still many things we can do to help protect us from air pollution. Here’s a list of things you might want to do in order to help clean up the air in your home.
  • Get a High Efficiency Particle Air Filter (HEPA) for your living space; get the best one you can afford that covers the widest range of pollutants in your home
  • Use unscented cleaners and all-natural cleaning products
  • Don’t smoke, and don’t allow people in your home to smoke
  • Limit the use of wood-burning fires and candles in your home
  • Provide adequate ventilation—including inside the attic and crawl spaces—to avoid moisture buildup
  • Use plants that help eliminate allergens and harmful substances, such as spider plants, English ivy, Boston ferns, and peace lilies
  • Regularly dust with a damp cloth and wash bedding in hot water to kill dust mites
  • Bag up throw pillows, stuffed animals, and other dust collectors and freeze them for two days to kill dust mites before returning them to your home
  • Avoid paint strippers, pesticides, and unsafe solvents in hobby materials
  • Make sure any exhaust fans and dryer vents empty outside
  • Keep any humidifiers in use very clean, and change the water in them daily
  • Clean any water damage right away before it leads to mold growth; consider eliminating carpets in areas that are prone to leakage
  • Use a dehumidifier in places that tend to hold water
  • Keep pets off beds and furniture to avoid inhaling dander
  • Eliminate carpets to avoid pet dander, dust, and pollen buildup
  • Regularly clean the home to keep allergens at bay
  • Remove any mold in your home and have air ducts cleaned if there is mold present in them

Regarding air outside your home, you can:

  • Drive less, drive a vehicle that pollutes less, avoid using your car’s air conditioning, or refrain from driving completely
  • Write to your local and national officials about raising vehicle and company emission standards
  • Start a city-wide campaign for better air that includes planting trees, creating affordable alternative transportation options, and cutting down on local business air pollution

Reuse It: Cereal Boxes

I love cereal boxes! They are perhaps my favorite versatile recycling material, ever. I even love them more than toilet paper rolls. Here are some wonderful things you can do with the next cereal box you’re about to toss.

Make a Magazine Storage Unit. I’ve never really used these for magazines, have you? I always end up using mine to hold paper, small notebooks, and other odds and ends. I have always loved them, though, and find the cheapest ones to always be plastic—not much fun!—and the truly beautiful ones a bit out of my price range. For this reason, it’s a fantastic idea to make your own by cutting a cereal box in half—a diagonal across the front and back of the box, leaving a good three inches to the bottom—and taping the bottoms down tightly to keep them firm. A full tutorial can be found here. I like to decorate mine as well, with scrap construction paper from our other craft projects.

Make Wall Shelves. By cutting the box in half width-wise, you can make excellent wall shelves. Cut the box on in fourths on one side, leaving a high back (the full back of the box) on the other, then decorate as you wish. We have a few of these hanging in my office where we keep drawing paper for my daughter, my correspondence supplies, and other office stuffs. Remember that these won’t be able to hold very heavy items, however.

Make Small Boxes. Cut the box like you would for a wall shelf, but instead of leaving the high back, cut it so that all of the top edges are uniform. Boom—you have a quick, easy box to use! These are great for holding pencils, paint brushes, glitter pens, and whatever else you need to organize. Cut them even shorter for quick drawer organizers.

Make a Village. Cereal boxes are great to decorate and use for a village for your children to play with. Cut out windows, doors, even bridges for them to use with their toys and cars. Decorate them for themes—such as with snowmen, wreaths, and paper lights—and use them for holiday decorations in place of expensive ceramic villages as well. You could make a whole set for every holiday! When you’re finished, you can often fold them up for easy flat storage as well.

Use Them for Projects. I find that cereal box cardboard is often the best to use when crafts call for cardboard. It’s just sturdy enough without being too thick for everything from masks to puppets to gift tags and more.

Shed A Single Tear For The Last Hummer

All right-thinking people did a smug little dance of joy this week when it was announced that the last Hummer H3 had finally rolled off the line in Louisiana.  I almost feel bad for the Hummer, for the way it became the poster child for an entire Earth-destroying lifestyle.  Did it really deserve all the hatred?

The early Hummer models were genuine military vehicles, repurposed and used as eye-catching displays of conspicuous consumption.  Arnold Schwarzenegger drove one.  You would have expected him to.  The first Hummer (the H1) was released in 1992, right at the tantalizing edge of the Dot Com Boom.  It was perfectly poised to capitalize on an unprecedented explosion of wealth.  Within a few short years, "bragging about being wealthy" practically qualified as a hobby for a lot of people.

The Hummer's gas mileage has always hovered around 14 MPG city/18 MPG highway.  That's not great, to be sure.  But there are a lot of vehicles that get less.  The Bentley Azure gets 9 MPG city/15 MPG highway, but it has never become the flashpoint of an entire political movement.  The Toyota Tacoma pickup truck gets the exact same gas mileage as a Hummer, but no one (to my knowledge) has ever set fire to a Toyota Tacoma as a public statement.  

The Hummer became everyone's favorite whipping boy by being ridiculously, ostentatiously useless.  The owner of a Toyota Tacoma will tell you that they frequently haul around sacks of concrete.  The person twirling the keys for a Cadillac Escalade (12 MPG city/19 MPG highway) will claim that they need a lot of room for ferrying the family around.  These things may not be true, but that's what they will tell you.  

But no Hummer owner even pretends that they take it off road.  The very point of owning a Hummer is to keep it in pristine condition, always perfectly waxed, as a showy demonstration of wealth.  In the same way that a wide expanse of perfect lawn started out as a display of wealth (because the landowner had no need to do anything useful with it).  

As time went on, owning a Hummer became the ultimate statement of "eff you, eco-hippies!"  It was the massive cigar being puffed in the non-smoking section, the thick bloody steak waved around a vegetarian restaurant.  It was the Rush Limbaugh of cars.

In that sense, the Hummer deserved everything it got.  The Hummer may not have been the worst car in the world, but it exemplified a lifestyle that became increasingly passé.  

Of course, as Michael Pollan has observed, the carbon footprint of a vegetarian in a Hummer is lower than that of a meat eater in a Prius.  Except that no one sees you not eating meat, while everyone sees you driving a hybrid car.  

But if a hybrid is just another form of showing off, at least we feel it's showing off the right things.  Hybrid owners put their money behind their backing political and philosophical beliefs.  They wear their hearts on their sleeves, and they save a good deal of gas by doing so.  

And so I have to say to the Hummer: Don't let the door hit your tailgate on the way out.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user ANATOLI AXELROD

"Climate Culture" Calculators Break New Ground


Recently as I was checking out the Treehugger site, I noticed a bar on the side for Climate Culture Calculators.  Intrigued, I clicked through to check them out.  What I found really blew me away.

I love the idea of lifestyle carbon footprint calculators, but they always have the same set of problems:

1.    They aren't configurable enough.  I heat exclusively with a wood stove.  (Which is carbon neutral, by the way!)  That's never been an option on any carbon footprint calculator I've found so far.

2.    The numbers vary widely from one calculator to another.  Most calculators lack transparency.  Where are these numbers coming from?  Who knows!

3.    You quickly get the feeling that the entire exercise is just to make you feel bad, or smug, rather than to provide valuable feedback.
There's no good answer on a carbon footprint calculator.  Either you are shocked and horrified at the amount of carbon your lifestyle produces a year, or you feel smug about how small your footprint is compared to most people's.  

Being shocked and horrified isn't really useful.  You want to direct people towards best practices, maybe help them identify which areas of their lifestyle needs improvement.  That kind of thing.

Being smug REALLY isn't useful.  We can all do better, even Smuggy McSmuggersons could trim their carbon footprint a little farther.  Reducing your impact on the planet isn't a singular goal - it's an ongoing project of improvement.

Compare this with the calculators Treehugger is offering.  For one thing, each calculator is specific to a single purpose.  What's the carbon footprint of your current alcohol consumption, and how much can you save by cutting that down?  I only spend $5 on wine a week, but if I cut that in half, I was shocked to find that I could save 144 pounds of CO2 per year.

The calculators also mix obvious issues - like commuting to work - with interesting problems like alcohol.  I had never thought about it before, but alcoholic beverages take a lot of resources to produce.  From growing the grapes (with pesticide), to shipping the grapes to a factory, processing the wine, making the glass bottles, shipping it all to the store - it's actually pretty significant.  

The final thing that I like best about these calculators is that they let you see what a difference you can make just by adjusting your consumption slightly.  The calculator didn't just tell me "YOU'RE DESTROYING THE PLANET WITH YOUR HABIT OF BUYING TWO CHEAP BOTTLES OF WINE A MONTH."  It encourages you to play with the numbers.  What if you only spent half as much?  What if you only spent a dollar less per month?  

It's these incremental changes which will get people's attention.  It's neither fair nor realistic to expect people to give everything up entirely.  Telling people to give up all consumption of beer, wine, and alcohol is a losing proposition.  But I bet a lot of people would be willing to cut $10 of one of those out of their budget a month, if they felt it would make a difference.  And it will!

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user draggin

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