Earth-friendly Living & Crafting: Forum Report #2

Plastic Grocery Bags: Part 2

In the last report from the popular Etsy Forum thread Earth-friendly Living & Crafting, I talked about the importance of using reusable bags instead of plastic. But what should you do with all those bags that you still have stuffed into a closet or cupboard? Or with the bags that you have to get when you forget your reusables? Here are some creative ideas...

• If you're a knitter or crocheter, turn the bags into yarn and make a reusable grocery or beach tote, a floor mat or even dishwashing scrubbies. If you're not sure how to get started, you can find a tutorial on how to make the plastic yarn here. There's also a great example of a finished bag made by GranKnit on Etsy here.

• Have an iron? Fuse the plastic bags together using wax paper to make a stronger fabric-like sheet of plastic that you can use for just about anything. Make a waterproof wallet, shipping envelopes, baby bibs...you name it! The Etsy Storque posted a great tutorial on how to do the fusing here. For an eco-friendly fashion statement, check out this plastic bag raincoat!

• If you can't re-use all those bags yourself, find a local supermarket or other store that has a plastic bag recycling bin. Or see if a Goodwill or other thrift shop near you will take them for their customers.

• Using plastic grocery bags to line your waste baskets at home is another great way to re-use. Although if you compost your organic waste (or at least keep it separate from other garbage and recycling), plastic garbage bags aren't all that necessary.

Thanks for reading!

Sarah

Earth-friendly Living Tips: This Week in Plastic News

Plastics: Adored, Deplored and Ubiquitous - New York Times:

The author agrees we need to use less plastic bags but then asks: "Now tell me this: What am I supposed to line my garbage cans with?"

I also think this statement is true. If you look around, almost everything is plastic.

"We adore plastics for their versatility, lightness, strength and affordability, and it seems we can’t get enough: the United States produced 6.5 billion pounds of raw plastic in December alone, up 2.3 percent from a year earlier. We deplore plastics for being cheap petroleum products and fear we’ll never get rid of them."

The article then goes into what is being done to create non-petroleum based plastics.

Bag Monsters to educate shoppers on evils of plastic bags- Gristmill:

The bag monsters, made of 350 plastic bags (amount an average family of four uses in four months) will be handing out educational material and reusable totes at malls across the country.

The project is sponsored by the cosmetics company Lush, and the bag monsters will be making an appearance at malls in NYC, LA, Carmel, Pasadena, Aspen, Boulder, Chicago, New Orleans, Boston, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

U.S. health agency says ubiquitous chemical may harm kiddos- Gristmill:

"A U.S. federal agency has declared that there is "some concern" that chemical bisphenol A can harm the development of children's brains and reproductive systems...
BPA can seep from hard plastic beverage containers, including baby bottles, and was detected in the urine of 93 percent of participants in a recent study. In light of the NTP report, congressional Democrats are asking the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider its view that BPA is safe."

See our earlier posts on using less plastic.

This Week-From Rachel: Buying Local, Real Food, Natural Haircare

How to Buy Local

Meet Your Local Farmer courtesy of Mother Earth News:

"Recent news about the side effects from artificial colorings and preservatives, the decline of nutrients in mass-produced food, and the unappetizing practices of industrial beef production have made the choice crystal clear: Bypass all of that and buy as much food as feasible from local farmers you can get to know and trust. You can go straight to the source and purchase food from a farmer, shop at a farmers market or join a CSA (community supported agriculture)."

Find out how to locate a local farmer... MORE

Eat Real Food Already!

Potential for Harm in Dietary Supplements - New York Times:
Dietary supplements (poorly regulated if at all) including vitamins, herbs, and other supplements, are taken by 70% of adults in the US. Some are good for you, some are not, and some can be toxic you take too many or have a bad combination.

You know, we know these things about plants and animals, I don't know why we consider our health any different.

Examples from the article and MORE

Does Your Hair Care? Part 2

In Part 1 of Does Your Hair Care?, I explored what possibly harmful ingredients are in my current shampoo. I tried out some other brands and did a little research and came to the conclusion that I am concerned about the safety and costs of conventional shampoo.

Homemade and Natural Options: I started looking into homemade options, and found there are many very inexpensive and easy options, and I have most of them in my house already! I posed the question to my Homesteading group and got tons of great information! By far the most popular answer, and the one that inspired the most people to try it was, Baking soda: mixed with water, followed by a vinegar rinse.

After some more research on the subject I found:
Most cleansers you buy in the store are not actually 'soap', they are synthetic detergents with additives, with possibly real soap as an ingredient. MORE

The 'No Poo' Experiment
Baking soda scrub/vinegar rinse users and 'real soap' users inspired many of us to try to give up our addiction to shampoo. Shampoos clean all right, but they clean too well, stripping away our natural oils. Our bodies compensate by making more oil until you can't go more than a day or two without turning into a greasy mess. MORE

So, I'm ready to jump on board, I have my baking soda ready and my vinegar/herbal rinse in a spray bottle. But wait, they say you will go through a couple weeks of withdrawal where your hair will seem really greasy. I'm not sure I can go to work like that, so I did a little more searching and found this advice from The Herbwife's Kitchen.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of Does Your Hair Care? where I will have the results of the baking soda experiment. Will I be a walking greaseball? Will my hair fall out? Will I find the good for you but not expensive solution I have always dreamed of? MORE

Here Comes the Milkman

One bad plastic habit that is on my list to break is that of buying gallons of milk in plastic jugs, which I do try to recycle but I'd like to use as little plastic as I can, and reducing waste is better than trying to recycle everything. The only plastic-free alternative is to buy milk in glass jars, which I hear tastes a lot better. (The cardboard cartons sometimes use plastic linings and often can't be recycled.) But is it worth the inconvenience of returning all those jugs and paying a higher price for milk that is already so expensive? How much more expensive is it really? I did a little research at my local co-op to find out.

Buying Local:
$3.99 for one gallon, in a plastic jug, of locally produced 1% milk.
This is what I have been buying so far. (I'm pretty sure I could get a brand name gallon for about $3.49 at the Big Box Supermarket, but I don't shop there much anymore and I like to support local farmers when I can.)

Buying Organic:
$6.99 for one gallon, in a plastic jug, of certified organic 1% milk.

Silk Vanilla Soymilk:
$3.79 for a half gallon in a carton.
($7.58 per gallon.)

Buying in Glass:
$3.69 for a half gallon glass jar of locally produced 1% milk, delivered by the farmer's sons.
-$1.50 deposit for returning the jar.
Total: $2.19 for a half gallon, or $4.38 per gallon.

The result? Silk Soymilk is by far the most expensive, with Organic coming in a close second at $3.00 more than the local milk I'm buying now, while milk in glass jars is only 39 cents more per gallon! I admit, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that the glass jugs weren't as expensive as I thought they might be. Also, those glass jars might come in handy and I may want to keep a few! At only $1.50 each, they might make some pretty nice storage containers.

Earth-friendly Living Tips: Deodorant

Earth-friendly Living Tips: Deodorant

I have recently begun the daunting task of weaning myself off of all of those convenient, plastic-packaged, store bought beauty products filling up my bathroom...just as soon as my huge bottle of shampoo and bulk-pack bars of soap run out, that is. One of the first switches I made was to natural deodorant. I had previously been under the impression that only a thick white paste of an anti-perspirant would free me from the social horrors of body odor. But I also hated that this white gunk would inevitably end up all over my clothes, and that the aluminum and other potentially toxic chemicals found in these anti-perspirants were soaking into my body every day. Interestingly enough, apparently perspiring is a perfectly normal bodily function which we should not feel forced to suppress, as it provides many benefits to our bodies. The point of a deodorant should instead be to neutralize any odors caused by bacteria, not to just cover it up with heavy perfumes.

So I went to my local natural food co-op and decided to try Kiss My Face's Active Enzyme Deodorant, which is aluminum-free, paraben-free, and artificial fragrance-free. The best part about it is that it is in a hard clear gel form, which means no more white stripes on my black shirts! The bad thing about it is...that it doesn't make me smell very nice. It has a lovely faint lavender scent, but its claim to "neutralize and eliminate odor" isn't holding up so far. I did give it a few weeks to see if my skin just needed to adjust to these "Active Enzymes", but I still am sadly noticing more unpleasant odors than ever before. I don't want to give up on the search for an effective natural deodorant, so perhaps I just need to find the right brand that will work for me. So the search continues...

Sarah

Earth Friendly Living Tips- More Ways to Conserve

Update- Project: Use Less Plastic

Not too long ago in my post about Reducing my Plastic Use I wondered what I would do for trash bags when I use reusable shopping bags and the flow of plastic bags into my home slows.

I asked and the internet answered with this piece from Grist.

• Their advice- Make less trash, use less bags, and talk to your city and waste disposal company and see what they have to say on the subject.

Give Us a Nudge Towards Green

Great article today in the NYTimes- Are We Ready to Track Carbon Footprints? (Published March 25, 2008) I got really excited because it just makes so much sense. Marketers know how to get consumers to behave a certain way, so why can't we apply that to convince consumers to be greener?

They found that associating behavior with actual costs (like conserving energy), comparing behavior with social norms, and just giving people a nudge in the right direction, could do quite a bit towards decreasing our carbon output.

So, lets get some marketing people on this! I hope to see more of this soon!

Bathroom Cleaner Reviews

The Grist's product reviews are not scientific, but usually interesting. I found this one on Green-cleaning supplies for the bathroom, where they found the cheap old fashioned ingredients work better than the ones that you can buy.

Green cleaning supplies can be a better alternative to conventional cleaning supplies, which contain ingredients toxic to you and the environment (see this fact sheet). While the Grist review suggests Borax, most people don't realize what you can do with things you probably already have in your cabinets. They are cheap, safe, and they work.

My bathroom cleaning arsenal contains a box of baking soda, a spray bottle of vinegar water, and Dr. Bronner's Castille soap (multipurpose in the bathroom, more on that later!) See My List of Bathroom Cleaning Supplies

You don't really need a pantry-full of expensive cleaning supplies, all you need is some good old fashioned ingredients and a little elbow grease. You can breathe a little easier knowing you aren't spraying irritants in your air or dumping toxins down the drain.

Update- How to Recycle CFL's

My CFLs are still going strong, looking good, and my electric bill has gone down. Coincidence? Maybe, but I'm not complaining.
I found some more information on CFLs at Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs – A Tale From Dust to Dust
If you're still not convinced, see this data from the article:
"If a CFL bulb lasts for longer than 50hrs, then the total life cycle energy consumption of the CFL will be lower than that of an incandescent bulb even though they are more complicated to make."

This Week-From Rachel

Pesticides Bad! Some Scientific Support

'Landscape Pesticide Use: Hidden Risks'
Dr. Claire Gervais, a family physician and President of Madison, WI's Healthy Lawn Team, gave a presentation on . Her handout is available online, and it contains summaries of multiple studies on the effects of pesticides on health, and online resources.

Study links Parkinson's disease to long-term pesticide exposure

'Did Your Shopping List Kill a Songbird'
"...Migratory birds, modern-day canaries in the coal mine, reveal an environmental problem hidden to consumers. Testing by the United States Food and Drug Administration shows that fruits and vegetables imported from Latin America are three times as likely to violate Environmental Protection Agency standards for pesticide residues as the same foods grown in the United States.

Help for Springtime Skin

Spring cleaning, gardening, home improvement projects, a long winter- all have the ability to turn your hands dry, cracked, and painfully red.

A member of my Homesteading group recently started a discussion on the best things to use for Springtime hands. Here are some of the most popular, from people who really put their hands to work in Spring... MORE

Does Your Hair Care? Part 1

I am in the market for a new shampoo.

I have had success with what I thought was a 'good' brand, recommended by a stylist (before I started cutting my own hair!) but it is a bit expensive, and not easy to get. What is the difference between cheap and expensive shampoo? I need something that is good for my hair, not too expensive, and readily available. There has to be something out there right?
First Step: What is in my shampoo? MORE

Stay tuned for Part 2 of 'Does Your Hair Care' when I experiment with the No 'Poo Method.