Recently in Ethical Consumption Category

Grace and I were at the Goodwill a couple of months ago. I scored some teethers for Boy Detective (which I sterilized before giving to him, obviously) and a couple of Home Depot brand plastic kids' tools. As we were leaving, Grace said to me (roughly) "I'm so glad you're not one of those crazy people who won't let your kids have any plastic."

Grace, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we've become those people.

Last weekend we tossed all of Boy Detective's plastic toys, replaced his pacifiers, replaced the plastic bottles with glass, and chucked all of our tupperware. I just got tired of all the drama. Hey, now they've found this thing! Hey, now they've found this thing! Hey, it's giving us all cancer! I really wanted to ignore it, because it just seemed like such a pain in the backside. Then I really wanted to learn about it, but conclude that it wasn't a real issue.

Oh well. It's a real issue.

I feel sick that I didn't take this seriously before Boy Detective was born, but I can't go back and change the past. I can just start now. We're working on acquiring toys for him that are non-toxic, sustainably produced, by companies we admire for their environmental actions and labor conditions, bought at stores we respect. The first few acquisitions only met two of those criteria. Now that we got a couple of things so I won't go crazy trying to entertain Boy Detective in an empty house, we're taking our time to do it better.

So far, wood toys and rocks have joined his stuffed animals. The rocks are a big hit, because he can move them around, bang them together, and put them in or take them out of a metal colander his Grandma got him. And chew on them, since they're too big to fit in his mouth. The one plastic toy he has now is a non-working computer keyboard, which he's not allowed to put in his mouth. He has one "safe" plastic sippy cup, but honestly we're leaning towards replacing it with stainless steel.

Now to convince the relatives to change their gift-giving ways...

People who don't delete Gmail are sucking up energy. Not that we can estimate how much, apparently, but free storage isn't free.

Austin's Goodwills and other thrift stores have an abundance of all of the following, and I'm sure it's also true of most other resale markets in cities across the country. Let's put it this way - either you can keep items out of the trash while saving money and supporting local charities, or you can reward companies for mass producing more stuff that will eventually end up in the garbage or at Goodwill (and quite possibly exploiting and/or poisoning their overseas labor to make it).

You don't even have to settle for "used" merchandise in many Goodwills around here. They also have lots of new goods that were donated for sale.

1. Vases
2. Baskets
3. Gift wrap
4. Gift bags
5. Holiday lights
6. Holiday cards
7. Holiday decorations, such as ornaments and figurines
8. Unopened gift sets of soap, perfume, etc. to give as gifts
9. Baby clothes with the tags still on (or not, but in mint condition)
10. Cleaning supplies in case you're hosting the family get-together

And by the way, please don't think of shopping at thrift stores as taking something away from low-income folks. Thrift stores that raise money for charities are set up to raise money for charities, not to provide shopping opportunities for low-income people. Even if they were, I assure you that there's more than enough merchandise to go around.

So this holiday season, while retailers are urging you to accumulate more and more new stuff, head to your local thrift store at least once before you reflexively head to Wal-Mart, Target, Ross, TJ Maxx, etc. Your community, the environment, and society will thank you for it!

If you're in Austin and you need some guidance on thrifting, check out the Thrift category archives on What If No One's Watching. Grace has reviewed a number of the thrift stores around town.

It's pretty hard to be stylish, or even presentable, when you're 8 months pregnant. Trust me. However, I can't imagine that my look would not be improved by these reusable shopping bags:

See the post on Treehugger for more details.

They're sleek, they're black so they go with most of my wardrobe (yes, even my maternity wardrobe is at least 50% black), and I love the big, bold lettering. Other pros: partially recycled materials, water-based inks, and you get 5 bags for $25. Unfortunately, there appear to be some cons: made in China, and the bags that Treehugger tried out had structural integrity issues.

But boy are they prettier than my canvas Central Market bags.

It's been a while since I last reminded my treasured readers about how easy it is to avoid using plastic bags when shopping. Around our house, progress has stalled a bit as we work on how to bring the produce home and keep it from decaying without plastic bags, but I am confident that a solution will be discovered.

While we've been dealing with that, the Christian Science Monitor has been keeping its eye on the international scene. Apparently a plastic bag revolt is spreading across Britain:

Dumbstruck by what she'd seen off the Hawaiian coast during her year-long filmmaking trip, Hosking set up a local screening of her film and invited the town's 43 shopkeepers to come see where plastic bags end up.

All but seven of them showed up. At the end of the viewing, held in a local hall, Hosking called for a show of hands in support of a voluntary ban on plastic bags. Every single hand went up. The rest of the town's shopkeepers quickly followed suit. On May 1, Modbury won bragging rights as the first plastic-bag-free town in Europe.

Now, larger towns and even cities are calling up Hosking to ask how she did it. Supermarkets and other retailers are experimenting with plastic-bag-free days, reusable totes, or even buy-your-own bags to discourage usage.

If you're still haven't kicked the plastic bag habit, there's help over at Miss Malaprop. She highlights the gorgeous Envirosax bags available from Bright and Bold:

They're gorgeous (and/or handsome, for those of the masculine persuasion), they're apparently easy to store in a purse or backpack, and they're on sale. What more could you need?

Last year I made resolutions in October and March. I did pretty well. I finished up all nine of my major unfinished sewing projects between October 2005 and January 2006, except for one which was completed and donated in December of this year. I made 3 more kid quilts and delivered them across the country. Then the March "resolutions" were actually just a list of areas in my life that had gone bonk and that I needed to fix. I got most of those cleared up as well. Notably, I did a good job giving The Dog at least a short walk every day.

Now we're buying a house. We've been packing this weekend, even though we haven't heard back on the appraisal yet. I'm just not going to be superstitious anymore. Our realtor is a consummate professional. The inspector and C-Man's architect dad thought it was in fabulous shape. Our financing has already cleared. The house was already bought by someone else who backed out, and he was going to pay more than we're paying. The house is not going to unexpectedly appraise for dramatically less than the value everyone thinks it has.

Part of my brain is convinced Everything Will Be Different when we move into a house. We will cook more, eat better, play with The Dog more, have friends over more often. We shall see.

However, I know it will change our Ecological Footprint. Living in a small apartment without a car, I was at about 1.9 planets to support my lifestyle. I didn't want to retake the quiz once I bought the car; we use it for errands so often. I really don't want to re-take it now that we're moving from 625 square feet to 1740+ square feet. C-Man's drive to work will be shorter, but we'll still need to focus and crank our resource usage down to compensate for the house.

So, my first New Year's Resolution is to reduce our newly enlarged footprint. The foremost decision is that we are committing to buy pre-owned furniture and decorative items. (Details of other ideas for implementation are at the end of this post, so I can keep track throughout the year. Let me know if you have any other suggestions.)

The Recycled Yarn Tutorial

I'm going to be working this plastic bag topic for a while.

We're doing a mighty good job Chez Us at reducing the plastic shopping bags we bring home. I think we're at about 1 per month. Two areas are slightly more difficult, though: produce bags and dry cleaning bags.

We're more heavily reusing produce bags as a first step. After all, if you have zucchini in it this week and more zucchini in it next week, what's the harm? But honestly, I'd like to not get them in the first place. However, produce left unsupervised in our fridge goes downhill fast.

This post on TreeHugger about BioBags has given me an idea. What if instead of bringing produce bags back to the store, we buy produce naked, put it in BioBags when we get home, and just keep reusing the bags as long as we can. They probably have a better chance of breaking down safely in a landfill than plastic bags do, and when we get a house we can just switch to composting them.

Now what to do about the dry cleaner...

Not for my budget, but damn.

I promise I will run out of gloom and doom posts within the next few days.

Excerpted from BOTTLED WATER: Pouring Resources Down the Drain, a report by the Earth Policy Institute:

The global consumption of bottled water reached 154 billion liters (41 billion gallons) in 2004, up 57 percent from the 98 billion liters consumed five years earlier. Even in areas where tap water is safe to drink, demand for bottled water is increasing—producing unnecessary garbage and consuming vast quantities of energy.

In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are also used in the packaging of water. The most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

After the water has been consumed, the plastic bottle must be disposed of. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Almost 40 percent of the PET bottles that were deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 were actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China—adding to the resources used by this product.

In addition to the strains bottled water puts on our ecosystem through its production and transport, the rapid growth in this industry means that water extraction is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located. For example, water shortages near beverage bottling plants have been reported in Texas and in the Great Lakes region of North America.

Studies show that consumers associate bottled water with healthy living. But bottled water is not guaranteed to be any healthier than tap water. In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water; often the only difference is added minerals that have no marked health benefit.