Recently in Ethical Consumption Category

Friends, I have a confession to make.

Last night I ran the dishwasher when it wasn't completely full.

I used to read the admonishments in crunchy literature about waiting until the dishwasher was full and think "Who would run a dishwasher before it was full? Any why?" I have even used this blog to brag about my dishwasher loading prowess. No mixing bowl was too large, no collection of plates so tightly packed that an additional plate would be left out.

(Mostly because I despise washing dishes by hand.)

(But I don't put things with wood handles in the dishwasher.)

(I think my sister does. She hates washing dishes by hand even more than I do.)

(My sister's insistence on putting everything in the dishwasher drives my mom up the wall.)

Last night, though, I found out exactly why a tofu-eating, Goodwill-shopping, organic-food-buying, Austin-living, non-SUV-driving, meat-avoiding, even-tiny-scrap-of-paper-recycling, formerly-Green-Party-registering, 50-Simple-Things-You-Can-Do-To-Save-The-Earth-buying, upright eco-mama such as myself might run a dishwasher before it was full.

When you only own four stainless steel cups for your kid to drink out of, and he is demanding two cups per meal, and he's almost three so he eats like five meals a day, and you have spent approximately half the day at the kitchen sink washing tiny stainless steel cups (with zebras on the bottom!) by hand?

THAT my friends is when you too might be tempted to run the dishwasher at the end of the day regardless of whether more dishes could conceivably be placed therein.

To you this dishwasher might have looked full. I know better, though. If I had been fortunate enough to have dirtied three additional plates, two small bowls, and half a dozen pieces of flatware yesterday, plus a cake stand or a blender jar or even a measly pie plate, then perhaps I could have been spared this humiliation.

Do you think the Austin hippie police are coming for me now?

Do you think they can be bribed with locally grown pattypan squash? 'Cause hell if I know what to do with that thing.

Peeps, I have angst.

Dictionary.com defines angst as "A feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression" and that is exactly what I feel every time I think about my shower curtain. The vinyl shower curtain was purchased in 2003, and it is dying. I have tried running it through the washer. I have scrubbed it by hand on the driveway. I have scavenged from plastic packaging to cut small rectangular bits, punched holes in them, and taped them over where the hole for the shower curtain ring used to be before it was finally torn through.

At this point, though, I cannot get it satisfactorily clean and it is disintegrating faster than I care to maintain it. We need a new one.

So, my friends who care about the planet, what do I get?

After the flap about how many VOCs are emitted by regular vinyl shower curtains made with PVC, I definitely do not want to go there. I know there are now PVC-free plastic curtains, and I wish I could justify buying one, because my vision is so bad without my contacts that I crave all the light I can get when showering.

But honestly, less toxic plastic is still plastic, and we have made significant efforts to cut down on that around here. We're due for another round of improvement (*cough* why are plastic bags getting brought home exactly dear people who are not me? *cough*), but it's something we care about. Is a plastic shower curtain really a need? Or is it a want?

When I lived in Austin before, c. 1995 to 1997, I had a canvas shower curtain. It went from off-white to off-white with decorative mildew stains quicker than you can say boo. Our current bathroom is so humid that our "pewter" shower curtain rod from Target has rusted after 2.5 years in this house, and I'm pretty sure there is no metal in it.

(Kind of like the time I got stopped for an extra security check on my shoes after I went through the metal detectors at the Newark airport on my way back from Paris. THEY WERE FROM PAYLESS, PEOPLE, THERE WAS NO METAL!)

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I would do a better job maintaining it this time. We certainly do enough laundry around here that laundering it twice a week would be an option. So something like these organic cotton ones might be lovely.

However, I am remembering the time when water started dripping from the kitchen light fixture because C-Man loves to spill water outside of the shower and the grout in our tile floor up there is a mess. And that was with plastic.

Perhaps I should just have the bathroom remodeled? A shower door doesn't need a curtain, right?

But what's the carbon footprint of one bathroom remodel versus 10 plastic shower curtains (my lifetime supply if they last 6 years and I live to be 95 in this house)?

We'll see you next time on the continuing adventures of trying to make my house look decent without feeling like I burned down 300 square feet of rainforest.

Our air conditioning went out last Sunday. Tons of people live without air conditioning, including in Texas, and obviously it would not have killed us to go without it for a few days, but I was still quite glad that it was fixed within a few hours of the sun coming out on Monday morning.

It got me thinking, though, about what I would give up if it were guaranteed to solve the climate problem. We usually air condition our house to 82 in the summer, would we be willing to go to 90? 95? When it's cold, we heat to 65 or 68 depending on how much I'm moving around the house. Would I be willing to go to 60?

Would I be wiling to say okay, we'll only drive to the library closest to our house, and the park that's closest, and only to each of those once each week? We'll entertain the two year old within walking distance of our house for the other five days.

If I wore makeup, would I be willing to give that up?

Would I be willing to give up margarine? I can't imagine it's a good use of resources to manufacture it and make all those plastic tubs. What foods that don't grow within Texas would I be willing to give up?

Would C-Man give up buying new video gane consoles? Would I give up buying new non-organic cotton fabric for quilting until all the pre-existing fabric in America was re-used, and then only buy locally and organically grown fabric? Would I drive to Colorado instead of fly?

I realize that consumer choices alone are not the solution. We probably can't not-buy our way out of this mess. Also, if we all decided to avoid purchasing anything we don't need for bare survival overnight, I think the current recession would pale in comparison to the economic collapse that would ensue. My small individual day-to-day purchasing decisions can't re-plan cities so that more of the neighborhoods are walkable, the majority of our electricity is suddenly produced by renewable resources, our houses are a reasonable size, and the majority of our population eats lower on the food chain a lot more often.

But when you look at the average resources consumed by an American versus someone elsewhere in the world, you have to stop and think: if they were suddenly consuming like we do, how much would that mess things up? And if we can't afford for everyone to be us, then what about our current way of life has to change to bring it down to a level that we can afford to have everyone enjoy? What would that look like? What would I be going without?

C-Man and I don't buy a lot of decorative stuff. If you've been to our house, this will come as no great shock to you. Even once we finally gear up and paint the walls something other than white, though, I'd be surprised if we transform into knick-knack displaying, decorative bowl using, lots of little pictures in frames collecting type of people.

Leaving aside coffee, which neither of us drink, have you noticed how much fair trade merchandise is really just frills? Jewelry, scarves, scarves, purses, placemats, special use dishes, holiday decorations, and that loveliest of lovely useless crap categories: gifts. Shiny baubles.

Where are the fair trade curtain rods, hammers, measuring cups, flyswatters, and laundry baskets? The kind of thing that everyone ends up buying at Target or somewhere when they move into a new apartment, or runs over to Home Depot for when starting a project? Every once in a while I see a little bit of furniture, but overall, trying to rely on fair trade products to meet my shopping desires is not working for me.

I totally get it that fair trade good usually come from non-industrialized (and even non-electrified) areas, thus the lack of flat panel televisions and blenders and car batteries. Fair trade goods, as they're promoted, come from people practicing traditional crafts or learning new crafts or skills they can do without building a big ugly factory. I wouldn't wish the factory on them anyway if that's not what they want.

The idea of fair trade coffee, even though I don't drink coffee, actually works better for me than the shiny bauble model of fair trade marketing, though. Fair trade coffee is a replacement for non-fair trade coffee. Buying fair trade removes support from labor practices you don't approve of and provides financial rewards to companies who do business in a way that you support. The shiny bauble model says, in effect, buy this stuff. Not buy this stuff instead of this other stuff. It's a fundraiser, not a shift in consumption.

Unfortunately, if you continue to support the big bad guys while also supporting the little good guys, the bad guys are still going to be running the place twenty years from now.

(The photo is by flydown under a Creative Commons license, I thought it was cute.)

Sure, it's nice to pay $8 for an Ann Taylor suit jacket, but that's not the main goal for me.

I thrift shop INSTEAD of regular shopping because by doing so, I reduce the amount of garbage in landfills, reduce the need for raw materials to be used in manufacturing, support job training programs for people with disabilities and barriers to employment (among other causes), and I can feel certain that the people I'm giving my money to don't use slave or child labor or poison their workers to produce the goods in question.

Just so we're all clear on that.

Except that the people who need to be clear on that don't read this blog, so they will probably keep enthusing about discount stores to me as if I am a fellow bargain hunter, specifically citing my love for Goodwill as evidence of my kinship.

Ah well.

I don't think that individual crafters using recycled materials are going to make a dent in the amount of garbage we toss out, but if you're going to craft anyway, turning trash into treasure is a much lower impact way to go about it than stocking up at the local craft mega-store.

BellyBuzz Craft sells reusable gift bows made out of magazines. The Martha Stewart ones are lovely, the Wired ones are geeky, and the Discover ones are quite festive.

So if you actually wrap gifts, which I seem to have forgotten how to do in recent years, you should totally check these out.

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.