Flooded Lizard Kingdom

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...

The second Sustainable Shoppers' Ball is happening this Saturday in Austin. I missed the first one, so I hope I make it to this one. It's held on Earth Day, what could be better?

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.

Use What You Have Month originated with a post at Simple Sparrow. Every quilter I know has what's called a "stash," and apparently it's common to other kinds of crafters as well. The idea is that for the month of April, you only make projects from what you already have in your stash. I cheated by going to the fabric store on Thursday to buy a yard of neutral for the background of one of my works in progress. But other than that, I think I'm going to finish up quilts for JPed's twin girls this month just out of what I already have.

It's kind of a nice antidote to the American shop-shop-shop mentality.

I do worry (imagine that!) about how much pesticide is used to produce all the cotton I buy for quilting. So it's nice to see organic fabrics starting to come out. Check out HarmonyArt and Mod Green Pod. They aren't really for quilting, but I'm confident we'll get there.

I really like Etsy.

Yesterday I watched a woman walk up to H-E-B with several plastic bags full of plastic bags. She put them into the recycling bin and then went inside, presumably to buy some groceries and bring them home in more plastic bags.

I'm developing a tic just thinking about it. There's a reason that the mantra is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. That third option is kind of crap compared to the first two.

Correspondent tesseract26 sent in this report a couple of months ago, but I had forgotten about it until she dropped off one of the bags she describes at my house:

On my pilgrimage to the downtown Whole Foods today, I noticed they had some of these bags. They're WF branded, of course, so you're walking product placement; but on the upside, they have a bottom panel, so they're structured (so much easier to deal with than floppy canvas), and they're only $3!! I bought three of them to round out my collection.

I guess I have to give it back, since I have one third of her collection.

Another fun link to check out, via a post on Treehugger: Take Your Bag For A Walk. You don't have to buy theirs, you can buy (or make) your own and it will work just as well.

Honest, it's not that hard. Especially if you drive to the store in a car, which most of you do. Just keep a bag or two in the car with you. I'm not just talking grocery store either - do it at Fry's, at CVS, at Walgreens, etc.

Of course, the most common cashier response to "I don't need a bag" is "What?" So you'll probably have to say it twice. But really, who can blame retail employees for zoning out a little from time to time?

If you didn't get enough loot during the holidays, you should buy yourself some scented pencils made of recycled paper or a smart power strip that doesn't draw idle current. It's not shopping, it's SAVING THE PLANET. :)

Americans are a high-consumption lot. A lot of the consumption I understand: food, toys, and travel can make people happy.

But I do not understand plastic grocery bags. They break, the handles are usually poorly designed, and they multiply ridiculously fast.

I have been a beneficiary of some of my friends' bag consumption, as these bags found a second life picking up after The Dog. But since C. gave me a gift of some degradable dog-size bags, I've been frowning a little more at the stash of bags in my closet.

Apparently, one-use paper grocery bags consume more energy than do one-use plastic bags, even when made of recycled paper. All my paper grocery bags, by which I mean about 3 per month, are used twice: once to bring home groceries, once to hold recycling. So I'm feeling ok about those.

Plastic bags, though, seem to have a host of other issues. Greenpeace has noted concerns about plastic recycling, though the article is a bit dated. The North Coast Journal in California has reported dangerous conditions for workers overseas who recycle American plastics. Mother Jones has reported that the plastics industry isn't all that keen on using recycled materials.

On the upside, H-E-B grocery stores here in Texas seem to actually recycle plastic bags, turning them into new bags that they sell.

However, what's the point in having all that disposable stuff made in the first place? As definitive proof of evil goes, the above is a little thin, but I think we all realize that making stuff uses up resources and creates waste, a lot of which is pretty nasty. How much energy, petroleum, and toxicity do we think is a good amount for the dubious convenience of toting around objects in plastic bags?

If you make just one New Year's Resolution, please consider this one: buy 5 canvas grocery bags, and keep them in your car. If you take them in the house and don't bring them back out to the car when they're unloaded, you won't have them with you when you need them. When you get a small item, say "I don't need a bag, please." Just take it and your receipt and go. When you go into a store to buy several items, take a bag with you and follow a similar procedure, placing your items in your bag. I have never been stopped by security either for carrying my own bag in a store or for leaving a store with an unbagged object if I was also holding the receipt.

I'm planning to have kids someday, and I'd like them to be able to live on this planet. Mars just isn't ready yet. And I promise The Dog won't mind.

Thanks to Carrie's lefty gift guide, it now says "Heifer Bees" next to my mom's name on my shopping list.

And Mom, if you're reading this blog, please stop. It freaks me out.

Today is Buy Nothing Day, but since I generally buy nothing on the majority of the days of the year, I'm not skipping the comic book sale.

Instead, I re-took the Ecological Footprint quiz. If everyone lived like me, we would need 1.9 Earths.

The quiz results say that worldwide, there are 4.5 productive acres per person. I only used .7 acres for mobility, since I use the bus for most of my travel and the Honda Civic gets kickin' gas mileage. But I used 4.4 for food, since I don't eat local and I eat dairy and/or eggs every day. I used 1.7 acres for shelter, which I don't know how I could lower in the quiz since I can't make many energy efficiency changes to my apartment. I guess the 1.7 acres for goods and services comes just from living in America. That number I can only change by working on the systems, not by my individual choices.

I'm already thinking about New Year's Resolutions. Perhaps eating more locally will be one of them. If these folks could do a 100-mile diet in northern British Columbia, surely Central Texas offers some possibilities. In theory I'd like to support a CSA, but as a legendarily picky eater it's intimidating.

I've been a scattered gift-giver in the past few years, due to funding issues and an annual denial about the holidays that lasts until about December 17th. I'm going to try to be better this year. Luckily, Carrie's written up a fabulous gift guide to help me get on with it without troubling my eco-conscience.

One of the more interesting bits she mentions is carbon offsets for travel, which I had seen written up in NRDC's OnEarth. I thought I had done my part by purchasing a Honda Civic, but there's always another small step to take. Mental note: revise budget to include carbon offsets for trips to California and Colorado this year.

Also check out Green House Framing, which uses reclaimed lumber and friendly stains to make picture frames. They have premade, or you can get cusom orders. Very pretty!

Or you could just give everyone one of these.

Though I have never hugged a tree, I do like finding out about cool things I could buy like organic, hand-harvested, free-range alpaca mittens for $15, or recycled stainless steel scissors, or wood stains that won't give you cancer, or recycled rubber stepping stones (which they call "pavers" for some crazy reason).

I also enjoy reading about designer doghouses, dog-powered scooters, and how to recycle a 747 into a house.

It's high-volume, and sometimes the pages take a bit to load because of so many graphics, but I'm enjoying it.

Vegan Lunch Box still reigns supreme as my favorite blog, though.

For those of y'all who like your eco-friendliness to be really, really easy, you might want to check out Ideal Bite. They have a daily tip email list that sends out one little tip each day and tells you how to follow through, usually by shopping :). Like wine? There's a tip on organic wine Like chocolate? There's a tip on organic chocolate.

Since I don't like either of those things, here are my faves from the past few months:

• Eco-friendly dry cleaning (in Austin, this means EcoMat on Guadalupe)
• Eco-friendly light bulbs
• Ditch the antibacterial soap and a related tip, Wash your hands in cold water
• How to pick eco-friendly art supplies
• Socially responsible investing
• Recycling tires

The tips can be kind of fluffy, but they're well-written and entertaining. Way better than the email from the American Airlines frequent flyer program.

Hat tip to Joel Makower.

[Update, later that same day...UnwiredBen points out that they also have a blog: http://idealbite.blogs.com/. I don't care for it, so I didn't mention it in my post. It is different from the tip e-mail list.]

I'm going to buy my first car at age 30. I love the idea of going to the grocery store all by myself and not having to judge the weight of my groceries as well as the price, but I really hate the idea of using gasoline.

I know, I know, I use gasoline now when my friends take me places, and I will still have control over how much I use. The car doesn't have to run me. I can walk right past it and take the bus whenever I want. But I still feel like I'm doing something icky, so I've been keeping an eye out for ways to do it in the best way I can.

First good find is the Better World Club:

Better World Club provides nationwide roadside assistance. We are the nation's only environmentally friendly auto club. Membership includes eco-travel services, discounts on hybrid cars, insurance services, free maps, auto maintenance discounts and bicycle roadside assistance. We donate 1% of annual revenues toward environmental cleanup and advocacy.

This is in contrast to the AAA, which, as the Sierra Club puts it, "is now a major force in pushing for more highway spending, fewer pollution controls and less money for mass transit." Rivlin's piece, in the National Resources Defense Council journal, also mentions that the AAA opposed the Clean Air Act and the mandatory installation of airbags.

My happy second discovery was via Joel Makower's blog Two Steps Forward. He highlighted a new phenomenon called Green Tags:

The simplest explanation I can muster is that when you buy green tags, you’re paying a electricity generator to put a certain amount of renewable energy (usually from wind, sometimes from solar or biomass) into the grid, thereby reducing the need for some dirty power plant to produce the same amount of juice from coal or natural gas or nukes.

Buying green tags has a couple of other benefits besides reducing the need for fossil-fuel electricity. It helps to stimulate markets for renewable energy, and it allows individuals, businesses, and others to "offset" their climate emissions -- from electricity, driving, and other activities.

The Green Tags producers he lists and compares are Certified Clean Car, DrivingGreen, Bonneville Environmental Foundation (I don't think there's a relation to the Cadillac of the same name), Native Energy, and ETA Roadside Rescue (in the UK).

CNN did a story on Green Tags last week featuring a company called TerraPass, which sends you a sticker when you buy the credits for your car:

Not surprisingly, few SUV drivers have been buying them. Most have gone to owners of fuel-efficient cars that produce relatively few pollutants.

That initially surprised [Tom] Arnold, [TerraPass's chief environmental officer and sole full-time employee].

"We fully expected to target SUV drivers with SUV guilt," he said. "It just doesn't exist"

Instead, he's been travelling to environmental fairs pitching the idea to those who, for the most part, drive fuel efficient small cars and gas/electric hybrid vehicles.

"Environmentalists have a very conflicted relationship with their cars," said Arnold.

And how!

My approach to encouraging people to copy on both sides is likely to sound like this: "I WILL SEND THE DOG TO BITE YOU IF YOU DON'T GET WITH THE PROGRAM! WHERE DO YOU THINK MY CHILDREN ARE GOING TO LIVE WHEN YOU FINISH DESTROYING THE PLANET?!"

Environmental Defense, as part of a project with Citigroup, has come up with a much better approach: Reasonably funny, cute signs that encourage people to use both sides.

I wonder if I'm brave enough to sneak around and put them up at work. Maybe I should make it a goal to work my way through the building.

I have these periodic fits of mild outrage about how my parents were unjust to me when I was a kid. I'm not actually mad at them for it anymore, but (for example) virtually every time I wash my hair I feel the need to make a speech about the oppression I experienced when my mother told me I was using too much shampoo. Hello, Mom, your hair is thin, fine, and short. Do those adjectives describe my hair? Rarely. Case closed. And Dad, telling me I was going to end up in the gutter because of Guns N' Roses was just silly. YOU OWNED APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION, for cryin' out loud!

Anyway.

Much more recently than the abovementioned traumas, my mother told me that turning off the lights when you leave the room isn't necessary because light bulbs use very little energy. Marshalling all my intellectual forces, I asked "then why did Saturday morning cartoons tell us to turn them off?" Her response: "Because that's something kids can do."

I was suspicious.

My vindication, which I located via the Natural Resources Defense Council's article "Everlasting Light" (which I found on some blog, because what else do I read these days?):

Every American is encouraged to change out their 5 most frequently used light fixtures or the bulbs in them to ENERGY STAR qualified lighting. If every American home made this "5 light change" not only would each family save more than $60 every year in energy costs, but together we'd also keep more than one trillion pounds of greenhouse gases out of our air. That's a $6 billion energy savings for Americans equivalent to the annual output of more than 21 power plants.

If we can equal 21 power plants by downshifting, I think it's just possible that turning off lights when we're not using them could do some good.

p.s. I love you, Mom!!!!

Gristmill is one of my favorite blogs, even though I have been out of the loop on environmental issues for quite some time. The tone is generally witty and insightful, but without taking a know-it-all stance.

This article on individual choices versus systems change made me smile:

A humane, sustainable human society is not an individual undertaking. It cannot succeed solely through individual willpower. Already our culture works to atomize us, to make us feel like islands of consumer desire whose sole function is to accumulate as much as possible. It discourages us from thinking of ourselves as involved in communities that impose obligations and responsibilities. But if it is to mean anything substantial, a new ethic of sustainability must be collective. It's going to be about community, about our mutual bonds and mutual care.

Whether or not you recycle your plastic makes not one tiny iota of difference in the grand scheme of things -- really, it doesn't. If our society's survival rests on individuals' ability to refrain from easily-available ecological sins, we are screwed. It's the infrastructure that matters: the laws, the economic relationships, the physical structures we inhabit. [...] We have to establish a system in which it's easy and natural for people to live sustainably.

I don't know how to accomplish that cultural transformation, but I do know that for me, it has never been enough to make my own choices. Everything I do affects the world, and I feel a deep responsibility to contribute to changing the systems.

I don't know why it has taken me so long to realize that electoral politics are one part of that responsibility. Maybe it's just the next step in my evolution - from direct social services, to social services policy, to working on the leadership that makes the policy.

My friend C. has come up with a neat phrase: "Try to buy stuff from people who made it." I like it.

I've thought of one to add to the collection: "Try to buy stuff made without poisoning people." I know it's not as positive, but I'm in a feisty mood. For more on one way to do that, visit OrganicBouquet.com. Their prices seem fairly in line with normal floral delivery, and they're working with major growers to encourage them to start up organic production. All in all, a way to buy something you can feel good about.

I don't mind being told how much environmental damage is done by what I buy, but I've pretty much heard it all already. It's so much better when I'm shown specific friendlier alternatives.

Otherwise it's pretty much just a lecture, and how many of those do we ever listen to?