Bring Your Own Bag
Bring Your Own Bag
One trillion plastic grocery bags are consumed worldwide each year. Yes, I said *trillion*. These bags can take up to 1000 years to degrade. When they finally do break down, they leak toxins into our soil and groundwater.
Hundreds of thousands of marine animals die every year from eating plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags are among the twelve most common items found during beach clean-ups. They can be found floating in the oceans from the north to the south pole. Sailors say that plastic bags are the most common ocean trash that they encounter.
Wind blown grocery bags are a signifigant source of litter. Tens of thousands of plastic bags are collected each day during environmental clean-ups around the world. Plastic bags are notorious for clogging stormwater drains in urban environments.
Plastic bags are made from oil and natural gas. The production of plastic bags accounts for four percent of the world’s total oil usage.
While paper grocery bags do biodegrade, they are still not green alternatives. Compared to plastic, paper bags take more energy to produce and transport, produce much more pollution during manufacture, and require much more energy to recycle. In 1999 14 million trees were cut down to supply the nation with paper grocery bags.
The Bring Your Own Bag movement is taking action to stem the tide, one consumer at a time. One person consumes 300-600 plastic bags per year. By taking your own reusable bag with you when you go shopping, you will make a big impact on the environment.
Kroger is the only mainstream grocer that currently offers reusable bags bags to its customers. You can buy a sturdy, washable market bag from Kroger’s for 99 cents. Those bags hold three times more groceries than a normal plastic, so you only need a few.
If you don’t have a Kroger in your town, ask the manager of your grocery store to start stocking reusable grocery bags. Retailers can team up with the folks over at http://www.bringyourbag.com to offer market bags at the same incrediblly low prices as Kroger. Since your local manager might not have the clout to make this decision, a letter to corporate headquarters couldn’t hurt, either.
If none of your grocery stores carry reusable bags, its not a problem. You might have some bags around your house that would suit the purpose just fine. If you just don’t have anything on hand, and can’t find anything in the stores around town that seems suitable, there are stores online that have just what you need. Reusablebags.com is the most popular site.
Anything that you can do to spread the use of reusable bags throughout your community will make a huge beneficial impact on the environment. http://www.love-a-tree.com will provide wholesale custom printed cotton canvas carry bags for community fund-raiser projects. With a 40% profit margin, this opportunity is a great way for any club to raise funds and spread the Bring Your Own Bags gospel. By choosing to print the bags with a “Stop Using Plastic Bags” slogan, you are spreading the message even further. Your fund-raising customers become walking billboards.
Do you have a collection of plastic grocery bags under your sink, waiting to be used as trash bags? If so, take them down to your local grocery store and put them in the plastic bag recycling bin. If you can’t find it, speak to the manager. You should not put plastic grocery bags in with your recycling at home. Most municipalities lack the infrastructure to handle them appropriately.
Get your own bag. Use it. Recycle all of the plastic grocery bags that you’ve stashed. Tell your friends. Work to inform and engage your community. If all of that sounds overwhelming, then just do one thing. Get your own bag.
Most Toxic Produce
Eating organic is hard to do. Organic foods are often unavailable. When you can find organic products they are usually twice the cost of regular food. As the demand for organic food increases, the tide is slowly changing. More mainstream grocers have organic sections, and the prices are falling. Still, it is just about impossible for someone to completely switch over to organic foods.
Some people have an “all or nothing” attitude. They feel that a partially organic diet won’t make a difference. They never buy anything organic because they can’t buy everything organic. This is bad judgement, and I’m going to show you why.
Before we talk about the health benefits of a partially organic diet, I want you to think back to your high school economics classes. If we are upset about the lack of organic availability, we must act according to the laws of supply and demand to fix the problem. If we buy the organic foods that are available now, and actively request a larger selection from our grocers, then the market will expand to meet the demand. We already see it happening all across the nation. Every time you make an organic purchase, you are strengthening the organic market!
We eat organic foods to protect our health. Knowing which foods are the most dangerous to your health can help you design a very effective partially organic diet. You can download a wallet guide that will help you make these choices. By eliminating the non organic versions of these foods from your diet you will drastically reduce your pesticide exposure.
A non-profit organization studied the pesticide levels in 50 types of common produce. The study tested the produce after it had been prepared by the common methods of washing and peeling. The wallet guide lists the twelve most polluted foods, and the twelve cleanest foods. You can download the wallet guide and read about the study at http://www.foodnews.org/walletguide.php
It is very important to make sure that your children do not eat the foods reported on the most toxic list. Even a few bites of some of these foods can put your child over the EPA’s daily adult limit for organophosphate exposure. These pesticides are nuero-toxins that can affect your child’s development and learning abilities.
We all become green by taking little steps towards a healthier lifstyle. One of the best ways to begin your organic conversion is by purchasing the organic versions of these twelve items. Your health, your children, the organic industry, and the environment will benefit immensely from this one small change.
Non Toxic Ant Killer
Every summer, my house is invaded by ants. They come in hoardes and attack EVERYTHING. They bite me at night while I am sleeping. This is war.
It sort of seems anti-everything-I-believe-in to spray my house with chemicals to get rid of them. I have tried ant baits but they seemed more interested in everything else in the house. Also, the ant baits themselves were pretty toxic. I worried about the after effects of throwing them in the landfill, and dreaded the thought of a dog or baby accidentally eating them.
After an exhausting internet search I found this stuff called Terro. It is nothing more complicated than corn syrup and borax. The ants can’t handle the borax and die. But if humans or pets eat it there won’t be any harmful side effects.
While I avoid laundry detergents with borax because of the enviromental impact, the miniscule concentration in these makes me feel comfortable with tossing the empties in the landfill.
They are not made of biodegradable plastic or packaged in an earth-friendly box with environmentally sensitive inks. But the little bait traps are recyclable, so that’s a start. It would be nice if Terro spread through the green market enough that we could influence green packaging intiatives within the company.
Ants think Terro is the best stuff in the world. They will bypass your lasagna sitting uncovered on the kitchen counter just to get to it. They march in thick streaming columns. They swarm. It is pure ant gluttony.
It kind of eases my guilt to see them so happy before they die. Within a day or two they are all gone. In the meantime they are too busy at thier corn syrup party to bother you.
In summary: Terro is cheap, convenient, sold in most major box stores, non-toxic, and it WORKS.
Cheap | Green | Modern 