Look, Mom, no bottles!
Wednesday, 16 June 2010Good D.C. news: MOM’s Organic, a small D.C.-based grocery chain is giving up on bottled water.
Details from the Washington Post, via Tapit.
“The Story of Bottled Water”
Tuesday, 13 April 2010A great video; a follow up to The Story of Stuff. The video is more than eight minutes long, so I suspect it’s use is best for those who are already convinced to make a case, rather than sugesting your indifferent friends to watch it.
The matching site also has other resources, including an annotated script.
Bag bill seems to be doing its job
Monday, 29 March 2010Three months on and the District of Columbia food bag fee is reducing demand for disposable plastic and paper food bags, per DCist today.
January receipts for the fee are in — $149,432.27. That means about three million bags were used rather than the 22.5 million thought to be used in the District any given month.
It will be nice to see how this will shape up in six months. I’ll see if I can find original reports from D.C. government sources and will post them here.
Low plastic? Shop on campus
Wednesday, 24 February 2010I was in Athens, Georgia last weekend for a University of Georgia alumni event. One fun thing about being in a college town is shopping for items unavailable elsewhere. (Metro D.C. is — what? — thirty times the size, but it’s easier to get beer-making supplies in Athens, for instance.)
One such product line is green office supplies, or rather school supplies. I was taken with the recycled paper blue books — dubbed and colored as “green books” — plus recycled-plastic-content pens (I prefer my fountain pen) and corrugated-cardboard ring binders. There was even a aluminum-cased USB stick in all-cardboard packaging. Other things — one I bought and will describe later — too.
Some were marginally more than their non-recycled-content companions; others, like that USB stick, were quite a bit more. Bit it’s nice to have the options and I saw it at every bookstore I visited.
Making bread
Monday, 15 February 2010The District of Columbia and surrounding area is digging out from a pair of blizzards the likes of which have not seen around here in living memory.
Bread was one of the first commodities to disappear — this is a well-known phenomenon, even for modest snows — and the snowfall prevented trucks from restocking. We, however, did not do without. (Indeed, I think we may have had too much, but that’s a problem for another blog.)
In short, I had a nice hand-me-down bread maker and made five two-pound loaves over the course of the blizzards. My recipe uses bread flour, water, powdered milk, wheat gluten, white sugar, salt, oil and yeast.
Water comes from the tap. The flour, milk, sugar and salt come from paper or cardboard packaging. The wheat gluten comes packaged in plastic film within a cardboard box; I suppose I could do without it. The yeast — a bulk package, normally for commercial bakers; I’ve had it for ages in the fridge, transfered to a glass jar — came in a mylar-foil brick, like mass-market coffee. Oil comes in a plastic bottle, though I’m looking to start with canned oil after I’m done.
Really not too much plastic per loaf. Sorry I can’t say the same about calories!
Low plastic office: Hollinger boxes
Tuesday, 2 February 2010A truly paperless office, even if desirable, is very hard to organize. Paper is just too useful a product and paper printed quickly becomes paper stored. There are many metal filing tools for those who want to avoid plastic, but these are often packed in plastic or are simply too large or unwieldy for the task.
For this middle ground, I like the cool aesthetics and fiber and metal construction of Hollinger boxes. To me, they’re the visual language of archives, and thus research and storage. They even have boxes for human remains — think archaeology — so one might also be my final, er, storage place.
Until then, I keep manila folders full of files in flip-top boxes. Attractive enough to keep out, and no plastic. I keep rare books and papers in a lidded variety. I’ve had mine for years, but I recall them being shipped in cardboard cartons with kraft paper packing. (And D.C.-ites, one of their two factories is in Fredericksburg, Va. Loco-storage?)
Order them online here.
D.C. bag law, one month on
Sunday, 31 January 2010The District of Columbia law requiring a fee for disposable bags in food and liquor businesses is reducing the demand for thee bags, even if it irritates some locals.
No official reports yet, but shopkeepers report half the use of disposable bags — quite an accomplishment — per this January 23 article in the Washington Post. Of course, there are naysayers and complainers. But I have a hard time thinking too much D.C. grocery and liquor shopping will move to Maryland or Virginia. Particularly the latter which has a food tax that D.C. doesn’t. And if you can’t remember to bring a bag to pick up your lunch — or eat it on-site — and won’t pay for a bag, then I feel no sympathy when it lands on the sidewalk. Twice. How embarrassing, so much so when adding meaningless “big government” sloganeering to counter it. (Nobody complains about “big government” when the city shuts down a rat-infested eatery, for instance. Why shouldn’t I have the option!)
On the other hand, it’s now psychologically and socially easier to bring my bag — I keep one rolled up in my satchel almost all of the time — to a take-out restaurant (I have featured one in the article as they use sugarcane fiber boxes and biodegradable forks and spoons) or a liquor store.
Replace plastic with clay and water?
Wednesday, 20 January 2010Watching NHK World, the Japanese state broadcaster, in English tonight and a news segment noted Takuzo Aida of the University of Tokyo announcing a possible replacement for plastics made mostly of water, clay and organic materials. Potential uses include surgical implants.
New Scientist has details “Smart mud could be the new plastic“
Getting rid of phone books
Monday, 18 January 2010Today, NPR had a segment (“The Phone Book’s Days Appear Numbered”) about a California bill to make white page directories opt-in, the problems associated with their production and disposal and about the overall decline of the utility of phonebooks. (These are, of course, mostly paper — a valuable resource in its own right — but sometimes they’ve wrapped in plastic.)
A phone book trade group obviously sensing pressure — other state bill have failed, but for how long I wonder — have created an opt-out service. Not so useful, but worth promoting if your goal is to reduce useless giveaways. (Catalog Choice is another.)
Go to www.yellowpagesoptout.com for details.
Low Plastic Office: rubber bands
Monday, 11 January 2010I’ve been thinking about reducing plastic use in the office which — after home — is the place it makes the most sense for me and for many others.
I want to point out the obvious: rubber bands are really handy. I use them to bundle papers, including files. I use them to cinch cables — plastic-covered! — to protect them from wear. I use them to affix a note to an odd-sized object. I even use one in place of a wallet.
Being made of rubber, they biodegrade — indeed, how many times have we run across one that’s brittle and about to crack? And they can even be had without plastic packaging. Some are boxed, true, but I get mine from the letter carrier, holding together mail. But I only keep as many as I use. The rest I collect and return. Better, after all to reuse than recycle.