Green How-to

This is a really great website with every kind of project imaginable. You kind find every kind of green home project imaginable - and those you never even considered.

I really love this modular water jug shelving. (Not that I recommend buying all that plastic for water.)



Happy browsing!

www.instructables.com

Better shower curtains

Dilemna:  My shower curtain liner needs to be replaced, but I'm so tired of buying new vinyl liners.  I have tried washing the liner but it still has little spots  and its now ripped. Plus, these vinyl liners, however monetarily inexpensive they seem at the time, we do end up paying for them in the long run.  And not just by buying many throughout our lifetime, but paying for the time it takes them to decompose in the landfill...and since they are typically PVC, well, they don't really decompose, at least not in our lifetime.

Solution:  a hemp shower curtain

These don't even need a liner!  From what I have read (I am saving up to buy one now) they will get wet like any fabric but Hemp is naturally antimicrobial, durable and machine washable.  It also is PVC and VOC free (vinyl liners off gas so much!  Not good for you, and the manufacturing process is not good for the ozone.)  

When you are in the market for replacing your vinyl liner, think hemp!

There are many products out there...try to get something organic and made in the USA.

 

Lets turn on Disposable Culture

We are a disposable culture. Can you find room to disagree?

While it can be a pain to bring with you everything you might need in one day, its our responsibility to at least try to be aware of the things we are throwing away, that really we don't need to be using or tossing in the first place.

Eating out is a large instigator of this culture: aluminum foil, plastic/styrofoam containers, wax paper, plastic sporks, paper/plastic bags all for one meal? Well, lets turn our daily coffee and lunch into a saving grace.

Things like To-Go Ware can make this choice easier; as this cute as a button flatware set, simply rolls right up and slips into your bag. The cutlery is made from bamboo, and the pocket is made from post consumer recycled plastic bags. This company has other things to reduce the impact of our to-go culture as well, like stainless steel containers and cotton carriers.

What else can we do to be plastic free? I had a list of my own, but I found another blogger who agrees.

Remember, reducing our impact on the earth can certainly be a feat. If you take little steps every so often, you can begin changing our collective not-so-awesome way of doing things and make it a better place. Drop by bit, everyone, drop by bit.

Plastics: Micro scrubbing beads

I love to exfoliate like the next lady...but do you know that many exfoliating face washes have little plastic beads that you are rubbing all over your face and then pouring straight down the drain and into the water way? Oh yes, its true. And more often than not they don't get filtered out of the water system because they are so small, and they go right into the ocean fills as described into the post below.

So one small thing we can do is not to buy these products, and instead buy products with natural exfoliants.

Its ashame that consumers even have to watch out for this...these companies should not even be allowed to sell plastic beads that are meant to go straight down the drain. They know they don't decompose, they know that wildlife are feeding on them, which means we are feeding on them too. In the closed loop world we live in, they are basically permitted to contaminate us in a law abiding way. Oy times a million.

Plastics: the never ending story

Kind of disturbing? There are so many petroleum based products in our lives: most of them in the form of plastics: and many we don't even know or think about! So how can we take care of the massive amount of throw away products that consume our lives, the land fills and the ocean fills if we really aren't aware of how much they define the way we live?

Many of these plastics end up in ocean fills, which are humongous tide pools of current that draw in so much trash that there is a huge floating piles of it thousands of miles wide. The most well known is The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I read about this in The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman. In one terrifying chapter Alan describes that the plastic problem will not solve itself, as they have only been around 50 years or so, will most likely take thousands of years to disintegrate (into what we do not know), and knowing their outcomes is impossible because they will far out last us.

Saran wrap, laundry detergent, grocery bags, chip bags, shampoo bottles, food containers, packaging material, trash bins, cd and dvd cases, records, toothbrushes, micro scrubbing beads in your face wash, toys, pens, cups, bowls, furniture, building parts. so. many. things.

So what to do? It can be kind of overwhelming trying to figure out how to live symbiotically with the earth, when our society is set up on the basis of a disposable culture. My advice is to take care of one thing at a time. First, I did away with plastic grocery bags by getting the Baggu.

Next Step: plastic bags at the grocery store that you put produce in. You can try something like this, or I am sure you can find your own bags at home! Most of the time, I don't even use any bag when getting produce. Sometimes the checkout clerk won't so happy, but do you really need the bag?

What do you do to reduce the plastic in your life?