holiday shakedown

whew. it's over. i must say i am happy to be on the other side of the gift getting/giving/ buying part of the holiday season. this year was really confusing for me. pre-environmental freakout, i bought a bunch of crazy stuff for the kids (like a make your own superball kit) and sean (a heated back massager for the car. ?#@$?). post-freakout, i made homemade gift cards out of construction paper because i didn't want to buy the plastic ones. a few days before christmas, we met my parents at the mall and i felt like an alien watching everyone scramble to buy their last minute stuff. when the girls opened their gifts, there was such a strange mixture of decadent plastic stuff they'll quickly abandon and carefully selected used books they'll be reading for years. it sure is hard and awkward to change sometimes.

for me, the big thing i learned is that i don't want to do it like that again next year. i want to make my gifts next year, giving myself tons of time to get them done. i think i'll make a list of the things i want to give to each person and make them throughout the year, creating a stockpile of knitted hats and jewelry and bath salts and artwork instead of racing out to the mall in a final hour frenzy. it will be fun to see how different the holidays look and feel around here next year.

my friend gave me a cool book called "The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook" which has 77 suggestions for ways to go green. Number one is to Commit and number 2 is Change Slowly. the author says, "Changing an established way of life can take three to six months or more. Don't give up . . . in time, it gets easier and eventually becomes innate." so that's inspiring to me.

how were your holidays? i hope you had a wonderful season and are
getting ready for a fresh new year!

compensating for carbon

A quote from the recent UN Bali Conference on Climate Change:

"I would like to see incentives right down to the personal level at home, with carbon trading on eBay or eTrade."
--Odin Knudsen, managing director of environmental products for JP Morgan

This idea of buying units of carbon from your neighbor confuses me. How does it work? I don't get it. How can you cancel out your impact on the planet so much that you have carbon to spare? Here's what my smart (getting his PhD in renewable energy) friend Adrian has to say:

Even though we breathe out CO2, everything is balanced over our lifetimes with respect to CO2, because the energy to keep us going comes from photosynthesis, which takes up CO2 from the atmosphere. We are also stores of reduced carbon compounds, just like trees and plants. When living things die and decompose, a lot of the reduced carbon (carbohydrates) is oxidized back to CO2.

So if we don't burn fossil fuels (or whole forests), we probably have a lifetime neutral/zero carbon footprint. The cave people had it about right. If you provide power to the grid, I think (not certain) that you still can't be less than zero unless you are using the power to somehow remove CO2. For example, a wind turbine used by a single family just to provide power for lights, etc. is not removing CO2 from the atmosphere--it's carbon neutral but not carbon negative. Also, the turbine itself requires energy to build, as do all of the items that it powers. So I'm going to say that it would be quite difficult, over a lifetime, to do better than a Neanderthal's carbon footprint. Unless you are a plant.

Most people are net consumers of CO2, with the qualified exception of people with solar, wind, [and other renewable resources] at their homes. Carbon taxes, carbon trading schemes, carbon credits, all assume that we need to produce some CO2 to live in a modern society. As such, each person, household, family, or whatever gets a set amount. If you exceed that, you pay a tax or have to buy credits from someone who is under their allotment. So a person can still earn carbon credits, even though they are net producers of CO2; they've simply come in under their quota. It is a short-term (few decades) solution, after which time the globe will hopefully be much, much closer to carbon neutral by using sun, wind, geothermal, tides, etc.

That makes sense. So, who determines what each person's set amount will be? That sounds like a political debate.

Freecycle and The Compact

I'm looking for a bike to start riding around town when I'm kid free, and stumbled across Freecycle. Here's what they do:

The Freecycle Network is made up of 4,202 groups with 4,205,000 members across the globe. It's a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them's good people).

You start out by offering something, and then you can ask for what you need. It's kind of like a free Craigslist.

Taking it one step further are people making the pledge not to buy anything new (with the exception of food and health necessities) for one year. The organizers are calling this movement The Compact. Instead of hitting Target, they go to thrift stores, Craigslist and Freecycle. What a great idea. I don't know if we're ready for that step yet, but it would be interesting to try. Striving to reduce our consumption that much would really slow me down, even if I can't do it all the time. Have any of you tried it out? Here's more info if you're interested.

I [heart] Al Gore

"Now comes the threat of climate crisis ­, a threat that is real, rising, imminent, and universal . . . The penalties for ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?"
--Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

Notes from our first meeting

Last night we had our first going green family meeting! We started out by getting to know each other and talking about our efforts to go green. Different areas we're working on:

shifts in attitudes/education :
- learning how to let go of keeping up with the neighbors
- let go of fashion trends
- teaching our kids to think about their consumption choices by modeling them ourselves
- figuring out how to go green without "sucking the fun out of life"

transportation:
- carpooling for kids' activities
- walking or biking to school, errands
- learning how to use the bus with kids

holidays:
- fighting the impulse to over-consume
- reuse paper and gifts

house:
- green cleaning supplies
- learning how to refinish and reupholster old furniture

waste:
- getting clear about what we can recycle
- fighting the urge to buy the latest gadget or product
- buying a ceramic compost bin (amazon.com)

food:
- choose less packaging, buy in bulk
- eat healthier, more local food
- butter bell
- co2 bubble water attachments

clothes:
- good consignment shops/thrift stores
- get leather shoes cleaned every year
- buy one new dress for the holiday season
- get old shoes resoled

other areas to think about:
- green shopping list
- eating out, coffee shops
- identifying green companies you can feel good about supporting
- ways to offset your bad habits that are hard to change
- learn more about being an activist in our everyday lives

Our next big project is creating a community website. We want to make it a positive, encouraging and supportive site with lots of manageable ways to go green. Some ideas include setting up a place for people to post things they no longer need and tools to keep track of our individual and collective green efforts. We're also thinking about creating tiers of things people can do, with beginners starting at the first tier. As we move forward, we can challenge ourselves to go greener with the next established set of clear objectives.

I'd love your thoughts and suggestions for the website - any idea is welcome and possible! I'd also love your ideas for manageable things people can do at each tier of going green. As a starting point, I'll just call these tiers Level 1 (beginning) and Level Two (next steps for people who have been doing this for a long time).

Thanks for all your great ideas and suggestions!

keeping on keeping on

We've been talking about drinking out of toxic plastic on our listserve and getting bummed out about all the years we've been doing it. It is hard sometimes to do this work, to face what is happening and change it. I especially don't like looking at the ways I contribute to the problem. I hate the fact that my little girls have been drinking out of toxic sippy cups for years and that my breast milk probably did a number on them too. And the plastic thing is just one little tiny facet of this incredibly complex and integrated crisis we find ourselves in. It's scary because we don't know what's going to happen with any of it. And sad because I love my family and want a bright and happy future for them.

So what do we do? How do we move forward? I was talking about this whole situation with a friend of mine who has been a therapist for many years. He said two things that really stuck with me: First, that we need to stay in balance ourselves as we work to return our lives and the world to balance. It's so easy for me to abandon things like sleep, regular meals, exercise, time with my family and friends and plain old fun. But I think my friend is right. We've got to pace ourselves, which is never my strong suit. His other idea is to think of this work as continual transition. We don't have to have it all down, and probably never will. We just need to keep learning, responding and changing, making healthier and more informed choices each time. The sum total of all our small changes will lead to good things.

Some days (often multiple times a day), I don't want to do this green thing anymore. I want to go back to where I was a month ago, blissfully buying plastic toys at 5 in the morning on Black Friday and feeling all cozy in my 72 degree house. But two things keep me moving forward. I keep mentally bouncing against the idea that the reality of global warming isn't going away whether it makes me happy or not. And the thought that always follows is that I need to face it for my kids. The depth of my learning to live green is fueled by my love for my kids. They're (to use my favorite phrase I learned in high school) inextricably intertwined.

I want this future for my kids and I believe it's possible. We can change direction. It's just hard sometimes.

Energy

Last week, I attacked the plastic in the kitchen. I threw everything I could get my hands on into recycling, including my husband's favorite pasta grabbing claw. Sean fished it out and brought this offense up five times in a single day. Didn't go over very well. He's still talking about it. So, I am just starting to learn about how to make these (sometimes radical) changes in a life that I share with other people. We decided I can't go flying off the handle until I give him warning first. I need to do the research and send it his way, give him time to digest it and then make our plan of action together. Since he's the voice of reason around here, I guess that's probably a good idea. Slows me down a bit, which is probably a good thing. Since every relationship is so different, I would be interested to hear how you navigate green decisions and make big changes with the people in your lives.

This week, I'm taking on our energy consumption. Lightbulbs, covering the water heater, windows, stuff like that. My friend Adrian has been conscious of energy issues for a long time and had some great suggestions for me:

The first thing to do is cut your household emissions. I checked out some of the links on your site, and the important stuff is covered well: lower water heater temp and house thermostat, insulate, turn off lights, computers, stereos at the plug, etc. It is not hard to make improvements over the national (regional) averages. The Energy Information Administration has awesome statistics. You can compare your monthly gas and electric bill to national/regional figures to get a sense of how well you're doing relative to your neighbors. Kara and I, for example, use about 40% of the per capita electricity and 50% of the per capita natural gas, and our house has old windows and thin walls. (We did blow in a bunch of recycled newsprint attic insulation.) And we use electricity, dishwasher, clothes washer, etc. I think people just tend to leave things on without thinking.

I know we do. So that's my project for the week. For those of you who have been doing this for a long time, I'd love to hear how you do it at your home. For those of us who are new to it, I'll post all the information I find here. Sean, here's my research. Get ready, mister.

> How to Green Your Electricity (Treehugger)

The Story of Stuff & Sippy Cups

Karen from our listserve sent a link to The Story of Stuff, a quick online move about the myth and reality of our production cycle. It's animated, funny, really informative and has a frisky host. And it's only 20 minutes long with a pause button! I hope you get a chance to check it out.

I've been thinking about plastics this week and started looking at our sippy cups. We're advised to stay away from plastics imprinted with a 3 or a 7 on the bottom because they leach Bisphenol-A into the water and milk our kids are drinking. Bisphenol-A is an endocrine-disrupting hormone that produces precursors to breast cancer and infertile sperm. Turns out the sippy cups we've been using for a long time are toxic. So that's a . . . bummer?

Here's what the good folks at Z Recommends say:

We recommend bottles by Born Free, MAM and Adiri, breast pumps and supplies by Medela and Mother's Milkmate, and sippy cups by Born Free, Klean Kanteen, Thermos, and SIGG.

If you are here to check on information about bottles or sippy cups you already have, we can say with some confidence that you should be most concerned if you are using bottles by Avent, Dr. Brown's, Evenflo, the First Years, Munchkin, Nuby, Playskool, or Second Nature, or sippy cups or breast pumps by many of these brands. You are also likely, but less certain, to be using products containing Bisphenol-A if you are using bottles by Gerber, Playtex, or Tommee Tippee.

After I pulled myself together, Sadie and I headed to REI to buy some new SIGG bottles for the family. We found them interspersed and dwarfed by a huge wall of Nalgine bottles. I randomly picked a few up and looked at the bottom. One had a 3, the other a 7. This is freaking REI!

I feel like I'm coming to the going green party pretty late in the game, so I just can't get my head around why these major corporations, even those interested in health and the environment, aren't leading the way. Does anybody else know?

this hurts my brain

I'm realizing one of the hardest parts for me about this going green thing is how hard you have to think. Right before I went to the grocery store, our preschool teacher told me she's working on packaging. She buys one big tub of yogurt instead of ten little ones, stuff like that. I was thinking about this as I went shopping and was stunned to see all the environmentally unfriendly choices we're offered every day. The grocery store became a minefield of destructive choices packaged in shiny, pretty wrappers. My trip took at least twenty minutes longer than normal with all this extra deliberation, resulting in a squirmy unhappy kid and a frazzled burned-out mom. And then I came home to put my stuff in the fridge and saw my pre-green purchases with new eyes. That huge bag of individually wrapped cheese sticks, the microwave popcorn, the steak packed in styrofoam. Why do companies and stores keep offering this stuff? I understand why we keep buying it. It's so much work not to.

There's some capitalist, symbiotic relationship going on here between the producer and consumer. We're making agreements with each other to continue pretending convenience foods and packaging are benign, and so they keep churning this stuff out and we keep consuming it. So what do we do? I'm going to keep pushing myself (and my poor old brain) to learn how to make greener choices at the grocery store. And write an email about this experience to my local Fred Meyer. And maybe one to the headquarters too.

experiment: writing consumer emails

After reading that NY Times story on high tech toys for little kids, I decided to leave a comment on the website. I noticed that neither the story nor the 50 reader comments that followed talked about the massive toxic waste all those toys are going to generate. For some reason, the comment feature was shut down, so I thought I'd just try writing the reporter directly. It was so easy (his email was right there. Come to think of it, I'll send the same email to his co-author too) and so satisfying. Instead of stewing about it and getting depressed, I just asked him to contemplate doing a follow up story on what happens to the e-waste generated by these toys. Took me five minutes. He might completely ignore me, but that doesn't even matter. It's just the act of doing it that feels great, asking our reporters to take responsibility for the consequences of the messages they're delivering. And if he does listen, his deeper investigation into the issue could impact the nation's conversation about buying electronic toys for kids. I'm struck by how easy and painless it is to say your thing to the big dogs via email.

Today, I did it again. I went to the store to buy some Pyrex containers and realized how cool it would be to walk in and pick up a Green Kitchen Kit with a bunch of containers of different sizes, a measuring cup and some tips on how to go green in the kitchen. Especially if the containers were made of recycled glass. Something like that could make going green easier for people looking for it, and introduce the idea to people that aren't. So I just wrote and told them about my idea. Took me another five minutes and it was fun. They might ignore me too, and that's ok. Because now I'm on a roll!

Let me know if you have any email projects you'd like others to help out on and I'll post them here:

> NY Times: Tech Toys Story needs to address the e-waste fallout
> Pyrex: How about a Going Green Kitchen Kit?
> Trader Joes: Why are you selling garlic from China?
> REI: Get rid of the toxic Nalgene bottles

greening up the kitchen

This week, I'm taking on our plastic storage stuff in the kitchen. I have no idea how to do this. Could you plastic-free kitchen people tell me how you did it? Here's what we've got:

- plastic lunch containers and sippy cups for the kids
- one-use freezer containers
- saran wrap
- big and little ziplock bags
- plates and cups (I guess I can handle that one)

Any and all suggestions are welcome! Here are all your great tips in one place:
> try your local thrift store for replacement glass and pyrex stuff first
> buy unbleached wax paper and wax paper bags - these can often be used instead of ziplocks or saran wrap
> buy lunch baskets instead of those vinyl lunch boxes
> buy mason jars - we use little ones (4 and 8 oz wide mouth) for the kids lunches, and we use the big ones to freeze soup, make juice, or store grains.
> Pyrex is great and now they come with plastic lids (yes, i know, plastic) in case you really need something air tight.
> There are stainless steel little water bottles you can use as sippy cups - made by sigg or kleen kanteen
> enamel plateware is great for kids - durable and nontoxic.

As I do my research today, I'll post all the good links I find here:
> Kitchen Plastic: Easy Greening
> National Geographic: Outfitting the Green Kitchen

high tech toys

Stacey over at Fussbucket just posted a story from the NY Times about the growing market of high tech toys for little kids. Apparently the little guys want to do what they see us doing. She reports,

"The so-called youth electronics category accounts for more than 5 percent of all toy sales. Overall toy sales have been flat at around $22 billion a year for the last five years, according to the market research firm NPD Group. The industry sees growth potential in this new category, the article says. Sounds like we'll be seeing a lot more of these kid-gadgets in the future."

I just did a quick search on what happens to old computers and electronic equipment when they break or we get tired of them (which happens quickly for kids as we all know). Our electronic devices are made with toxic chemicals like lead, mercury, arsenic, stuff like that. When we throw them in the trash, they go into our landfills and leach into the soil and our water. When we "recycle" them, industry insiders say 80 percent of the e-waste material is exported, and 90 percent of that material goes to China. There, lots of women and children strip these devices by hand for every reusable bit of plastic or metal. Including lead, it seems. This whole cycle just makes me want to cry. And think long and hard about buying electronic gear. And wonder what we do with that big old monitor sitting down in the basement.

experiment: the gift that keeps on giving

Today Sadie had a birthday party. Last week, I would have run out to the toy store to buy a gift bag, tissue paper, a card and some random gift probably made out of plastic for a kid we don't know very well. Today I tried something new. Sadie's friend was having a dinosaur party, so I looked through our stuff to find something dinosaur-related. I found a big cool dinosaur encyclopedia in our book collection that we've never read, made a necklace out of beads Sadie got as a gift for her birthday and wrapped everything up in wrapping paper made from a brown paper bag. As the gift chooser, I felt much more connected and thoughtful about the process of giving than I usually do. It also felt great not to consume gas to go buy a bunch of stuff no one (neither us nor the birthday girl) really cares about. And then there's the meta gift of saving those resources for another day. I think I might actually start looking forward to birthday party "shopping", especially if it's in our playroom.

It was interesting to notice my thoughts and discomfort as I trolled through our stuff: "They're going to know it's used and be offended. This is rude. You're supposed to give people new things. You're supposed to impress people with the things you give them." And then to wrap the book up in that paper bag and give it anyway. The whole experience was so liberating! I've been such a good dutiful consumer, so well versed in the American way. So now I'm wondering what else is rattling around in that subconscious of mine. Guess I'll find out with each new step I take.

future days

I'm realizing that we are the generation that has to make the big consumption paradigm shift and teach these new practices to our kids. The world our children will live in 20, 30, 40 years from now is going to look very different than the one we all inhabit now. I keep trying to imagine what daily life will be like in the future, and I wonder if it will be more like it was in the Depression, back when everything people consumed was scarce and precious. That might not be such a bad thing.

This leads me to think about the expectations I'm setting for my kids with the holidays and gift giving. I don't want to set them up to expect more more more, knowing they need to practice being happy with less and grateful for what they already have. I'm not sure what that looks like yet. So we need to start making some new traditions around here. How are you approaching the holidays and gift giving this year? What are your favorite traditions that aren't about stuff?