Blessings Darlings!
I'm hoping that your reaction to the title of this was "No Shit".
Now, read this on an idea on where to put your efforts on solving the problem. And feel free to point out why banning single use plastic or whatever is better. We can argue here.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-06-07/plastic-straws-aren-t-the-problem
Frondly, Fern
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Saturday, July 7, 2018
Monday, March 4, 2013
Too Windy to be Green
Blessings Darlings!
The wind is killing me today. I'm one of those traditional types who prefers to do laundry on Mondays ... and dry it on the line. But in winter/early spring, I can only get one load dry on the line on a GOOD day. So I end up doing laundry pretty much every available day of the week!
So I hung today's laundry - linens. Big top and bottom sheets, which catch the wind. And boy is there wind today! I had to come in to the house to put gloves on, because the wind chill while handling wet laundry was killing me. In the 2 hours since I hung the laundry I've been out there twice to recapture what has blown off the line (and I put a LOT of clothes pins on each piece) and re-hang them.
And the wind hasn't just been screwing around with me on that. The newspapers and cardboard I used last week to help smother grass in the area I plan to garden in have had their protective heavy mulch blown off - I've been chasing after them in my 3 acre yard (and I think I see some in my neighbor's yard as well).
The weather folks promise that the wind will die tonight ... if I make it that long. And if we get the promised snow storm on Wednesday, that will help settle the garden, but with rain starting on Tuesday and the storm on Wednesday, those are at least two more days I can't hang laundry.
I'm going to get a nice HOT cup of tea now.
Frondly, Fern
The wind is killing me today. I'm one of those traditional types who prefers to do laundry on Mondays ... and dry it on the line. But in winter/early spring, I can only get one load dry on the line on a GOOD day. So I end up doing laundry pretty much every available day of the week!
So I hung today's laundry - linens. Big top and bottom sheets, which catch the wind. And boy is there wind today! I had to come in to the house to put gloves on, because the wind chill while handling wet laundry was killing me. In the 2 hours since I hung the laundry I've been out there twice to recapture what has blown off the line (and I put a LOT of clothes pins on each piece) and re-hang them.
And the wind hasn't just been screwing around with me on that. The newspapers and cardboard I used last week to help smother grass in the area I plan to garden in have had their protective heavy mulch blown off - I've been chasing after them in my 3 acre yard (and I think I see some in my neighbor's yard as well).
The weather folks promise that the wind will die tonight ... if I make it that long. And if we get the promised snow storm on Wednesday, that will help settle the garden, but with rain starting on Tuesday and the storm on Wednesday, those are at least two more days I can't hang laundry.
I'm going to get a nice HOT cup of tea now.
Frondly, Fern
Friday, April 20, 2012
Self Evaluation: Plastics Use
Blessings Darlings!
I use Earth Day as a time of evaluation and vow taking. Two years ago my vow was about reducing my use of plastics. Evaluation (a few days before Earth Day, I admit) makes it clear I'm failing at this.
I've had some success at reducing styrofoam and #5 plastics that are brought into the house - because we can't afford Chinese take out any more (comes in #5 black plastic bowls with a translucent plastic lid) nor can we afford to eat out (leftover brought home in styrofoam plastic boxes). OTOH many of our groceries still come into the house in plastic bags, because we fail to use the cloth bags. Even at Aldi's, where we use bags from home, the bags we re-use are the plastic bags from other stores.
Implementing a system other than Gladware for refrigerator food storage has also been a failure. I can't buy Pyrex replacements (which still have plastic lids) and I am afraid that if I DID use them I'd break them. I drop things. A lot. And we have regular 'landslides' in our freezer and refrigerator.
I'm going to keep looking for metal bowls of all sizes at garage sales, in the hopes that they will be useful for fridge storage. I would be able to use aluminum foil to cover them with ... not that the mining and refining of THAT is not destructive to the environment, just that aluminum foil can be recycled more readily than plastic wrap can be. Like - it can be recycled at all.
I use Earth Day as a time of evaluation and vow taking. Two years ago my vow was about reducing my use of plastics. Evaluation (a few days before Earth Day, I admit) makes it clear I'm failing at this.
I've had some success at reducing styrofoam and #5 plastics that are brought into the house - because we can't afford Chinese take out any more (comes in #5 black plastic bowls with a translucent plastic lid) nor can we afford to eat out (leftover brought home in styrofoam plastic boxes). OTOH many of our groceries still come into the house in plastic bags, because we fail to use the cloth bags. Even at Aldi's, where we use bags from home, the bags we re-use are the plastic bags from other stores.
Implementing a system other than Gladware for refrigerator food storage has also been a failure. I can't buy Pyrex replacements (which still have plastic lids) and I am afraid that if I DID use them I'd break them. I drop things. A lot. And we have regular 'landslides' in our freezer and refrigerator.
I'm going to keep looking for metal bowls of all sizes at garage sales, in the hopes that they will be useful for fridge storage. I would be able to use aluminum foil to cover them with ... not that the mining and refining of THAT is not destructive to the environment, just that aluminum foil can be recycled more readily than plastic wrap can be. Like - it can be recycled at all.
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Who's Green?
Blessings Darlings!
Earth hour was March 31. I KNOW I wrote about it a few years back, but I can't find where. It might have been somewhere other than my blog. Oh well. I find it rather a feel-good gimmick, similar to clicking 'like' on a picture on Facebook thinking that's going to change something.
But it got me to thinking about how environmentally 'green' most neopagans are, by looking at me.
By most of those 'measure your environmental footprint' things .... our family uses less resources than 'average' in America. Which of course means NOTHING, since the 'average' American uses a disproportionately high amount of resources. And those measurement tools don't count how many resources your job uses. We're lucky that way - since we work at home at least it DOES take that into account for us.
But .... if we used our fireplace for heat, using the 100% non-fossil fuel of wood, it would be GREAT for helping stretch out the end of oil .... but it would be TERRIBLE for air quality, pumping incredible amounts of particulates and carbon dioxide into the air.
I'm online a HECK of a lot, as a part of my work. That means that I share responsibility for the raping of the groundwater in Silicon Valley, the work conditions in factories in Asia, environmental damage from mining and refining rare earth elements used in the batteries and such.
It's not like my coven is in the town I live in, either. It's 65 miles away. The denomination covenstead is 190.
I can, and pretty much do, recycle every scrap of paper, every bit of plastic, every bottle, etc. than comes into the house. That does not negate the energy that went into making them, the pollution they generated, the mining/drilling/etc. Heck, recycling some of them take more water than creating them from scratch. Recycling doesn't mean not consuming.
Right now my dishwasher is running. In part because it uses less water than washing that many dishes by hand, and in part because it sanitizes the dishes better than I can do by hand. Saves water, saves electricity used for heating and pumping water, but uses electricity to run.
The fact that I cook from scratch actually causes me to use MORE energy than if I didn't. It woul be FAR more energy efficient to have a central bakery do all the baking, a central kitchen do all the cooking. Cafeteria food is efficient. It is not what I'd like to eat. It is not HOW I'd like to eat, giving up deciding what to feed my family personally. But environmentally - not having every house have a kitchen thus saving on all the appliances, cooking in big batches not individual family servings - is better for the environment.
All this before even looking at the coffee and chocolate issues. Or citrus issues (that's sure not a locally grown item, either). Or my beloved avocados.
Yeah, I only spend 12 minutes a week showering - I time it. In, wet down, turn off water, soap, rinse, do the same for the hair. Rain water, mostly, for the garden - tho' right now we're kind of droughty already so who knows what this summer will be like. Clothes line for laundry, but I can't afford to get the washer fixed and the cold water line is blocked .... so it's washing with warm to hot water, not cold.
Everything has trade offs. We have cats, how much less can I vacuum without cat hair being everywhere? How many holes in my husbands underwear before we have to toss it? Bleaching the tighty whities isn't happening, the better to make them last longer. They are now tighty off-whities.
The freezer that saves me HUGE amounts of money on food ... uses electricity to run, and wasn't great for the environment to manufacture. Two cycle engines, like on tillers for the garden, are TERRIBLE for polluting the air. Deer netting is made from plastic - other mesh is from metals that involve mining and refining, too.
The 'measure your footprint' things say I'm green. I look at my life and know I'm not. At all. "Relative to other Americans' is a foolish comparison.
Frondly, Fern
Earth hour was March 31. I KNOW I wrote about it a few years back, but I can't find where. It might have been somewhere other than my blog. Oh well. I find it rather a feel-good gimmick, similar to clicking 'like' on a picture on Facebook thinking that's going to change something.
But it got me to thinking about how environmentally 'green' most neopagans are, by looking at me.
By most of those 'measure your environmental footprint' things .... our family uses less resources than 'average' in America. Which of course means NOTHING, since the 'average' American uses a disproportionately high amount of resources. And those measurement tools don't count how many resources your job uses. We're lucky that way - since we work at home at least it DOES take that into account for us.
But .... if we used our fireplace for heat, using the 100% non-fossil fuel of wood, it would be GREAT for helping stretch out the end of oil .... but it would be TERRIBLE for air quality, pumping incredible amounts of particulates and carbon dioxide into the air.
I'm online a HECK of a lot, as a part of my work. That means that I share responsibility for the raping of the groundwater in Silicon Valley, the work conditions in factories in Asia, environmental damage from mining and refining rare earth elements used in the batteries and such.
It's not like my coven is in the town I live in, either. It's 65 miles away. The denomination covenstead is 190.
I can, and pretty much do, recycle every scrap of paper, every bit of plastic, every bottle, etc. than comes into the house. That does not negate the energy that went into making them, the pollution they generated, the mining/drilling/etc. Heck, recycling some of them take more water than creating them from scratch. Recycling doesn't mean not consuming.
Right now my dishwasher is running. In part because it uses less water than washing that many dishes by hand, and in part because it sanitizes the dishes better than I can do by hand. Saves water, saves electricity used for heating and pumping water, but uses electricity to run.
The fact that I cook from scratch actually causes me to use MORE energy than if I didn't. It woul be FAR more energy efficient to have a central bakery do all the baking, a central kitchen do all the cooking. Cafeteria food is efficient. It is not what I'd like to eat. It is not HOW I'd like to eat, giving up deciding what to feed my family personally. But environmentally - not having every house have a kitchen thus saving on all the appliances, cooking in big batches not individual family servings - is better for the environment.
All this before even looking at the coffee and chocolate issues. Or citrus issues (that's sure not a locally grown item, either). Or my beloved avocados.
Yeah, I only spend 12 minutes a week showering - I time it. In, wet down, turn off water, soap, rinse, do the same for the hair. Rain water, mostly, for the garden - tho' right now we're kind of droughty already so who knows what this summer will be like. Clothes line for laundry, but I can't afford to get the washer fixed and the cold water line is blocked .... so it's washing with warm to hot water, not cold.
Everything has trade offs. We have cats, how much less can I vacuum without cat hair being everywhere? How many holes in my husbands underwear before we have to toss it? Bleaching the tighty whities isn't happening, the better to make them last longer. They are now tighty off-whities.
The freezer that saves me HUGE amounts of money on food ... uses electricity to run, and wasn't great for the environment to manufacture. Two cycle engines, like on tillers for the garden, are TERRIBLE for polluting the air. Deer netting is made from plastic - other mesh is from metals that involve mining and refining, too.
The 'measure your footprint' things say I'm green. I look at my life and know I'm not. At all. "Relative to other Americans' is a foolish comparison.
Frondly, Fern
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Happy New Earth Year!
I don't believe in Earth Day. Oh, sure I accept that folks are out there celebrating it, it's the whole concept of a 'day' for it that I don't believe in. A 'Day' makes it a carnival, a day-out-of-time/normal life.
Instead, I sort of look at today as New Year's Day of the new Earth Year. A day to make resolutions and start work on them, sort of like starting a diet or whatever on January 1.
In my fantasy, folks would have done some serious preparation for this. Say, looking over their lifestyle and the environment starting on the first day of spring and deciding on goals for the next year, and researching what it would take for them to reach those goals. The goals should be measurable, as all good goals are, so that month of preparation can also include measuring the impact on the environment you now have. After all, you can't really tell if you have reduced you car miles by 20% if you don't know how many car miles you put in weekly/monthly already.
Or, since I've been nagging the husband and son, since we have 14 meals with meat a week now, if we reduce that by 20% that means changing 3 meals a week. Functionally, that means eggs for one dinner a week, meat-free soup and a salad one (or more) lunch a week, and one 'experimental' meal a week. Which will most often NOT be experimental but will be something like quesadillas or cheese and veg pizza, but could be a stir-fry with tofu or nuts. Or I could try bean burritos (son with sensory issues will eat beans, but only if mashed) or bean or cheese enchildadas.
The other thing I'm going to work on for the year is reducing food waste. Things tend to get 'lost' in the fridge, then the stuff growing in them tries to take over the kitchen. This must end. Better menu planning and control will help that.
So, sure, I'm also doing some 'one offs' during the 'earth day fortnight'. Like repairing a toilet that's running on - but it only JUST broke, so I'd be doing that immediately whenever it happened during the year. I'm working my compost heap into the garden, but, again, that's normal before planting.
But working the compost into the garden is only normal because during the ENTIRE year I work with the compost heap, adding all sorts of veggie and fruit matter into it. I can only add eggshells to the garden because I save them all year. I can't really reduce my personal car time, because I don't have much, because my son does the grocery shopping on commute to and from college. If he was willing to take the shuttle bus to college 3 days a week, I might have to walk to the store. But I can only change myself, he is in charge of changing himself. Or not. Dammit.
What are your New Earth Year Resolutions?
Instead, I sort of look at today as New Year's Day of the new Earth Year. A day to make resolutions and start work on them, sort of like starting a diet or whatever on January 1.
In my fantasy, folks would have done some serious preparation for this. Say, looking over their lifestyle and the environment starting on the first day of spring and deciding on goals for the next year, and researching what it would take for them to reach those goals. The goals should be measurable, as all good goals are, so that month of preparation can also include measuring the impact on the environment you now have. After all, you can't really tell if you have reduced you car miles by 20% if you don't know how many car miles you put in weekly/monthly already.
Or, since I've been nagging the husband and son, since we have 14 meals with meat a week now, if we reduce that by 20% that means changing 3 meals a week. Functionally, that means eggs for one dinner a week, meat-free soup and a salad one (or more) lunch a week, and one 'experimental' meal a week. Which will most often NOT be experimental but will be something like quesadillas or cheese and veg pizza, but could be a stir-fry with tofu or nuts. Or I could try bean burritos (son with sensory issues will eat beans, but only if mashed) or bean or cheese enchildadas.
The other thing I'm going to work on for the year is reducing food waste. Things tend to get 'lost' in the fridge, then the stuff growing in them tries to take over the kitchen. This must end. Better menu planning and control will help that.
So, sure, I'm also doing some 'one offs' during the 'earth day fortnight'. Like repairing a toilet that's running on - but it only JUST broke, so I'd be doing that immediately whenever it happened during the year. I'm working my compost heap into the garden, but, again, that's normal before planting.
But working the compost into the garden is only normal because during the ENTIRE year I work with the compost heap, adding all sorts of veggie and fruit matter into it. I can only add eggshells to the garden because I save them all year. I can't really reduce my personal car time, because I don't have much, because my son does the grocery shopping on commute to and from college. If he was willing to take the shuttle bus to college 3 days a week, I might have to walk to the store. But I can only change myself, he is in charge of changing himself. Or not. Dammit.
What are your New Earth Year Resolutions?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
