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Posts Tagged ‘shopping’

It is time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag!  While we keep on our journey through a eventful 2010, it’s crazy to think about how much purchasing we traditionally do now in America and world-wide. Whether it’s regular trips to the supermarket as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for amazing meals and tasty goodies or those occasionally dreaded (yet skillful) “6 bags on each arm” walks through the neighborhood shopping mall, it all adds up to so much unnecessary waste.  One of the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable shopping bags.

An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are used each year within the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal.  Most plastic bags end up in landfills and the rest frequently end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the sea, where animals can ingest or become entangled in them.  Considering the number of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to spread the word about the positive benefits of eco-friendly reusable grocery bags.  After all, the majority of us want to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.

Creating a BYOB approach in our individual shopping habits is a simple method to do just that.  If we can increase awareness presently, the positive impact for our environment is immense for 2010 and well into the future.  Numerous metropolitan areas have already made gradual but momentous progress in promoting the use of eco friendly bags in recent years.  Encouraging consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, savings at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of.

Right here in America, the San Jose City Council recently approved among the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags.   It is a great victory for the Bay Area, which has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay.  San Jose becomes the latest bay area town to enact some sort of ban on disposable shopping bags; others comprise of San Francisco and Palo Alto. Tracy Seipel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that it was actually ONE man who truly jump-started the ban, a further remarkable instance of the power of one person.  Here’s a an excerpt:

“While visiting his sister-in-law in Taipei, (Kansen) Chu (elected to San Jose city council in 2007) went grocery shopping and was surprised to get charged for plastic grocery bags. The next day, he brought his own cloth bags back to the store.  “I guess the question,” said Chu, “was, ‘Why not San Jose?’ ” He began a conversation with the city’s environmental services staff, which later moved to council committee discussions.

Save the Bay’s 4th annual report on the most garbage-strewn sites in the area further demonstrates the need for BYOB.  The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 explicit bay-area sites where almost 15,000 plastic bags were retrieved in one day last year in their account.   Here’s an passage of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito.

According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags – made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States – is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand.

Ten US metropolitan areas have banned plastic bags thus far, five in the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August.  The city of 20 million currently faces the realities of effective enforcement, which isn’t easy while the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there are actually 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown area alone.

Bans on plastic bags aren’t the only valuable means to cut back dangerous waste brought on by disposable bags.  PlasTaxes, which tax customers at the register for using plastic bags while shopping, were being primarily launched by the Irish.  John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 about the worldwide momentum that’s been building from the time when Ireland instilled a PlasTax in 2003.  The Irish confirmed they could cut down plastic bag utilization by 90% or more.   Momentum is increasing the world over, particularly in America.  From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are developing a global trend to scale back the unsafe environmental effects of disposable shopping bags.  In the great state of Hawaii, the legislature is at this time considering a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to ascertain a small fee to use SUP bags.

Even major retail stores like Target and CVS are taking action by enacting savings at the register for customers who decide to BYOB or simply carry-out their items without a bag.  For the naysayers, it’s convenient to disregard recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste.  But to a few, the wide-spread adoption of eco friendly recycled bags is inevitable.  Have a look at the way smoking is becoming taboo in America.  Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire.  In the same way, who’s to say the use of disposable bags won’t turn out to be taboo someday within the (hopefully near) future?  The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is certainly gaining steam.  Our personal decisions to carry our recycled shopping bags can go considerably farther than we imagine.  That’s what BYOB is all about.

Obviously, plastic and paper bags ought to be recycled and it’s important to keep in mind most large retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just need to bring them your accumulated stash).  That being said, a BYOB shopping strategy can make your life much easier because there isn’t a need to accumulate that cupboard full of plastic bags or determine what and when to deal with it.  Keeping a few eco friendly bags in your car or backpack is a great way to ensure you possess them when required. So give back this year by remembering to BYOB!   Whether it be in a convenience store, the shopping mall, or while grocery shopping, we can make a difference for the environment and help increase consciousness one transaction at a time.  In the battle to eliminate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.

Have you ever wondered how “green” and sustainable your cup of coffee is? If yes, which type of coffee beans do you choose – organic, shade-grown or fair trade? Read on to learn all that true eco-enthusiastic coffee fans should know about the different certifications…

Organic coffee

When buying organic, you decide on coffee that is grown without pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers. This is beneficial not only to your health (as the coffee beans do not contain any chemicals), but also to the environment since the soil and water are not contaminated with artificial substances. In order to be sold as organic, the coffee has to be processed under special conditions without chemicals in an organic mill.

Shade-grown coffee

Shade-grown coffee is grown in a traditional, environmentally friendly way from farms with thick layers of trees and bushes. Unfortunately, as demand for coffee grew, a new, higher-productivity approach was introduced to coffee farming. The system, introduced in 1970s, is called sun cultivation since coffee is grown in rows under the sun with little or no forest canopy.  It has become popular because the growing process is more rapid and gives higher yields, however it has several disadvantages:

-          it requires the increased use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, which can contaminate land and water; however, when growing under the shade, there is less risk of pathogen infection and the leaves that drop from the shade are a natural fertilizer;

-          it has led to deforestation of many areas of coffee cultivation, which is disastrous for some animal species like songbirds, howler monkeys, iguanas, ocelots, and pumas;

-          the taste of coffee is worse; although the yields are higher, shade-grown beans are of a lower quality since a longer ripening time contributes to complex flavor.

This is why many eco-conscious consumers prefer the traditionally grown coffee. As shade coffee farms in general use little or no chemical fertilizers, the shade grown coffee is often also certified as organic.

Fair Trade coffee

Even though the price for a cup of coffee seems high, many farmers that grow the beans live in extreme poverty. It is due to the fact that most of the costs that add up to the price of coffee are generated by the middlemen. Fair Trade organizations help producers in developing countries cut out middlemen, and obtain better trading conditions, so that they are not forced to compromise the quality of their products and work hygiene or turn to child labor to earn for living.

Written by PennySaverUSA. If you would like to have a cup of organic, shade-grown or fair trade coffee and looking for an interesting place in your area, visit us online to find a comprehensive list of cafes in the USA.

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Natural Cleaning Techniques: “But…how did they do it 100 years ago?”

This is a common question that I ask myself and my fellow community members here at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, a striving-to-be-sustainable community. How did they do this or that before electricity? Before mass production? Before everything came in plastic? More often than not we adopt the old way of doing things here: canning or root cellaring our food for preservation, heating our homes with wood, and making butter with a hand cranked, turn-of-the-century churn.

When it comes to cleaning, there are certainly many old fashioned ways of cleaning that one could easily choose to use. From baking soda to lemon juice, there may be simple ways to save yourself from adding too many products to your life. I know at least a few folks who believe that you can clean just about anything with white vinegar and newspaper or an old rag. And while we do employ a number of very simple cleaning techniques here at Dancing Rabbit, even we are not free of mass-produced cleaning products… but we stick to those that meet our standards for sustainability.

That’s why you’ll find a number of Seventh Generation products under our sinks. We’ve been known to use their various spray bottle bathroom cleaners and those squirty-topped dish soaps, because we know this company shares our vision of living more lightly on the Earth. Having replaced toilets with a simple humanure system, we don’t need to use any of their toilet cleaning products (though we do still use Seventh Generation toilet paper).

You will also find a number of citrus-based cleaners used for anything from mopping the floor to washing our clothes. Citric acid can, in almost all cases, be used in the same way as bleach. Mixed with salt, citrus becomes especially powerful. And just think of how much more pleasant the smell of lemon is compared to the smell of bleach!

Personally, I have, at one time or another used Dr Bronner’s Magic Soaps for just about everything. From its inception, Dr. Bronner’s has listed “eighteen-in-one” potential uses for their product on the bottle, and it can really be used for every one of them. Along with body wash and hand soap, Dr Bronner’s also makes great laundry soap, and is even safe to use on your pets!

I have no doubt that some people look at our way of life, and think that we’re trying to return to the 19^th century. With some specific practices, they’re right! But we don’t reject progress… we just want to see it achieved sustainably. These natural cleaning products allow us to enjoy a bit of convenience, while still maintaining our values.

Best of luck combining simplicity, sustainability, and practicality, and happy cleaning!

Mary Beth Bishop is a resident of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Northeastern Missouri, and a freelance writers currently under contract with long-running green blog sustainablog, which now features an eco-friendly shopping portal that carries a full range of cleaning brands, including Dr. Bronner’s.

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I recently came across a site that I find tremendously useful, ShopWiki. It reminds me of the game changer that Google was when it came into being, however rather than organizing the web into a search-able structure, shopwiki puts every product sold on the Internet in one place. This is huge, I am always trying to find gardening tools or hoses or a wide variety of other products needed in my quest to turn my home into a self sustaining “homestead” and this tool just made it much simpler to do that. it is a game changer.

The first question you have to be asking is “How is this green?” It is not overtly green, however not having to drive all over town to track down a particular product is very much a green shopping ideal. Another way this is helpful is giving the little store around the corner the ability to compete with large Internet retailers and big box stores. All the Mom and Pop needs to do is get their products online and there they are.

With the ability to search all products listed on the Internet you can find very specific things, and to me this is the greatest benefit. I want to find locally sold, owned, and manufactured products first. Better yet are they done in a sustainable fashion out of reclaimed materials? Just imagine how Google has changed the web, and now imagine finding tools, and products with that same unimaginable depth and refinement. That is exactly what Shopwiki.com is.