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Taken by the hub.

Photo by Upside Dive

Upside Dive is a Toronto-based vintage store run by four siblings—Mike, Elisa, Angelique, and Natasha—with a shared passion for preloved goods. Their stylin’ philosophy: By enjoying and reexperiencing what’s already out there, you don’t need to “sacrifice global consciousness at the expense of consumerism.” I could get down with that.

Photo by The Land of Nod

I’ve written twice now to The Land of Nod to try and ferret out if its furniture is made with wood from sustainably managed forests. Both times, no response was forthcoming, which is usually corporate code for “No, now go away and leave us alone.” This is a pity because even The Land of Nod’s parent company, Crate&Barrel, has dipped its toe into bamboo construction and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified woods.

Still, whoever sources goods for The Land of Nod—even if they use PVC oilcloth and never mention a product’s country of origin, which I find frustrating—has exquisite taste, and I like browsing the toothsome, candy-colored Web site to fill my mental inspiration silos.

The above I’m Not Bored Anymore art jar is a great example of this—it’s jammed full of art supplies and various odds and ends, such as googly eyes, pom poms, pipe cleaners, construction paper, buttons, spools, and beads. After all, rainy days don’t have to be excuses for parking child-size tushies in front of the television, passively receiving information and being advertised to.

For some creative recycling, you can make your own jar out of a used container and whatever bits and bobs you already have lying around the house—cut-up egg cartons, scrap yarn, pieces of fabric too small to sew with, bottle caps, sparkly candy wrappers, a toilet-paper roll, leftover wrapping paper, empty matchboxes, and old snipped-off buttons, just for starters. It makes a pretty swell gift for someone else’s kid, too, without adding any new garbage to the waste stream.

Photo by Sam Rae, under a Creative Commons license

Is San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags merely a band-aid solution to a deeper environmental issue? Anna of Bring Your Own makes a convincing argument:

Replacing plastic bags with paper and compostable does little to address the root of the issue: our disposable mentality. Yes, its potentially preventing plastic bags from winding up in the ocean, to be chomped by poor unwitting sea turtles…..but at the end of the day, a tremendous opportunity to educate is missed. We gotta start valuing our resources! Bring your own damn bag, use it over an over, take some responsibility for your crap!

She cites Ireland’s tax of 15 cents per plastic bag as a more effective solution. “People no longer looked at the nasty little suckers as expendable, valueless items, to be tossed unthinkingly,” Anna writes in her blog. “We HATE having to pay for things we think should be free…..and when we have to PAY, even a paltry sum of 10-15 cents, we immediately attach some value.”

It’s an indisputable fact that plastic bags are a scourge on our planet—each takes 1,000 years to break down into microscopic particles that wind up polluting our soil and waterways, not to mention enter our food chain through accidental ingestion by animals. (Thousands of marine animals die each year after mistaking plastic bags for food.) In the case of the endangered leatherback turtle, plastic bags masquerading as delectable jellyfish—its primary food source—are far too tempting to pass up.

San Francisco’s solution: Replace all petroleum-based plastic bags with bags made from recycled paper—which returns to the earth in about a month—or compostable ones made from plant starches. Corn plastics, such as the patented PLA, only decompose into carbon dioxide and water under industrial composting conditions, in special facilities that can subject compost to high temperatures—we’re talking about something like 140 degrees Fahrenheit—for long spans of time. That rules out utilizing your backyard compost pile or tumbler. PLA also poses a problem for conventional recycling facilities that aren’t equipped to handle this newfangled plastic. Unlike polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which can be broken down into pellets and fabricated into new products such as carpeting or fiberfill, PLA currently has few applications, largely because of its low melting point. In fact, recyclers see PLA as a contaminant if it’s mixed in with your PET recyclables—they have to fork out cash to get the PLA sorted out and disposed of. (This does not make them happy campers, as you can imagine.)

Paper bags are no better, and in fact could be far worse than their plastic counterparts. According to the EPA, paper bags generate 70 percent more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags do. Four times as much energy is expended in the production of a paper bag. Plus, it takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle the equivalent in paper. (And, regardless of the medium, there will always be antisocial yahoos who litter and don’t recycle. This is where educational programs need to come into play.)

So paper, plastic, or corn starch? If our society is ever to break from its throwaway, narcissistic mentality, the right, most ecologically beneficial answer would be “none of the above, I’ve brought my own.”

References:
1. Royte, Elizabeth. “Corn Plastic to the Rescue.” Smithsonian August (2006)

Photo by Old Navy

Wendy Richardson needs to blog more often. How else would I have found the U.K.-based Environmental Justice Foundation’s 2007 report, The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton? It’s a 40-pager, which may require more dedication than you currently have, but here is a sampling of the salient points, as outlined in the report’s Executive Summary. (Those two pages very worth a read-through in their entirety.) Global consumption of cotton, by the by, has doubled in the past 30 years.

• Cotton is the world’s most important non-food agricultural commodity, yet it is responsible for the release of US$2 billion of chemical pesticides each year, within which at least US$819 million are considered toxic enough to be classified as hazardous by the World Health Organisation. Cotton accounts for 16% of global insecticide releases—more than any other single crop. Almost 1.0 kilogram of hazardous pesticides is applied for every hectare under cotton.

• Between 1 and 3% of agricultural workers worldwide suffer from acute pesticide poisoning with at least 1 million requiring hospitalization each year, according to a report prepared jointly for the FAO, UNEP, and WHO. These figures equate to between 25 million and 77 million agricultural workers worldwide.

• A single drop of the pesticide aldicarb, absorbed through the skin can kill an adult. Aldicarb is commonly used in cotton production and in 2003 almost 1 million kilos was applied to cotton grown in the USA. Aldicarb is also applied to cotton in 25 other countries worldwide.

• Despite being particularly vulnerable to poisoning, child labourers throughout the world risk exposure to hazardous pesticides through participation in cotton production. In India and Uzbekistan children are directly involved in cotton pesticide application. While in Pakistan, Egypt, and Central Asia child labourers work in cotton fields either during or following the spraying season. Children are also often the first victims of pesticide poisonings, even if they do not participate to spraying, due to the proximity of their homes to cotton fields, or because of the re-use of empty pesticide containers.

• Hazardous pesticides associated with global cotton production represent a substantial threat to global freshwater resources. Hazardous cotton pesticides are now known to contaminate rivers in USA, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Australia, Greece and West Africa. In Brazil, the world’s 4th largest consumer of agrochemicals, researchers tested rainwater for the presence of pesticides. 19 different chemicals were identified of which 12 were applied to cotton within the study area.

(Emphasis is mine.)

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