Tiny Choices

Tiny Choices Survey: Leslie!

tinychoices — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:00:19 +0000

Vital statistics (name, age, location, link to website/blog)?
Leslie R., 31, Louisiana; Pixiepine Blog: http://cuppapixie.blogspot.com

How do you reside (apartment or house, roommates)?
We live in a single family home: 2 adults, 2 kids, 3 pets.

Are your housing decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
We decided to buy a home last summer and end the renting cycle. We chose a home with enough room for all of us, but under our budget and with modest amenities. It’s an older house with few updates, but it has been well taken care of by previous owners. We love it! There’s plenty of room in the yard for planting herbs and vegetables. We space to keep our home recycling going in between drop-offs. We have furnished the house totally with family items or “new to us” stuff.

How do you travel (transit, car, etc)? Are your travel decisions dictated by choice or necessity? Please explain.
We travel by car for work/school. For leisure activties, we try to go by bike whenever possible! We have arrived by bike to art shows, parent-teacher conferences, potlucks, birthday parties, and everything else.

Tell us about a Tiny Choice you’ve made in your life.
I choose to use non-disposables in our kitchen. With four people, it saves a ton of resources to use dishtowels, cloth napkins, reusable thermoses, lunch containers, etc. rather than the disposable options.

What is the one environmental dilemma you personally struggle the most with?
I love to-go coffee! There is something about that paper cup that makes me happy! I have my own cozy now and return the cardboard one to the barista.

What is one Tiny Choice you can make in that direction?
I am trying to always remember my own mug or thermos when I go out for coffee, and I try to make my own at home whenever I can. I keep a mug at work for coffee and water. It’s a work in progress.

What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you make that people question (in either a positive educational or a negative hassle way) you the most about?
I get a lot of strange looks about my green smoothie in a mason jar daily at work…but I usually win them over when they see how much energy I have.
I also have gotten some funny reactions when I choose to share that I use cotton reusable menstrual pads. I love my Gladrags and hope tons of ladies will give reusables a chance!

What is the one environmental Tiny Choice you would like every single person to adopt?
Taking a reusable grocery bag to the store is such an easy and fun choice…make it happen!

Do you feel like you make sacrifices for environmentalism? Please explain.
I don’t feel like I sacrifice much. It does take some time and effort to always make sure I have my reusable items (like shopping bags, clean cloths) in order, but the payoff is worth it. I really enjoy things like planting edible plants, hanging my clothes on a clothesline, and making homemade gifts. It’s a different path than the ease of buying stuff or getting things done fast, but it feels really good to complete a task well and feel good about how you did it.

Are you generally: optimistic, pessimistic, neutral about environmentalism and the future?
I am optimistic (like most things in my life). I see so many inspiring individuals and families making such effort. I love reading blogs of people radically changing their habits to live more in line with environmental choices. It’s also great just to see “normal” people toting their cloth shopping bags these days!

Click here to read all of the Tiny Choices Surveys!
Take the Survey: email us your answers to the questions above, along with a photo!

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Chewing Gum for Good…ish

Jenn — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 10:00:13 +0000

I bought two packs of gum recently, which is a bit odd for me, as I’m not a huge gum fan. But this gum is by Project 7 and is called “Feed the Hungry” gum. I was skeptical but curious, and figured if nothing else the subject would make a good blog post…

The flat package of gum is wrapped in a blister-style pack, which I never like as it’s made from non-recyclable plastic. The outer wrapping is recycled cardboard made from 40% post consumer recycled material, which I always like, and it’s full of facts, including: “We willd donate more than 50% of profits from the sale of tis product to support 7 areas of critical need across the globe.” According to their website, those 7 areas of critical need are Build the Future, Feed the Hungry, Heal the Sick, Help Those in Need, Hope for Peace, House the Homeless, and Save the Earth.

This is how it works: “Non-profit organizations supporting any of these seven areas of need can submit applications to Project 7. Seven of these organizations, one from each area of need, will be voted on a by consumers and supported by product proceeds for the upcoming year.”

The gum was good enough, and the ingredients seemed natural enough. Of course, after reading Beth Terry’s post about how practically all chewing gum is made from plastic (including the most natural brands), I take the ingredient “gum base” with a hefty grain of salt.

I love that the social entrepreneur behind Project 7 has dedicated time and energy towards raising funds for humanitarian projects. It’s always a little frustrating, though, when such funds are raised by selling disposable products such as “bio bottle” water bottles and (admittedly super cool) recycled plastic test-tube mints.

Seen any interesting “goods for good” products lately?

[Image by Jason Spaceman via Creative Commons]

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Urban Farming in Detroit

Karina — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:00:20 +0000

A few weeks ago I came across an article that I’ve been mulling over ever since - about the millionaire John Hantz and his plan to make Detroit into an ultra modern urban farm. See, Detroit has been dealing with foreclosures and urban blight for longer than most of us - and now it’s looking at about 30% vacant land, which can be dirty and ugly, or lovely and repurposed. One of the big problems with this vacancy rate is that it stretches city services too thin - it takes longer for police or fire to respond to emergencies, for one. The mayor is urging residents to move into the downtown city core, but others are concerned that this is just a land-grab effort.

Regardless of motivation, Detroit is pretty bleak (as an urban center). If you do a Google Earth Flyover you can see how many blocks just have one or two houses on them,and how much empty space is available. So what’s to be done with all that open space? Organizations like Greening of Detroit are going out right now and planting, and there are lots of urban farmers making a good go of it currently in “downtown detroit” - and have been for several years, as this 2008 NPR story would indicate - and not coincidentally, back when the housing crisis was really picking up, and foreclosures were becoming more common. And in general, Detroit is very large in area for it’s population, and I dare say always has been. The graphic above shows the population compared to the area of Detroit vs several other cities - and Detroit is larger Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco combined - but the population doesn’t even go anywhere near (these cities combined - or even grouped together. So what’s the solution? Urban farms for everyone, with a spreadout infrastructure? Or have everyone crowd into the downtown?

Anyone out there familiar with Detroit, or other similar infill proposals for areas hard-hit by foreclosures?

[[Map by Dan Pitera, a professor of architecture at University of Detroit Mercy, via cityfarmer.info.]]

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Electric Bikes Are Kinda Cool!

Jenn — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 10:00:26 +0000

I’ve been noticing a lot more of those electric bikes around town lately, and they’ve got me a’pondering. I’ve not really been sure of my feelings towards them, but after reading this Treehugger article, I think I get the point a little bit more than I did.

The way I see it, they’re a bit like a cross between a moped and a bicycle– pedal when the going’s easy, and get some electric assistance when paths get steep or long. It’s kind of a win-win I guess– electric bikes get people out and about, perhaps making the decision to leave their car at home or skip public transportation for shorter trips– and even a little pedaling is a healthful thing.

As biking in NYC has proven, when there are more cyclists on the street, the streets become safer for cyclists. The number of city cyclists rose 66% in the past two years, and I can understand why– it’s really the best way to get around– air, exercise, smiles, and the relief of avoiding mass transit. If electric bikes get a few more folks on the road, it’s good for them and good for the rest of us.

As an enlightening exercise, I punched my address into the Two Mile Challange mapping tool, and was really surprised at what’s encompassed in a 2-mile radius around my home. I don’t currently own a car, so it’s not like I’m driving to all those places now– but I know lots of people who do drive everywhere in the city… 2 miles is walkable and bikeable for most folks in decent shape, and it’s inspiring to see what’s so close by!

Karina had sent me the link to the new Google Maps Bike Directions feature, and it’s really neat– it provides bike directions for safer, flatter routes in many cities– and check out this video for more features, like drag-and-drop re-routing:

What do you think about electric bikes? Are you, like me, looking forward to de-rusting your ride once Spring hits?

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No-Till Gardening?

Karina — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:00:49 +0000

I’m entering into Spring Number 1 in my new home, which means the first year to get a real start on planting a garden from scratch. Last year when we were cleaning up the yard (I moved here just too late for setting seeds, but just in time for the annual “oh we didn’t rake leaves last year and we have to clean out everything so the new grass has a chance to grow” effort. [note we are looking forward to this effort again this year, having not done a good job with leaves last fall.] So, the general ideal last year was we would pitch all of the yard waste back into the far back corner of the yard - the area where we will eventually plan a garden of some sort, and where we will be building our compost bin this spring. This area is on top of a rock outcropping and while I haven’t dug down to actually check, I am guessing there’s not much topsoil back there either. And the general plan was we would just pitch all that stuff back there, let it decay on it’s own for a couple of years, and then till it under and plant an awesome garden with berries and herbs and tomatoes. I was hoping to amend the thin soil covering the rock outcropping back there with even more delicious organic matter, and to avoid bagging and transporting all our lawn waste to the town compost. (Though there are lots of largish tree limbs back there, too, which will have to be addressed somehow. They can’t be tilled under!)

However, lately I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about no-till agriculture. On a commercial level, no-till farming - where the old crops are left in place, not tilled or moved around, and new crops are planted directly in with the old stubble - has been shown to reduce carbon releases from the soil. That’s right: it turns out that agriculture is a greenhouse gas producing industry not because of pesticides and fertilizers (though these don’t help!) or the machinery used, but because the act of stirring the soil as you till it releases carbon into the atmosphere. From the NPR article linked:

“That reflects the past century of plowing and such. We’ve seen the organic carbon content of the field go from 5 percent to about 3 percent.”

It may not seem like much, but it means that over the past 100 years, every acre of this field has vented about 50 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s about as much as eight average cars pump out in a year.

Of course, there are billions of acres of farmland around the globe. Rattan Lal, a soil scientist at Ohio State University, has traveled the world to study those fields, trying to calculate how much carbon farmers have unleashed.

“From time immemorial when world agriculture began, we have lost roughly 140 billion tons of carbon from trees and soil,” he said to an audience on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Over half of that, almost 80 billions tons, is from the soil alone. In fact, up until the late 1950s, plowing had released more carbon dioxide into the air than all the burning of coal and oil in history.

Which of course makes me start to wonder: how can I prevent this carbon release at home? An article about this last year hints on how to start no-till gardening at home:

“The first year is the hardest for no-till practitioners. The ground must be cleared of debris, weeds and other obstructions before nutrient-rich compost and protective mulch can be used.

“Initially, some digging of perennial roots may be required,” said Charles Dowding, a commercial gardener and author of “Organic Gardening the Natural No-Dig Way” (Green Books, 2007). “If the soil is full of durable perennial weeds, a long-term (smothering) mulch for a year is worthwhile. It becomes much easier thereafter.”

Also many of the on-line resources I read say that no-till gardening is great at home, but only as long as no one walks on the garden beds. We don’t have garden beds yet, we just have giant piles of leaves and grasses and the odd volunteer pumpkin (we chucked our halloween pumpkin guts back there too) and tree limbs.

There are a couple of good resources on how to get started at home here and here, but you know, I’m a little nervous about this whole situation. I want to clean up the back yard over the next few months (well, I don’t *want to,* but I am going to) and I really am not sure the best situation. Should I just leave everything in place as best as I can, dealing only with the really big stuff and roping off a big area to become my new no-till area?

Or tell me straight: we are talking about a teensy tiny piece of my yard here, and honestly, I’d only be plowing it up once to get the garden started, after which I’d use more hands-on methods like direct hoeing where needed only. Am I being reactionary and alarmist here?

I am turning to you!

Are there any no-till practitioners out there? Garden commandos? What would you recommend I do with my back yard organic debris heap?

[[Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stawarz/ / CC BY-ND 2.0]]

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Easy Peasy Tip: Fixit!

tinychoices — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:00:33 +0000

Taking a tip from the Fixers Collective in Brooklyn, NY: start to think about the things in your life which can be coaxed back into life. The Collective have repaired favorite umbrellas with broken spines, brought ceiling fans back to three working speeds, and reattached workboot soles.

While some fixes may require detailed knowledge, others may just need a blob of glue or a new cord spliced into place!

What’s laying around in your junkpile just waiting to be noticed with an eye towards a fix?

[Image by klinslis via Creative Commons]

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Friday Tiny Confessions

tinychoices — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:03 +0000

So, as happens occasionally, we are out of surveys. [big hint! go fill one out! and send it to us!] and the Favorite Green Place has never taken off [um, it’s not too late to share one of those with us either!] So, what to do for Friday content?

it’s TINY CONFESSION TIME!

We’ve done this before - this is your no-guilt place to let off some steam about a tiny choice which you think may have not gone in the right direction. Today’s topic: What’s the most frivolous purchase you’ve made that has really been eating you up? You know what we mean: something you bought that you didn’t need, couldn’t justify, and feel pretty silly about it now that the moment has passed.

Karina: Almost immediately before we started this blog - spring of 2007? I purchased some of those over-the-counter tooth whitening trays. The disposable plastic trays that are wrapped in plastic and have weird bleachy gel in them. And I didn’t use them all up, and I am STILL thinking about them, years later. Of course it doesn’t help that I’ve never gotten rid of them, and in fact *moved them* to my current home. Gah!

Jenn: Lately I’ve been buying cups of coffee in disposable cups. Like, more frequently than I’d like to admit. I had given the stuff up for years, but now am back to drinking it (though I’m trying to cut back), and so I’m in this middle ground of not really being a coffee drinker but kind of being a coffee drinker. So, the part of me which is denying the addiction refuses to bring my reusable mug along, because I’m not going to get coffee on my way to work! And then the animal half of my brain takes over between the time I exit the subway and enter my office… and thus, disposable cups. It’s unnecessary and embarrassing. And now ya’ll know.

So, what about you? Leave your Tiny Confessions in the comments! (anonymous is ok too!)

[[Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/santos/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]]

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Tiny Tea Choices

Jenn — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:00:45 +0000

I was making myself a cup of SleepyTime tea the other night, when this statistic printed on the box caught my eye:

“Because these natural fiber tea bags don’t need strings, tags, staples or individual wrappers, we’re able to save more than 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year”

That’s an impressive number of waste! We talk a lot about tiny choices here, but sometimes it’s hard to feel like our small choices really do make a difference. Sure, govenment legislation may be needed to make the huge, across-the-board impacts– but not putting strings, tags and staples on tea tags? Apparently that makes a significant difference, for one tea company alone.

What if most (or dare I say “all”) tea companies rebranded themselves and removed the string, tag, and staple from their products? And what if all those tea purveyors who are now individually wrapping each teabag within their box, sheathed inside a paper/plastic envelope stopped *that* inane process? It would make a significant reduction on resource use, not to mention the pollution avoided by the manufacture and shipment of those items.

Everything we buy has an environmental impact– we can sometimes remove this by growing/making things ourselves, but in many cases we just need to make the best choices from the options available to us. As an example, let’s look at the options facing us when we want a cup of peppermint tea, from most sustainable to least:

Grow our own peppermint
Buy bulk dried peppermint, using our own containers
Buy loose peppermint in prepackaged boxes/bags
Buy peppermint teabags: unbleached paper, no tags, no strings
Buy peppermint teabags: tags & strings
Buy peppermint teagags: tags, strings, & individually-wrapped teabags

I’m not saying that the last option is wrong, per se– heavens knows I fall into that bulletpoint myself, more than occassionally. I just find it personally helpful to think about the whole scale of choices available to me regarding a purchase, and try to make the one with the least negative impact, when possible. It’s what Tiny Choices is all about, after all!

Notice any great product packaging decisions lately?

[Image by House of Sims via Creative Commons]

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Tiny Choosin’ Keeping Me Healthy

Karina — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:00:43 +0000

I have to preface this post with: I am not a doctor! nor a medical professional of any sort. So take everything here with a grain of salt (so to speak).

Because of my day job as an environmental engineer who occasionally has need to go onto hazardous waste sites, OSHA requires that I have an annual physical in order to monitor my health and make sure, well, I’m not being impacted and that I am fit for that sort of activity. I just got my physical results back and I’ve been thinking about them for a few days and I have to say, I really think that my food choices are doing a great job of keeping me healthy!

I think to understand how big of an issue this is to me you should know that my family has a whole lot of heart disease. It’s a big problem, with lots of young heart attacks being had by various people, and I’m so happy that my dad is doing so well now after several scares and several surgeries. (The photo is of an embroidered heart I gave him for fathers day one year. He pointed out where his problem areas are!) I’m not sure if I have good luck in this area because of my lifestyle, or if my mom’s genes have so significantly moderated my heart disease risk, but every time I get blood work back I call up my daddy and tell him how healthy my heart is. This time around my cholesterol was 141 (normal is under 200) and my triglycerides were in the 70s (normal is 150). Best of all, my cholesterol ratio indicates that I have a below average risk of heart disease! PHEW!

So as I have been thinking about my test results, I realized how worried I am every year at blood test time because of my family history. And to be honest, I’m a tiny bit overweight and while I do like to run I am not always a 3x a week active person like I should be. In some respects I am no poster child for healthy eating. If I could get all my required protein from cheese I would be happy to do so, and since I met my partner about two years ago I’m afraid I’ve eaten more butter than I have in my whole life before that… and I have *never* skimped on the butter. Ever. Plus, in the same vein as protein, I am also happy to satisfy any calcium requirement with ice cream. Very happy to do so, yes sir.

When I mentioned how happy I was that my diet hadn’t impacted my triglycerides or cholesterol to my dad, he suggested that he thought maybe butter got a bad rap - maybe it was really the processed foods that American’s eat so much of. And it’s true. Other than my favorite microwave burritos (a lunch standby, despite their plastic wrapper) I would guess I eat processed or packaged food just once a week, probably - and it’s less during the summer when I’m wrassling with my giant CSA share. Personally, I think I have a fairly moderate diet - one full of whole grains, fresh seasonal vegetables when I can, and I always try not to eat in my car. Because I don’t like to throw away plastic I don’t buy many processed or packaged foods to eat, and certainly not in individual serving packages. I always choose the option with the most fibery and green stuff when I’m in a grocery store. I do eat meat - but not every day, for sure. And I really think that the “no meals in the car” rule helps moderate my junk intake a lot - after all, I am in the car a whole lot between commuting and various other obligations I have.

(And for the record, I actually *have* been working out several times a week - but it’s not that aerobic, more of a cross-training weights-and-fitness program. I am phasing in running more, especially as the weather is getting nicer!)

For more ideas about eating healthy - I love this run down of eco-friendly healthy diets from LA Green Girl!

How do you moderate your diet? Does it help keep you healthy?

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Tell Me What to Grow

Jenn — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Sure, it’s still winter here in the Northeastern U.S., but with recent temperatures in the balmy and beautiful 50s, I’m beginning to have springtime daydreams. In fact, I just noticed the first little pointy and tenacious green buds beginning to poke their heads out of the urban soil around a street tree on my block– yipee! Life is beginning to bloom again.

This has brought me, once again, to thinking about growing some of my own food. You might recall my previous attempts at this: rosemary, peppermint, chives, lettuce, and tomatoes.. all dead. They were strong contenders, but all ended up biting the bullet. And the previous year I had a gorgeous tomato plant out on my fire escape, but lost all but the final two fruits to squirrels.

So, here we are. I love the idea of growing my own food, and yet have had no real success at it yet. I feel ready to try again this year, and am asking you, lovely readers who may have a greener thumb than I do: what should I grow? I’ve got windowsills which get indirect light, and a fire escape which attracts squirrels. Does peppermint stand a chance in a large pot indoors? Is it possible to grow tomatoes indoors without direct light? Is there an herb or leafy green which would somehow miraculously thrive in these conditions? Or should I just go join a local community garden, get my hands in real soil, and learn from those who know?

Help, please!

[Image by Itzafineday via Creative Commons]

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