Tiny Choices

Easy Peasy Tip: Learn Where It Goes

tinychoices — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 10:00:05 +0000

So you’ve put your recyclables into the blue bin and bundled your cardboard up with twine; good job! Now, do you know where these materials go when they’ve been picked up by your municipality or after you’ve dropped them off at your local collection center?

Try to sleuth out what happens once recyclables have left your hands. Is your plastic being sent to a local point and melted down there, or is it being shipped over to Asia and dumped on poorer populations? Is your paper recycled locally or shipped to China?

While this tip might not be as Easy Peasy as others, it’s encouraging you to take a more active role in the waste recovery process– being aware of our trash lifecycle can help us modify and tiny choose our future behaviors!

[Image by Bucklava via Creative Commons]

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“Happy Eco-News” Fridays!

tinychoices — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:00:03 +0000

Some fun links that we’ve been extra- enjoying this week!

This blog about riding a bike everywhere is just super. Full of fashion and interesting information and helpful tips.
Some really helpful tips to help you line dry your clothes! While it’s not rocket science, there’s definitely some room for technique.
Karina is still looking for a local rent-a-goat service, here’s some news about the growing trend.
We love stories about self-sufficient families who grow food in swimming pools!
And similarly, also lovable is the idea of building a sustainable home for *free* from found materials.

Any stories you’ve loved this week?

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Bottled Water While Travelling

Jenn — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:00:17 +0000

We certainly don’t have to repeat this: Team Tiny Choices is very anti-bottled water. But during my recent travels in Central America, I drank more of the stuff than I care to admit– and this was also the case when I visited India last year.

It nearly killed me, buying so much of the stuff, but the option might very well have actually killed me. It’s easy for my NYC-dwelling-self to forget that most of the worlds’ population does not have access to clean drinking water. And while this is a sad but true statistic while I’m at home, once I put myself on the map in one of these places I become one of those numbers– a human being who needs water to survive, yet can’t drink what comes out of the tap.

While I was at surf camp in Nicaragua, there was a big 5-gallon purified water bottle which we all refilled our smaller bottles from, so although this used transportation & purification energy, at least we weren’t creating more plastic waste in a location which isn’t really equipped to recycle it properly. I then moved on to Santa Teresa, Costa Rica with a friend, and from the local market we carried home another 5-gallon jug of purified water which we decanted from for the next week.

And then I was on my own, in another Costa Rican surf spot paradise, where everyone was telling me the tap water was safe to drink. Really? Once you’ve been sick with a stomach bug in a foreign country, it’s a little difficult to make yourself take a leap of faith such as this. I’d have glasses of sparkling tap water set in front of me at restaurants, and I’d eye it suspiciously. I kept buying the largest bottles I could find– 6 liters– and decanting them into my smaller bottles for everyday use. But even this disturbed me, and I just wasn’t drinking enough water because it hurt me to buy this much bottled water.

So, I ended up getting slightly dehydrated. Partly this was due to crazy amounts of sun exposure, but it was exacerbated by the fact that I just couldn’t buy enough water to keep my fluid levels up. So, I started drinking the tap water. I’d met at least a dozen travelers who agreed that the tap water was fine in this town, so I chose to believe them and chose to believe in my digestive system, and started drinking the stuff in huge quantities.

And it turned out to be fine! What a relief. The remainder of my trip, I didn’t have to buy another bottle of water, and after a few listless days I got my energy back up and moved on to the mountains and out of the sun.

The next time I travel, I’m bringing my camping water filter with me– it would make most any tap water safe to drink, it’s an appliance I already own, and would completely remove the issue of bottled water from the equation. I felt foolish that I had left it at home during this trip but look forward to this solution for my next journey.

Have you had to rely on bottled water recently? How do you deal with this issue while you travel?

[Image by Moffitt via Creative Commons]

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100+mpg car

Karina — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:00:11 +0000

Have you all heard about this? The Avion is a car which was prototyped in the 80s, and which is super efficient and designed to get over 100 miles per gallon. And there’s a guy who is driving one from Mexico to California! As they say:

“In our testing the car we were able to achieve 80 mpg At 70 mph and an astonishing 114 mpg at 55 mph driving from Eugene OR. To Portland OR.”

Wow! that’s great! There’s a news story here, they started driving down this weekend.

Now, I look at this car and think a few things: 1. what a geat commuter! 2. with a lightweight vehicle like this, I wonder how difficult it would be to make this an electric car?and of course there’s 3.: Jiminy Christmas, those are some awesome doors.

Because I’m so dorky, and also so committed to my own high-efficiency automobile (which gets around 60 mpg if I’m driving at 55 miles per hour), I wanted to make a comparison - the problem being, of course, that the Avion is a diesel engine and my Insight is gasoline. Everyone talks about how great the gas mileage is with diesel, but it’s actually an unfair comparison because (due to the nature of the different hydrocarbon chains that make up diesel and gasoline) there is more embodied energy in diesel than there is in gas, so part of the reason that diesel cars get better mileage than gas is just that the fuel is inherently more powerful. Using the excellent explanation and embodied energy here, I figure that gasoline is about 85% the efficiency of diesel. So really, to compare apples to apples, need to calculate the gasoline-equivalent mileage of the Avion by multiplying 114 mpg by 85%… which still gives us 96 mpg! that’s darn amazing, and tops my 60s-70s mpg in the Insight.

Would you buy this car if it were in production?

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Surfboard & Snowboard Wax: Oops…

Jenn — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:00:03 +0000

I recently picked up a new obsession/hobby (it’s a fine line): surfing. Add this to my love of snowboarding and nordic skiing, and I’ve now got three board sports to participate in during two seasons of the year. Lucky me!

All three of these pursuits have one main thing in common: it’s necessary to apply specialized & highly engineered wax to boards/skis. For skis & snowboards, the wax allows the planks to glide smoothly over snow, and wax on a surfboard gives the rider enough traction to stand and maneuver. In both circumstances, the wax gets rubbed off and must be regularly reapplied. I then had the kind of thought which led Karina and I to create Tiny Choices in the first place: where does that wax go when it disappears from the boards?

While I’m surfing or boarding or skiing, the wax is abraded off by snow. Eventually that snow melts, and presumably the microscopic wax particles settle down onto the mountain itself. While this may seem like a ridiculous thing to even think about, consider that skiing trails are static and generally unchanging over many, many years– so there may be decades worth of hundreds of thousands of skiers depositing petroleum-based wax onto mountains and hills all over the world. There are animals which feed on these mountains, and streams in these places which empty into rivers which empty into oceans. This is a very slippery slope, so to speak.

In the case of surfing, it’s easy to see exactly where that wax is going: right into the ocean, where it’s then absorbed by plants, coral, fish, shellfish, sharks, whales, dolphins, octopuses (octopi?), clams, lobsters, jellyfish, seahorses, and starfish.

So thus is the conundrum: being active means we’re healthier, yet activities such as Bikram yoga, surfing, skiing/snowboarding, can be taxing on the environment. Of course, my personal goal is to mitigate and minimize my impact as much as possible: when possible and safe, I buy second-hand gear, I’ll use natural-based waxes when they’re available (and a quick preliminary search shows they are), and participate in sports with as little travel-impact as possible. So it’s a funny situation: I live a car-free city-based low-impact life, but then expend greater amounts of energy in order to reach the big wide open spaces I love. Tricky situation!

How do your pastimes and pursuits and hobbies impact the environment, and what do you do to lessen the weight?

[Photo by Mike Baird via Creative Commons]

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Recycling Aerosol Cans

Karina — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:00:10 +0000

I just got back from a beach vacation, and as a redhead with fair skinwhile I have a lot of things to say about sunblock in general, I will say this: it is much easier to keep the little kids protected from sunburn by using aerosol cans of sunblock spray instead of subjecting them to lotion lotion lotion.

So of course, after making that decision I found myself where Jenn and I often do - wondering if it was the right choice, and even if it wasn’t, how I could make it better.

First I refreshed myself on why we all generally steer away from aerosol cans. I mean - they’re made of metal, right? which I normally always buy when given a choice between metal or plastic (see: infrequent purchases of coke in a can, but never in a bottle).

Of course the big concern with aerosol cans was the CFCs - which are ozone depleting chemicals, and conveniently, a very effective propellant (used to get the product to spray out of the aerosol can). In the 80s teased bang hairstyles were threatened by the hole in the ozone, and responsible teenyboppers switched to pump hair spray. Please, PLEASE, don’t ask me how I know this. These days, though, if something is related closely to food or body care the propellants are more inert - usually propane or butane (though flammable) or CO2 or nitrous oxide. Interestingly, the aerosol products industry group reports that in recent studies 7 out of 10 American’s think that CFCs are still present in aerosol cans! Even though this has been outlawed for several decades in the US.

So if the problem isn’t the ozone then it stands to reason that the aerosol can may be the more appropriate choice over a plastic bottle, right? But how to take care of end-of-life issues?

Earth911 points out that I should be able to recycle at the local level, as long as the can is actually empty:

Be sure that the can is empty. This means that all of the product has to be used up.

Dispose of the empty cans using your curbside pick up service or by visiting your local drop off centers. It is best to touch base with your local centers to be sure they accept this type of product for recycling.

NEVER throw aerosol cans in roadside dumps or trash fires. These cans are still pressurized and can explode.

So next I checked my local recycling requirements:

Glass, Plastic, Tin & Aluminum Recycling

Glass Bottles: Clear, green and brown glass. The bottles and jars must be empty, rinsed and without caps and rings. Labels may be left on.

Metal Cans: Tin and aluminum food and drink cans must be empty and rinsed. Labels must be removed.

Plastic Containers: Plastic soda, milk, juice, shampoo and detergent bottles must be empty, rinsed and without caps. ONLY those bottles marked on the bottom with numerals 1 thru 7 inside a triangle will be taken. The numbers refer to the seven kinds of plastic.

Milk/Orange Juice Cartons: Straws from juice boxes are to be thrown in with the regular trash.

Aluminum Foil/Aluminum Pie Plates: Foil/Plates encrusted with food are to be thrown in with the regular trash.

White Refrigerated/Frozen Food Containers: Includes frozen vegetables, ice cream and butter containers

So my local recycling doesn’t say anything about aerosol cans at all. Which means I guess I’ll have to give them a call and see what they say.

My research turned up another resource, though, which is interesting and hugely useful for people with limited municipal recycling options: 1800recycling.com has a very useful search feature on their website that looks up where you can recycle hard to recycle materials. I put in my location and came up with this:

And… it turns out that there isn’t anything immediately nearby, so I’m pretty much stuck hoping that my municipality actually DOES recycle aerosol cans, and if they don’t, that my workplace will take them. On the other hand, I did download an iphone app from 1800recycling.com that will tell me where all the local recycling is for all those weird things I find myself having to recycle while on vacation, which is super, and much much needed.

Have you found yourself questioning the disposal of a product lately?

[[Photo from flickr user Scott Witt via creative commons license. And by the way, I really enjoyed finding this set of graffiti art on flickr as well.]]

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Easy Peasy Tip: Use a Dish rag!

tinychoices — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 10:00:52 +0000

Here’s an old fashioned tip - use a dish rag in the kitchen! Sponges are convenient and effective, but they’re also disposable and sometimes have lots of plastic involved. Even the eco-friendly sponges are still something that must be bought frequently.

So how about moving back to a tried and true technology that our grandparents used? Get some dish rags to use! you can make your own easily (especially if you crochet or knit) or buy them, and the key seems to be to have one that is not too big, because it will be overly swishy and in the way when you wash dishes. Have several on hand so you can use them for dirty jobs and chuck them in the wash pile when you’re done (and they’re dry).

And if you need an extra scrubby, try getting a stiff bristled scrub brush or how about repurposing those plastic mesh canvas bags?

Are you a dishcloth fan or foe?

[[Photo from flickr user doubledutchess via creative commons license.]]

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“Happy Eco-News” Fridays!

tinychoices — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:00:30 +0000

A green fitness building in a senior center!
Karina just LOVES articles about living in small spaces…
and we think this water bottle is right up Jenn’s alley!
There’s a new water calculator out, you can check their footprint!
Now this is just gross: photos of London sewer pipes that are clogged with fat!

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Reusable Toilet Paper: Not So Crazy

Jenn — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 10:00:02 +0000

So, I know there are a few of our readers who have made the switch at home to reusable toilet paper– which, for the uninitiated (and probably squicked out), means keeping a supply of clean cloths next to the toilet, using them to wipe, then tossing them into a collection bin until laundry day. Before you fall off your floor in horror, please consider that this is actually no more gross than parents who use reusable diapers for their babies.

This is a switch neither Karina nor I have made, and to be honest, while I totally saw the environmental benefits, I just didn’t think I was on a regular enough laundry schedule to implement a system such as this. It’s different if one has a large family– wash is always being done– but for a solo hobo, it’s very hit or miss.

I recently travelled in Central America, where the toilet lines are so delicate that folks don’t toss their used TP into the bowl, but instead into a small trash bin. That bin is emptied every day, and there’s no smell or mess. I just realized how close this system is to a reusable TP system, except for the fact that the Central Americans are still using regular disposable paper, instead of reusable rags. What strikes me is how easy and economically-sensible it would be for them to make the next small switch– when the average living wage is a equal to a few dollars per day, why should any of that necessary money be going towards an unnecessary disposable product?

Of course, our cultures at this point in time are biased towards disposables, and many folks the world over have developed the “gross!” reflex in the last generation or two about things like this– hankies instead of paper tissues, reusable cloth pads instead of disposables, etc. But when I stop to think about it, there’s really nothing gross about this at all. In fact, it could easily be argued that the truly gross thing is to cut down trees in order to make paper to wipe our butts with.

Where do you stand on the resuables issue– TP, hankies, or pads? Do you think this is grody, or a no-brainer?

[Image by Public Domain Photos via Creative Commons]

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Tell Ellen: Plastic Bottles are P-yucky!

Karina — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:00:46 +0000

Juli at plasticlessnyc let us know recently about her campaign to against Ellen and the rampant use of plastic bottles - of course we had to share the news with you!

Apparently, Ellen has started to shill for vitamin water zero during her show - and while I might have cynically written it off as a non-transparent advertisement, Juli has gone the extra mile and taken the proactive stance that we can stop this irresponsible and lazy showcase of and perhaps unintentional endorsement of plastic bottle usage!

She’s set up both a petition and a facebook group, please do go take a look at them. It is frustrating when a celebrity as loved as Ellen is chooses to remain purposefully ignorant about the effects of their actions and endorsements, so hopefully Ellen will listen up!

Do you think celebrities ought to behave better than the rest of us in order to be good influences?

[[Picture from flickr user bernielevine via creative commons license.]]

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