Green Sexy

Indoor Pollution?

We're all concerned with the quality of the outside air, but the air inside our homes can be much more polluted!  According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "the air within homes and other buildings can be more seriously polluted than the outdoor air in even the largest and most industrialized cities."  The EPA also states that "people spend approximately 90 percent of their time indoors."  That means that most of us are breathing in a good amount of toxic air in an environment where we usually feel the safest.  Health effects could range from cold or flu-like symptoms to dire illnesses like cancer. 

I know what you're saying:  Aaarrgh!  Is NOWHERE safe?  Well, before one can apply some remedies to help solve the problem of indoor pollution, one has to first know what the main causes of it are.  According to the EPA, "Indoor pollution sources that release gases or particles into the air are the primary cause of indoor air and quality problems in homes."  Great---so, what does that mean?  Well, "combustion sources", such as oil, gas, kerosene, coal, wood and tobacco are one source of indoor pollution.  A "geological" source like Radon could also pollute your space.  Other sources are things such as:  insulation that contains asbestos, wet or damp carpet, pesticides, central heating and cooling systems, and humidification devices.  And yet other sources of indoor pollution may seem innocuous, but can be just as harmful; these sources are:  cabinetry or furniture made of certain pressed wood products, air fresheners, materials used in hobby activities, cleaning products, personal care products, pets,  plants and even ourselves!!! 

Before you run out of your house and move to the North Pole to go live in an igloo, let me suggest some remedies to lessen or negate the effects of indoor pollution.  First of all, you  could increase the ventilation in your home.  Systems similar to the fans in bathrooms could be installed in other strategic locales in the home or you could open the windows on warmer days.  Air ducts can be cleaned by a professional cleaning service.  If you or someone in your household smokes, smoke outside or even better---QUIT!  Clean/change all filters in your furnace or air-conditioning unit on a regular basis and keep up with the regular maintenance schedule.  Get your chimney swept every fall.  Vacuum your house more often and buy a bagless vacuum with a Hepa filter on it.  Sweep and wash all uncarpeted floors and dust furniture and ledges (yeah, right!).  Remove lead based paints.  Keep the humidity of your house at 40%-60%.  Comb your pet's fur on a regular basis.  Also consider that older appliances tend to emit more harmful pollutants than newer ones---so when economically feasible, replace your oldest appliances, even for a refurbished appliance.

Try out some of these measures and research other methods for cleaning up the air inside your home! Sometimes, before we can tackle "saving the world", we might need to try to save "our world" first.   

 

Put your hands up or I'll pump you full of GREEN!

There's the silver bullet.  There's a "magic bullet".  But is there a "green" bullet?

Yes there is.  New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation is switching from the lead-based bullets that its 464 environmental conservation officers and park rangers use in firearms training to "green" bullets that are lead-free and have nontoxic primers.  Although these "green" bullets are more expensive than traditional lead-based munitions, DEC Commissioner Alexander Grannis says that New York State could ultimately end up saving money by reducing lead's negative effect on the environment and people's health, and they wouldn't have to clean up lead at firing ranges.

How can lead from spent bullets negatively affect the environment?  Lead dust, bullets, and bullet fragments, when exposed to moisture, can seep into the soil and then leach lead into the ground water.  This can affect any organism that comes in contact with or drinks this contaminated water.  According to the Environmental Protection Agency, children who are exposed to lead can suffer damage to their brains and nervous system, which in turn hinders behavioral development, learning and growth.  Adults who are exposed to lead can suffer reproductive issues, high blood pressure, neurological disorders, kidney dysfunction and a host of other ailments.    Over 150,000 bullets are fired in DEC training exercises every year, so a good amount of lead will be taken out of the equation with this welcome move, making the DEC part of the solution, not the problem.

This forward-thinking move by the DEC may influence other agencies and organizations that use firearms to switch to "greener" munitions.  How long will it take for the U.S. Military to get the lead out?

Bush's Final (yay!) State of the Union Address

Ah, George.  Still trying to capitalize off his previous State of the Union speech where the former(?) oil-brat boldly declared:  "WE ARE ADDICTED TO OIL!" 

In tonight's State of the Union Address George Bush dedicated close to two minutes on environmental issues (which he then transitioned into a diatribe on stem cell research).  He reiterated that we need to reduce our addiction to oil...and replace it with an addiction to a wasteful venture like ethanol. 

And how about his call for more efficient coal-burning energy plants with better emissions-capturing technology?  As if we're not already not "addicted to coal" as well as oil, there are 150 more coal-burning plants proposed in the United States alone, with only 10 percent of those plants slated to use "clean coal" technology.

He stressed the need to support emissions-free nuclear technology.  While nuclear power does hold much favor in energy-progressive countries like France and Japan, which derive a good amount of their energy from nuclear power, it's those "x-factors"--- Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl---that just freak people out!  Nuclear energy proponents like Dr. Bill Wattenburg would argue that technological advancements in the nuclear energy industry since these debacles have all but negated the risk of such a catastrophes.  While that may be true, and also while taking into account that you can never truly negate all risk of any technology, there is one glaring problem with nuclear energy that is usually swept under the rug (or under the Earth)---what to do with the radioactive waste?  The hundreds of thousands of tons of radioactive waste that is produced by nuclear power plants each year are stored underground in cannisters will remain radioactive for thousands of years!  France, Japan and Russia do reprocess a portion of their nuclear waste into fuel, but the byproduct is plutonium, an element used in the production of nuclear weapons, which in itself raises security issues---eh, Bush? 

And what's up with the omission of Wind and Solar technologies in Bush's speech?  I think George is more into pandering to special interest groups (corn lobby, coal industry, nuclear power industry) than he is into technologies that, while expensive on the front end, are renewable and ultimately more Earth-friendly!  Bush is more into short-term solutions, and since so much of our nation's money has flowed into funding his war in Iraq, he's not willing or forward-thinking enough to promote wind and solar energy.  Thus far, wind and solar energy are to the U.S. Government what massage therapy and acupuncture are to health insurance industry.

Will the next President be more progressive in his or her energy initiatives?  Well, the best we can do is vote with our hearts and hope for the best!

Can't Whitewash a Crow?

Hey---who ever said that you "can't whitewash a crow"? 

I first learned about white crows from an article in the October 2007 issue of The Conservationist Magazine and I was so enchanted.  I instantly trolled the web for more information and I came across a most  interesting account.  Back in November of 2006, Jeanne at houseinprogress.net encountered a white crow in distress and did her best to help it out.  You simply have to check her amazing story out!  Here's some of her pictures:

Greenissexy.org is not Green-Sexy.com

Yep, they're not us and we're not them.

Still, Greenissexy.org is a neat-o environmental site that promotes all kinds of Earth-friendly products and provides a plethora of eco-riffic tips!  A creation of three like-minded friends---Rachel, Didi, & Megan
(you might recognize Rachel)--- this site is a fun and easy way to spend a few minutes gettin' greener.  If you have a moment, check out this site today!

THEN...come back to the loving arms of Green-Sexy.com and we'll take extra special care of your environmental needs!

Love,

Steve & Karin  ;)

FreeRice.com

John Breen, a computer programmer from Indiana wanted a tool to help his son study for the SATs.  He also wanted to help raise awareness about world hunger.  Thus, FreeRice.com was born!  FreeRice.com is the sister site to Breen's hunger-awareness site Poverty.com.  On FreeRice, you play a vocabulary game, and for every correct guess you donate 20 grains of rice via the United Nations World Food Programme.  FreeRice launched on October 7, 2007, and by today's count, 15,756,331,270 grains of rice have been donated thus far (that's enough to feed 700,000 people for a day).  According to USA Today, The U.N.'s World Food Programme "gets the donations in cash---$258,000 thus far---and buys the rice locally."  This is such a fabulous idea, for not only are you giving food to those in need, but you are also learning something at the same time!  To play and donate, you can visit the link in this post or click on the FreeRice.com banner on this blog!

On a related note, the folks at almostmonumental.com found two more sites whose aim is to put an end to world hunger. With a simple mouse click on both TheHungerSite.com and hungerfighters.com, you can donate food to a person in need somewhere in the world.  Bookmark these sites today and click away!

Whole Foods Bans Plastic Bags!

Whole Foods, an organic grocery store chain, announced earlier this week that it will stop offering plastic grocery bags to its shoppers by Earth Day, April 22nd.  With 270 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, it is estimated that 100 million plastic bags will be kept out of the environment from Earth Day until the end of 2008.  In place of plastic bags, free paper bags in four different sizes will be offered, in addition to reusable bags made from recycled plastic bottles (for 99 cents) and canvas bags (for $6.99 to $35).  Whole Foods will also give their customers an incentive to bring their own shopping bags by taking 5 cents off their bill for each bag brought.  Not bad, eh?

This move by Whole Foods has followed a national and international trend of businesses, cities, states, and countries taxing or banning outright the use of plastic bags.  Last year San Francisco became the first United States city to ban petroleum-based grocery bags and Oakland is considering banning plastic grocery bags as well.  30 remote Alaskan villages ban plastic bags.  States such as New York and New Jersey require retailers to recycle plastic bags.  Retailer Trader Joe's is pushing paper bags over plastic and Ikea's United States stores are charging 5 cents per plastic bag and donate the money to a conservation group! In preparation for hosting the upcoming Summer Olympic Games, China will impose a ban on the lowest-grade plastic bags beginning June 1, 2008, so that they can cut down on what they call "white pollution".  In countries like France, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, and Taiwan, the plastic bag has lost its appeal in light of additional taxes and recycling fees that are imposed on the merchants and consumers. 

This is a welcome move, because Sierra Club estimates that 100 billion plastic bags are thrown out each year in the United States alone!  Worldwatch, an environmental research group, estimates that it takes more than 1,000 years for a non-recyclable plastic bag to break down in a landfill.  Combine these sobering facts along with all of the issues related to many countries' dependence on foreign sources of oil, and ceasing the use of plastic bags in retail stores is an idea that really makes sense!

Whole Foods gets one big Green-Sexy endorsement!   

The information for this post was derived from "Whole Foods sacks plastic bags" by Bruce Horovitz, USA Today, Tuesday, January 22, 2008 and from "China bans free plastic bags shopping bags" by Christopher Bodeen, The Associated Press, January 2008.   

Legalize it, dude! Reefer Madness!!!

The once golden luster of corn-based ethanol has now dulled, as has the nation's enthusiasm for this once-heralded savior of our fuel needs.  According to Craig Cox from the July/August issue of Ode Magazine, it turns out that corn ethanol "takes 30 percent more energy to grow and process than it produces as fuel."  Not only that, but it hardly reduces carbon-dioxide emissions, and causes food prices to rise.  With the demand for corn ethanol, we are creating a struggle between using corn for food for humans and livestock, or using it for fuel to feed the machines we depend upon.  Either way, the corn lobby and large-scale farmers are more than happy to receive federal subsidies to grow corn---and only corn!  Is it going to come to the point where we're going to start importing vegetables that we used to grow here in the states because farmers are too concerned with growing corn for ethanol?  Sounds alarmist, but if the government keeps holding hands with the corn lobby, it could become a partial reality. 

So, what to do?  Well, there are other sources of plant-based fuel that are easier to grow, take less energy to process, and don't detract from our food supply.  It appears that so much more biodiesel can be produced per acre from less obvious sources than almost every ethanol crop.  One such alternative would be switchgrass, which produces 1,150 gallons of biodiesel  per acre (compared with the 354 gallons of ethanol that corn produces).  How about algae?  That wonderful green stuff you see floating on the surface of ponds can produce 5,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre!

Okay---get out your hacky sacks and crank up the Grateful Dead: HEMP can produce 1,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre!  Well, if algae can produce so much more biodiesel, then what's so great about hemp?  The thing about algae is that the growing conditions have to be just right to attain maximum yield, and it is often influenced by evaporation and the invasion of less effective algae populations.  Hemp, on the other hand, grows like a...um, weed... and would be very easy to grow and cultivate.  Also, hemp has many wonderful uses, such as in textiles, soaps and body lotions, food-grade cooking oils, ropes, and many, many other ingenious uses.  Maybe you could think of some of your own, perhaps? 

It seems that corn-based ethanol is to national fuel independence, as the H-4 Hercules Flying Boat was to Howard Hughes:  the government dropped a whole bunch of money on it, but then realized it just couldn't really fly.  Sorry, but corn-based ethanol just seems a bit, well...corny.      

Wal-Mart Goes Green, Small Towns Still See Red

So, former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach is on the payroll of Wal-Mart as an environmental consultant, thus bolstering Wal-Mart's credibility as an emerging "green" company and also improving the company's PR.  Well, I don't want Wal-Mart's image to improve and have its profit margins increase, to the detriment of small businesses and small towns.  It's true that Werbach could make a huge environmental difference if he can change Wal-Mart's environmental practices on even just a small level, but what I think would be even better for the nation and the world is the dismantling of this corporation and its conquer-the-world business model.  Now, I realize that Wal-Mart will probably always be a part of the world's "landscape", but it must be made more accountable for its steamroller approach to fiscal success.

First of all, Wal-Mart's way of doing business is bad for, well...business.  Wal-Mart is a town-killer, selling merchandise at such low prices that small local businesses are forced to close.  That hurts the local economy: the landlords lose the rent, the town loses the tax revenue, and ultimately may lose one of its most vital resources---its people (who may have to move out of town to find a new source of income).  Part of a healthy "environment" is having a sense of community, a sense that there's something good and unique about your corner of the world and that you belong to this place.  Wal-Mart robs towns of their uniqueness and, once other local independently-owned-small-business shopping options are eradicated, forces the town to become Wal-Mart shoppers. Hey---but where else could you go to buy a pound of chicken thighs, a pack of socks, a car battery, pick up a prescription, grab a bite to eat, and get the latest best selling novel, all in one stop?  Are we so convenience-oriented as a country that we can't frequent a handful of local businesses to get what we need, instead of supporting a megacorporation whose dollars flow back to banks in Arkansas and don't stay in the local economy?  How many pockets does Wal-Mart have to dip into until they're selling basically everything that every other store used to specialize in?  I'm sorry, I don't want to shop at a place that sells both produce and firearms.  Hell no!

Also, Wal-Mart abandons old stores (which are already huge) and builds Supercenters, sometimes just blocks away from its old stores.  In fact, this practice just occurred in the town of Brockport, NY, which is about ten miles away from my town.  Wal-Mart built a Supercenter about half a mile away from the old store, leaving behind a huge empty building, and also a dying plaza. There were other businesses in the old Wal-Mart plaza that have since closed down because there's no more traffic there.  Now there's tons of traffic in another part of town where there used to be a forest!  Ah, how quaint it is to see the "small town" facade that Wal-Mart has slapped on the front of their newest big box Supercenter instead of the trees that used to live in that space.   Is the new Supercenter designed to absorb all of the carbon that those trees used to remove from the air we breathe?  Also, if the Supercenter itself has a footprint of close to 200,000 square feet where trees used to be, just how large of a footprint does the parking lot have?  So, we're now talking about a store with an overall footprint of what must be at least 500,000 square feet total.  What size shoe is that?

Can Adam Werbach influence Wal-Mart to raze its old empty stores, plant trees in their place, maintain ownership of the said properties and maintain parks for the towns, or would that not be cost-effective?  Can he influence them to cut down on their imports from China, thus reducing not only the trade deficit, but also potentially benefiting American manufacturers (who still make products in the U.S.A.), and cutting down on the environmental impact of having to ship tons of "goods" from China?  Can he convince Wal-Mart to reduce the size of its stores so that towns don't have to lose so much precious green space?  Can he convince Wal-Mart to work more cooperatively with town governments, instead of strong-arming them into giving up the right to collect property taxes from such a huge store, thus giving Wal-Mart a huge economic benefit, which in turn, makes it possible for them to undersell local businesses, thus killing the hearts of many towns?  Is Adam Werbach an Annie Sullivan?  Is he a Miracle Worker?  Can he teach this deaf, dumb and blind corporation that it's okay to reduce its profit margin by just a bit in the interest of the environment and the people who live in unique and vibrant small towns?  Are we all just a little too naive about the difference we can make with a company such as Wal-Mart? Well, I hope Adam can make a positive difference working for Wal-Mart; I'll continue the good fight working against them!

For a chance to win a cool prize, check out this related post about the Sierra Club/Wal-Mart connection.

Lifeline to Africa

*  Nearly 2 billion people in the world, approximately 35% of the global population, still do not have electricity.

*  The areas in the world with the high levels of poverty also have the lowest levels of modern energy consumption.

*  People in least developed countries on average spend 6% of their income on batteries ($24/year) – if people in developed countries were to spend the same that would amount to $2331/year!
(excerpted from Freeplayenergy.com).

I first discovered the Freeplay Foundation when I was writing a post on the Freeplay crank/solar-powered radio that I own.  The Freeplay Foundation is a non-profit humanitarian organization that supplies the Lifeline Radio (pictured here) to those in developing countries, giving them a "lifeline" of information and education they would otherwise lack.  You can donate a Lifeline Radio for only $70 U.S. Dollars to places like Rwanda and Afghanistan.  Also, CEO, Kristine Pearson, has been named one of TIME magazine's Heroes of the Environment for 2007!

For a limited time (Jan. 22-Feb 1), the Freeplay Foundation and  will eBay be auctioning off ten Lifeline radios (which are not available to the public).  The radios will be autographed by Tom Hanks and will be accompanied by a personal letter from the actor himself.  All of the dollars raised, including $15,000 donated by eBay, will go directly to the Freeplay Foundation.

People can go to www.ebay.com or can click on www.shopvictoriously.com to place their bids.