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Gimme 5

Are you as annoyed as I am when you do everything in your power to recycle but your recycling center won’t take the #5 plastics that are all too often the choice of manufacturers? I also have some prescriptions which I fill regularly and have been stock piling those little #5 plastic bottles hoping to be overcome with a particularly clever creative use for them rather than toss them.

 

Well I finally came across Preserve Products. I don’t know why I didn’t know about them sooner but I’m glad I do now. Go to PreserveProducts.com to see what they are doing. Preserve products are made from 100% recycled plastics and 100% post-consumer paper. I love what they are creating, or should I say re-creating?

But the best news for me was their Gimme 5 program. They know that a lot of communities don’t have recycling capabilities for the #5 plastics. No problem. Their Gimme 5 efforts have made it possible for everyone to recycle those pill bottles, butter tubs, yogurt cups, hummus tubs and other food containers.

 

There are two methods to Gimme 5.

 

1 - You can drop off clean #5 plastics at participating Whole Foods stores. The Preserve Products website has a state by state listing of the participating Whole Foods stores. If you live near a Whole Foods store that isn’t yet involved, make a suggestion that you want them to get with the program.

2 - If you don’t live near a Preserve Gimme 5 location you can send them directly to Preserve Products.

 

Send Gimme 5 shipments to:

Preserve Gimme 5
823 NYS Rte 13
Cortland, NY 13045

 

If you have any questions about the Gimme 5 program or have a large shipment you’d like to send, call them at 888-354-7296.

 

Here’s a note from Preserve Products about the impact of shipping your #5 plastics to them:

 

“Before starting the mail-back Gimme 5 program, we wanted to make sure that we were taking a positive step for the environment. We produced a single factor Life Cycle Assessment to analyze the impact of the Gimme 5 program. The results showed the benefits of keeping #5 plastics out of landfills and remaking them into new products outweigh the environmental impacts of shipping them back to us. We hope that the success of our program will help convince local recyclers of the value of taking #5 plastics back in more communities across the US.”

 

Finally a solution for a problem that has been bugging me for a long time.

Toxic Assets

The following article comes from Bill Walsh of Healthy Building Network. Please visit their website for more information about the excellent work they are doing.

By Bill Walsh, Executive Director
Healthy Building Network

May 6, 2009

President Obama has rightfully linked our economic recovery to our environmental recovery. But we need to break the link between the corporate behavior that drove us to the brink of financial ruin in the first place and that which continues to drive us towards ecological ruin.

Like the economic collapse, our ecological collapse is being fueled by industries creating widespread social risk in their reckless and dangerous pursuit of short-term profits. What’s worse, their modus operandi includes massive public relations campaigns, philanthropy and lobbying efforts that portray their self-interested behavior as part of the societal solution. Think Clean Coal.

In the green building movement, the leading example of this behavior is the rebranding of virtually every building material as a “green” product, officially recognized by one label or another. The green label craze resembles the virus-like uptake of the financial assets known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), the so-called derivatives that brought down the financial house. CDOs purported to apportion risk, protect conservative investors and assure long-term economic stability. But CDOs, like green labels, were really a Trojan horse.

Journalist Matt Taibbi’s recent R-rated description of the CDO rage in Rolling Stone Magazine sounds like a description of green product marketing today: “Suddenly, thanks to this financial seal of approval, banks had a way to turn their shittiest mortgages and other financial waste into investment-grade paper.... The problem was, none of this was based on reality.... To get AAA ratings, the CDOs relied not on their actual underlying assets but on crazy mathematical formulas that the banks cooked up to make the investments look safer than they really were.”¹

Relying upon the fraudulent AAA ratings, the most conservative investors unwittingly fueled the machinery of their own ruin. Relying upon the plethora of greenwash labels and certifications will have a similar ironic outcome – the most committed environmental consumers unwittingly fueling the industrial engines that have driven and continue to drive us towards ecological collapse.

The bad mortgages sold by Citibank and the bad debts bundled into the CDOs by insurance behemoth AIG have been labeled “toxic assets.” Their detoxification depends largely upon the full faith and credit of the US Government, i.e. the Fed’s ability to create wealth by printing money. But the Fed won’t be able to create species gone extinct and cultures extinguished under the greenwash forest certification standards authored by the timber industry, or undo the avoidable reproductive problems caused by endocrine-disrupting chemicals in thousands of green-labeled products.

Whole systems of banking, insurance and credit thought “too big to fail” have failed. We are all too aware that big ecological systems – arable land, fresh water, the climate - are under stress. Their collapse has the potential to make this economic crisis look like kids’ stuff. All it takes is another Katrina in New Orleans, or another tsunami, this time in L.A., or another Chernobyl, the plume this time spreading across the US bread basket or California’s Central Valley, or the final disappearance of honey bees. Or maybe it will be some statistically impossible combination of ecological crises, as unlikely to happen as say mortgages, insurance and credit failing all at once.

Our major industries – mining, timber, energy, chemicals, plastics – have been reinventing their images, not their industries. Ubiquitous green labels and advertising are part of the problem, not the solution. If it seems too easy being green these days, remember how easy it was to refinance your mortgage two years ago.

Footnotes

[1] Taibbi, Matt "The Big Takeover." Rolling Stone, Issue 1075. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover

It Is Still Hurricane Season and There Is Still Time To Prepare

St Petersburg, FL. – I live in a very fortunate place. We have been lucky in the last couple of years to not have had to deal with a full-on hurricane. We still have had the effects of several named storms tear through the area without enduring too much damage.

If you live anywhere near the East coast or the Gulf of Mexico’s various coasts then you are either prepared or not for the next big storm.

We are, for the most part, very fortunate to be able to live here in St. Petersburg. We don’t endure winter – in any shape or form. This area gets cold now and then and we even have to deal with frost once in awhile but never winter. And in the summer we rarely ever hit temperatures the go beyond the high nineties. I grew up in the Midwest where winter is all too plentiful and summer can be hot and humid and temps can go above 100 degrees and stay there just long enough for people to die because they don’t know how to deal with it.

So living here in St. Nirvana has been a great move for me, but it still has its own mean Mother Nature reality. And if you don’t want to know how to prepare for that eventual reality, stop reading now. But if you do need some advice about the inevitability of hurricane “somebody” coming your way, pay attention. And the issues aren’t that specific to the “hurricane season” as we like to refer to it. A lot of storms, predictable or not cause the same kind of chaos all over the nation and when you’re prepared, you can be better at handling the aftermath.

   

I’m going to give you a couple of places to check out for a list of things to do to be prepared for a

hurricane or any storm that threatens the loss of your power, water and food. The bottom line is to protect yourself and your home.   

The National Hurricane Center has the details on how to prepare for the next one – go to http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/HAW2/english/disaster_prevention.shtml.

Along with the general how to prepare details Ready America also has links to federal and national resources like the Red Cross, FEEMA, NOAA, US EPA and US Department of Health and Human Services – go to http://www.ready.gov/america/beinformed/hurricanes.html.

Hurricane season is officially over November 30^th, but the reality is, it isn’t over until it’s over. Be prepared.

Happy Earth Day

By Tom Chasm

April hosts one day when we can stop and celebrate the accomplishments we’ve made to preserve our environment – Happy Earth Day. I was 20 years old that first Earth Day in 1970 and mildly interested in the concept, but the world took notice and the environmental movement was born.

One of the co-founders of Earth Day, former U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI), recognized the power of the anti-war teach-ins that were happening at college campuses all over the country.

In "A Brief History of Earth Day," by Gaylord Nelson (1989) he says, “I visited Santa Barbara in the summer of 1969 to speak at a water conference, and then flew north to Berkeley to speak at a conservation conference. On the plane I read an article about the use of campus anti-war teach-ins to educate students about the Vietnam War. Suddenly the idea occurred to me: Why not devote a day to a nationwide teach-in on the environment?

Thus was born Earth Day. Eight months later, on April 22, 1970, 20 million people, 2,000 colleges and universities, 10,000 grammar and high schools and 1,000 communities mobilized for the first nationwide demonstrations on environmental problems. Congress adjourned for the day so members could attend Earth Day events in their districts. The response was nothing short of remarkable, and the modern American environmental movement took off.

My major objective in planning Earth Day 1970 was to organize a nationwide public demonstration so large it would, finally, get the attention of the politicians and force the environmental issue into the political dialogue of the nation. It worked. By the sheer force of its collective action on that one day, the American public forever changed the political landscape respecting environmental issues."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was a direct result of Earth Day in 1970. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed by Congress. And the Supreme Court affirmed the EPA's role in environmental protection enforcement.

We’ve come a long way since the EPA set the first human health exposure levels. We’ve removed lead from our paint and gasoline. We no longer are exposed to DDT or asbestos on a regular basis. But technology keeps bringing us new challenges in the form of a stew of chemicals in the products we use that may or may not be harmful. These days as those chemicals are reported to be dangerous or even suspected to be, we can usually find safer alternatives from which to choose.

This year’s Earth Day Celebrations can proudly look back at the accomplishments that are a direct result of the first Earth Day, but due to our dependence on petroleum and coal for energy and transportation, we have a much bigger challenge to deal with right now.

It’s no secret that global warming is everyone’s biggest environmental challenge. The international recognition of this problem is bringing about intense research and development in water conservation, alternative energy sources and green initiatives. More and more cities are adopting green policies in building practices and in public transportation. States like California are passing laws limiting the use of dangerous chemicals in products sold to consumers.

Governmental mandates are cutting the amount of carbon gases being released into the environment, but not everyone is participating so we have more to do before we start to see a reversal of the damage which is causing our climate to change.

The choices on a personal level are growing daily. Organic food has become available in your local supermarket. Organic fibers are being used to make clothes and linen. Hybrid and electric vehicles, and bio-fuels are options for your personal transportation. Recycling and buying recycled products continues to be easier all the time. And the growth of the green building industry continues even though construction and the new housing market have slowed down.

Here’s some news you can use locally - Pinellas Living Green Expo is scheduled a couple of weeks after Earth Day this year. Set aside some time on the first weekend in May to attend the third Expo being held at the Harborview Center, 300 Cleveland St. in Clearwater, Florida. Get details at www.pinellaslivinggreenexpo.org. You’ll find exhibitors who can offer more sustainable choices and information about reducing environmental impacts in the following areas: Transportation, Energy, Home Building and Remodeling, Food, Yard and Garden, Recreation and Leisure, Household Products and Practices, Sustainability Education and Lifestyles, and Arts and Culture. It just gets better every year.

Check out Earth Day Celebrations in your neighborhood and have a great Earth Day!