Virescent

Al Gore is publicizing the environment again. This time, it comes with professional ad-people and $300 million dollars, instead of a small documentary about the little Power Point that could, but hey, green’s come a long way since 2006. Gore wants to push that momentum into a popular movement that will convince politicians to actually maybe please pretty please do something sensible? Like, we’ll be more energy efficient if you dudes stop ignoring the problem. How about that? The group’s name (and motto, too, I guess) is “We Can Solve It“, and some of the first few spots are airing now on a tv near you.

In an NPR story on the new campaign, Al Gore’s own carbon footprint was brought up again. If you recall, it was reported last year, right after his Oscar win, that his personal energy use at a TN mansion was some ridiculously high number- though even Fox News reported on his solar panel installations and carbon offsetting plans. Not bad, considering their regular columnist on environmental matters thinks global warming is a vicious myth. And yes, the column is named “Junk Science,” and no, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean it to be funny that way.

The NPR story highlighted an important part of what Gore’s message is going to have to be, though- to tackle the environmental problems we’re creating, we’re going to have to think and live differently. And the man who’s fronting and financing a campaign to tell us to do this, and write our congresspeople while we’re at it, needs to set a squeaky-clean tech example.

John Tierney over at the NYT wrote a piece last week on how to remind people to be green- nudge them into making good “abstract” and “long-term” choices by tying their carbon footprints, or resource use, or what have you- into a real-time display, like a mood ring or changing LED jewelry. He argues it would instill a sense of connection to our choices- plus, it will facilitate some public green-upmanship backed by facts, not hype. It’s an interesting read. I’d like Al Gore to start the ecomood ring trend- him and everyone else who argues for the environment. I’m in, of course- mood rings are sweet, almost as sweet as living up to your own standards.
Speaking of sweet, and environmentally sound, and things that light up, here’s the Gentleman Friend’s flower from this weekend, made from old cds, circuit boards, and flashy lights:

Nicely done, sir!

For an event tonight, the organizers requested we bring the flowers- made ones, by hand, please. I sewed mine, and it’s all recycled- made of fabric scraps from various projects, and some beads from a broken necklace. I modified a template for kanzashi, which are Japanese folded fabric or paper flowers worn mostly by Geishas. Here’s the chain of inspiration: I first saw the fabric version on etsy, then found a website with plenty of links to different tutorials for both paper and fabric versions. I adapted the instructions at this site, since I was using a flimsier fabric for the petals. And, voila:

I had a petal base. Basically, I cut triangles of fabric, and folded them twice (so you have two folds at the top, and two loose ends and one fold at the bottom), then sewed a couple of times through the four layers at the bottom of the petal. I stitched each new folded triangle to the same thread, until I had a long chain that, when I held it in a loop, formed a solid flower circle with no obvious blank spaces yearning for its own petal. I then sewed through the circle at the bases once more, to space them a little more neatly.

You can see the “hole” in the middle, where all the petals meet, and it looks a bit uneven. I needed a bud, which I made by stuffing a little square of fabric with some leftovers, and sewing on the beads. I also made a stem by rolling a bit of rectangular cloth and sewing up the sides in a spiral- when it was long enough, I trimmed the top to make a neat circle. By poking the bud through the middle of the hole from the top, and whip stitched the sides of the petal to the top folds of the petals. This allowed me to flatten out the bud over the entirety of the messy middle, and to hold the petals evenly in place around the bud. I then stitched together the mess at the bottom of the flower center- all of the folded bases together with the bud base poking through- then whip stitched the stem over all those to the single fold at the bottom of each petal, to space the bottoms of the petals neatly. The results:

As you can see, I added a few more beads and a little stitching to the bud, and leaves (folded the same way as the petals and sewn to the stem).

If I get a chance, I’d like to try and add some thin wire to the beads, so they poke up perkily- I’m going to dig out some twisty ties after this and see how that works. And the bud looks unfinished, since I’m no good at embroidery (yet). I’d like to finish it with some cool contrasting beads, and I haven’t got any of those. But otherwise, I’m quite happy with it.

I found other instructions for fabric flowers here, through a post at Crafting for a Green World, and they look pretty cool, too. I went with the kanzashi for this project because I liked the more defined petals, and thought they’d look good in larger sizes.

So, one handmade thing finished! I should have a few more over the weekend for you. If you have any questions about my methods, feel free to ask, of course.

At the Salvation Army, yes. I found this sweater there this afternoon while I was dropping off a load of unnecessary apartment stuff, and had to share. So classy and soft, and if the price and quality won’t convince you to browse your local second hand shop, nothing will. Finding something at a thrift store is way more exciting than finding something at a normal retailer- the element of surprise, the thrill of the chase, etc. Less chance of getting a winner, true- I saw plenty of ugly sweaters made with gorgeous yarn, so maybe next time I’ll try out this advice on recycling sweaters I found through another blog (which I’ll link soon, they’re nifty).

After that ecofriendly success, I balanced my day by getting caught in a rainstorm on my walk home from work, while carrying my bag of groceries. Fortunately it was the perfect warm evening and light rain, and I only stepped in the big puddle and soaked my socks a few hundred yards from my door. But it was a good reminder that practical hippies should carry umbrellas.

There’s been a lot of ecotalk on the scourge of plastics, and that’s generally fine by me. I made my own shopping bag, I have ranted about excess plastic packaging, I’m hip. Yo.

But last week, while sick and moving, I spent an afternoon being very grateful for my drugs and my bubble wrap (I’m betting the drugs had a bit to do with all that deep contemplation). My pills were packaged in plastic, and bubble wrap is, of course, plastic, and these are wonderful things. Actually, lots of wonderful things are plastic. Plastics are durable and can be made so much stronger and lighter than most natural materials, and they’re fantastically easy to manufacture into almost anything. Plastics have made incredible engineering advances possible. Plus they’re cheap enough so that goods ordinary people could only dream of a few decades ago are readily available to the masses. These time-saving devices  allow people to raise their standards of living at no cost to resources like wood and ore. Without them, modern medicine wouldn’t exist (and they’d even have to package all those natural supplements in something else). Plastics are awesome.

So why do we hate them? They’re made of chemicals. They’re overused. Their lovely inexpensive qualities take care of that. Stuff we most noticeably don’t need is made of plastic- again, it’s the cheapest way to hand out toys with every faux-food meal, or flimsy bags with every purchase. And once they’re made, they’re here forever. Recycling them is difficult and tends to degrade their properties, and on their own they won’t break down for centuries. And when they’re not stuck in landfill properly, adorable things choke on them, or they blow around tackily. But most of that is because we use plastics poorly, not because plastics are bad.

Maybe part of it is that plastics are decidedly “unnatural”. There’s no “handmade” plastic anything- they reek of machines and mass production and technocracy. Homesteaders can swap butter recipes, but not plastic recipes. The Economist’s green.view column a few weeks ago was on how us hippie folk think that all things unnatural are bad. I thought the column was singularly poorly thought out for such a respectable publication (tone was derisive and bitter, examples chosen were blatantly skewed), but is that it? Is our visceral reaction to plastic the result of our yearnings for an ideal of naturalness?

I think it has more to do with the abuse of plastics by man, and not the plastics themselves. I’m an engineer, after all, and I like science and technology, and I appreciate that we can make it work for us, or we can abuse it. It’s just a lot easier to crusade against the definite “plastics” than against everybody’s thousand bad plastic habits- that makes ecopeople seem so judgemental and self-righteous, after all.

I’ve struggled with my plastic use in the past.  All those piles of guilt stuffed in rustling baggies. I’m still going to avoid foam plates and grocery bags (unless I need trash liners) and use aluminum foil instead of sandwich baggies- but I’ll rejoice in my plastic tupperware (or reused cream cheese tubs to prevent food and other waste!) and useful medicine containers and new, affordable latex mattress. Plastics can be part of a sustainable lifestyle, as long as we use them wisely and well.

I can take a deep breathe and come back to post regularly now, since I finally only have one apartment again, and most of my boxes are empty and their contents distributed. It’s been a long move, and I’m very glad it’s over. I’ll give you a summary along with the six-month review and March monthly goal I owe you, but not yet.

Tonight, you get a few links to stories from the past week I’ve been itching to put up for days. Guiding theme is legislative.

The EPA released their actual reason for denying a waiver to California and about 16 (or maybe 18, depending on which article you read) other states so that they may pass their own emissions laws, the same week as memos from the EPA’s staff opposing the decision were made public. The agency said in December that they’d deny the waiver, for reasons that would be forthcoming. After over two months, they’ve come up with

“While I find that the conditions related to global climate change in California are substantial, they are not sufficiently different from conditions in the nation as a whole to justify separate state standards,” Johnson [the EPA head] wrote.

The policy director for the National Resources Defense Council called that statement “both factually and legally wrong”. Johnson’s own EPA agrees with the NRDC.

“It is obvious to me that there is no legal or technical justification for denying this,” Margo Oge, director of the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, warned in talking points prepared for a meeting with Johnson in October 2007.

While the EPA is taking their bold, defenseless move, the House has passed a bill with a much less certain future. A plan to shift funding to renewable energy resources, paid for by removing tax breaks given to oil and gas companies, passed the House Wednesday. No idea on when the Senate will get to it, but Bush has of course threatened a veto. After all, American oil companies (who are hitting year after year of record profits- not just records for them, but records for any American business ever- and record profits, not just record income, straight-up profits) are suffering badly, and may not survive much longer without those tax breaks. Limping along, suspended by a thread, suffocating under the weight of their own cash, etc. You know how it is. The NYT article on the House bill highlights Republican reasons for opposing it (besides the poor, poor oil companies) (ok, “poor” is a bad word choice), and what doesn’t boil down to “taxes==evil” goes along the lines of “energy prices are high enough, and this will increase our dependence on foreign energy supplies”. I’ll go ahead and call that laughable, considering how dependent on foreign oil resources we already are, and considering that the main gist of the bill is to shift energy production to sources that Americans control, on US soil. Let’s see how the Senate takes the idea before we get all excited, though.

And in a Wired piece, recycling at the Obama campaign! Not speeches (har-dee-har), no, but campaign materials themselves. For those of us who’ve been hankering after a teeshirt, you know that the Obama campaign is trying to fill such a huge demand for their merch that their orders are being delayed by weeks, and the ObamaCycle site is emerging as the most effective way to get posters where they’re needed fast. Considering the political litter all over our corner of Alexandria, I hope more campaigns pick up the idea. Of course, since total inundation seems to be the general goal of the posters, perhaps the best I can hope for is that all those signs end up in a recycling pile by November.

It appears that China wants to keep lurching toward environmental responsibility, sprawling development and fossil fuel use boom aside. This week, the government announced that plastic shopping bags would no longer given out for free, beginning in June. Manufacture, use or sale of very thin plastic bags would be outlawed entirely. I’m curious if their ban on manufacturing extends to manufacture for shipping abroad, and if China is as big a producer of plastic bags for the rest of the world as they seem to be of everything else.

NYC Council passed a measure requiring stores to provide recycling for plastic bags, and to have reusable bags on sale.  Makes sense, I like the idea that the life cycle of a product (the plastic bag) shouldn’t be ignored once it’s passed off to a user- a well-designed product has a viable disposal plan, too.

As much as plastic bags are overused and wasted, I will be a bit put out when their free distribution is banned.  I use them for all sorts of gross-things disposal, and to collect my recycling in accordance with Alexandria regulations.  Mostly, I’ll just be cranky that I have to buy what I’ve taken for granted for so long.  If I have to pay for it though, at least I’ll use it with respect.  So hey, let’s let the market work this one out!  Put a price on them, then see if people waste them.  This is one of those plans where the magical hand of the “free” market might just work out for everybody.

I hope that the success of my Halloween party will be measured by the heft of the recycling bin afterwards. It was both more and less difficult than I expected to make the shindig ecofriendly. Fortunately it was a simple affair- a few snacks, drinks, and a nod at the reason for the season (refined sugar and the color orange). First, the decoration: I used some heftier paper streamers that made it through last year’s party and a string of paper pumpkins from a late seasonal gift that also escaped said melee. Inexplicably, these were in a box under my bed, along with the leftover orange plastic ware and napkins and a few red ribbons- it looks like Christmas will benefit from my packing tendencies, also. I found a few other decorations on clearance, but I didn’t purchase anything that wasn’t useful in itself and that I didn’t like enough to use regularly. Orange and black aren’t my color scheme of choice, but I found non-garish dark orange placemats and a few sparkly black bowls whose Halloweenic nature will be completely hidden when dispersed among the contents of my apartment. None of the snacks required silverware, and only a few napkins were needed in anticipation of party fouls. All the decorations were packed up afterwards for next year.

Comestibles were almost as simple to green. I stuck with mostly canned beer, since aluminum cans tend to contain a good amount of recycled material and can be fully recycled themselves. The available glass bottles had their caps collected for my jewelry-inclined friend to experiment with as threatened. Solo cups remaining from the last party (and cleaned!) were put out for the other available liquids. Soft drinks were purchased in 2L quantities, since those are shared and come with less packaging than canned sodas, though their tops are not recyclable. In the aftermath, the surviving cups were collected and washed for the next bash. Grist has advice on whether to go reusable and wash after parties, or use paper products and dump, and this was the toughest decision due to the complex calculations of life cycle analysis and comparison of different resources depleted. We’re not in a drought, so I used a little bit of water washing the cups by hand. There are biodegradable partyware lines, but “not having to buy new stuff” trumped exploring for those items. I didn’t serve food, just organic chips, organic salsa, and candy, and picked candy for it’s addition to the color scheme and lack of bulky, redundant packaging (MnMs, candy corn). In the latter, I was partially thwarted by my thoughtful and well-meaning gentleman friend, who showed up with a bag of doubly-wrapped candies for me. No worries, though, those are best for party favors. Stuffing handfuls of MnMs in your guests’ pockets as they leave is not quite the same as a contained box of Nerds, despite being much more entertaining (for you).

The final touch was the aggressive recycling box, which, after it has been emptied, will be available for me to bring to any parties that I may, in the future, be invited to. All in all, we ended up only tossing out the sales tags on the bowls and place mats, a few napkins and paper towels used for spills, packaging for some of the candy and chips, and a tangle of toilet paper turned upon an uncostumed guest- I run a strict costume party, and he knew the chance he took.

After collecting my plastics for a week, I find myself feeling a little appalled and very guilty- the hallmark of a budding ecoworrier. Here is my bagful. In it are three general categories of plastic bits. The first is food related: baggies for vegetables, a bread bag, a seal from my spinach dip, frozen food packaging, and styrofoam takeout containers. The second is cleaner and un-food related: wrapping from my cutting mat and new knife, shrink wrap from sundries, and price stickers. The third is plastic caps from bottles and a peanut butter jar. The only thing I feel positive about this plastic week is my record in refusing plastic carrying bags. I collected only 2, both with the takeout containers (from delicious little counters, but so much styrofoam! Can I bring my own food container to restaurants?) since the service was quick enough that I couldn’t object to the bag before another customer was being served: I need more refusal practice. A new larger, stronger tote bag aided this lack of grocery/shopping bags.

So, what to do with this sack of guilt? The dirty and sticky plastic I will have to toss. The clean plastics are a different thing. I can’t think of a sure way to recycle them. None have recycling marks, and none look like anything that Alexandria (or anywhere else nearby, fellow guerilla recyclers) recycles. The bread bags, grocery bags, and some of the shrink wrap is strong but pliable enough to be turned into yarn, which is good, since I can use yarn. The vegetable bags might be yarnable, but they aren’t very strong, so I’ll have to be especially careful with them. The rest of the clean plastics, and the remnants of the yarn plastic, come to a smaller but significant pile, and I’m going to experiment with them. My hypothesis is, I can use them for floor pillow and seat cushion stuffing: shred them into long and thin pieces, and maybe they’ll have enough loft together to sit on. I’ll report back on the tests and results of this scientific endeavor.

I’d also like to reduce my rate of plastic acquisition- I only need so many pillows. But given the number of useful objects that come wrapped in plastic for hygiene reasons, this is going to be difficult. And here the guilt needs to settle in and transform to a reasonable attempt at change: I will never, without leading an uncomfortable and awkward life, be completely free of plastic wraps. That will not be my goal. I will aim to reuse almost all of it that I must purchase, however, and investigate ways to buy foods in recyclable packaging- breads in paper, vegetables in a reusable sack (perhaps at a farmer’s market?), and avoid to every extent possible the unnecessary plastic wrapping.

The guilt says: How dare you! Totally eschewing plastic is more important than you being comfortable and able to participate fully in life! I say back, the total avoidance of plastic will require me to stop participating in my design and drafting classes (the materials are specific and often shrink wrapped) and require me to drive all about to find edible unwrapped items. Plastics can accomplish great things- notably the dissemination of many cheeses- and sparing use and careful reuse balance a healthy life. So there, guilt.

How naive of me to assume recycling was a straightforward and simple process! Instructions: 1) wash your glass, metal, paper, and plastics, 2) dump them in the right bin, 3) feel accomplished. Except that’s not it. Regulations at the Alexandria recycling website have some pretty odd restrictions on the glass, metal, papers, and plastic that aren’t acceptable for recycling in this county. Most notably, aluminum foil doesn’t make the cut. Now, cue the creepy theme music: Arlington VA also does not recycle aluminum foil, but Bowie, MD does, along with Kensington, MD. Statewise divide, maybe, but Alexandria recycling is taken to recycling centers in MD to be sorted and processed. Whoa! What’s the deal? Also, in Alexandria all manner of plastic bottles with necks may be recycled, whereas in Arlington only plastic types 1 and 2 (check the number inside the arrow triangle) are eligible. The restriction on plastic to necks-only seems uniform- so your hummus and spinach dip containers are no good. (Fortunately, they can be reused for Tupperware once you rinse them out, but if one likes spinach dip then one best prepare for an overabundance of Tupperware. Sure saves doing dishes though!)

This sort of regional divide must give rise to guerrilla recycling tactics: MD folks, I’ll be sneaking my foils into your recycling containers, and Arlington folk, I would be happy to get your non #1 and #2 plastic bottles (but not their caps, those aren’t allowed anywhere I saw) to where they belong. If you haven’t yet, check out your local recycling rules. If not linked here, they can usually be found somewhere near your country trash web pages. If something you think ought to be recycled isn’t covered in your county, check surrounding counties, or states. Then, get a ninja mask (recycled from Halloween?!) and dump responsibly away.