Recycling Tyvek Envelopes

I bet that you also have a stash of those plastic envelopes stuffed in the top of your hall closet because one day, long, long ago, you read somewhere that you could mail them someplace to be recycled. But you're cutting your consumption, and your kids haven't been deluged with gifts lately, it not being the traditional Season of Giving, and it's been awhile since you got something in the mail. The weather is cooling, tho, and you may be reaching for your fleece jacket soon enough, and they are going to come tumbling down on your head. Why, just today, I got something small in the mail that I'm going to give away on Monday at the Green Moms Back-to-School Carnival, so I was reminded once again: Tyvek envelopes are recyclable.

Reusable, too! In the instructions for mailing them back they tell you to turn it inside out and to write the address on the inside. Doh! Why didn't I think of that? Not to mention that you can just use a new label, for that matter. So reuse them to death, of course and then.....

Tiny Choices just talked about this, and while I will leave the interesting Cradle-to-Cradle conversation to their comments, suffice it to say that Fake Plastic Fish won't be having any wanton Tyvek-envelope consumption parties just because the end product is going to be a recycled park bench (ie not a new recycled plastic Tyvek envelope).

Perfect enemy of good? Who knows... but here's the info:

For Small Quantities (less than 25 envelopes/month)
Turn any Tyvek® envelope inside out, so the unprinted white surface shows on the outside. Stuff the inside-out Tyvek® envelope with other used Tyvek® envelopes for recycling.

Address and mail the envelope to:
Tyvek® Recycle
Attn. Shirley B. Wright
2400 Elliham Avenue #A
Richmond, VA 23237

I am going to assume that you don't have more envelopes filling up your mailbox than that. If so, you need to go read Suze Orman, not MamaBird. Or you can click through my link in the first paragraph for instructions. That'll work, too.

Happy decluttering!

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Affluence

I often think to myself that money is freedom. The less money you have, the more you have to focus on meeting basic needs. Once you have more than the basic amount that works for your family, you can work on meeting Maslow's hierarchy of needs (morality, self-actualization and so forth) or even (since I really am a Carol Gilligan lover myself) strengthening relationships as the end goal. My Achilles heel of consumption is definitely buying people rockin' presents (stuff I could easily deny myself, hmmm). But I digress...

For the upcoming APLS (Affluent People Living Simply) Carnival (which you can participate in if you send your entry to aplscarnival at gmail dot com by Sept. 10), we were tasked with thinking about what it means to be affluent. I guess a lot of folks commented about how uncomfortable they were calling themselves affluent. Myself? Not so much. C'mon, you know your parents used to invoke starving children all over the world when you wouldn't eat your dried-out meatloaf. Even if your station wagon *did* have a rusted-out floor that reminded y'all of the Flintstones. Even if your neighbor retired at 40 to sail around the world. In the relative sense, I would venture to say that lots of us with the time and resources to blog are probably affluent.

I am affluent because I can afford to spend my free time poking around the interwebs researching product safety. Because I can, as part of a family vacation, stop by BlogHer to meet fellow enviro-mama bloggers that I now pepper with daily questions and green business ideas (ok, that really means: make this! this safe product! for my kiiiiids!).

I have competing goals when I am considering purchases or actions. First and foremost, I consider health and safety for my kids. Is this plastic going to leach into my child's food and cause her harm? Does tuna have levels of mercury that will damage my child's developing brain? And so forth.

On the other hand, as a mother, I also consider it my duty to keep the earth's air and water clean, and resources undepleted, not only for my children but for their children and for all of the other kids around the world who aren't as, well, affluent as my kids. And I would venture to say that to one degree or another, lots of us who have pets consider most animals to be in need of protection as well. Not to mention the earth itself, which is a pretty magical ecosystem.

So: safety/health, protection, stewardship. I consider those my competing demands when thinking about, say, what to make for dinner. Or what type of clothing to get for my toddler (thanks, Big Green Purse! we love the Maggie's Organics athletic socks). Or even whether we choose to simply stop consuming. You know the list.

It is truly fortunate that our family has the resources (money, time, education) to consider making choices that reflect our values. I recognize that not everyone is affluent in this particular way, and not everyone has my same decision-making schema. That's why being greener-than-thou is so ridiculous. I so appreciate being able to be neurotic thoughtful about my life-worth-living, and love doing so in the company of others who are thinking about many of the same issues. Hats off to the green blogosphere! Thanks for giving me so much to think about -- and to act on.

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Stack Your Plates To Skip the Plastic Wrap

Did you guys read Super Baby Food? With its 17,000 healthy recipes for maximizing the nutritional value of every morsel your drooling baby eats? The baby equivalent of What To Expect From a Book Chock Full of Guilt Trips for Hormonally Vulnerable Women? Anyhoo, I actually really loved reading Super Baby Food and can heartily recommend it as a curiosity piece. You can read a chapter on grinding seeds and growing your own sprouts and go back to feeding your kid some mushy avocado while you daydream about a decade in which you are able to sleep for more than four consecutive hours. Then read a different book on cutesy food decorations, and go back to feeding your kid some oatios.

But I am totally digressing. This post is about a tricky way to get around plastic wrap and foil. Plastic wrap is fraught with troubles: potential leaching into food, even if it's made from theoretically safer plastics; lack of biodegradability; cutesy holiday patterns. Foil takes a whole lotta energy to produce. So what to do? Use Pyrex and Corningware, 'fo 'sho, but what if you don't have any in the right size and no cash to restock your Tupperware supply with glass and metal tiffins?

Use your *existing* bowls and plates and stack them. Yaron, Super Baby Food author and all-round purveyor of fabulous tips, swears by her particular plates (which I don't have). Whatever. This tip still works just fine for me. Salad plate on top of bowl? Check. Soup bowl on top of cereal bowl? Check. Try it! You're just looking for a close-to-airtight fit. What do you have to lose, except a bowl of leftovers?



For other, you know, cheap and easy tips, check out Thrifty Green Thursday at the Green Baby Guide. Read more!

Back to School: Eco-Friendly Clothes Shopping

It's not rocket science, but it's worth noting that children are tough on their clothes. They get 'em dirty constantly and grow like weeds. Not to mention the tiny divas who will only wear that one glitter-purple leotard for 17 consecutive weeks (while grandma begs for her to wear the smocked heirloom in despair). So while thinking about back to school shopping, don't forget the ease and thrift of the secondhand store.

If you're traveling, you may want to keep your eyes peeled for gems like the children's consignment store I hit up in Healdsburg while visiting family at Preston Vineyards. We got all of EGirl's back to school clothes (she got to do the old thumbs up, thumbs down, and her brother got to play in a rockin' toy area). Her brother is awash in hand me downs so we didn't need to buy him a thing. If you don't live near a thrift store, don't forget EBay, freecycle, craigslist, and yard sales.

I figure if we get everything possible secondhand, we can (more often) afford to shell out the big bucks for fair-trade, organic, sustainable duds when we've got a gap in the system. It's always much easier on the planet to reuse (energy and materials use to create anything new, no matter how sustainable), and this way, you can feel good about your once-in-a-blue-moon extravagances.

Either way (thrift store or hand me downs), don't forget as you are clearing the closet to make way for bigger clothes to make sure you find a good home for the old ones. Whether you give them to family or friends or sell them, those tiny duds can be used and used until they fall apart! And even then someone might be able to upcycle the scraps into something cute.

Now to find myself some good consignment stores....

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Carbon Footprints and a Respect for the Mundane

As a mother, I tend to think quite a bit about environmental health issues. Let's be honest. I obsessed about food politics and the impact of toxins on human health long before I had kids. So it's refreshing to shift my focus and swing over to the topic of carbon footprints in order to participate in the inaugural Green Moms Carnival. Of course, my favorite way to do this is to reminisce about those who figured out how to conserve (through necessity) long before I came along.

My grandmother lived through the Depression and World War II and flourished for years on a not-enormous pension. She loved nature: birdwatching (including taxidermy -- she once saved some perfect specimens in her freezer for some generationally-horrified neighbor children), fuzzy animals, children. She gardened. She made excellent use of the things she had, reusing tin foil and rubber bands, and refusing ever to buy a dryer, instead ironing her sheets and towels well into her nineties. She cooked her own food, including lasssssagna (enunciate that g). Much of what I learned about living sustainably from my father came from her brand of conservation. So my take on living simply is deeply rooted in this old-fashioned, pragmatic valuing of the everyday, coupled with my sixties' parents' conscious devaluing of stuff. It's a delicate balance -- learning to not desire very much, but to treasure and honor what stuff you choose to have. In thinking over carbon footprints, I realize that this respect for the mundane translates into a modern-day low carbon lifestyle.

My grandmother would never turn on a light if there was sunlight streaming in behind her rocking chair to read. She'd put on a sweater instead of jacking the heat and living, as a friend put it so perfectly last week, as if her house were her clothing. She'd walk to the store for supplies for her daily luncheon salad. This turns out to be a good thing in terms of reducing one's carbon footprint, since electricity generation and usage account for more greenhouse gas emissions than actual direct consumption of said fuels for heating and transportation (who knew? Thanks, Nancy S. Grant! leave a comment below if you want a copy of the Pocket Idiot's Guide to Your Carbon Footprint to read and then pass on. And Nancy? Make sure they print your next edition on post-consumer recycled paper).

I don't know what my grandmother would have said about switching to 100% wind power (which I did recently after reading a great discussion of energy sourcing on Burbanmom's yahoo group - many thanks to Green With a Gun for the simple explanation of choices). She probably wouldn't have paid more for either the green energy (biomass) we bought for 8 years or the wind we're now supporting. She was, after all, a thrifty woman. My grandmother did support environmental causes (carving out a share of her dead husband's pension to champion myriad causes for her furry and feathered friends). It's just hard to imagine her supporting new technologies, 'cause when I lived with her in the early 90s, we were still adjusting the rabbit ears on her old tv.

In deference to my grandmother's generation and way of life, I'd like to propose that more carefully valuing what we already have -- treasuring the mundane -- is a shorthand for conserving energy and shrinking our individual carbon footprints.

Sure, we can better source our electricity, purchase energy-efficient appliances when the old ones run into the ground (and only then), we can stop consuming so much electricity and stuff in the first place. We can buy less food of better, local quality, so our food doesn't have thousands of miles attached to it. What we do buy we can try to get in bulk with as little packaging as possible, even if stores are urging us to get smaller and smaller portions for so-called convenience.

But really what I need to do? Aside from borrowing a Kill-A-Watt from Burbanmom to see what the biggest electricity drains are in my house? Limiting my air travel (which is practically impossible, imho, when you're faced with family reunions and great-grandmothers who are closing in on 100)? The biggest thing I need to do (aside from staying away from those jetliners) is to honor the memory of my grandmother by eating a daily salad for lunch (making her rockin' ketchup-garlic vinaigrette) and treasuring the everyday.

Thanks so much to Lynn at OrganicMania who founded the Green Moms Carnival -- head on over there tomorrow to see a myriad of posts about this important topic. I'll put up a direct link tomorrow with a list of green mommy bloggers who took the time to post about global warming.

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Laying off the Bubbly (Water)

I am a big water guzzler. Seriously, I make a mean glass of ice water. Shhhh! I know that room temperature water might be healthier and is totally more eco-friendly, but you have to give me credit for coming a long way. I used to be a seltzer guzzler. Imagine the overflowing recycling bin from all the giant 2-liter plastic bottles I sucked down on a daily basis. On top of the ridiculous pile of bottles (plastic, then glass), I started wondering what kind of water was in my seltzer. I mean, NRDC all but tarred and feathered the lack of regulation in the bottled water industry years ago, so buying seltzer while I was fretting about my tap water seemed silly. But like I said, I am a water guzzling fool. And I looooove seltzer. So I went down many roads in search of a greener seltzer.

First stop was a handheld seltzer maker I got at Sur La Table. This was irrationally appealing because the brand name iSi nearly approximated the name my daughter had for nursing (isiii!). It only cost $50 (aside from the CO2 chargers - looks like it's $70 now, I guess it's been awhile). I still have this but stopped using it pretty quickly because a)I couldn't figure out how to recycle the chargers (which only made something like 20 oz of water each), b)the amount of energy used to make the chargers in the first place must have been obscene, and c)the seltzer itself really wasn't bubbly enough for my particular thirsty palate. So I have that in my closet. It's got freecycle written all over it.

Second stop was a trip down highbrow mineral water road. Which was kind of annoying because I am really at heart a Vintage-seltzer-on-sale-in-the-chips-aisle kind of girl. You know, the Ty Nant, Calistoga-kind of road? At least they were glass bottles. Heavy glass bottles shipped across one or two continents. Sigh. This is what I now allow myself to get on my birthday.

Third stop? Too expensive but promising. A friend of mine has a SodaClub dispenser which she says is easy to use (and the chargers, which are recycled by the company, last for a few months). She uses it just for seltzer, not for soda (and they'll send you lots of HFCS syrup with it to get you started, bleccch). My problem is, if I want to buy something new (which I really don't, right?) I want to get reusable glass bottles instead of plastic (Fake Plastic Fiissssh!). And that system costs about $230 (with s/h). All for BUBBLES in my water (and see here for a negative review of the Penguin's temperamental nature to boot).

Now? I've weaned myself off seltzer, despite its purported benefits. As a friend said (a dear seltzer-lovin' friend who just made the mistake of asking me my enviro take on bubbly water and thus has already heard this entire meandering diatribe), "Hey, if I could stop drinking Diet Coke, I can stop drinking bubbly water." Bottom line: if you buy seltzer you can't guarantee any kind of water quality plus you incur a huge environmental cost for the bottling and shipping. If you make your own you're out big bucks for the system plus you're still incurring energy costs to create the chargers.

Me? I'm off to drink some filtered ice water! Ack, should I disengage my ice maker so I can control the water in my 'cubes? Or just go swimming? Maybe both.


Photo courtesy of Nazreth at sxc. Read more!