Monday, June 16th, 2008
How many books are on your bookshelf?
Of those, how many have you read?
Who cares.
How many do you plan to read?
Who cares.
How many do you plan to read, and then go back and read or reference again after that? Those are the ones that I think are probably worth buying. The rest you probably could have gotten from the library and been just as happy.
Yep, the library. Remember that place More…
Sunday, June 8th, 2008
Ahhh, “reduce” and “reuse” — the poor stepchildren of “recycle.” Truth is, the grand green triumverate starts with “reduce” and “reuse” for a reason.
Recycling is nice, I suppose, if you’ve absolutely got to use and dispose of something. But the recycling process still uses up a lot of energy — and it’s nearly impossible to say how efficient the process is in More…
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Bikes are on the rise around the world, according to a recent article on OneWorld.net. (I should know — I edited it.)
Some 130 million bikes were produced worldwide in 2007 — more than double the number of cars rolling off assembly lines (52 million). Bike production took off in the 1970s, and after a brief dip, has been soaring since 2001.
So, why don’t you hop on and get with the cool kids. It saves gas, which saves money and reduces your CO2 emissions. It’s healthy for the body and, More…
Monday, April 16th, 2007
Actually it was a juice bottle first.
I really needed some healthy yummy juice yesterday, so I bought a bottle (at the local food co-op in Mount Rainier, of course - Glut represent!). This morning I really needed some healthy yummy water, so I poured some from the tap (through a Brita filter of course because this is Washington DC and I have no interest in spending the rest of my week here in the bathroom), and into yesterday’s juice bottle. I carried it around with me all day — to a conference, to the park, even to a coffeeshop — refilling it in water fountains when necessary. What are the advantages of this?
(1) tap water is free. bottled water is not free.
(2) No extra bottle means 1 less plastic bottle produced, 1 less bottle of water shipped across the country, 1 less plastic bottle sitting in a landfill somewhere. If I use this bottle all week, that’s 7 less bottles. If I get a permanent water bottle, like a Nalgene, that means hundreds fewer bottles produced, shipped, and sent to landfills every year — just because of me. That feels good.
(3) I get a hint of flavor in my water.
(4) I get to carry my “Naked” bottle around longer.
Do you know that human beings spend $100 billion dollars on bottled water every year, but for just $15 billion a year everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation? It’s true. Did you ever stop to think that, at $1.50-$2.50 per liter ($6-10 per gallon), bottled water costs twice what gasoline costs in the United States? Get the whole low-down on the implications of buying bottled water from this excellent OneWorld article from last year.
Friday, April 13th, 2007
Seems like an inocuous thing to do. It was one of those one-person-at-a-time bathrooms in a small restaurant. Imagine how much electricity is wasted every day in all the millions of small public bathrooms not being used! Think about all the bathroom lights that get left on all night long because the person who pays the bills isn’t around at closing time. It was around the end of the night when I came out of this bathroom and turned out the light, so it’s possible I saved a whole night’s worth of electricity. Maybe not, but a girl can dream, right?
Friday, February 23rd, 2007
Here’s the Thing:
When you fly, offset your greenhouse gas emissions.
|
|
|
Fly right. |
I’ll probably be about 30,000 feet over Memphis when this posts, doing my part to hasten the onset of global climate change, right? Well, only sort of.
You see, I try to fly as rarely as possible, because I know air travel is one of the single most potent contributors to climate change. But when I do have to fly (it’s sort of an emergency this time), I pay a company called Climate Care that invests in projects that clean the environment.
Here’s how it works. They provide a handy calculator to determine how much extra carbon dioxide my trip is spewing into the atmosphere, and translate that into a dollar amount. (Actually, it’s pounds, but who’s counting?) The money supports projects around the world, doing an equal amount of repair to the climate as the damage I’m doing up there in the troposphere. I pay, and travel guilt-free.
The projects Climate Care supports are all over the world, “wherever More…
Wednesday, February 21st, 2007
From Jill:
Sometimes things happen in life that stop us in our tracks, and things are left hanging. It doesn’t even have to be a big thing — life happens.
So give somebody a break today.
Thursday, February 15th, 2007
Here’s the Thing:
Pick up a piece of trash, even if it’s not yours.
My dad taught me something when I was about 10 or 12 that stuck with me, and he probably doesn’t even remember doing it. We got out of the car in the driveway one windy afternoon and he walked around in front of our house picking up all the bits of trash strewn about — a Dunkin Donuts cup, some dirty bits of newspaper, maybe a candy wrapper or something like that.
I must have walked right past trash in our yard thousands of times before that. I guess I just assumed it wasn’t my problem — that whatever was lying about in our yard would get blown on by the wind within a few minutes anyway.
That twenty second experience taught me something I’ve always remembered. There are some problems out there that affect us all, and More…
Monday, February 12th, 2007
Here’s the Thing:
Take 1 less plastic bag next time you leave the supermarket.
 |
|
No laptops were harmed |
The pile of plastic bags under my kitchen sink is getting out of hand. No, it’s been out of hand for a while — in fact about a year ago I started a second pile in a shopping bag under the microwave. I now have a paper bag of plastic bags supplementing a plastic container of plastic bags, each of which had an active useful life span of about six minutes — the time it takes me to walk from the Key Food to my apartment.
I try to reuse the bags as often as possible, but honestly, what am I going to do with six hundred plastic shopping bags, most of which have small holes in them? It’s a war I’m never ever going to win. And I’d bet a lot of us are fighting the same war and we’re all losing.
Imagine the sheer number of bags flowing into and out of New York City every day, most of which will only see a couple blocks worth of daylight in their lifetime. I can’t even begin to guess at the amount of wasted natural and human resources — making the bags, shipping the bags, carting the bags away in the trash. And the amount of bags that sit in landfills around this country? (There are over 3,000 active landfills and 10,000 old municipal landfills across the United States, all of which will eventually leak into ground and surface water, according to zerowasteamerica.org.)
And if your local supermarket checker is anything like mine (and I bet he is), he’s a bit bag happy. Okay, I get that my eggs need to go in a separate bag so they don’t get jostled by the big bad Tropicana man. But do they really need to be double bagged? Does that 8 oz cereal box need two bags? How about the package of sponges and toilet paper? Especially if I’m just walking a few blocks — or even better — out to my car and then in from my car. Seriously, lose the second bag every once in a while. Maybe pile a few more things in the same bag. Or, if you’re really bad ass, get a big stinking canvas bag to carry home all your oversized jars of marmalade.
This is New York. Imagine if each one of the 8 million of us asked for one less bag this week. Every week. That’s nearly half a billion fewer bags to end up in landfills this year. And that’s just New York City and just one less bag per week. It seems to me there’s a lot of potential here.
Copyright © One Little Thing | Powered by WP 2.0.2. | Tree by Headsetoptions and MandarinMusing a minimal theme based on HyperBallad
New Themes from Merchant
Accounts: Web Site Hosting
Back to Content
Click to Get the Tote:
