You’re Doing It All Wrong

The Road to Hell is Paved With Helium Balloons

2011-02-01T13:39:00.000-08:00

WHY THEY’RE BAD
Helium balloons – so round, so squeaky, so floaty and colorful as they disappear into the blue sky! And yet, so pointless, polluting, and wasteful both inside and out. Once it descends from the sky, the Mylar or latex balloon can end up inside the belly of a sea turtle, whale or dolphin, which often mistake them for jellyfish until the indigestion sets in. The ribbon and strings can end up tangling up sea birds – as the photo shows, even when wrapped up in ribbon and balloon fragment, a dead bird still doesn’t look all that festive. And then there’s the helium inside, which is totally benign – and totally irreplaceable.
As I wrote in Sierra Magazine in November:

At present rates of consumption, the world's supply of helium could be exhausted in three decades. "Once it is released into the atmosphere, it is lost to the earth forever," Nobel physicist Robert C. Richardson explained in a recent lecture. The world may be able to survive without Mylar party favors (which, if Richardson had his way, would cost $100 each), but helium is essential to many less-frivolous products: MRI machines, liquid-fueled rockets, microchips, and fiber-optic cables. Scientists are already complaining that helium shortages are delaying research and driving up cost.

The bulk of the world's dwindling supply, 1 billion cubic meters, currently rests in the underground Federal Helium Reserve near Amarillo, Texas, created in 1925 and maintained by the Bureau of Land Management. In 1996 Congress decided to liquidate the reserve by requiring that its contents be sold off by 2015. That decision artificially lowered the price of the gas. This, combined with skyrocketing helium use by China and India, has led to the rapid disappearance of an element that it took 4.5 billion years of radioactive decay to produce. Scientists say there's no cost-effective way to synthesize helium or reclaim it from the atmosphere. Once it's gone, there will be an empty place-setting on the periodic table--an ignoble fate for a noble gas

WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE?
This one isn’t too complicated. Do you really need helium balloons? If you must use balloons, blow ‘em up with air and then put them in the garbage when you’re done. Otherwise, figure out some other way to decorate for the party.

CANNED FOOD PUTS THE CAN IN CANCER

2010-09-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

If you’re an environmentalist worth your salt, you know the apocalypse is around the corner. It could be global warming, colony collapse, oceanic dead zones or genetically-modified frankenfish, but something’s gonna get us before long. Naturally you’ve stockpiled canned foods in your basement, along with a few guns in case someone tries to steal your solar panels. But wait one (organic) cotton-pickin’ minute here. Are you sure those canned foods will really see you through the devastation to come? Or will they be wreaking devastation of their own, this time on your endocrine system?

WHY THEY’RE BAD

Turns out most cans have an epoxy liner containing bisphenol-A (BPA), an estrogen-mimicking chemical linked to reproductive harm, alterations in behavior and brain development, increased risk of prostate and breast cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, and an earlier onset of puberty. That would be okay if the BPA stayed in the liner, but in May 2010, the National Work Group for Safe Markets tested 50 cans of food, including fish, fruit, vegetables, soups, and soda, and found BPA in 92 percent of them. The amounts varied from as few as six parts per billion to as many as 1,140 parts per billion, with an average of 77.36 ppb. The EPA’s safe level is 50 parts per billion. A December 2009 Consumer Reports study had similar results.

WHAT’S THE ALTERNATIVE?

Some companies are beginning to replace their can linings with other compounds, but so far the pickings are pretty slim. Eden Organics hasn’t used BPA in its canned beans for ten years, and Native Forest has BPA-free canned veggies and coconut milk. Trader Joe’s canned fish and meats are BPA free, as is Vital Choice and several other brands of canned seafood. (You can find a complete – but rather short -- list of BPA-free canned foods here.)

If the food you want isn’t available in BPA-free cans, your best bet is to start preserving your own. That means you’ll need to get yourself some BPA-free canning lids, which can be obtained here or here. Or, if you’re intimidated by home-canning, use your freezer to preserve fresh tomatoes and other veggies.

Children's Books Pillage The Planet

2010-06-01T15:29:00.000-07:00

I write the things, so don't blame me for spreading the bad news. If I weren't such a blabbermouth, I'd keep quiet about it. Still, a new report by the Rainforest Action Network called Turning the Page on Rainforest Destruction: Children’s books and the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests reveals the sick truth: children's books may be good for the soul and all that, but they're still linked to rampant razing of rain forests in Indonesia.

WHY THEY'RE BAD:

RAN chose three children’s books that were printed in China from each of the top ten children’s book publishers and had their pages tested by an independent laboratory for fiber associated with deforestation in Indonesia. The result: sixty percent of the books (18 out of 30) contained fiber linked to Indonesian rainforest destruction. Books with rainforest paper came from nine of the ten publishers -- despite the fact that half of those publishers have policies committing them to the use of sustainable paper sources.

AS RAN explains:

Unchecked by government or industry, pulp and paper companies are razing natural rainforests on the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sumatra and replacing them with acacia pulp wood plantations. This expansion of the pulp sector directly threatens endangered species like tigers, elephants and orangutans with extinction in Sumatra. It is causing ongoing conflicts with local communities whose lands, livelihoods and rights are being usurped, and it is causing massive greenhouse gas emissions from rainforest loss and drainage of carbon-rich peatlands. Driven by global demand for pulp and paper that favors “low-cost” producers, the enormous emissions from the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands have vaulted the country into the rank of the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter after China and the U.S. Moreover, at least half of the logging in Indonesia takes place illegally.

It turns out that half of the American children’s picture books printed on coated paper are printed to China and China is the top importer of Indonesian pulp and paper.

With the rapid growth of book printing and manufacturing being outsourced to China, the U.S. book industry has become increasingly vulnerable to controversial paper sources entering its supply chain. . . . .From 2000-2008, Chinese sales of children’s picture books to the U.S. ballooned by more than 290 percent, averaging an increase of more than 35 percent per year.

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?

Here's where things get tricky. Some say e-readers like the Kindle or I-Pad are an improvement; others say not necessarily. There's some surprisingly sloppy "research" on this topic, and, like all life-cycle assessments, there are a lot of variables -- in this case, the big ones are how many books you read on a single e-reader, how the e-reader is manufactured, and how the e-reader is disposed of when you're done with it. A New York Times Op-Ed says that if you're concerned about global warming, you'd have to read 100 e-books before your I-Pad becomes a better choice than old-fashioned books. (A good summary of research on this topic can be found on the Ecolibris website.)

If you choose an I-Pad, commit to keeping it for a long time, and using it a lot. If you buy books -- and I want you to buy books! -- help pressure publishers to use sustainable paper sources by signing this “I Love Books and Rainforests” petition. And, of course, support your local library, which is still the greenest way to read.

Candles Cause Cancer and Brain Rot

2010-03-26T14:59:00.000-07:00

Ah, candlelight. It's so scented and flickery and romantic and 18th century and ... carcinogenic. Recent studies reveal that paraffin candles -- that's your generic, garden-variety hunk of wax-- are flaming sticks of burning poison, releasing a bouquet of aromatic toxins into your home every time you light them.

WHY THEY'RE BAD
Paraffin comes from crude oil, and it's filled with all kinds of nasty chemicals, just like gas and oil are. (Paraffin candles even contribute to global warming -- emitting about 10 grams of carbon dioxide per candlelit hour.) One study observed that the soot produced by paraffin candles is very similar to diesel exhaust:

Diesel soot and candle soot share the same physical and many of the same chemical properties which are believed to contribute to both toxicity and carcinogenicity. These similarities point to a similar potential for adverse health effects.

An August 2009 study by the American Chemical Society found that burning paraffin candles releases compounds like toluene, benzene, methylethylketone, naphthalene -- the first two on the list are known carcinogens.

Many commercial candles also have lead wicks, which -- big surprise -- release lead into the air when burned, thus helping rot your brain. Lead wicks are illegal in the U.S., but they are easy to find anyway -- EPA researchers had no trouble finding candles with lead wicks when they did their candle study.

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?
Look for candles made of beeswax or soy. Both have been found to be significantly less toxic than paraffin. If you want to use up your old paraffin sticks, just make sure to provide adequate ventilation.

Corn-Based Plastic -- Vice Masquerading as Virtue

2010-03-03T21:11:00.000-08:00

So there you are, tossing your corn-based plastic cup into your corn-based plastic garbage bag and then tossing your corn-based plastic garbage bag into your regular old garbage bin. OK, so it's going to the landfill, but still, it's biodegradable and that makes you all green and virtuous and stuff, right?

Actually, no.

WHY IT'S BAD:
Turns out that compostable plastics are only green if you actually compost them. If you toss them in the landfill, they're not going to decompose any more than a conventional plastic bag will. Or at least you hope they won't. In the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of the landfill, decomposing organic materials produce methane, a greenhouse gas 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20 year time frame. Landfills are the largest human-made source of methane emissions in the United States, with a greenhouse-gas impact equal to one-fifth of that produced by the nation's coal-fired power plants.

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?
If it's not going to be composted in an industrial-grade composting facility, don't use compostable plastic. Throwing compostable plastic in with recyclable plastic just contaminates the recycling load, and trying to compost corn plastics in your home compost pile doesn't work (home compost piles don't get hot enough). If the garbage is headed to the dump anyway, you might as well use conventional plastic garbage bags. The real low-impact solution: work to eliminate your landfill-bound garbage entirely by composting your food waste, recycling your recyclables, and avoiding products with plastic packaging.

Bagged Salad Greens Are Full Of ...

2010-02-03T10:00:00.001-08:00

I said it before, and I'll say it again: Bagged Leafy Greens are a plastic-encased petri dish of punishment for people who are too lazy to wash their own lettuce. Just ask Consumer Reports, which found "bacteria that are common indicators of poor sanitation and fecal contamination" on both the organic and inorganic samples researchers picked up at supermarkets in the tri-State region.

Here's what they said:

We tested for total coliforms and for other bacteria, including enterococcus, that are better indicators of fecal contamination. Federal action limits exist for indicator organisms in water, raw meat, milk, and some processed foods, but not produce. Those organisms are typically used to gauge possible pathogen contamination.

Several industry experts we consulted suggested that for leafy greens, an unacceptable level of total coliforms or enterococcus is 10,000 or more colony forming units per gram (CFU/g) or a comparable estimate. In our tests, 39 percent of samples exceeded that level for total coliforms and 23 percent for enterococcus.

My suggestion: If you want mixed greens, buy them direct from the farmer, or grow them yourself. Otherwise, buy your lettuce by the head, the way your parents did. Wash it yourself. Really, it isn't that hard.

PLUSHY TOILET PAPER IS THE DEVIL’S HANDIWORK

2009-11-04T15:44:00.000-08:00

WHY IT’S BAD:
Was a time when people wiped their asses with the Sears Roebuck catalog. Now we use old growth forest. The paper pulp in plushy toilet paper comes from old growth forests in Northern Canada, the Southern U.S., Indonesia, and Brazil – a full five percent of the US Forest Products Industry is devoted to butt wipes, according to Treehugger.com. The site also points out that making a roll of toilet paper uses 1.5 pounds of wood, 37 gallons of water and 1.3 KWh of of electricity. All that, just to wipe your hiney.

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES?
Buy toilet paper with a high post-consumer recycled content – that doesn’t mean it’s made of old toilet paper (ew!) -- it’s made from recycled newspaper and printer paper. Face it, if you’re feeling virtuous because you recycle, but don’t buy recycled products, you’re not fully engaged with reality.. Or break with the TP habit altogether and install a bidet – ironically, because toilet paper takes so much water to produce, washing your hindquarters with water is still a net savings, and think how clean you’ll feel!

Bagged Salad Greens Kill Baby Animals

2009-10-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

WHY IT'S BAD:
As I wrote in the March/April 2009 issue of Sierra:

That bag of prewashed salad in the supermarket may be convenient for you, but it's becoming less so for wild critters. After E. coli O157:H7 from bagged spinach killed three people and sickened nearly 200 in 2006, some producers of bagged leafy greens, among them Dole and the Chiquita subsidiary Fresh Express, developed proprietary standards known as "supermetrics" that require farmers to keep their fields totally free of wildlife.

In California's Salinas Valley, the source of 80 percent of the nation's lettuce, the result has been an all-out assault on the natural world. Nearly 90 percent of farmers there are clearing trees, plants, and brush; leaving poison bait for birds, squirrels, and mice; draining waterways or dousing them with frog-killing copper sulfate; and erecting eight-foot-high fences to keep out deer.

Farmers don't want to be doing this," explains Diana Stuart, an agricultural management graduate student at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "But the market is controlled by a handful of powerful companies, and they're helpless to resist."

Mike Burness, Fresh Express's vice president for global quality and food safety, insists that the company doesn't require vegetation removal--it simply asks farmers not to grow near vegetation. "If a food-safety concern exists regarding a specific vegetative area, we would ask the grower to grow elsewhere in the field, or move to a different field altogether," he says. Such rules may be counterproductive. Less than one percent of wildlife carries E. coli, but up to 50 percent of cows do, and denuded soil allows dust from tainted manure to blow onto cropland. "Relatively small grass buffers can filter 99 percent of pathogens," says U.S. Department of Agriculture resource conservationist Danny Marquis.

Stuart hopes consumers can make the difference: "Do people know when they buy bagged salad, frogs are being poisoned in their ponds?"

WHAT'S THE ALTERNATIVE?
Buy a head of lettuce and wash it yourself. Really, when did we become so lame that washing a head of lettuce was too much effort? Or buy prewashed mixed greens directly from an organic farmer at the farmer’s market – small farmers are likely to be using sustainable methods that preserve wildlife. The huge processing plants where the greens are washed and bagged are where contamination can spread most easily, and sealed plastic bags sitting in a supermarket are a nice petri dish for bacterial growth.

For more information, visit the Wild Farm Alliance.

WASH DOWN THOSE RECRIMINATIONS WITH CUPCAKES AND WATER

2009-09-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

There was an item in the San Francisco Chronicle this week about Make it Better, a bakery in the Castro that packs its goodies in a box that says “I f***ed up.” Cupcakes seem like a good way to signal repentance, and I’d like to suggest that Steve Wasik, the CEO of water-bottle manufacturer SIGG Switzerland, order a few thousand. Because, as Wasik is learning, when a company gets caught withholding information from its customers, some serious groveling is in order.

The SIGG imbroglio might be a little hard to comprehend if you don’t closely follow the controversy over Bisphenol A, or BPA, the estrogen-mimicking compound found in polycarbonate plastic bottles and canned food linings. For years, the plastics industry has denied that BPA poses a health risk, even bankrolling some very questionable science to get the FDA to back it up. But in recent years, even as industry obfuscated and regulators dithered, consumers have begun giving BPA a wide berth. As word spreads about BPA’s potential to cause diabetes, brain damage, developmental abnormalities, and pre-cancerous changes to the breast, prostrate, and testes, glass baby bottles and metal water bottles are enjoying a sudden spike in popularity. With 93 percent of the population already having measurable amounts of BPA in their bloodstreams, many consumers figured they’d already reached their maximum dose.

(The clarity of consumer preference on this issue has spooked the canned food industry so badly that this spring a number of can manufacturers huddled with customers like Coca Cola to see if they could design a PR campaign that would allow them to keep using BPA. Notes from the meeting were leaked to the Washington Post, which reported that the industry hoped to find a “pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA.” Good luck with that.)

The bad news about BPA has been good news for SIGG, which makes aluminum water bottles that are coated with an internal epoxy liner to protect the liquid inside from any aluminum contamination (aluminum has been associated with health risks of its own). SIGG bottles weigh less than the stainless steel bottles produced by rival company Kleen Kanteen, and they’re cheaper. Both factors have made them a popular choice for people who were reluctantly abandoning plastic.

Then, about a year and half ago, people began asking SIGG what exactly was in that epoxy lining. Green gizmo bloggers at treehugger.com queried Wasik about whether the lining was BPA-free and were told that the lining’s composition was a proprietary trade secret. Wasik shared the results of independent testing that showed that there was no leaching of BPA from SIGG bottles even after 2 years of rough treatment and Treehugger concluded that was good enough, saying:

“We are not sure if the lining of SIGG bottles is made with BPA or not, but we like the results of the testing, which is what really matters.”

Given that response, SIGG can be forgiven for having failed to predict the outcry that would follow last month’s low-key announcement that their linings had indeed contained BPA at one time. SIGG’s intention was to highlight the fact that their linings had been BPA-free for the past year, but what ended up dominating the environmental blogosphere was outrage over the fact that the linings had ever contained BPA at all. Bloggers, particularly those with young children, described feeling “angry,” “betrayed,” and “disheartened,.”

One wrote:

“I'm feeling kind of like I did when I found out that John Edwards cheated on his wife. It isn't the worst thing to ever happen in this world, but I still feel really disappointed because I thought SIGG to be a genuinely green company.”

That, of course is the heart of the issue. Convinced that the plastics industry couldn’t be trusted, consumers put their trust in SIGG, assuming that the company felt the same way about BPA that they did. SIGG, while quietly searching for a new BPA-free formula, couldn’t bring itself to be forthright about the old formula until a new one was found. As corporate sins go, this seems to me to be venal rather than mortal. No one is saying the old lining leached BPA, and it’s a lot better to formulate a new lining than to go searching for a pregnant woman to tell consumers they should be happy with the old one.
But what SIGG has learned the hard way is that the cover-up almost always gets you into more trouble than the original crime (remember Watergate?). In a world in which all of us are exposed to toxins simply by breathing air and drinking water, any corporation’s concern about revealing its proprietary formula rings a bit hollow. Being green means coming clean – trade secrets be damned. Companies like Dell and Herman Miller, in fact, share their best green practices with one another, knowing that creating a greener supply chain will end up benefitting everyone.

Wasik recently posted a mea culpa on Huffington Post, which indicates he knows where his U.S. customers hang out. As corporate apologies go, it’s a pretty good one.

“I am still learning to be a green CEO,” he writes. “When I took this position, I naively assumed that "green" meant being a steward of the environment. . .However, being a green company also means being held to the highest degree of corporate transparency. Some executives learn this because they have grown up within the green movement. I have learned this by reading hundreds of emails from SIGG consumers.”

Whether Wasik’s repentance – and his offer to replace old SIGG bottles with new ones – will satisfy these angry consumers remains to be seen. Repentance tends to work best when its accompanied by real change. SIGG has already reformulated its bottle liners but I’d like to see the company advocate for real transparency around toxic chemicals. How about supporting SB 797, now pending in the California State Assembly, which would ban BPA from baby products like bottles and formula cans? Or lobbying in favor of the Kid Safe Chemical Act, which would require chemical makers to document the safety of their products before they go on the market? There’s a lot Wasik can do to show that it really understands that the discussion was never about which water bottle to buy. It was about giving consumers the freedom to assess risks based on a full disclosure of the facts. Transparent companies rarely need to give cupcakes.

More Fun In Dubai

2009-08-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

In this month's issue of Sierra Magazine, I write about the two sides of Dubai -- the world's greatest per capita resource consumption, combined with a new, and often missing-the-point interest in "sustainable" design. Now comes word of a new development proposal that epitomizes this only-in-Dubai approach to eco-friendly development: a six-story floating ice hotel . Perhaps there's a contest going on among architects working in the UAE to see whose project can suck up the most energy?

Here's the description from the architects' website:

Blue Crystal is the idea of a swimming world of ice offshore Dubai, which showsthe bright variety of water and its beauty.With the help of light and sound luxurious restaurants as well as eventlocation are melted into a three-dimensional experience.

Inhabitat reports -- with well-justified skepticism -- that, "The German design duo Frank and Sven Sauer claim that Blue Crystal will harness the world’s natural energy sources, keeping it self-sufficient. It will supposedly be powered by solar cells embedded in the icy facade and employ an ‘energy recycling system."

Of course, it turns out to be far-easier to type the word "sustainable" than it is to actually create a sustainable floating iceberg in the middle of the desert.