There’s a thousand ways to make your house greener and cleaner, but here’s a few of my favorites to keep in mind this summer:
1. Stop with the bottled water already. It leeches toxins, the water is not EPA regulated and the plastic is killing our sealife.
2. Turn off the lights. It’ summertime. Unless you live on the side of the world, you shouldn’t need them for most of the day.
3. Throw a dry absorbent towel in the dryer with your wet clothes. Or ,better yet, line dry!
4. Make your own housecleaners. There are thousands of recipes on the internet, free of charge. Or, if you’d like something a little less labor intensive, visit www.eco-me for inexpensive do it yourself household cleaner and bodycare kits.
5. Enough with the disposable grocery bags already! If you don’t have a reusable bag in your car right now, shame on you.
6. And if you must partake in the Ziploc culture, wash them out and reuse them. If you want to live a little on the wild side, visit www.reusablebags.com for all kinds of reusable options.
7. Plants. They’re pretty, and they make your indoor air cleaner. Check out B.C. Wolverton’s book How To Grow Fresh Air for information on the best plants to clean up your air.
8. Take your shoes off before entering your house. You have no idea how many chemicals are dragged into your house on the bottom of your feet, polluting your air and causing everything from allergies to hormone disruptions to cancer.
9. Keep your refrigerator full (of locally grown, organic goods, of course!). A full refrigerator actually uses less energy.
10. Use fans instead of air conditioning as often as possible.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
MORE PROOF THAT VINYL SUCKS
New car smells...new paint smells...new shower curtain smells: despite what you may have been trained to think, "new" smells are usually code for "toxic poisons entering your blood stream." Case in point: The Los Angeles Times published an article recently on vinyl shower curtains in which they discusse a study conducted by The Center For Health, Environment and Justice. The study found vinyl (also known as PVC) shower curtains to posess dangerous levels of chemicals that cause damage to the central nervous, reproductive and respiratory systems as well as the liver.
One of the five curtains tested released at least 108 VOCs, chemicals that infected the indoor air for as long as a month.
According to Marth Dina Argüello, the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, "PVC is just bad from cradle to cradle...It's just not very good or safe to produce. It's a mess when you create, it's a mess when you get rid of it, and it's off-gassing when you're using it." Argüello went on to say that "in the face of scientific uncertainty you should probably act to protect rather than bring me the dead bodies. We always say: How much evidence do you need to act if there are safer alternatives?" You said it, sister.
Follow this link to read this article in completion
One of the five curtains tested released at least 108 VOCs, chemicals that infected the indoor air for as long as a month.
According to Marth Dina Argüello, the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, "PVC is just bad from cradle to cradle...It's just not very good or safe to produce. It's a mess when you create, it's a mess when you get rid of it, and it's off-gassing when you're using it." Argüello went on to say that "in the face of scientific uncertainty you should probably act to protect rather than bring me the dead bodies. We always say: How much evidence do you need to act if there are safer alternatives?" You said it, sister.
Follow this link to read this article in completion
BOTTLED WATER: WHY IT'S SAFER TO SWIM IN THAT TO DRINK
It's definitely summer. The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming and it's HOT. I don't know about you, but I try to drink at least a liter of water a day, especially when it's hot out. My body and my skin function better when I'm hydrated. But I don't think I'm alone in thinking that I'd prefer not to be poisoning myself while I'm doing all that hydrating.
40 percent of bottled water comes from city water supplies. That's right, tap water. Now, you may live somewhere where the city water supply is safe to drink, in which case you could fill up 4,000 plastic water bottles for the dollar it costs to buy just one small bottle. In fact, the EPA regulates city water supplies, sometimes testing them as often as three or four times A DAY, whereas the bottled water supply must adhere to some EPA standards but isn't necessarily tested. Both tap and bottled water have been scrutinized lately for containing trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs, but a good filter system can clean that right up.
What to do about it? Geez, that's simple. Filter your water. Yup, a simple filter system and a reusable bottle can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars and add years back onto your life. Water filter systems can cost anywhere from $30 (for a Brita or Pur filter)to $1200 (for a reverse osmosis system installed under your kitchen sink). They work to varying degrees, but any filter is better than none at all.
And don't forget a reusable bottle. This is important for all the obvious reasons: less waste, less pollution created in manufacturing them, and you avoid the mass amounts of fossil fuels emitted when you truck thousands of plastic bottles across the country. But if your moral responsibility scale isn't convinced by these global reasons, maybe knowing that plastic leeches dangerous chemicals into your water will convince you. And for goodness sakes, DON'T REUSE YOUR PLASTIC BOTTLES! As if plastic weren't bad enough the first time around, it becomes softened with multiple uses and increases the toxicity of the water inside.
If you're like me and don't want to spend $20 on a reusable aluminum bottle, simply buy a glass water bottle (easy to find in upscale grocery stores, usually about $2-3 apiece) and reuse those. I keep about five or six blue glass bottles (a little known fact-- the blue glass helps to filter the water) that I buy at Trader Joes for under $1.29 apiece on my kitchen counter. Every morning, I fill up a couple and keep them with me all day.
So drink heartily, and hopefully, with good, clean water from a glass or aluminum container.
40 percent of bottled water comes from city water supplies. That's right, tap water. Now, you may live somewhere where the city water supply is safe to drink, in which case you could fill up 4,000 plastic water bottles for the dollar it costs to buy just one small bottle. In fact, the EPA regulates city water supplies, sometimes testing them as often as three or four times A DAY, whereas the bottled water supply must adhere to some EPA standards but isn't necessarily tested. Both tap and bottled water have been scrutinized lately for containing trace amounts of pharmaceutical drugs, but a good filter system can clean that right up.
What to do about it? Geez, that's simple. Filter your water. Yup, a simple filter system and a reusable bottle can save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars and add years back onto your life. Water filter systems can cost anywhere from $30 (for a Brita or Pur filter)to $1200 (for a reverse osmosis system installed under your kitchen sink). They work to varying degrees, but any filter is better than none at all.
And don't forget a reusable bottle. This is important for all the obvious reasons: less waste, less pollution created in manufacturing them, and you avoid the mass amounts of fossil fuels emitted when you truck thousands of plastic bottles across the country. But if your moral responsibility scale isn't convinced by these global reasons, maybe knowing that plastic leeches dangerous chemicals into your water will convince you. And for goodness sakes, DON'T REUSE YOUR PLASTIC BOTTLES! As if plastic weren't bad enough the first time around, it becomes softened with multiple uses and increases the toxicity of the water inside.
If you're like me and don't want to spend $20 on a reusable aluminum bottle, simply buy a glass water bottle (easy to find in upscale grocery stores, usually about $2-3 apiece) and reuse those. I keep about five or six blue glass bottles (a little known fact-- the blue glass helps to filter the water) that I buy at Trader Joes for under $1.29 apiece on my kitchen counter. Every morning, I fill up a couple and keep them with me all day.
So drink heartily, and hopefully, with good, clean water from a glass or aluminum container.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Didja ever think about all the crap you drag into your house on the bottoms of your shoes? I mean, really...you spend all day dragging around the city, complaining about the brown haze that fills the sky and settles on your windowsills and door jams. The same brown haze that is made from millions of little molecules off-gassed from cars and buildings and factories and all the other crazy pollutants in our city. You trudge from your car (or the bus, if you're really serious about greenhouse gas reduction) to the market, from your car to the elementary school, from your car to the (environmentally friendly) dry cleaner, from your car to the doctor's office...then you finally come back home and remnants of your entire day accompany you on the bottoms of your feet in the form of pollution which then settles in your carpet, floor, rugs, sofas-- you name it. This is a long winded way of saying, take off your shoes before you enter your house. Your lungs will thank you.
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