Forget The Car - Do It Online

At the top of any list of how to reduce pollution you will always find something about reducing your vehicle usage. Take the bus, carpool, combine errands, walk or bike there when you can, etc. - and they are all great suggestions that can save you in fuel and maintenance on your vehicle and reduce greenhouse gasses, but they are also inconvenient and time consuming. It can take over an hour to use public transportation to get somewhere that would take 15 minutes by car. Carpooling is great if everyone lives the same direction, but more often than not people live all over the place, not to mention carpooling can make you late to work and restricts your ability to stay late or leave early from work. Combining errands is actually more efficient, but forget that one thing and it's over. If you're looking for a long-term, convenient, time and cost saving and easy to stick to solution, why not order online and get the things you need take public transportation to you.

The US Postal Service is going to take the same route every day whether you order your products online or not, and the FexEx and UPS trucks will be out there regardless. It may be true that the additional packaging your products come in can be harmful, but the local store will receive and dispose of packaging anyway, and this way you get to ensure it is recycled. You can fill the extra boxes you get with other paper products and set them out on recycling day or carry them to the recycling center if you don't have curbside. There will always be a few things you need to get at the store, but these days you can get just about anything shipped to you online, and why not? When you shop online, you go right for what you need without having to walk through aisles of what you don't need that are set up to make you impulse buy. This kind of impulse buying leads to over shopping, leaving you with items you don't need, won't use and will probably end up being thrown away. Even if you don't impulse buy and the store is easy walking distance, who wants to waste their day off work pushing through crowded aisles just to find the product you came for is sold out and standing in a checkout line? You could be spending time doing whatever leisure activity your family enjoys and relaxing for the upcoming week of work?

I've mentioned Amazon's Subscribe and Save program before in passing, but the overview is you pick what you like, choose when to have it delivered, and pay no shipping plus get 15% off the Amazon price which is almost always lower than the store price to begin with. The program is very flexible, and operates with minimal management. You can send new deliveries whenever you want and cancel deliveries whenever you want. I've gotten everything from household products to over the counter medications to non-perishable grocery products through Subscribe and Save and my total savings over my local grocery store have been more than 50%. For clothing, electronics and larger items you can do a search to find the best deals or use one of the many website comparison search engines. You can review product features from every manufacturer and decide what will work best for you, then find the best price available. Most sellers of clothing or larger, more expensive products have lenient, user-friendly return policies because they understand sometimes when you hold a product or try it on you just don't like it. Shopping green is very easy online as well because you can search out eco-friendly options for just about everything you use including sustainable hemp, organic cotton, wool or bamboo clothing, plant based plastics, energy star appliances, recycled paper and plastic products, natural cleaning products and personal care products and much more.

Product selection is more important than it sounds. Often people are willing to buy a product at the store that does not have the features or ease of use they are looking for because it is "all the have left" or "what's on sale." For example, say I want an inexpensive coffee maker with a timer on it so I can grab my coffee on the way to work rather than stopping at the expensive coffee shop next door to the office. I get to the store, and the only ones they have on the shelves in my price range do not have timers, so I figure I'll live without it and just get up a few minutes earlier because I don't want to drive around and can't afford the very expensive one with the timer. I get home and the first week I hop out of bed 10 minutes earlier to use the coffeemaker, but after the newness of it wears off I start hitting the snooze button. I don't get up earlier and never have the time to brew my coffee, so the coffeemaker sits on the counter unused until one day I decide it's taking up too much space and put it in the basement and now I either keep buying the expensive coffee at the coffee shop or go shopping for a coffeemaker again. Or maybe I do actually get up and use the coffeemaker, but 9 months later it breaks. The store certainly wasn't going to tell me that that model breaks all the time because they want the sale, but other annoyed product owners would have told me online in their negative reviews. Either way, I've wasted my money and wasted the natural resources that went into making, marketing and picking up that product. If I'd shopped online, I would have found a coffeemaker with the features I wanted that I would have used all the time and I would have made sure it had a high rating so I could be relatively certain that it would not break in a short time. Underhanded marketing strategies like creeping featurism and planned obsolescence require customer participation. When people fail to research a product and end up with something poorly manufactured, or settle for something that doesn't really meet their needs and figure they'll upgrade later before the product reaches the end of it's usable life they are making a decision to waste the resources that go into the manufacture and shipping of that product.

Perishable grocery items can be a bit harder to come by online, but not impossible in many areas of the country. While I don't advocate personal shoppers since this just means someone else will be generating pollution and doesn't really help conserve fuel or reduce emissions, services like Giant's Peapod and Safeway's home delivery use delivery trucks that drive a route and bring a large number of groceries at once. There are a number of local services in different areas that do the same, so if they do not operate in your area, check out grocery stores that deliver around you and make sure they are not personal shopper type services where one run per order is done. Unlike other online services this service may cost a bit more and you need to make sure they service accepts coupons if you use them. Often you can save a few dollars and allow the driver to pick the most fuel efficient route by allowing for delivery within a larger block of time, and if you distribute enough of your purchases to discount services on websites like Amazon, though, you should be able to end up with savings overall, not to mention extra time for yourself. You can spend days working on your list and save your staple products on your account, and you can still get the store specials. Since grocery stores are physically laid out to make you walk through all the products you don't need in order to increase impulse buying. It can also be hard to find the natural, organic and eco-friendly products in the store, while it is searchable online and easy to compare the different price, unit price, and manufacturer information online. For example, in the store I was unaware of the Nature's Promise cage, hormone, antibiotic and pesticide cage free eggs from vegetarian fed hens because reading the package of each and every product in the store is time prohibitive. Online I was able to look up natural and organic eggs, then see the clear cage free label, letting me know that for $0.30 more I could purchase a cruelty free product. I also found chicken and milk from the same company (treated the same way) and bison in place of beef (it is illegal to factory farm bison). By shopping online, I improved my health by purchasing food with no added toxins and the quality of life for the animals that produce my food by ensuring every company I purchase from is cruelty free and still was done in less time that going to the store. In addition, making your purchases online will allow you to stick to the list of things you actually need, so in spite of the slightly higher prices, you may even find yourself in the black if you are prone to knocking those extra things you swear you'll use (someday) into the cart.

In every way, shopping online allows you to make a better informed, better thought out decision. There is no more impulse buying, no more getting to the register and realizing you've spent too much but being embarrassed to remove items from your purchase, and plenty of deals you might not otherwise find. Not to mention you will really come to appreciate the convenience and extra time for yourself all while saving energy and reducing emissions.

Beyond Cloth Diapers - Green Toileting For Adults

For people out there that have never used cloth diapers this may come as a real shock, but for those that have, you probably have either seen or used cloth baby wipes. You use them, toss them in your diaper pail or wet bag and then run them through the wash. Wallypop takes it to the next logical step. In addition to selling reasonable priced cloth napkins, hankies, menstrual pads, cloth shopping bags, breast pads, diapers and baby slings, the staple products of many home operated natural living sites, Wallypop offers cloth family wipes (toilet paper) and asks the question if it's good enough for your baby, isn't it good enough for you? I'd think any user of cloth infant products would feel the same way. For those of us with no children, I admit it can be a bit of a leap, especially for #2, but the average toilet visit is not a #2 visit, and most of the toilet paper women use is for urine, which is sterile and generally does not have much of an odor. Not to mention if you "let it mellow" which is an excellent water saving practice, you know that the biggest problem is the collection of toilet paper you get in the bowl. Once you eliminate the toilet paper flushes you will find you save a lot more water, especially if there are a number of women in your household.

I took a look at some of my feminine products - cloth pads, sea sponges - all much grosser than a cloth with a little pee on it. I thought about how many recycled paper towels I have thrown away because one of my dogs had an accident or my female was in heat. I wipe that up with a cloth, so I finally got up the guts to order some of the soft flannel wipes (they are also available in hemp and sherpa). They are very thick and similar in size and weight to a pot holder. They are much softer than many brands of toilet paper and I never have to worry about soaking through or tearing. Granted, there are brands of regular toilet paper that are very thick and absorbant, but they use a lot of paper to get that thickness, don't have as much to a roll and are therefore not very eco-friendly. All right - I still haven't gotten there for a #2 visit and my husband doesn't use them at all due to the obvious biological differences. For now, I set the wipe bag along with the Seventh Generation toilet paper and Natracare organic wipes and everyone is happy.

So where do you store a soiled cloth wipe? I like the wet bags people use for diapers, also available at a reasonable price from Wallypop for the upstairs bathroom, and I toss the ones from the downstairs bathroom right in the soaking container I keep for my menstrual pads. Since I pre-clean them with Bio-Kleen oxygen bleach and Bac-Out, I can launder them in a mesh bag like pantyhose or menstrual pads. If you still can't stand the thought of washing them with other clothes, use a hand washer or a low cycle with just the wipes and any pads you may need to clean. Ultimately, you will save a lot of money on yet another product that you flush away (and if you use toilet paper to wipe your nose, you can always buy some soft cloth hankies to take its place).

Another unique product Wallypop sells is their cloth sandwich baggies and wraps. Since there is no way to make plastic bags and wrap eco-friendly, these products are really important and I'm shocked that I haven't seen them elsewhere. There are alternate products like this natural waxed paper or these PVC and plasticizer free plastic bags that are better for you by eliminating harmful chemicals, but at the end of the day you still have plastic or paper being consumed and discarded. Even these compostable food storage products consume resources and create manufacturing waste. I'm not saying reusable cloth products will ever replace plastic bags completely - for long term storage you still have to have something airtight, but if you pack a sandwich for work or school or want to carry some cookies or crackers along in the car (and don't want to waste money and resources and generate waste by purchasing single serve packets), washable and reusable bags and wrappers that last for years and don't generate waste are the way to go.

Finally, for those reading this thinking how strange it is that I use and recommend so many cloth products, how gross it is to deal with food scraps, snot, pee and blood and/or how much time it must take in maintenance, remember that the concept of disposable items, unnecessary packaging, and single use items is largely a mid 1800's to present concept, and one that has done our species, our planet and the other species forced to share the planet with us nothing but harm. For the millions of years that humans have existed before the 1900's people tried to conserve and reuse products because most everything was made by hand until the mid 1800's and later. Check out this history of trash to see how little a problem trash was in the past, and how as we urbanized and began buying packaged and single use products rather than using natural, reusable products the problem with trash disposal became a global crisis.

An interesting point is that the invention of synthetic plastic in 1868 seemed to begin a new age of trash dumping. What initially was a fairly stable trash problem consisting largley of organic matter like sewage, food and dead animals began to increase rapidly as people began to produce more household waste consisting of manufactured items. This lead to new "solutions" like incinerators (1874) and the development of recycling centers (1897), but failed to address the increasing amounts of refuse. In 1900 the average person produced up to 1400 lb of trash per year, by 1916 that increased to up to 1750 lb per year and it remains close to that figure to this day. That is 10 times the body weight of the average person in trash every year times everyone in the country and the population is increasing - way grosser than handling your own bodily fluids.

Next time you carry your trash to the curb, look at how much is in the can for the week. Is it one bag? Two? Are you one of the families that has two or more cans full over the brim with trash? For my family, my goal is to put at most one full bag of trash out per week. I'm not counting recycling here, just the trash. If it is more than that, I try to figure out what is in there and what can be replaced with reusable products or eliminated because I don't want to see the day where we have generated so much waste that even burning and burying it doesn't work anymore.

6 Good Reasons To Use Cloth Diapers

1. You want to protect your baby from chemicals.

There is a huge market for organic foods for baby because of the concern of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones used in food production. There is also a growing market for organic clothing, bedding and furniture for baby. But what about diapers - the very thing that is against the most sensitive part of your baby for the first few years of their life? If you read my article on menstrual products then you already know about the chemicals used in the bleaching natural fibers and the synthetic blended fibers and plastics used in menstrual products. Diapers are no different but have the added negative effect of being worn all day every day and some additional chemicals depending on the type of diaper you are using to improve absorbancy and to feel cold when wet or change color or other features that have emerged in the past few decades. What we don't know is the long term effects of exposure to these additional chemicals. Many things that were once thought safe are now known to be harmful, and there are a lot of problems increasing in incidence that we just don't have a reason for yet. Take dioxin for example. We do have studies directly linking dioxin exposure to endometriosis, which aside from being painful can cause infertility, in other primates, but not humans. We also have an unexplained increase in incidence of endometriosis in the past 50-100 years. The saddest part is that we pay a premium for the presumed privledge of exposing our infants to chemicals that when it comes down to it we just don't know what effects they will have. I've always thought better safe than sorry - if I've washed cloth diapers and the disposables are not harmful, I've lost nothing, but if I use them and they are harmful, there's no turning back the clock.

2. You want your baby to be comfortable.

Plastic may hold back odors and wetness, but it doesn't breathe. No matter what you do with plastic and chemical powders, you will never get the breathability of plain old natural, renewable cotton. The plastic wrapped fibers hold the wet next to your baby's body, increasing the odor and the risk of discomfort, diaper rash and even infection in the most extreme cases, which then requires more medication that your baby otherwise would not have needed. Even the chemicals in the stay dry diapers will only absorb so much before they overflow. And how well do you really want odor, wetness and chemicals held against your baby's sensitive skin? Which would you rather have, a damaged couch or an injured baby? And I'm sure you don't need a color changing diaper to know when your baby is ready for a change - parents have been figuring it out on their own for millenia. I'm sure you know, too, that a happy baby is much easier on tired new parents than a fussy, uncomfortable one, so why not invest a little time and keep your baby a lot happier.

3. You have more important things to buy for your child than a pile of disposable diapers.

If your family is anything like mine, you have to make financial choices every day. For every purchase you make, there is another purchase you don't make. In the long run, cloth diapers will save you over a thousand dollars per child, and I know several parents that kept their cloth diapers and used them for future children - they didn't spend a penny on diapers for them. Imagine what you could do for your child with an extra few hundred dollars. You could do something meaningful for them, something that would bring your family together rather than throwing it in the trash bit by bit.

4. You will never run out of diapers in the middle of the night (or the day before a paycheck).

What happens when the worst happens. Your hot water heater blows, the sewer line collapses, the car breaks down, the refrigerator dies or any of the many other urgent problems a household can have happens. You have to fix the house now, and just like that you have $7.53 left in your bank account. You have enough food in the cupboard to last you until your next paycheck, though maybe not the best food in the world. You can drink water and your fuel tanks will make it till Friday, but you can't live without diapers. This is the advantage to having almost everything in the house renewable, especially if you are economically challenged like I am. The security of knowing you will never be trying to fashion an old towel and some toilet paper into a diaper for a few days is comforting, even if the emergency never happens.

5. You want to leave your baby a clean, healthy planet to live on.

Plastic diapers fill the landfills and since the aren't biodegradable your childrens' children's diapers will join the remnants of theirs in the landfill years later if we don't stop. Maybe it's not in your backyard yet, but with 6 billion people on the planet and an ever growing population, it's only a matter of time before it gets there. There are some things we can't prevent - every society will have waste, but this is a major pollutor that could easily be stopped by switching to a natural, reusable, renewable product that is better for our children anyway.

6. You will be supporting environmentally conscious companies, work at home parents, and/or small businesses with minimal environmental impact.

While disposable diapers are made by big, greedy, polluting corporations using toxic chemicals and underpaid workers in the manufacturing process, cloth diaper manufacturers are usually the polar opposite. Usually a group of work at home parents or a small, family friendly workspace and using only natural fabrics and just enough power to run a sewing machine, these companies or sole proprioterships pay fair wages and produce little or no waste (and certainly no toxic waste). Most manufacturers of cloth diapers are also careful to select only fabrics manufactured in a natural, chemical free, sustainable way because they understand how important it is to you to keep your baby's environment chemical free and preserve the earth for their future. These individuals and small companies are also dedicated to producing a quality product, and there are some like Wallypop that price their products to be accessable for lower income families. Sarah (the owner of Wallypop) even notes that her purpose in business is not to make as much profit as possible, it is to make sure that single income families still get quality products, and she hit the mark! This is just one of the many manufacturers out there of cloth diapers, and I'd suggest that you try a few and find out what works best with your family. It would be a good idea to also get some wet bags and a diaper pail to keep down on the smell until you get a chance to wash them, and if you don't want to wash them, you can try this hand powered washing machine which takes care of small loads with less wear and tear to the fabric too. Be sure to use environmentally friendly, natural cleaning products that will not cause skin irritation for your baby. I will be doing a whole article on them coming up.

Reusable Menstrual Products - Think they're gross? Think again!

I remember the first time I read about reusable menstrual products like those found at www.lunapads.com www.gladrags.com www.pandoraspads.com and many other places online. "Eeew - gross!!" I said. I simply could not imagine taking a bloody pad, tucking it into a waterproof liner and putting it back in my purse. Or even worse - taking a cup or sponge and rinsing it out and putting it right back in. I was convinced it could not be clean or healthy. I could not have been more wrong.

Years earlier I had tried an Instead disposable menstrual cup, but it was horribly uncomfortable and spilled on the way out. I tossed the rest of the box and went back to my trusty tampons. It was not until very recently that I found out my "trusty" tampons aren't so trustworthy. Dispite what is implied by the white medical look of tampons, they are not sterile. Even the seemingly natural cardboard applicator tampons have chemicals like dioxin, which has a half life of 11 years in the human body, so if I absorb the dioxin of a single tampon today, 11 years from now half of that dioxin will still be in my body - now THAT'S gross! Sure, the levels won't kill you, but nobody really knows how much dioxin they are getting from all sources and we do know that it can cause a whole host of medical issues in high doses, so why expose yourself to more than you need to? Tampon manufacturers would rather expose you to the byproducts of the chemical bleaching process than have their tampons look like natural fibers. That is, if they even are - many tampons are made of a lot of synthetic fibers that can scratch the vagina and open tiny wounds that increase the risk for infections, including Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS).

So what to do for internal protection. I was never a pad person since they always ended up chafing my skin and leaving a nasty rash up to a week later. They also had a bad odor, and I am sensitive to scented products and they are subject to the same chemical bleaching products and covered in non-breathable plastic that makes me sweat. I was not going to all pads and Instead cups don't fit. Luckily Instead is not the only option. I found things like the Moon Cup http://www.mooncup.co.uk/ (great for women that are not so large "down there"), the Diva cup, the lady cup http://www.ladycup.eu/ and the Keeper cup (and their version of the Moon Cup) http://www.keeper.com/ and many more. Check out http://menstrualcups.org/ for information from many women that have used these products and find out what is right for you. These cups can last for up to 10 years and cost $20-40 USD, so imagine the savings for your pocket, too! But maybe the cups aren't right for you for whatever reason. Maybe, like me, you are right on the cusp between the two sizes because of age, or maybe you are planning on having a baby soon and don't want to buy a cup until after when you will need the larger size. What to do in the interim if you're ready to dump your disposables? I decided to buy some silk sea sponges. When they come, they seem hard and uncomfortable, but once damp they are softer than any tampon on the face of the planet and you can trim them to the perfect size for you. They are easy to clean (just rinse them out like a kitchen sponge and reinsert) and are natural and renewable. I suggest buying 4 sponges to start so if you have to use a public restroom you have extras. You can tuck a used sponge into a reusable pad carry bag to clean at home.

I did eventually decide I needed some better pads though, and so I finally took the plunge and got some cotton pads. I have since been amazed at the difference in feeling and odor and my entire opinion of pads has changed. When I got my first pantyliner (from Gladrags) I was immediately shocked with how soft it was. These pads wrap around your panties and close with a snap, and once in I could barely even feel it - a far cry from the disposables that make me feel sorry for infants everywhere trapped in diapers. They even make different absorbancies - some companies make 3 (liner, day and night) and others have many different sizes and styles (liner, mini, maxi, long, wide, heavy/night and postpartum). I got some Gladrags, but the day pads are too big for my light cycle and I had to continue in search of a cloth pad that was soft, but smaller. I found my match in Lunapads mini pad and liner. They are a perfect fit, and you can adjust the absorbancy from maxi pad to pantyliner by adding layers of some of the softest fabric I have ever touched, then because the liners attach on the top rather than fitting under the pad, you can change only the liner and go on with your day. I thought I would do no better until I saw that Lunapads also makes a line of menstrual underwear called Lunapanties with built in liners and the ability to add additional ones. These are quite plainly the most comfortable external menstrual product I have used in my life. They feel like regular underwear. There are many other brands out there, and I encourage anyone willing to try a few.

Still thinking it's gross? Well - I guess gross is relative. If you think it's disgusting to wash out a cotton pad or sponge in the sink or empty a cup of blood into the toilet and you think you can't take it, I ask you to think of how many cycles you've had in your life so far. About how many soiled pads and tampons do you throw out during the course of that cycle? Now imagine all those pads with their non-biodegradable synthetic fibers and plastics and all the packaging and applicators that came with those pads in a heap in your backyard. Maybe they're not in your backyard personally, but they and all the other products from all the other women using disposables are in someone's backyard, or maybe floating in a bay, ocean or river somewhere. Wherever they ended up, they are still on this Earth contributing to the mountains of trash we call landfills. That's really gross, a whole lot more gross than throwing a blood stained cloth in the wash (something you would not think twice about if you got cut and bled on your favorite blouse).

But they cost too much, some people say when they first see the staggering prices of these products. Well - up front these may seem like expensive solutions, and you can easily spend $100-200 getting all the reusable products you will need for your cycle, however once you buy them, that's it for the next 5-10 years. Even if you buy discount products and sale products, you will still spend more than that in the course of 5 years, and if you take good care of your products, they may even last longer.

I should also note that many pad manufacturers also make pads for during pregnancy and after childbirth. The soft, skin-friendly fabrics are great for soothing already irritated skin (not to mention promoting healing and preventing secondary infection - there is a reason we don't use airtight bandages) and the adjustable absorbancy is great for heavy bleeding and incontinence.

Still not convinced? There's probably nothing I can say that will open your mind, but I leave you with one final, albeit less ideal, solution. Seventh Generation, Natracare and other such Earth-friendly companies offer a line of organic cotton disposable menstrual products. These are biodegradable, renewable and non-toxic, though they still end up in landfills and still require packaging and manufacturing energy and shipping and all the other nasties that go hand in hand with anything disposable. Still, if you must dispose, now you can do so in an environmentally conscious way.

These aren't your parents' light bulbs!

I know this is a very over discussed topic, but CFLs have come a LONG way. When I first went to CFLs in response to the ever increasing price of electricity, I had to change several light fixtures and switches in my house in order to accept the lights. There were no 3 way CFLs, dimmer CFLs, CFL bug lights or CFL flood lights. All CFLs were the spiral design and they came in 40, 60 and 100 watt light output equivalents. If you were lucky, you might be able to find a daylight style light but that was all the selection you got. Imagine my surprise when just 4 years later as I shopped to replace a burned out CFL I found the huge selection now available. There are bug lights for outside. There are triple tube lights (three arches next to each other) and A shape (look like a tungsten bulb) if you don't like the look of the mini twists. There are chandelier lights, cylinder lights and globe lights for your fancy fixtures, 3 way lights and dimmer lights for your special switches, and even reflector (flood) lights for inside and outside. And they aren't even that expensive! If you've ever purchase specialty lights of the regular high-consumption variety you will be surprised to find this long-lived energy-saving alternative to be quite cost effective. But do they really work? Do they really last as long as the package says and do they really save money? And most importantly are they safe? As a long term user of this type of bulb, I say yes. I remember 4 years ago when my husband first showed me the package of funny looking twists on sale in Home Depot and I asked him the same questions. If they last for 7 years, why is the warranty only for 2, I asked, and what if they explode in my face? Don't they take time to warm up - that's so annoying! And how much energy do we really use in lights anyway? What's $50 over the course of 7 years IF they last that long anyway? Well, I moved once since buying many of them and none of them exploded even with the stress of the move. Not saying you don't have to be careful with them and how you dispose of them, but I am now convinced that they are as safe as the next piece of technology. After 4 years I have all but 2 of the bulbs. One I used outside and it did take time to warm up (I've now replaced it with a bug light that is designed for outside and it works perfectly), and the other was in a high traffic area and it's light output diminshed over time. For having every single bulb in my house converted to CFL, 2 bulbs in 4 years isn't bad. I should also note that you need to be careful to watch how many lumens the light puts out. In many rooms a 40 watt CFL will work just as well as a 60 watt standard light. If you like bright lights, this won't be a problem, but if they bother you, watch out! Just imagine how much less energy we would use as a nation if everyone switched! If we used those savings to eliminate plants dependant on harmful fuels, think of how much greater an effect that would have on the climate.