Back to Paper Drinking Straws

Drinking straws used to be made of paper... Or at least I think I were! But that was a while ago...

With concern for all the plastic waste in our garbage dumps, some communities are banning plastic drinking straws.

In one of those communities, Terry and I were recently served water with a large paper drinking straw in it...

After using it, I decided that I'd rather have no straw in a glass of water - but in a delicious milk shake, I'd be  willing to put up with the slightly unpleasant taste.

A Delicious Dessert

I don't usually write about desserts that I buy in the supermarket - but this one is special!














It's a package of individual fruit sorbets... that come, ready to be served, in "natural" containers. The orange sorbets come in half an orange hollowed out... the lemon, in half a lemon. (I'm a great fan of the lemon!)














Another one I like is the pina colada... served in half a (real!) coconut shell! After eating the sorbet, I washed out the empty shell. It's perfect for holding paper clips...














... or maybe some jewelry... perhaps this "natural" necklace that my mother made by stringing apple seeds together!

Spring: The "Greening" of My World

GREEN is my favorite color - I sleep better when I use our dark (forest) GREEN sheets! (No, seriously! I really do!!)














I enjoyed making this GREEN quilt...














My GREEN indoor plants relax me...














Even my journal is GREEN!














So this morning, when I looked outside and saw the lawn turning GREEN (after several days of rain) ...














And GREEN plants overtaking the wood chips in our back flower bed, it made me really happy. (That's what our favorite colors do, I guess!)

Before the invention of pavement, there was a lot more GREEN in the world. (And I've often wondered - feeling the heat rising from black paved roads in the summer sun - if the world's climate would be affected if, instead of black, all our roads were a lovely shade of forest GREEN!)

Ottawa Recycles

What should we do with all our garbage?

That question has been around for a long time. As a child in fifth grade, I remember my class discussing the problem. (And in those days, we burned our garbage in old metal oil drums in the back alley - so there was less of it. The truck only picked up the ashes!)

What will we do if we run out of room for garbage dumps? our teacher had asked us.

We can send the garbage into outer space, one imaginative student suggested. There is lots of empty room out there!

We had all laughed - pleased at having found the perfect solution!

But now, all these years later, we are still grappling with the problem! (The our space option hasn't worked!)

Which is why I'm happy our city has an active recycling program.














We have BLUE BINS for plastic and glass (picked up every two weeks).














BLACK BINS for paper and cardboard...


















And our most recent addition, GREEN BINS for kitchen scraps that decompose or can be burned.














Yard waste (tree branches and leaves) are picked up during the summer months, though they can also go into the GREEN BINS, if they fit. They are composted - and people can buy the compost back from the city.

I'm a great supporter of RECYCLING... so it does make me sad that we no longer recycle plastic bags... or Styrofoam. (Isn't Styrofoam plastic too?)














What worries me is that - if we are no longer sending "healthy garbage" to the dump - by that I mean food and paper which decompose - aren't we creating a very toxic plastic mountain with the rest?!

(Is there a fifth-grader out there with an answer?!)

Rent a Roof? A Green Idea...

I was wandering around Home Depot - looking at this and that - while Terry shopped. Eventually I found myself standing in front of several solar panels, reading brochures on various types of solar energy available - for heating pools, indoor hot water systems ... or even to simply create electricity to sell back to the electric company.

The comment that caught my eye indicated that a panel like the one before me could potentially earn a homeowner $1,300 a year, for electricity put back to the electrical grid. The south-facing side of our roof could hold at least 2 of those panels...

That's a lot of money to get back! For simply having a solar panel on my roof?! What an untapped market - and an opportunity for greener living!

I started to imagine... What if a neighborhood of homeowners all had solar panels on their roofs and sold the generated power back to the electrical grid... How much electricity would that generate? How much could they individually earn - as electrical rebates from the company?

What if the electrical company took the initiative by offering to install panels on suitable roofs in exchange for monthly refunds in electricity costs? How much would that offset the cost of electricity? How many people would offer to rent their roofs? I know we would!

Is there anyone out there interested in pursuing green ideas like these?

Did it! ... Almost

After keeping these old yogurt containers as storage bins for my used alkaline batteries (and 2 rechargeable ones) for more months (perhaps years?) than I remember...














And after creating yet another storage container for a new twirly CF light bulb that died prematurely and now needs to be recycled to avoid polluting the environment...

I happily discovered that my neighborhood Home Depot store now recycles batteries and energy-efficient CF light bulbs.

So this morning I wandered over with my containers in my re-usable shopping bag - to dispose of my toxic waste! (As some of you may know, I'm trying to get rid of 100 things I no longer need in my house this week...)














They had a place for recycling the light bulb (I had to bag it first) - and for the alkaline batteries...














But I had to bring my rechargeable batteries back home with me... Mmmmmm

I do appreciate your recycling efforts, Home Depot... so I don't mean to complain when I say, Why does recycling have to be so hard?!

When I first posted on recycling on March 15, 2009, I had touched a nerve that a lot of us respond to. Thank you, readers, for commenting on recycling...

There seems to be uncertainty as to whether or not alkaline batteries pose a threat to landfills - though rechargeable ones certainly do. I have no special knowledge on the topic, but I found an interesting discussion on this website:
http://willtaft.com/environment/there-may-be-no-need-to-recycle-alkaline-batteries/

From what I read there - (and I'm no scientist!) - my understanding is that there is less danger in alkaline batteries now, since they no longer contain mercury - but they do still contain "heavy metals" and this poses a danger to the environment.

What are "heavy metals"? you may wonder - as I did. (All metals seem pretty heavy to me.)

I chose this US Government website to help me understand.

So I think I should continue recycling alkaline batteries.

A GREEN Solution: Winter - and Year Long - Composting

One of the easiest ways to "go green" is to practice composting, summer and winter. It's easy if you have even a small bit of land around your home.

I try to compost all plant and vegetable waste from the yard and the kitchen, everything. in fact, except meat (or fat) and bones - which have to be buried or they will smell foul.














Our compost container, a pail from Lee Valley Tools, sits covered on our kitchen counter.

When we first moved into our house with a yard, I read up on composting. I wanted to grow a natural garden, recycling all I could back into the soil. I read that you really need to have 3 compost heaps beside each other, each in a screened bin about a meter wide. As the dead plants or vegetable peelings decompose, they are moved from one pile to the next. The first pile is for stuff that is new, the second is partly decomposed (large unrecognizable pieces) and the third is for crumbly soil-like compost that you can take out and use.

This method is fine for professional gardeners or for people who love to work in the garden, watering and turning their compost a lot, so that it will decompose more quickly. (Actually all compost should be watered a lot or it may become a haven for wasps nests or squirrels... But keeping it damp will deter critters from making a home in this cozy pile.)














I prefer a simpler composting method. I have several different piles for composting throughout our yard - a large one in my back yard where I put a large amount of plant cuttings and dead leaves in the fall. It usually takes a few years for this to turn into compost. When it does, I dig it into the soil or spread it around garden plants as a fertilizer.














But I also have a few smaller compost piles in open plastic compost containers nearer the house so I don't have to go far to put my kitchen scraps into them. When they're ready to use in the garden, I don't have to take them far either.














I just moved this small container beside the fence, near where I have a partially decomposed heap from a year ago.

When these containers are full, I top them up with dirt and take away the plastic container - which I then move to a new location and begin again. Eventually these little mounds of dirt and compost turn into rich soil - which I then haul away with a wheelbarrow into my garden. I compost summer and winter. In winter the snow covers the compost heap - and I never throw peelings in the garbage.

Composting doesn't need to be complicated. My method - of having several small compost piles throughout the yard - works well for me. But the easiest system I ever encountered was at the home of friends in Montreal who had a small yard surrounded by flower beds and bushes.

Don't you compost? I asked John, when I didn't see a compost heap anywhere.

Of course, I do, John replied.

Then where do you keep your compost pile? I asked

Oh, I don't have a pile - I just dig a little hole behind one of the bushes. When it gets full, I cover it with soil and dig another. I never have to move the compost - it just turns into garden fertilizer where it is.

His method reminded me of how my father fertilized his hazelnut tree in our backyard on De Hart Avenue in Kelowna, BC. An avid fisherman, my father would clean the fish he caught outside on the picnic table, as he prepared to cook the fish. But instead of putting the scraps into the garbage, he would dig a hole beside the tree and bury them there.

The tree, on its part, rewarded him with bountiful harvests of nuts year after year!

Going GREEN ?

Disposable alkaline batteries are one of the most dangerous household pollutants in garbage dumps, yet we nonchalantly toss them away everyday. I can't count how many of these handy little batteries inhabit my home - in flash lights, remote controls, watches, and smoke detectors. Yet they will all end up polluting the soil, air and the ground water, unless they are taken to a toxic waste depot and properly disposed of.

But that all takes effort! Nonetheless - in an attempt to be more environmentally responsible - I am not throwing them away. Instead, in my study, I have an old plastic yogurt container full of them. I plan to take it to the waste depot when I have enough batteries to make the trip worth while. (Is it any wonder my study is so cluttered!!)

Now, if I had small children around, I would probably throw them away quickly - as they are toxic for children to play with ... especially young ones, who put everything into their mouths...

I would hardly call those batteries environmentally friendly or "green." (I also wonder about the rechargeable batteries I have in my cell phone and camera... they also need to be disposed of in a special way.)

So here is what I don't understand: There is a lot of talk these days about going green by using those twirly new low-energy light bulbs. In fact, in our home we have replaced most of our old light bulbs with these new energy-efficient ones. Once you get used to the way they take a few minutes to light up, they are fine.

But recently one of these new bulbs in our house burned out. (I know they are supposed to last 10 or more years, but this one didn't.) It was then that I was informed that, like batteries, these new bulbs shouldn't be simply thrown into the garbage. They also need to be taken to a toxic waste dump to be properly disposed of.

I'm not sure how this can be called going green - if they are too dangerous to just throw out. If I need to drive to a special disposal depot, does the energy they will save me surpass the energy I need to use to dispose of them? Are they worth the contamination they will create in garbage dumps, where - let's face it - most of them will end up?

For us to really "go green," these bulbs shouldn't be a hazard. Neither should toxic waste depots be so hard to get to. Why not put them in all shopping centers, for example - so that I could drop off my old batteries and light bulbs when I go to buy new ones?

One Swiss student told me that supermarkets in his country have recycling stations for used cooking oil. When people come to buy new cooking oil, they drop off their old, used oil. That makes sense. If we make recycling easy, most of us will actually be able to do it.

Now back to my burnt-out twirly light bulb... I really do want to be responsible in disposing of it, so instead of putting it in the garbage, I have taken another old plastic yogurt container and put it in there - to keep until I go to the toxic waste depot...

When I think about it, my study is now a toxic waste holding station! I'm not sure how comfortable that makes me feel!