Happy Thanksgiving to my friends to the south, please remember the importance of conserving energy while prepping and entertaining. For those of us that could use a gentle reminder of how much energy we actually use in our day to day lives,  check out the Wilting Flower Device over at Eco Geek.

The device is shaped like a flower that provides a visible reminder of how much energy is being used at the moment. When low amounts of energy are being consumed, the flower stands tall and blooms open. Flick on more lights and turn on the TV or video game and the flower wilts and closes up.

A wireless connector is connected to the household electricity supply and when more appliances are turned on, the amount of current drawn increases and is relayed back to the Wilting Flower. When the flower displays a blue and greenish light, that means power usage is low. Purple is a bad sign and an indication that the flower is about to wilt and it’s time to turn off some of those appliances.

Sure this is a novelty and the $90 price tag is a bit high but the message is a good one. I think we could all use a reminder of how much energy we actually use.

What’s a day without learning about another toxic additive to our lives? This time it’s a chemical substance called Propylene Glycol. This little baby is found in moisturizers, as the killing and preserving agent in pitfall traps (usually used to capture beetles), as a food additive (AKA E1520) and…are you ready for this? To De-ice airplanes! Because of its low chronic oral toxicity, propylene glycol is generally recognized as safe for use as a direct food additive. The US Food and Drug Administration includes it on its list of ingredients that are generally recognized as safe (GRAS) and the World Health Organization recognizes it as safe for human use. I would beg to differ. Putting the same chemical used to de-ice planes on my skin, doesn’t strike me as the safest thing to do. So much is deemed safe for human consumption because it won’t immediately strike you dead, however does anyone really know the cumulative effects of this and other chemicals on the body? Continue reading Propylene Glycol?!

I know it’s been said a million times…”take your own cloth bag to the grocery store”. We all need to reduce our dependence on plastic bags, that’s a fact, but I don’t think I truly understood the devastation that plastic bags have on our environment until I read the following statistics:

• somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year- I know i’m having a difficult time wrapping by brain around that number!
• it costs $4000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags which can then be turned around and sold for $32
• plastic bags photo degrade and break down into smaller, more toxic petro-polymers-here I thought photo degradable bags were a good thing! These polymers then get into our soil and water supply
• nearly 200 different species of sea life (whales, dolphins, seals, turtles etc…) die because of our plastic addiction. They mistake it for food and die as a consequence.

Enough of the bad news…what can I do to help?

• by simply switching to cloth bags we can save 6 bags a week = 24 bags a month = 288 bags per year = 22,176 bags saved in a life time- now that’s something each of us can do!

If you do happen to find yourself at the grocery store sans your reusable sacs and are asked if you prefer paper or plastic, the correct answer probably isn’t what you would think. Paper isn’t the way to go. According to treehugger: Paper bags come from trees. The trees are removed and heavily processed using machines, therefore using fossil fuels and polluting. The pulp is washed and bleached (using lots of water) then transported. Plastic although synthetic, is apparently least damaging on our environment to produce.

Some countries like Bangladesh and Rwanda have banned plastic bags, while others like China have banned free plastic bags. In the US, San Francisco has become the first US city to ban plastic bags and others are considering it.

After a while, using cloth bags have become second nature. I now have a collection of what I call ‘cute’ enviro bags that come with me everywhere.

…and I don’t mean the golf cart variety. Popular Mechanics is announcing that the Toyota Prius is coming out with a plug in electric version. Unfortunately this won’t be available for at least 2 years, but a company called Hymotion is selling after market plug in converters for the hybrid that converts it into an electric, clean vehicle. They claim that you can drive a 30-40 mile range on electric, and once the power runs out, the gas power kicks in. All this for the cool add on price of $9,995 (including installation). This may sound like an initial ‘ouch’ but the gas savings outweigh the cost pretty quickly, not to mention the environmental benefits! As an example I used the calculator on their site and assumed the following variables:

• an even 50/50 split between city driving and highway driving
• a 15 mile average daily 1 way commute
• ability to plug in at work
• 15000 miles driven in a year

It yielded the following results:

• a whopping 105 miles per gallon!
• only 12 yearly trips to the gas station
• and only 2771 pounds of carbon produced yearly (as opposed to 12, 125 for the typical gas powered vehicle and 6258 for the standard Prius).

This sounds so promising! I’d love to say I own a Prius, because I would seriously consider this modification, but sadly with 3 kids and all their gear, the Prius wouldn’t accomodate all of us. Here’s to hoping for a plug in mini van in the near future!

Who thought shopping for pjs for a 4year old could be stressful? I unassumingly walked into a store with my son giving him carte blanche to choose some warm jammies for the upcoming cooler months. He immediately gravitated to a pair with a fire engine print. I picked it up to look at it and noticed several tags hanging from it, one of which declared that the garment was flame resistant. Why had I never noticed this before? Have I been innocently putting my son to bed wrapped up in chemicals? I needed answers.

If you’ve never heard of PBDE (Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether), you should acquaint yourself, after all you’re living with them, we all are. Household products ranging from kids’ pajamas to computers release these brominated flame retardants according to the Environmental Working Group. The obvious goal of these chemicals is to reduce the risk that the product will catch fire. The problem however, is that these chemicals via dust and off-gasing enter the body and accumulate. These same chemicals have recently been turning up in tests done on breastmilk. In fact these same tests have found that toddlers and preschoolers typically had 3 times as much of these hormone-disrupting chemicals in their blood as their mothers. Why are our children more polluted by these chemicals than us? Because these nasty PBDEs stick to kids’ hands, toys, furniture or other objects that they put in their mouths.

Continue reading Toxic jammies?