Wet Wednesday: Hang Out

A single-use water bottle can't do this...

 Yet, another reason why reusable bottles are better than single-use plastic.  :)

Our Daily Ocean: Day 76

For some unknown reason, I've been completely slacking when it comes to posting.  We hit the beach, clean it up... and count the mess... but the post just lags behind.  Hmmm...  Must be something about summer.  :)   Having not been out to Wrightsville Beach as much as I would've liked during the month of June, I'm making the commitment to get out to WB a lot more this month.

My mom and sister have been staying with us... so, on Friday, I asked them which access they wanted to go to.  My mom's response, "I want to go see how bad it is at the pier."  Wish granted.  We, along with my mom and sister, met my friend Tracy at Johnnie Mercer's Pier-- aka Access 16. 

My mom, my sister, and Tracy.

Since it was the start of the Fourth of July weekend, I had prepared myself for a disaster.  BUT... strange thing happened.  There was plenty of parking, the trashcans weren't overflowing and while the beach was definitely littered... it wasn't anywhere close to what we've seen in the past.  Thank goodness!

From the very start of this litter project, I've always been adamant about the fact that I am "never expecting perfect, I just want to get to better."  When I go to the wrack line and can pick up a handful of cigarette butts and plastics in less than a minute... I can honestly state: It's not better. (yet)  Wrightsville Beach is working on the cigarette butt issue.  From what I understand, they're passing out pocket ashtrays.  Not sure how to gauge whether or not it's working because we're still picking up a large amount of cigarette butts.  Hmmm...

Aside from counting cigarette butts, I also count other things including straws.  Friday we picked up a record number of straws:  64 in 20 minutes!  WHOA!  I'm sending my tallies to the WB-- Keep It Clean blog... and since May together we've removed 557 straws from WB!!!  YIKES!!  Please, please, please... when ordering your drink say, "I don't need a straw."  If you like to use straws... how about getting a reusable straw to carry with you??  I have some from Glass Dharma and I absolutely LOVE them!!   Another thing, skip the juice boxes.... take a reusable container and fill it with juice.  No straw or plastic straw wrapper to be littered is a good thing for the beach!! :)

20 minutes on July 1, 2011 at Access 16

Litter by weight: 8 lbs 3.6 oz  

Cigarette butts: 703

Total amount of cigarette butts removed from Wrightsville Beach, NC in 76 days:

23,117

Backyard Birthday Bash

Back in mid-May, my husband let me in on a secret:  He was planning a party to celebrate my 33rd birthday!!!  This was big news to me as I couldn't remember the last birthday party I had... AND... as soon as I got over the "shush, no you're not" feeling... I began to get excited.  Not only were we going to be having a Bushwalla house show... this was an opportunity to throw a different kind of party.  Normally parties create a lot of trash, because who really has enough plates, flatware, and such for 50+ people?  Red solo cups, aluminum cans, plastic flatware, paper napkins, bags of chips, and convenience foods reign during parties.  For my party, we had to do something different.  So on Saturday, June 25, we did just that.

Photo credit: Tracy Carr

In general, I have this great desire to prove (most often to myself) that when we most think we can't get around plastic... there ARE ways around it and through planning and rethinking it can be done.  Deciding to throw a party without using the typical party fare: paper plates, plastic/compostable cups, plastic cutlery, etc. takes extra thought.  The first thing we did was figure out what kind of food we wanted to have.  Based on past experiences of trying to reduce waste during parties, we immediately decided on foods that didn't need forks, spoons or knives.  Here's what we ate:  Flaming Amy's Burritos, chips with salsa, Mellow Mushroom Pizza, watermelon, cantaloup and cupcakes.  Here's how we avoided waste:  Took our own containers to Flaming Amy's for salsa, requested no plastic, composted food scraps including cupcake wrappers and the pizza and cupcake boxes :)

Another thing that I wanted to consider was filling my recycling bins with a bunch of aluminum cans and glass. Obviously, we got a keg of beer.  Then we made an easy decision:  No soda.  Instead, we had sweet tea and homemade lemonade.  We put the sweet tea in one of those big Igloo coolers (like you see get dumped on sports players). While we were at Hands Across the Sand on Saturday morning, my mom made fresh lemonade by squeezing 50 something lemons!  Then we filled reused glass juice jars that I had saved with the lemonade.  The lemonade could be poured from or drank directly from the bottle.  It was SO yummy!!  Check it out... can you guess how much I LOVE lemonade??? ;)

Oh right... so what did we eat on and drink from?? At first we thought about going to Goodwill and buying extra plates, but after the suggestion from a friend... we ended up renting plates and glasses.  Seriously.  What was awesome about renting was that we didn't have to do any dishes.  We just put the plates and glasses in their respective trays and took them back to the party rental place!

Photo by: Gabrielle Lyons

The party was SO much fun... everything turned out better than I could have ever anticipated.  We created  zero-trash and I would guarantee that nobody felt like they missed out on anything or realized that we were striving to go plastic-free. (Ok... there were a few people that knew what was up ;) ) Now... I can't end this post without mentioning how amazing Bushwalla was is.  Not only is he an extremely talented artist and an amazing performer... he's also like-minded.  What I mean by "like-minded" is that he's eco-conscious.  While at Hands Across the Sand, he was exactly like me... stopping to pick up every piece of litter he saw... even the cigarette butts!  He even wanted to do a 20 minute beach clean up with me!  (Bummed we didn't get to it, but no doubt there will be another time!) Turns out that he's been wanting to start doing beach clean ups in San Diego for quite sometime... and now he's feeling inspired to get it started!  YAY!!!  So if you don't know "who" Bushwalla is... go check out his music and support this eco-friendly, funky, soulful, hip-hoptimistic, being love musician...entertainer....artist.

Gratitude to all of my family and friends who shared my birthday with me... I had an absolute blast!! 33 is going to be good... real good... I just know it :)

A Vacation

It's been three weeks now since we packed our bags and then headed out the door for our California vacation. No doubt, traveling is hard on the environment... all the fuel needed to get our family of 5 across the country makes me feel all guilty.   And believe me...as much as I would love to take a different route--like drive in lieu of flying--quite frankly, driving 1000 miles is my maximum right now ;))

Just like I am always thinking and acting on how we can minimize our impact on the environment everyday...  it only makes sense that we do the same while traveling. 

SO... we started off our trip with our 6 (empty) water bottles, two coffee (in my case, tea) mugs and some homemade granola bars for the LONG flight to Los Angeles.

Our water bottles are well traveled and our pockets are well lined because of it. As we visited so many different places along the SoCal coast... we could only imagine the money that we would've spent on bottled water (or flavored drinks) if we hadn't brought our own.  They've been everywhere we've been...

3 different airports, on a ride down the coast from LA to San Diego (and back again), Oceanside, El Cajon, San Diego Wild Animal Park, The Midway, San Diego Maritime Museum, Balboa Park (San Diego), a Bushwalla and Dawn Mitschele show, Legoland (2x!), strawberry picking in Carlsbad, Corona del Mar, Santa Monica (2x!), Disneyland, a couple of beaches and everywhere in between! 

Seriously, anyone who ever says that they can't afford to buy a reusable water bottle hasn't done the math... I'd venture to say that had we not brought our own reusable water bottles that we would have easily spent hundreds of dollars on bottled water. How do I figure? Well, between a family of 5 we easily drink at least 6 (big) bottles of water a day-- if not more-- while we're out and about.  Airports and places of interest charge out the wazoo for bottled water... most I saw were $2.75 each. We were traveling for 11 days...

Really though, we don't choose not to buy bottled water because we're frugal... we don't buy it because it's more than just a waste of money.... bottled water is a waste of resources.  The companies that produce bottled water do so at an environmental cost to the communities that they extract the water from... and as I learned from Sara of The Daily Ocean... "if you fill a plastic bottle about 1/4th of the way up with petroleum... that is approximately how much petroleum needed to make that one plastic bottle."  With the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico... that's a visual that we all need to start thinking about when we see plastic bottles.

Speaking of Sara, we met up with her in Santa Monica to participate in doing a 20 minute beach clean-up.  For 20 minutes, we talked and walked... and as we walked we picked up litter off the beach.  Read about the time we spent with Sara and how much trash we picked up in a very leisurely 20 minutes: http://thedailyocean.blogspot.com/2010/07/day-130-july-16-2010.html

Of course, our litter picking up didn't start or end in Santa Monica with Sara.  (Sure, I know that we were on vacation... but it doesn't take much time to bend over, pick up and put the trash where it belongs.) We picked up litter everywhere we went... Oceanside, Corona del Mar beaches, and ALL of the places we walked.   Unfortunately, we could never get it all... but picking up one piece of litter is better than doing nothing at all.  (Please take that phrase and insert any impact that you have doubt about... like this: " ___________ is better than doing nothing at all."

 Which as I'm typing I realize that I've gone on an unexpected tangent... but here were are.  And now I'm thinking about starfish...

"A young girl was walking along a beach upon which thousands of starfish had been washed up during a terrible storm. When she came to each starfish, she would pick it up, and throw it back into the ocean. People watched her with amusement.

 

She had been doing this for some time when a man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? Look at this beach! You can’t possibly save all these starfish. You can’t begin to make a difference!”

 

The girl seemed crushed, suddenly deflated. But after a few moments, she bent down, picked up another starfish, and hurled it as far as she could into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied,

 

“Well, I made a difference to that one!”

 

The old man looked at the girl inquisitively and thought about what she had done and said. Inspired, he joined the little girl in throwing starfish back into the sea. Soon others joined...."

 

Just imagine the possibilities :)

 

Doing SOMETHING is still SOMETHING... 

and it ALL matters.

Detergent-Free Laundry!!!

Back in December, a friend sent me something about magnets that clean your laundry and while I was completely baffled... I was also intrigued by the idea... AND...I SO wanted to believe in it.  I sent the info onto my husband who quickly told me "no way."  I pressed the subject...because I thought it would be SO amazing to not have to use laundry detergent... but he stood strong.  Then... as if by fate... I was reading the reusablebags blog, where the opening sentence was:

"When I told my husband we were considering adding a product to use instead of chemical-laden laundry detergent packaged in wasteful plastic containers he said, "This might be where I draw the line on your hippy environmental stuff." I laughed, but I understood where he was coming from."

I was immediately sucked in... I could hear all of the words coming out of my mouth.  It was "so" me.  I read the entire blog post and sent it onto my husband (and Mom).  I waited for a response from my husband... knowing full and well that he was going to tell me "no way" or laugh at me being SO naive.  BUT, much to my surprise, he came home at lunch and asked me when I was going to order the laundry stuff???!!!  I honestly thought that he was joking or testing me.  BUT... he said, "If it works then great, if it doesn't... you can send it back, right?"

So, on my last drops of detergent and fabric softener, I immediately placed my order through reusablebags.com for the chemical-free laundry ball and a set of dryer balls with a jar of fragrance sticks.  (I also ordered some other reusable products including new water bottle lids, and 3 oz airline approved tubes for my upcoming trip to LA.)  So... when my package arrived... I was so excited!!  I can honestly say that I really dislike doing laundry... with a family of five... it's never ending... but for the first time... I kid you not... I was so excited to get a load going!!

I waited... a little excited and nervous... for the first load to finish washing.  And when it did, I pulled out the wet clothes and smelled them.  AND... they smelled CLEAN!!  Of course, that's what I was hoping for... but I kept telling myself that it just might not.  Then after I dried the clothes, I smelled them again.  I just want to make sure that my desire to use less resources... isn't clouding my judgement ;) Needless to say, my nose has smelled A LOT of laundry these past 2 weeks!!  The good news is that after 2 weeks of using NO laundry detergent or fabric softener... everything smells SO clean (and static free)!!  Even though I totally wanted to believe in it... I'm honestly really amazed that it actually works!!  AND it lasts 700 washes!!  For real.

Obviously, I'm completely ecstatic about this for a number of reasons.  No products going into the water... no plastic bottles... no truck to deliver the plastic bottles filled with soaps to the store... no driving to the store to get more!!

So the other night, my Mom told me that she ordered her reusable laundry products!!!  And told me that she was going to get her neighbor to buy them too... create a "ripple" of her own!!  YAY!!

(Re)Fill 'Er Up

I was just reading an amazing blog that my friend Jennifer had shared with me over the summer.  The blog is mostly about the Pacific Garbage Patch-- it's a big HUGE topic... if you don't know much about it... you should.  But what I saw today, was something so simple and completely fits with starting somewhere small and making a big impact.  Needless to say, I just had to share:

'“Carbon footprint” has been in the dictionary for ten years. But what about other footprints? How many rolls of toilet paper do we use a year? How many jars of mayonnaise? How many light bulbs?  What are these footprints? Recently I came across a really interesting online calculator that figures out how many paper cups you use if you go out for coffee. Click on the photo to try it out.'

In case you're wondering... I'm not a coffee drinker.  My husband is.  Our kids and I prefer hot chocolate or tea ;).  So whenever we're going somewhere where coffee (and hot chocolate or tea) are in our futures, we grab our reusable coffee thermoses (mugs work, too).  When we order we hand them our cups and forgo the paper (or styrofoam).  If you don't have a reusable cup with you.... decide to stay and enjoy your caffeine of choice and ask for your drink in a mug.


No styrofoam, no paper for your coffee, tea or hot chocolate = less waste (and that's a good thing)  :)