So I've added the texting feature to my little blog in hopes that it will help me post more. This blog used to be about recycling and making less of an impact on the earth, and it still is, but now it's also about other things like BIG IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS ABOUT LIFE!

For anyone who doesn't know: I'm moving to Los Angeles over the summer!

I'll write a bigger post about it when I have more time but for the next 4 days I will be finishing up all my stuff for the UH senior photo show that is opening March 27th!

Shopping Cartography

I've been a terrible blogger again. One post in January? That's just outrageous!!

I've been posting, at least once a week, at my collaborative blog with Stephanie Gobea called Gobi and Char Will Destroy You. I took this great polaroid for our photo of the week assignment and now I can't find it. I need to stop losing things.

I found this at Readymade. It's a map of the world that you print out and put stickers in the places where all the things you buy are from. I think it's an interesting experiment in mapping out the ecological impact your spending has. Think about how much energy is wasted on that cotton shirt from Taiwan: all the boats, planes, and trucks it had to go on to make it to your house. Don't get me wrong, I'm completely hypocritical when it comes to this but at least it makes me think a little about what I buy and if I really need it. In this regard I really need to start going to local farmers markets because although I try really hard to buy food locally at the grocery store, there isn't much local going on at stores in the middle of winter.

2010!

Hopefully this year will be more bountiful than the last with blog posts about composting and things that correlate; definitely the latter half will be, once school is over and done with. But for now you get an iphone picture of my Bonsai tree from ikea and a little story to go with it.

I bought this cute little plant during one of my many trips to ikea because it was so cute with it's tiny little leaves and cute roots. To my dismay, a few days after the bonsai tree arrived to its new home, it started losing all of it's cute little leaves! Unbeknown to me, this is what bonsai trees do to accommodate to new climates. These days, a few months after I brought it home, it has more leaves than ever and keeps sprouting more! Now why is this of any relevance to composting? Because I put a little bit of the composting "juice" in all of my plants and now they smell terrible! Lesson learned: just because something is nourishing, don't let it reek up your house.

Wow, I'm a terrible blogger! This is like the 3rd or 4th blog that I've started and lost interested in within a matter of weeks after starting it. I promise to be more compositive when my life is less hectic! I have actually buried my compost from the compost bin twice since starting! I've also been actively choosing items that have less packaging, etc etc so as to not procure more waste for the trash bin.

But that is not what I came here for today! Last year some time I came across this blog where a man living in new york city was going to try to have a zero impact on the earth so he wouldn't drive or buy food that was out of season, etc etc. I thought the blog was an awesome idea but somehow I never ended up keeping up with it. Then the other day I was driving to work listening to the local npr station and a woman who worked at the station was going to try to be impact free for a whole week! In Houston! Amazing! and then later in the week I received an email about the No Impact Experiment. Here is a video from their website:

I'm trying as much as I can and once I don't have a million things going on in my life, this is definitely something I will be trying! For the month of September I didn't buy a single frivolous thing I didn't need! and it felt amazing but October was even more amazing when I bought new clothes. I need to break that habit!

Trash Talking

Today I took out the trash and this time it has been 3 weeks since last time! I love you composter!

Tuesday Tabs

recycled glass mosaic tile

So I started blogging for today's tuesday tabs and then I got distracted by etsy and then I got distracted by researching things from 500 Days of Summer and the decoration and design and outfits and everything and then I realized I never finished Tuesdays tabs! Here are some of the links from my procrastinating:
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I think 500 Days of Summer is my new The Brothers Bloom, I'm just going to watch it over and over again.

Begin Tuesday Tabs!
If I lived in California I would be cashing in so hard on my recycling skills. It's ridiculous! If you have a party and recycle 100 aluminum cans afterwards, you get over $5! If you recycle 100 approved plastic bottles you get over $6 and if you recycle 100 glass bottles you get something in between the two. Now that's not a huge chunk of change but it's better than nothing like what we get here in Texas.

Did you know it takes as little as 30 days for a recycled glass bottle to leave your kitchen recycling bin and appear on a store shelf as a new glass container? That's amazing! and glass is 100% reyclable so you can recycle it over and over and over again and it will still look great. From about.com: Every ton of glass that is recycled saves more than a ton of the raw materials needed to create new glass, including: 1,300 pounds of sand; 410 pounds of soda ash; and 380 pounds of limestone.

Tips for when you recycle glass from the City of Austin:
Rinse your glass bottles and jars
You do not need to remove the labels
Some things to not put in the glass recycling: light bulbs, mirrors, window panes, dishes and cups, ornaments and decorations

Austin apparently lets you recycle glass in their curbside recycling, something Houston does not. I don't think it's a good idea for glass to be in the curbside program because it's so easy to break and then it becomes dangerous.

More from about.com
Glass recycling saves energy. Making new glass means heating sand and other substances to a temperature of 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit, which requires a lot of energy and creates a lot of industrial pollution. One of the first steps in glass recycling is to crush the glass and create a product called “cullet.” Making recycled glass products from cullet consumes 40 percent less energy than making new glass from raw materials, because cullet melts at a much lower temperature.

Here are some examples of great things that can come from recycled glass:

adorable mini bowls

the outside of an entire building!

cute plates

colorful tiles

Trash Talking

Today I took out the trash! What's amazing about it is that it's the first time I've taken out the trash since I started composting. I put in a new trash bag the same day I started the composter, July 11th. So that's almost two weeks since my last trash outing! Think about how much I've reduced my landfill pollution! Exciting!! My trash bags are, of course, from the seventh generation brand:

Thunderstorms

Today there was the most amazing thunderstorm in Houston. The thunder was insane and shook the windows! The rain sounded like hail at one point and was just blowing across the street. My street flooded almost completely but by the time it stopped raining it had receded and was fine to drive on. The rain was greatly appreciated though, the Texas heat had started to take it's toll on our plants and grass. Too bad about those pesky mosquitos that come with the rain though. The polaroid is from another rainstorm we had last weekend that left the sky a radiating yellow and the clouds looked like something out of a dream, it really made me appreciate nature and the beauty of the earth. Now I'm going to carpool with some friends to a free screening of 500 Days of Summer.

Tuesday Tabs

For this Tuesdays tabs I did some research about biodegradable tableware. Here in Houston if you go to Brown Bag Deli you get a cup and straw that say they're biodegradable. The first time I saw this I was delighted but now that I've started my own compost, I wonder if those cups and straws are truly compostable? Biodegradable kitchenware is made from corn which is an amazing renewable resource, but the corn is turned into a plastic (PLA or polylactide) so how can it really be biodegradable?

Here's an article from Boston about biodegradable cups-
Biodegradable corn cups: Too good to be true?
This article says corn cups probably aren't biodegradable in your regular backyard compost but definitely in a industrial compost. The cup pictured in the article states

"This cup grew up in Blair, Nebraska. It's made entirely of corn. It's 100% compostable. It will disappear no matter what you do with it."

It's true that the cup will disappear but at what cost? If the cup is just thrown in the trash it will end up in a landfill somewhere and will decompose without oxygen and produce methane gas. Methane is the most potent of all the greenhouse gases and it contributes 25 times more to climate change than carbon dioxide. (TerraCycle)

The FAQ page for this biodegradable store says that their products will biodegrade in 30-45 days in commercial composts and a little longer in your regular old backyard compost.

I found this adorable Biodegradable party kit! I wonder how long it would take this to biodegrade in a regular backyard compost? It's a wonderful idea though. I think I might buy some cold cups for my next party, I wish they weren't made in Taiwan :/. I emailed another site about their cold cups because they didn't have any information on where they were made. If they're made in Taiwan they have to be shipped to the states and think about all that pollution it creates! Anyways, those cups would be great because even if it takes a while to biodegrade, it's a whole lot better than those blue party cups that no one ever recycles. Can you even recycle those??

July 17, 2009

A few days after I posted about the CD dilemma, Treehugger twittered about recycling CDs! It was fate!

Here's an article on how horrible CDs are for the environment.

And here are some solutions to CD recycling:
CD recycling center
Freecycle (but honestly, who wants your crappy old cds?)