The Great Garbage Patch

Did you know there's a garbage patch the size of the state of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and San Francisco? It’s called the Great Garbage Patch (or officially the Pacific Trash Vortex). The oceans currents and our irresponsible dumping (80% of the trash originated from land and 20% from ships) have created this nightmare for marine life and obscene evidence of our wastefulness.

Most of the debris in the Great Garbage Patch is plastic – about 46,000 pieces per square mile. 3.5 million tons of trash are floating out there. Fish, birds and sea mammals all ingest this stuff because it’s more plentiful than plankton, and they wind up dying of starvation or dehydration because their bellies are full of plastic.

Every piece of plastic ever created is still with us here on earth. Yep, all those happy meal toys and cheap dollar store crap will eventually fill up the entire ocean at the rate we’re going. Except for a small amount that is incinerated (releasing all kinds of lovely toxic chemicals), the plastic we create does not go away. If you’ve ever camped with children, you know the smell of burning plastic because they can’t resist throwing that plastic fork in the fire. There’s a reason that smell makes everyone turn their heads. There is no safe way to get rid of plastic, except recycling it. But even then we’re not really getting rid of it, are we?

Much of the plastic in the Great Garbage Patch is plastic bags and bottles. This doesn’t surprise me, does it surprise you? How many plastic bags and containers do we throw away each day? So much of our food comes in plastic and many times we are too lazy to rinse out that gross macaroni salad container or clean the bag that we toted the shrimp home inside. After seeing the footage (you can see it too), I’ve been haunted by images of marine mammals trapped in plastic, carcasses of great birds bloated with plastic trash, and the sheer volume of debris floating out there. I can’t bring myself to throw away another bit of plastic. I thought I was pretty conscientious before, but now it’s a compulsion. I don’t want any other creature to suffer for my convenience.

And we can’t say this is the fault of those overindulged folks on the other side of the country, we’ve got a Garbage Patch of our own here on the east coast. It’s called the North Atlantic Garbage Patch. There are other patches out there too. We’re all responsible. Our ignorance and laziness are to blame. I, for one, want to change my ways. More than ever we need to REDUCE, REUSE, and RECYCLE. This is the simplest thing we can do. That’s easy to say and most of us already try to do that, but we need to take it to the next level. Here’s some ideas/inspiration:

1) Give up the plastic shopping bags. Just swear them off. I know it’s a pain to carry non-disposable bags with you everywhere and sometimes we feel silly using them when we only need one small item, but do it. Be quick to offer your shopping bags or say “I don’t need a bag” because if you don’t, some disgruntled clerk will bag your stuff in plastic and then put it in your cloth bag (I kid you not – this happened to me just last week! And when I removed the plastic bag and handed it back to her, she threw the plastic bag in her trash can. No, really.). If more of us bring our own bags or opt for no bags, it will soon be the accepted practice and the people walking out with plastic bags will look shocking. Put your bags in all your cars, carry a small  bag in your purse. Environmentally friendly bags are available every where now in all shapes and sizes and materials. You can announce your cause or your coolness with them.

2) Stop buying bottled water. This one is so clear to me, I want to scream it. Not only is it a waste of money – it’s an obscene use of plastic. Everywhere we go – parties, picnics, and athletic games people are offering us plastic water bottles. People carry them everywhere - to the gym, out shopping, to meetings, we can’t seem to get enough of them. We’ve all gotten the message that water is good for us – but plastic bottles are not good for the world. If you must buy a bottle (I realize that at sporting events and movie theaters you can’t carry your own in with you), take the bottle home with you to recycle. We must take responsibility for the plastic we purchase. A few places offer recycling bins, but people don’t seem to take them seriously. As I peer in to recycling bins full of trash, I often wonder whether the minimum wage worker dumping the trash just dumps the recycling in the same place rather than pick out the errant garbage. If I was 16 and barely making enough money for gas, I doubt I’d get my hands dirty.

3) Don’t buy plastic sandwich bags. I admit to having one box in my pantry, but I can also tell you that box will at least a year in our house. We use Re-usies (and homemade versions of them), which are adorable fabric bags lined with (you guessed it) plastic that can be rinsed out or thrown in the laundry time and again.

4) This may be obvious, but just in case it’s not – DON’T BUY DISPOSABLE STUFF. There is a plethora of disposable cleaning stuff advertised. What, are we afraid of washing out a rag or getting our hands dirty? When I see things like this, I think of the garbage pickers in Mexico or the people who live in India subsisting on the things their neighbors throw away. We have come to believe that just about everything is disposable – phones, appliances, toys, home furnishings. We are very quick to throw out anything that is less than perfect or not the latest model. Many times we opt for the cheapest version of things, knowing that we can always throw it away and get another. We need to change this mentality. We need to buy quality things because they last, not cheap stuff because we can always get another.

5) Think about packaging before you buy, whether it be food or toys or anything. Don’t buy overpackaged stuff and let the retailer know. I recently bought the most delicious, healthy crackers at Trader Joes. They were called Thousand Layer Crackers and were fabulous and I wish to heaven I could buy them again. But I can’t. Why? Because each cracker is individually wrapped (yes – one cracker in each wrapper!) and then stacked in a plastic divider, which was then wrapped again in a plastic wrapper before being placed in a box. I wrote the company and complained and they sent me a nice form letter that said they’d look in to it. As long as those crackers continue to sell, I’m betting the packaging won’t change. And if most consumers make their choice based on taste without regard to the irresponsible packaging, they’ll sell just fine.

6) Buy recycled stuff. And I’m not just talking about paper products. I shop the Goodwill every week. This is a great way to buy recycled stuff. Yard sales, Craig’s List, Freecycle, there are so many options out there. Get in to the game – it’s fun to get a deal. I bought a leather Liz Claiborne purse at Goodwill last week for just $3.97! I’ve left the Goodwill price tag ($6.97) on my bread machine that’s been cranking out bread almost daily for over a year, just to remind myself of the great deal I got.

7) Donate your stuff instead of throwing it out. Just because that game isn’t in perfect condition and your dog chewed up some of the pieces, doesn’t mean someone else’s child won’t find it a treasure. I’ve been waiting for a Stratego game to appear at the Goodwill. Somehow my children lost the board (I know), and they want a new game. Well, their plastic-fearing mother can’t bring herself to buy another brand-new game (with over 60 plastic game pieces), so they must wait until one appears at a yard sale or Goodwill. Meanwhile, they’ve fashioned a board out of the side of a cardboard box and they play on. Make it easy for your kids (and you) to give away your stuff. Keep boxes marked for donation in convenient places around your house. We keep one in the laundry, one in the hall outside the kids’ rooms, and several in the basement. This makes it simple to get rid of stuff without contributing to the Garbage Patch.

I know these may seem like small changes, but like everything else, small changes add up. Retailers take note of what customers buy and don’t buy. Other shoppers notice when you carry in your own bags. Yes, that one bottle does make a difference. Change will happen, but someone’s got to lead the way. We cannot wait for government to take responsibility for the Garbage Patches. They won’t. We must take responsibility ourselves. We must be the change we wish to see in the world, right? Ghandi had it going on.

How Many Catalogs Does One Person Need?

How many catalogs do you recycle each day? My mailbox is laden with unwanted catalogs. It’s rare that I ever buy anything from any of them, but they do waste plenty of my time. I hate to count the hours I’ve spent leafing through their glossy pages fantasizing about buying lots of things I will never buy. Sometimes I even circle things and choose colors and sizes. As if. The catalogs float around on the counter for a few days and eventually end up in the recycling. I’ve tried several websites that are supposed to do away with junk mail, but still the catalogs come. Not anymore!

I’ve discovered a website called http://www.catalogchoice.org/ that allows me to opt out of catalogs I don’t want to receive. And Catalogchoice has extracted commitments from these companies to honor my choices. Not every catalog I would like to do away with is listed on Catalogchoice, but most are. In fact, there are catalogs I’ve never even dreamed of listed. And therein lies the danger. As I’m combing the list for catalogs to cancel, I can’t help but notice all the catalogs with intriguing titles. Of course not only does Catalogchoice assist you in canceling catalogs, they will also be happy to hook you up with some new ones. So there is this incredible temptation to find out just what they sell in the Bliss catalog. And what constitutes a Boundless Journey? Just what does a person buy from Handsome Rewards? If you’re not careful canceling catalogs with catalogchoice could be counter productive. Who can resist requesting a catalog called Long Elephant Legs? What do they sell? I have to know.

Some of the companies don’t make it easy for you to cancel. They force you to go to their website or send an e-mail from your own mailbox instead of catalogchoice’s. But the nice part is the website tells you exactly how to get off just about any company’s list. When you choose to stop the catalog, they ask you to click on a reason. Your options include: prefer not to answer (this way you won’t hurt their feelings), prefer shopping online (I worried that this would be a greenlight for said company to swamp my e-mail), no interest in these products (slam!), I want to help the environment (I hide behind this one mostly), and other (but no space to write - ‘because I think your products are overpriced and unnecessary’).

Another great feature that some companies offer is to choose how often you’d like to receive their catalog. Some offer the option of receiving the catalog just once per season or year, etc. Not all of them offer this, apparently. My husband likes getting his Crutchfield catalog so he can dream about all the electronics he could have if he didn’t have children, but the Crutchfield catalog comes just about every month and it would have been nice to change that to once or twice a year. Not an option, so I just nixed it all together (sorry honey!).

I stopped browsing the catalog choices at about the L’s (what’s a Lobstergram? I think I'd like one.) because it was getting too hard to resist wasting even more of my time investigating what they sell in Make Life Easier or Wild Horsefeathers catalogs. Now I’m simply making a pile of catalogs as they arrive in my mailbox and then going to Catalogchoice and searching for each specific catalog and canceling it. Catalogchoice even has a system for complaining if a catalog continues to be delivered to you. Brilliant website and I’m sure someone is making a buck or two from it even if it is a dot-org. I don’t know enough about how they track our activities online, but I bet there’s a kickback or two when someone discovers Bounty Hunter catalog while trying to cancel their Brookstone catalog.

Just today I got confirmation from several companies that they had canceled my catalog subscription so I know that Catalogchoice is not just a schuckster trying to lure me in to even more catalog options, which I suppose is still possible. Hopefully in the end I’ll cancel more than I’ll request. Check out http://www.catalogchoice.org/ and lighten your own load – less paper to be recycled and less stuff to fill your life and longings.

I Knew I Was Saving Those Bricks For Something...

I knew I was saving those bricks for something. Seven years ago, when we tore out an old brick patio, I painstakingly hauled each brick up the hill to the barn and stacked them carefully and artfully behind the barn. My husband shook his head. His plan had been to toss them in the back of the truck, haul them to the woods, and dump them there where they could rot for all eternity, if bricks rot. But I insisted they were useful and that maybe I would use them someday to lay a brick aisle way in the barn. He humored me but didn’t help haul the bricks to the barn. I did that myself, using a wheelbarrow.

Since then the bricks have found a few uses. They’ve held down plastic tarps covering machinery or hay. They’ve been experimented upon by two small boys wondering just how hard you have to throw the bricks at the barn wall to actually break one. And the chickens have made good use of them as a place to roost in the sun or get out of the wet or snow covered grass. I mostly forgot about them along with my fantasy of laying a brick aisle way in my constantly flooding barn.

But this weekend I found a purpose for them. I’m always on the lookout for new places to tuck in another garden. Last spring my daughter planted Jolly Jester marigolds all around one sunny corner of the barn. Those marigolds thrived. So much so that they spread themselves a good six feet out away from the barn in a perfect semi-circle. Last weekend when I finally cut down their dying stalks, the ground that was uncovered was barren – no grass left. What else can you do with such ground but plant a new garden?? No, I’m not a fan of grass seed.

The only complication was that the nice neat semi-circle is on a hill, like pretty much every piece of ground on our property. When I informed my husband of my plan he told me I’d need a wall to contain the garden or it would just wash away down the hill. I didn’t point out to him that the marigolds never washed away. In fact, they were pretty difficult to remove from their spot.

Saturday morning, I lugged several bags of newspapers up to the barn to lay the basis of my new garden. My plan was to lasagna garden the whole spot so that the soil would be rich and ready for my new salsa garden come spring time. I had visions of tomatillos, cilantro, and a gazillion new types peppers. But as I stared at the space, I had to concede that my husband might be right (don’t tell!). It is a pretty hilly spot. So I fed the horses and pondered what to do. I still didn’t know what to do, so I began the nasty chore of cleaning out the chicken pen. It’s really the only downside of chickens. Of course the manure collected from this nasty chore makes wonderful fertilizer. As I laid my broom against the huge stack of bricks next to the chicken coop, I had my eureka moment! The bricks! They’ve needed a purpose beyond stoking my guilt and supporting soggy chickens for 7 years! So I began hauling them once again.

I laid out a beautifully shaped garden using the bricks. I was not deterred by the absence of mortar or a mason. I once dry-stacked a beautiful stone wall that still contains our strawberries, lilacs, and mint, so I’m pretty confident in my ability to build a sturdy wall in to the hillside. My neighbor’s 150 year old farm house is built completely on a dry stack stone foundation.

For now my husband is going along with this, but he’s not yet convinced of my plan. For sure one of us will be thinking “I told you so,” by spring. My new brick wall is only two layers high so far, but as I fill in with dirt, manure, wood ash, leaves and whatever else I can find, I’ll build the wall up with more bricks.

There’s nothing wrong with holding on to useful things. Some people call it hoarding, but those people are simply not very creative. Sure, it’s a pain to store all this useful stuff, but in the end it’s worth the pain. And it saves you money. And it doesn’t load up the landfill. And it saves you time because you don’t have to go to the store. And it makes your neighbors and friends wonder if you’re nuts, which makes them keep their distance (and think of you when their daughter’s brownie troop needs 15 cream cheese containers!).

This past Sunday the pastor at our church was pondering Thanksgiving and he made note of the size of that day’s newspaper laden with store circulars. He pointed out that during this time of year we are naturally inclined to hunt and gather and fill our storehouses. It’s a natural instinct and a good marketing department preys on this fact. Instead of gathering lots more stuff, the pastor encouraged us to look around us at that moment and gather memories – a beautiful sunset, the sound of a baby, the smile of a loved one. Good thought, but most of us still want to shop right about now.

Shopping is a guilty pleasure. No, we don’t necessarily need what we are buying, but it feels good to have that power, to rub shoulders with all the other people picking out new stuff. Carrying our bags of stuff in to our houses and cutting off the tags feels very satisfying. I’ve been trying to let go of those feelings. Now, when the urge to shop hits me, I head to the Goodwill where my weakness won’t deplete my wallet.

When the urge to store all my nuts for winter hits, sometimes I spend time sorting out, rearranging, and repurposing – handling all my stuff. I have to say that repurposing is incredibly satisfying, much more so than buying which always leaves me feeling kind of sleazy. This weekend, I wasn’t the only one getting in on the repurposing. My whole family found something to repurpose. My husband repurposed the gravel left from where our old deck once stood. He removed that gravel to use under and around the flagstones at the base of the steps to our new deck (flagstones held on to after the same construction project that yielded the bricks!). It looks great, cost us nothing, and the spot the gravel used to occupy is perfect for –you guessed it – another garden!

My older son spied the shoe sorter my daughter was removing from her closet (the shoes were never actually sorted, most days they were piled on top of the little shelf with all the neat shoe cubbies). He laid claim to it. He’s repurposed it as a cabinet to hold all his game pieces for the complicated games he and his best friend invent.

My youngest son cleaned out his room and re-discovered his marshmallow shooter which isn’t really repurposing, unless you consider that its old purpose was to lie under his bed and collect dust.

My daughter, lacking a decent jewelry box (cheap parents!) decided to turn her lamp shade in to a jewelry box. She poked holes through the shade to hang earrings and secured a thumbtack (with an eraser on the other side) to hang her necklaces. Makes the lampshade very useful and actually, better looking.

None of these actions were necessarily intentional. They arose because of a need and our new found ability to look around us rather than run to the store. We ran to the store for plenty of years and now we are drowning in the stuff we’ve acquired. Before you go running off to the store for your solution – look around you. What have you got that would do the job?

Saving stuff is akin to a holy act in my book. You should always hesitate before you throw things out – are you absolutely certain there is no use left for this object? I used to play a little head game with myself as I walked toward the trash can. I would imagine I was a homeless person or a member of a tribe on a remote island – is there something I could do with this object? Crazy, maybe, but our society throws things out too easily. We do this because we don’t have to deal with our own trash. We pay our trash bill each month and the friendly guys in the bright yellow vests cart it away. But it goes somewhere, because just like the information on your computer – nothing disappears. Repurposing, re-using, and saving useful things are not only money-saving acts, but an exercise in creativity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness – great traits for any of us. And perhaps one key to preserving our planet for those who come after us.

So before you head to the store, or the trashcan, take a moment to consider your options. You have more than you realize.

Look how we repurposed this weekend!