Sunday, I spoke at our local Unitarian Universalist fellowship (ironically located in Baptistown, NJ) about my favorite subject these days "garbage." The turnout was pretty good considering the topic and the fact that every tv and radio station was predicting that a deadly Nor'easter would slam New Jersey right during my "sermon."
I had done quite a bit of research to prepare for my 30-minute talk, even preparing a 9-minute presentation that will soon be available on Youtube. The one area that I spent far too much time researching was the true cost of clothing. I figured I might as well blog about it to share some of what I uncovered.
My search started with the production of cotton, which, from researching my
book, I knew was the most heavily sprayed crop in the US. What I didn't know was just how bad it really is until I ran across this 40-page downloadable report, "
The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton." All you'll need to read is the Executive Summary on pages 2 and 3 and browse the photos to get the gist of the article.
The fifth bullet in the Executive Summary reads:
A single drop of the pesticide aldicarb, absorbed through the skin can kill an adult. Aldicarb is commonly used in cotton production and in 2003 almost 1 million kilos was applied to cotton grown in the USA. Aldicarb is also applied to cotton in 25 other countries worldwide.
The night before my talk, I found a roll of blue cotton fabric that I had intended to make something out of about 8 years ago before my son was born. A perfect example of buying cotton for no reason. I cut out a giant 4' x 4' t-shirt and hand sewed it to a couple of bent hangers. (I wish I'd taken a picture of it.) I then created two versions of the tag that hangs in the back of most shirts. One was a standard Old Navy tag (Large, Made of 100% cotton, Made in Uzbekistan) which I printed on a blank piece of paper and the other was much longer. I printed the second one on several pieces of paper, taped them together, then rolled them up until it was time to discuss the subject. Unfurled, it read:
OLD NAVY
LARGE
Made of 100% Cotton
Harvested by children as young as 7 in Uzbekistan where unemployment is near 70% and cotton workers are paid less than $7/month.
Children who fail to meet quota or pick poor quality cotton are punished by scoldings and beatings.
PROCESSING
The processing of the cotton required 1/3 pound of concentrated pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers and 744 gallons of water.
FABRIC
Cotton fabric was processed with formaldehyde to reduce wrinkles and bleached with chlorine producing dioxin, a known carcinogen. It was then colored blue using chemical dyes that contained toxic heavy metals including chrome, copper and zinc.
PRODUCTION
Sewn in Cambodia, one of the world’s poorest countries, by
Chenda, a 19-year-old seamstress working 80-hour weeks at 5 cents per hour.
FACTORY CONDITIONS
The “death-trap” textile factory Chenda worked in was cramped, hot, often over 100 degrees with no fans and very little ventilation. The two doors were kept locked.
WASHING/IRONING
This t-shirt will need to be washed frequently at high temperatures and require tumble-drying and ironing. 60% of the carbon emissions generated by this simple cotton t-shirt will come from the approximately 25 washes and machine dryings it will require over its lifetime.
After reading this lenghthy "price tag", I launched into my talk about consignment shops. We were running out of time, so I couldn't do my anti-Walmart, anti-cheap clothing, "5 t-shirts for $20" rant. Bummer.
Last month, my family and I took a trip to Washington DC to the Green Festival. This was our first Green Festival and our first trip to DC in several years. Since then, I have praised the festival for their numerous fair trade vendors, tasty vegan food choices and use of compostable kitchenware. The forks, spoons, cups, plates and even the plastic water bottles were made from potato and corn starch and presumably break down in fewer than 120 days.Large "compost bins" were strategically located throughout the convention center along with well-marked recycling bins for paper, plastic, cans and glass. (I'll bet the garbage cans were hardly used.) I thought two things: "How cool is that?" and "Are they really going to dump this stuff in a giant compost pile on the outskirts of DC?"
Two days after the festival I had a client meeting at a multi-billion dollar software firm. The corporate cafeteria where we picked up our lunch to take back to the conference room was stocked to the ceiling with styrofoam everything: food containers, soup bowls, coffee cups, etc. It did, to their credit, have several vegetarian dishes to choose from.
After that meeting, I did a quick search of the web for compostable and biodegradable cups, forks, bowls and carry out containers and found the following prices:
Compostable 7oz cold cups: 5 cents per cup (qty: 2000)
Biodegradable take-out containers: 9 cents per container (qty: 600)
Compostable forks, knives and spoons: 3 cents per item (qty: 1000)
According to Cereplast, manufacturers of the resin used to make these plastic products, price is no longer an issue. In this CNET article, the CEO of Cereplast says: The article goes on to say that in 2000, a box of 1000 biodegrable utensils cost around $60. Today, that same box costs around $10. That's much cheaper than the prices I quoted above - and that's a good thing. If you want to know the difference between biodegradable, degradable and compostable, check out this page on the WorldCentric site - the same site that I found the pricing above.
I'm pretty sure that this multi-billion dollar software firm could get quite the volume discount considering it employees nearly 22,000 people - most of whom probably eat in the convenient (and subsidized) company lunchroom. What I'm not sure of is this: at the end of the day (a saying they like to use), who's going to compost all this stuff?
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 8:55 AM 11 comments
Sunday, I led a discussion group at our Unitarian Universalist fellowship, on garbage. I chose the topic and title of the talk from Elizabeth Royte's best seller "Garbage Land: The secret trail of trash." If you throw things away, this book is for you.I didn't have the book with me - just a print out of the cover. I told the group of about 30 or so that I had loaned the book to my one friend who might actually read a book on garbage. Garbage Land is brilliant. It's a fast-paced, engaging and extremely enlightening story of one woman's investigative journey through the land of garbage and over-consumption.
I emailed Ms. Royte last week. I told her I had spoken to a group of extremely uninformed 3rd graders in the spring and that this time I would be speaking on the same topics (bottled water, plastic bags, over-consumption, etc.) but to a group of of adults. She wrote back:
From her email and from her book, Ms. Royte is clear that there is only one solution to the garbage problem (and it ain't recycling): Buy less stuff.
The Vice President of a New York City waste transfer station is slightly more pessimistic. He tells Ms. Royte, "You want to solve the garbage problem? Stop eating. Stop living."
For most people (in developed countries), buying less stuff is almost as hard as stopping eating and stopping living...
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 7:05 AM 3 comments
Sarah McLachlan, one of my favorite artists, has a heartbreaking video at www.worldonfire.ca. The lyrics are below. I love the line "The more we take the less we become".POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 9:31 AM 3 comments
Believe it or not, today is World Environment Day (WED), a day established by the United Nations in 1972. According the UN's web site:Principal vehicles? Worldwide awareness? Tell that to the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The WallStreet Journal, NPR and the BBC. Not one of these online news sites has even a small blurb on World Environment Day, at least not on the home page. (It's pretty clear that the story of the proposed marriage amendment that would not allow same-sex couples to wed bumped the other "WED" story to an inside page.) A mention was no where to be found on the home pages of both Grist and e Magazines either.I started to question myself and went back to Google and searched again for World Environment Day. Yep. It's today.
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 6:12 PM 2 comments
A few days ago I had the opportunity to make a guest appearence in my daughter Tess's third grade class to talk about what we can do to reduce our ecological footprint on the Earth. (Read: stop shopping at dollar stores.) They were all eager listeners to what I had to say, but the sad part was collectively (aside from Tess) they knew almost nothing about the three R's: recycling, reducing and reusing. I spent and hour with them, starting by asking how many of them turned off the water while brushing their teeth (all of them), how many knew to turn off the lights when leaving the room (again, everyone) and some other easy answer type eco questions. But then I asked them why they should turn off the lights. "To save electricity!" they all yelled. So, I asked them why they should save electricity? Aside from the tall, skinny eight year old whose bedroom is upstairs in my house waving her hand frantically, no one had an answer. So, I finally called on Tess, who proceeded to amaze the class (and the teacher) with her answer. "Electricity is made from gas, and gas is made from fossils and one day we're going to run out of fossils and run out of gas." (I swear we didn't practice that...)My goal was to get them to understand the whole concept of "reduce," so I asked them if they knew where the garbage that they take to the curb goes. They knew the garbage truck came to get it, but after that, it might as well have gone to the mall for all they knew. I wasn't prepared to have to explain what a landfill was, but once I told them that just this year we were opening up 500 new holes in the ground that are the size of several football fields, I think they got the point. When I asked them what's going to happen if we keep throwing away trash, one kid finally got it. "We're going to live next to a landfill, huh?" Amen.
Stay tuned...
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 7:30 PM 2 comments
The Swedes definitely have us beat in recycling convenience. Recycling bins are conveniently located outside of fast food restaurants - Burger King has a 6-hole collection system for trash, liquids, compost, kid's meal boxes, empty cups and bottles. Multi-bin recycling stations (like the one pictured here) are located at the zoo, around the marketplace, near schools, anywhere shoppers might have a recyclable. (The photo is from www.xonus.com.) Outside the only grocery store in the very small, country town of Rattvik, there were two additional bins for recycling batteries and light bulbs!
Did you know that fluorescent lights are 100% recyclable? (Standard incandescent bulbs are not - one more reason to switch to those energy-saving CFLs. Wikipedia does a great job of comparing bulb types.) Recyclers remove the mercury inside the light, then recycle all of the components - glass, metal and the mercury. Why take the trouble to recycle these bulbs? According to an article in the San Francisco Observer: You can find a recycler in your area by going to one of my favorite sites: earth911.org. The closest recycler to me requires the bulbs be wrapped in newspaper or placed in their original containers. Considering that CFLs are guaranteed for 8,000 hours (an entire year if left on 24/7), I'd say you'd have to be a real pack rat to still have the original box!
POSTED BY Wendy Richardson co-author of Nerdy Books AT 4:34 AM 5 comments
