Weekend Enviro-Blog

Here are two interesting enviro articles to read.

The first describes how to cut excess plastics out of your life, which is something I've been consciously attempting for quite some time. The author gives three great reasons to cut out the use of plastics, but doesn't hit on the biggest one (at least for me), which is waste. Plastic never goes away. If we produce a plastic widget for your consumption, that widget will be around for millions and millions of years after you are dead and gone (plastic never biodegrades). Think of how much superfluous plastic we "consume" every day--grocery bags, annoying excess packaging, water/pop bottles, shitty pointless happymeal toys that provide about 4 seconds of entertainment until they go in the trash--all things that are essentially worthless in their utility, completely unnecessary, and have infinitesimally short useful lives, yet will be clogging up landfills, rivers, oceans, and animal esophagi for all eternity. Is it worth it? Personally it disgusts me, it distresses me. To think of how much harm we do to the planet every day, even if we don't mean to, simply because plastics pervade our existence. So whenever possible I try to avoid using plastics, and when I have no choice but to use them, I reuse them and reuse them and then eventually recycle them. Anyway, I think this is a great and thought-provoking article for people who care about the environment, yet haven't really thought about how harmful plastics are. Check it out:

Deplasticize Your Life!
by Starre Vartan, Eco Chick

The second article of interest is about junk mail, that worthless crap we hate to get, yet nevertheless fills our mailboxes. The vast vast vast majority of the time this unsolicited waste goes directly from the mailbox to the trash, sometimes being handshredded in between in the case of ever-wasteful bankspam. Yet as unnecessary and utterly worthless as junk mail is, its impact on the environment is far from insignificant. A recent study estimates that "destroying forests to make paper for junk mail releases as much greenhouse gas pollution as 9 million cars." Check it out:

Junk Mail Produces as Much CO2 as 7 States Combined
by Dan Shapley, The Daily Green

And sign the Petition to Stop Junk Mail!