Mom Goes Green

Saturday is “America Recycles Day”… a day that ‘encourages more people to join the movement toward creating a better natural environment by recycling and buying recycled products’ and ‘promotes the social, environmental and economic benefits of recycling.’

A very worthwhile cause, I’d say!

As the Recycling/Environmental Programs Chair at our daughter’s school I’m promoting this great day by encouraging the kids to submit their best recycling tips and the favorite ways their families recycle.   I’m going to compile all of their great ideas and turn it into a recycling newsletter that will be sent home to each family.  Some will even win cool prizes, like a recycled pencil bag from Terracycle! The response has been overwhelming!  It’s so exciting to see their enthusiasm.  Kids rule!

So, to get back to the basics of this day… let’s remember WHY we recycle:

• to reduce pollution
• to save energy
• to help the environment
• to save natural resources
• to keep trash out of landfills

And here are some things to think about …

1. PLASTIC– it can take 20 years for a plastic bag to biodegrade and 250 years for a plastic cup!  And if every American household recycled just one of every 10 plastic bottles, it would keep 200 million pounds of plastic out of landfills each year!
2. PAPER – it accounts for HALF of what is sent to landfills… and it’s recyclable! Plus, recycling one ton of paper would save enough energy to power an average American home for five months!
3. ALUMINUM – recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a computer for 3 hours.  Last year cans that were NOT recycled and went to landfills were valued at $600 million! (let me go get my shovel and start digging!)
4. GLASS – a bottle in a landfill would take more than 4000 years to decompose, but glass never “wears out” and can be recycled forever!

Sadly, 75% of “trash” is recyclable, but only 25% actually gets recycled.

So get recycling, increase your recycling, start someone you know recycling… just get to it!… because “America Recycles” and that’s a club all of us should want to belong to!

I’m back up and running.  We have power, phone, our safety and our home — something that many, in the wake of Hurricane Ike, cannot say.

Our utility company said we peaked at over a million customers without power and we’re now down to about a quarter of a million… and some, whose power will not be restored until sometime Sunday…eek.

I’ve been seeing the aftermath and hearing chainsaws all day but, again, we have our safety and our home to be grateful for.

…sending all the best to those who can’t say the same…. wish I could hug you…

I suppose I should have been saying this Sunday afternoon BEFORE the remnants of Hurricane Ike decided to take his hike through Northeastern Ohio, mix with a cold front entering from the west and stir up 70 mph winds that toppled trees, ripped down powerlines and left us WITHOUT power or phone.  Yippee!  Thanks, Ike!

It’s not fun around here.  They say it will likely be FRIDAY before everything is restored.  FABULOUS!  But at least we’re not in Galveston… 

That’s where many of our power crews have gone to assist in restoring their power first.

Right now, I am away from home, on borrowed power, with a borrowed connection and I am, unfortunately, on hiatus until everything is restored.

It’s the power and force of Mother Nature.  Don’t suppose it has anything to do with global warming, do you?  Hmmmm…..

If you knew my father-in-law you might think this is a comment he is making about my mother-in-law, but alas, it is not! (And after 49 years, I suppose he doesn’t mind the hot air all that much!)

But I’m having the strangest little obsession with public restrooms and the unimaginable amount of paper towel waste that gets generated in a single day.  Don’t get me wrong…I’m not lying awake at night thinking about it, but for the longest time I’ve felt that while I’m recycling my tiny cream cheese box, all around the country there are public restrooms that essentially “allow” people to use four feet of paper to dry their hands.

One of the greatest things I’ve seen recently is an EXTREMELY high powered hand dryer that dries your hands in about 7-10 seconds flat…poof, you’re done… then it shuts off immediately. (Warning: they also nearly blow the flesh off of your hands and it almost shot our son across the room, but they’re great!) Problem is, you don’t see them often and far too many public restrooms haven’t even moved away from paper towels.

The thing I struggle with is the germ-factor.  When you walk away with damp hands, it’s a place for even minimal germs to hang around.  Paper towels help you dry better, right?  Plus, that door handle-factor…even our kids will occasionally yell out, “I got it, Mommy!” and use the paper towel to pull the door open.  Then I prop my foot by the door and they run back to throw it in the trash.

When I was thinking about alternatives, I discovered that in many Asian countries, you aren’t provided either choice.  You carry a small towel or handkerchief for hand drying!  I think that’s pretty cool, but how neurotic would I look doing THAT around here?

Given the choice, I wish more public restrooms would use hand dryers.  They are the far better choice for the environment…just a lot of hot air!  And despite the energy usage, that doesn’t compare to the extreme paper waste of dispensers.

On second thought, the back of my kids’ shirts will do…never mind.

So the whole “dead washer” thing got me thinking about other washing… dishwashing.

For some reason, ever since my daughter was a baby, I have felt compelled to wash my kids’ dishes, cups, utensils, etc. by hand. I suppose my logic has to do with the feeling that when I scrub them by hand, I can insure they get really, really clean, and they don’t sit around in a dishwasher, picking up cooties from other stuff.  Yeah, may be ridiculous, but it’s made sense to me for the past 6-1/2 years!

So I set out to see how wasteful that really is.  Lo and behold, in my newest quest of dishwasher vs. hand-washing, I learned a lot.  So, here I am to share this with you too!…

First, and most compelling:  newer dishwashers use only half the energy, one-sixth the water and much less soap, compared to hand-washing.  The cleanliness factory also favors dishwashers (BAH! I’m wrong again!).

Just think about how much water you waste waiting for the right temperature when you’re hand- washing?! I was guilty of that, big time.  And my husband is NOTORIOUS for wandering around the kitchen, doing other things, while water is still running! (… that remains a small (huge) pet peeve of mine, dear husband!)

You can also make your process more eco-friendly by skipping the pre-wash cycle, only running full loads and skipping the heat dry (that ALONE, saves 50% of the energy use!).

I understand that there may be methods of hand-washing that use very small amounts of water.  I also know that, in order to get truly clean items out of the dishwasher, they do need a degree of cleaning and elbow-grease before they reach the dishwasher, but this should be done quickly and immediately, before all of the food gets dried on … (oh yummy! It’s that “cootie factor” I always feared!)

So, SHOCKER!  Appliance wins this battle!  I’m going to give so much hand-washing a break and try to use the appliance exclusively for a while and see how it goes.  “Dishwasher” is one of the ‘Mom titles’ I’m willing to give up.

Yep…dead.  It was loaded up with my kids’ laundry and the damn thing wouldn’t spin.  It was such a joy to wring every item by hand so I could put them in the dryer (so, wringing?  That’s how they used to do it, huh?).

Of course, it was only one year beyond warranty(!), and the repair would have been so costly the only choice was to buy a new one. Fabulous.

The irony of the whole event is the education I received in my quest to find a new washer.  Did you know that top-loading washers require massive amounts of energy and water?… something I never thought about for a second, and I walked into the store expecting that’s what I would buy.  Was I ever wrong.

Front-loading washers are such an environmentally-conscious choice and I had no idea. I’ll wrap this in a nutshell:  They require 60% less water, 50% less energy to heat the water, hold larger loads (because there’s no agitator - so you will need to do fewer loads) and they spin faster (extracting more water and reducing the dry time in your dryer) and in turn, consume less dryer energy.  I love it!

If every U.S. household replaced their washer with a front-loading washer, the water saved each year could fill more than one million Olympic-sized swimming pools. ONE MILLION.

Meet my new washer…isn’t she pretty?   Sure, it cost more, but over time the savings in water and energy will balance it out, and now that I “know what I know”, I wouldn’t dream of NOT making the environmental choice.

Of course, one of my concerns was what happens to my poor, old, dead washer.  I am happy to report that the retailer has a local contract and it will be picked up and all recyclable parts and materials WILL be recycled.  Whew!  Without that kind of answer, I don’t think I would have bought from them…

…so, I just got greener…and since I am a green mom, I suppose the death of my “water & energy sucking” washing machine was destiny, with a splash of fate.  No problem.  I’ll take that wake-up call.

If you’re reading this, chances are you might have a blog or website of your own (that you host somewhere) or are at least considering launching something.

Well, can you believe there are actually GREEN hosting companies? And I just switched to one. I mean, wouldn’t it be hypocritical of me to talk about green living if the server I host with is sucking up massive amounts of energy?!

I’m using Greenspace with Rackspace. They have low voltage processors, energy efficient hard drives & RAM and carbon offsets for each server. I mean really….how cool is that?

If you’re considering a new provider or would like to switch to one that is truly thinking green, check them out here: http://www.rackspace.com/partners/solution_partners

Who would have thought I could make my MomGoesGreen blog even greener!

I love Cleveland. We are NOT the “mistake on the lake”* or any of the other pathetic references you have heard. (As my dear friend, Kev, says “Please, come up with something original!”) I always say “People who don’t know HOW to love Cleveland, don’t KNOW Cleveland.”

Anyhow, I vaguely remember hearing about World Environment Day a few months ago. I truly meant to research it, but I admit that in the chaos of being a Mom, I forgot about being a Green Mom, and it slipped my mind…

Until it was time to tuck my kids into bed for the night. Because we can see Cleveland from the back of our house, we all get used to looking out and seeing downtown. But that night, our daughter said “Mommy, where’s Cleveland?” I was ready to ask her what that silly question was all about, until I noticed she was looking out her window.

Lo and behold…where WAS Cleveland? The city was dim and so many of the lighted buildings we were used to seeing just didn’t seem to be there. It wasn’t until later, when I saw the late news that I realized….Wow. We participated.

Cleveland turned off non-essential lights to recognize World Environment Day! We are moving in the right direction. We may be a bit behind other regions, but just like greening our daily lives, every step is a step in the right direction.

No more “mistake” jokes, okay? New motto: Green City Blue Lake….

(* The important thing to remember about the Cuyahoga River catching on fire nearly 40 years ago is that it sparked an EPA movement that fought for strict regulations on industrial pollution and resulted in legislation aimed at cleaning up the nation’s rivers, including the passage of the Clean Water Act (less than a year after the incident). I think we should be proud, not ashamed.)

photos by: www.urbanplanet.org