Emily Bloss

Every time I see a phone book at the end of our driveway, I get mad. I didn’t ask for it, I don’t want it, and I don’t use it. I shove it in my cabinet and it sits there for a year until the next one comes. Then I pull it out and take it to be recycled… and so the process repeats year after year. I called once to have them stop, but I don’t think anything happened… we still have 5 pristine phone books. Today I found a site which says it can help you opt-out of receiving phone books. Yayyy!!!! I hope it works.

Yellow Pages Goes Green

Consider these facts (borrowed from the About page on the site):

Over 500 million of these directories are printed every year. That is nearly two books for every person in the country! These directories produce a staggering amount of waste, not only in terms of misused natural resources but also in filling of valuable landfill space.

To produce 500 million books:

• 19 million trees need to be harvested
• 1.6 billion pounds of paper are wasted
• 7.2 million barrels of oil are misspent in their processing (not including the wasted gas used for their delivery to your doorstep)
• 268,000 cubic yards of landfill are taken up
• 3.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are squandered

It’s pretty sad these days to go, “Oooo! ONLY $3.81 per gallon!” when driving by a gas station. The good news is, you can alter your driving habits and get as much as 35% better mileage. Woo!

SixWise - Hypermiling: How to Save Big on Gas

As you may be able to tell from my last few posts, I’m trying to clear out my Opera tabs (48 at this moment). I notice I post lots of these little tidbits with links when I’m doing that. Hope you enjoy them!!

I just love projects which take something people would normally throw away and make something useful out of it. Here is one such example:

Plastic Bag Tote

What a great idea! Now I have something to look for at the junk store - an M crochet hook. I’m guessing it won’t be too hard to find around here. One problem for this project is we don’t get too many plastic bags because we almost always use canvas bags at the store. I wonder how many it takes to make it?

This reminds me of a show we watched last night on the BBC Channel - Dumped. They sent 11 people to live in a garbage dump for 3 weeks, where they learned to scavenge and make money from the trash, and also they built a pretty nice place to live with things they found. It’s amazing what gets thrown away in our society… not a sustainable way to live at all. Will we all learn we can’t just consume, consume, consume… before it’s too late? I hope so.

I really like recycling, and even more, repurposing. Here’s a great article about recycling:

How to Recycle Practically Anything

I would really like to make a business of repurposing… it’s my dream job. Maybe in a few years I’ll be able to work on that one.

To me, geography is fun. I like to dream about visiting all of the exotic places in the world. Yesterday a found a site (via Gimundo) which donates water for every location you can pinpoint on a blank world map.

Free Poverty

One of the joys of living in Florida’s rural areas is the gopher tortoise. They dig burrows in the sand and munch grass, living a pretty sedate existence (except when their territory gets invaded by another turtle). I was happy to learn that Florida recently reclassified the gopher tortoise as threatened, which means increased protection. Yay!! One of the best results of the reclassification is repeal of a law which said it was OK to bury the tortoises during construction, as long as you paid a fee. Now that’s no longer allowed, thank goodness!!! Defenders of Wildlife has an article - No Tortoise Left Behind - which gives a lot of good info about the plight of and hopes for the recovery of the tortoise population.

Guess where the world’s largest landfill is…? If you said the Pacific Ocean, you would be right. Apparently there’s an area twice the size of Texas that’s filled with trash - mostly plastic. It’s a terrible, huge problem, killing more than 1 million birds and other sea creatures every year, because they eat it, get stuck in it, or feed it to their babies. And because of the way plastic degrades, it’s pretty much impossible to clean it up.

Most of it comes from land, either washed in via storm drains or blown in by the wind. Once the trash enters the water, it’s carried by currents and wind into the patch, where it can drift for many, many years before being eaten, sinking or washing up on the beach.

Here are a couple of places with more information, from HowStuffWorks and a personal account by Charles Moore. It’s rather frightening, and I keep wondering what I can do to help clean up this mess. Maybe that will be my next job?

I found this really neat article on how to make a furoshiki wine carrier… basically you take a square piece of cloth and wind it up around the two wine bottles and you have a nice, safe way to transport the wine. Very cool! Plus, here’s a page to show you how to fold various items into a furoshiki. I’ve printed this and will keep it on hand to wrap presents and such. Another simple and interesting way to help save our planet!

Today, with my nifty new grabby thing, we got to pick up a whole grocery bag’s worth of trash from our walking route in the park! I was thrilled. What a great way to directly help the environment. Thanks, Bleys, for the gift! And thanks, eagle-eye Trav, for spotting the trash, helping to pick up and showing me how to use it better. I’ve never been so happy picking up trash!!

I truly believe we are making ourselves sick by producing unnatural products… we’re poisoning our environment. I wonder how many kids have autism or something like that because of the amount of lead in our lives? It seems every day there’s a new story about lead or some other terrible thing in this or that product. How many of us have Christmas lights from who knows when that are full of it? I read the other day that you should wash your hands after handling strings of lights because lead will get on them from touching the lights. Aieeee!!!

Anyways, this rambling was due to seeing an article about Soapberry - I want to try this on my clothes:

Laundry soap grows on trees

I’ll let you know how it is if I try it. I hope I get a seed!