Are Paper Towels Really Necessary?
May 21, 2008 Eco Friendly Home
I’ll admit it. I can be a bit of a paper towel junkie.
Not too bad. I don’t dry my hands with them (I use a cloth towel for that), but I still use paper towel probably more than I should, given the waste.
It’s 99.9% the convenience of it all. Kids are messy and paper towels are fast. When you’re cleaning up several spills a day most days, you get very fond of convenience.
At the same time I do think about the overall impact. Overusing paper towels generates quite a bit of waste. Using cloth over and over can be better.
There are some things which I do like paper towels better for. I use cast iron frying pans, and oiling them for storage I find paper towels are simpler. Otherwise I’d get a single use out of a clean towel and have to get oil out of it. I’d pretty much need a dedicated set that I didn’t mind the oil on.
If you can, I recommend switching to primarily cloth towels. If you have a nice supply in the hand towel
One of the tricks is to know that they often can be reused. If it’s a stinky or germy job you may only get one use before you need to wash, but just drying off your hands won’t require that you immediately send the towel to the wash. Keep that balance.
Different kinds of cloths can do some jobs better. There are some things I prefer the old style cloth diapers
Other jobs do well with the standard terrycloth kind of towels. You’ll develop your own preferences as you go. The nice thing is that a cloth towel can do the job of several paper ones, as a rule, so you may be saving more than you think if you just count by the job.
Will I be giving up paper towels entirely anytime soon? Probably not. But I am working to steadily decrease my usage of them. It’s a challenging thing to give up with young children in the house.
Tags: cleaning, cloth towels, paper towels
Do the Little Things Matter?
May 20, 2008 Eco Friendly Home, Eco Friendly Parenting
I often write about the little stuff you can do to live a greener life. But when it comes down to it, how much does all that matter? Doesn’t what the big companies do far outweigh what we individuals control?
Sure. But that doesn’t mean the small stuff isn’t important.
The small things do add up. A single compact fluorescent lightbulb isn’t going to make much of a difference in the carbon output of the world. But all of us together changing over to CFLs where possible will make a difference. Still a smaller difference than many industries could make, but a difference nonetheless.
And then there are all the little things you can do that will matter to your family. Buying organic, local or growing your own garden gives your family the chance to eat better foods. It’s something that can matter to you as an individual as well as be kinder to the environment.
I pack my daughter’s school lunch every day in reusable containers. Do I really think it’s going to make a big difference? No, but it makes some difference. Less plastic wasted. Fewer paper bags thrown out. Better control over the kinds of foods my daughter eats.
And then there’s trying to avoid BPA. This can be a tough one, since some argue whether or not it’s even an issue. The FDA doesn’t have a problem with it after all. But there’s still that potential for it to work as an endocrine disruptor. Canada banned it for that possibility. Should we do less for our families just because it’s a small effect, possibly even not an effect at all?
If it’s a choice between a big thing and a little thing, of course, take care of the big things. Fortunately many of the little things really don’t take much time, and can even just be a part of your regular lifestyle.
Tags: BPA, compact fluorescents, little things, making a difference
It’s Hot!
May 19, 2008 Eco Friendly Home
It’s about 10:30 in the morning here, and already 93 degrees F outside. Another really hot day.
We’re pretty good at adapting to the heat. We wear light clothes around the house, and only rarely hit the point during the day that we feel the air conditioner is a necessity. A part of the reason for this is that we keep getting better about covering our windows to keep the heat out.
This year we’ve added one of those emergency blankets
The house still gets warm; it’s about 80 in here right now, but I consider that highly tolerable. It really is a matter of getting used to it. 80 with a ceiling fan is pleasant.
Adaptation and blocking windows isn’t always enough, but it sure helps to cut down on our use of air conditioning. Most often we use it to cool the house down to where it’s comfortable enough for sleeping at night, and that’s it. For our area that’s really, really unusual.
Green Shopping at Home Depot?
May 18, 2008 Eco Friendly Home, Gardening
Home Depot is without a doubt one of my husband’s favorite toy stores. Fortunately, it’s the garden department he’s mostly after. And that made it a lot of fun when a representative asked if I would like to review a few of their green products. They gave me a gift card to try some things out.
What can I say? There were certainly a few plants I need for the garden.
What I really love about these plants (cilantro, watermelon, basil and sage were some of what we needed) is the biodegradable containers. They’re in peatpots rather than the usual plastic containers. You remove the little plastic wrapper (sorry, can’t avoid it entirely), carefully remove the bottom of the pot, and plant.
When wet, the peatpots are a little flexible, so you have to be more careful when picking them up. But I like them better than the plastic ones that most people don’t recycle. I think you can sometimes return those to the store for reuse, though; I don’t know how many places do that right now but it’s something to ask. I remember my mother doing that a lot.
We’ve planted a couple plants from these already, and they seem to be doing all right. We’ve used peatpots for starting seeds in the past, so I have confidence in the technique.
I also checked out the Clorox Green Works products. These have been pretty controversial, since Clorox is not exactly a green company. The Green Works products do have a good ingredients list, though, and I do think it can be good to encourage a company to be greener. If all we do is say it’s not good enough because their other products are bad, what’s their incentive? Up until now I’ve enjoyed products like Simple Green and my own homemade cleansers, so it should be interesting to see how this compares.
I’ll get around to trying these out when it cools off a little. The house is over 90 degrees inside, so even though the bathtub really needs a scrub (how do men generate so much dirt?), it can wait a little while.
Tags: green shopping, home depot
How to Clean Outside Areas
May 12, 2008 Eco Friendly Home, Environmentally Friendly, Gardening
I got thinking on the topic of summer today when my daughter’s kindergarten teacher commented that there are only 4 Mondays left in our school year. It was one of those “wow, summer’s almost here” moments for me.
That, of course, brought me to thinking about cleaning up the outside of the house. Living in southern California, it’s pretty practical to keep the outside areas of the house nice all year. We don’t get much rain here, after all, never mind significantly colder weather.
One of those things that has always been a bit annoying is how some people like to clean their walkways and driveways with the hose. Considering the water situation in our area, I hope to see very, very little of that this year, but I know people will do it just because it’s faster.
A good broom
Most of the time, that’s all you need. If there’s a dried up mess outside then yeah, you might want to get the hose as the fastest way to clean it up. But most of the time you don’t really need it.
The same goes later in the year for leaf blowers and such. Get a good rake and a broom for the walkways, and get your yard cleaned up without wasting fuel, electricity or water.
Of course, many people do one thing that is pretty green is add plants to their garden. That can be more or less green, depending on how you garden. The plastic containers that many plants come in can be problematic, although some garden centers may take them back if they’re in good condition. Use compost instead of fertilizer, and you can make your yard more beautiful without hurting the environment much.
