Day 153 of our Green Year: Understanding Plastic Numbers

Throughout Our Green Year, we have endeavored to try and get rid of plastic from our lives. Plastic is everywhere it seems, and it can be very hard to eliminate it when even organic food is packed in plastic. During Our Green Year, we have stopped using plastic grocery bags, plastic vegetable bags, excess packaging that often includes plastics and even plastic milk jugs, which we replaced with glass milk jugs.

Since it can be very hard to completely eliminate plastics, it is very important to recycle and re-use what plastics you get. Each year, billions of plastic items are disposed of, but only a small portion of that is actually recycled. That is highly unfortunate because so much of it ends up in the environment, including the Pacific Garbage patch, which is a huge section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that carries massive amounts of plastic that is slowly broken down and eaten by fish and birds.

There are plastic numbers on most plastics, and this can give you a clear indication of what you can re-use and what you can recycle. Here are the numbers and what you can do with them:

1. This number is on most water and pop bottles and some packaging. It is hard to de-contaminate, and cleaning can lead to the release of harmful chemicals, including some carcinogens. DO NOT REUSE, RECYCLE THIS.
2. This number is on milk jugs, detergent jugs, oil bottles, plastic bags and toys. It is one of the safest forms of plastic and it can be re-used. Be sure to re-use this before you recycle it.
3. This number is found in food wraps, food oil bottles, teething rings, pet toys and more. This does produce toxins from manufacturing to disposal. Do not use this in the microwave and DO NOT REUSE, RECYCLE IT.
4. This number is found in shrink wraps, squeezable bottles and plastic bags. It is less toxic and can be re-used before being recycled.
5. This number is in bottle tops, disposable diapers, carpeting, food bags, yogurt and margarine containers. It is one of the safest plastics and it can be re-used before being recycled.
6. This number is on plastic cutlery and foam packaging. Chemicals can leach into food products. DO NOT USE AT ALL. FIND ALTERNATIVES.
7. This number is used on layered and mixed plastics and cannot be re-used, so recycle when done with it.
   

Last night, Layla and I saw a great news story about a man in Wisconsin who has found a way to make his dairy farm completely recyclable. While the animals, 1,600 cows in total, make milk by eating organic feed, they also produce manure that John Vrieze turns into water. Vrieze was tired of disposing of thousands of dollars of manure in holding ponds every year, so he started using the Nu Way system that breaks down cow manure into re-usable elements. Now, everything produced by the cows on the farm is re-used. You may think that the water would be disgusting, but Vrieze says both he and the cows drink it. It is great to see how some farmers are finding that things can be green, especially when it has to do with one of the largest greenhouse gas producing industries in the world; cattle farming. You can view the story here from CNN (I don't know why there is no sound, but I can't find another video. You get the gist of it though):

WKRG.com Video

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A good blog friend of ours, Wandering Coyote, will feature odd searches through Google and other search engines that bring up her site. They can be pretty funny, so here are two searches two people did that brought up our site:

• "5 pictures showing how a place has changed over the course of several years"
• "is it a deer or cow foot print"
  

Also, speaking of news stories, here is a news story that appeared on Shaw TV in our area about Layla and I. Enjoy!

Day 65 of our Green Year: Reusable Vegetable Bags

Here we are with only 300 days left in Our Green Year, and we have decided to continue our quest to banish plastic items from our house with the banishment of plastic bags for vegetables. We banished plastic bags very early on in Our Green Year, and now we are getting rid of those plastic bags that we keep vegetables in from the store to home and in the fridge, before throwing them out.

These are just as bad for the environment, and they are only used for slightly longer than plastic bags. Instead, Layla and I have decided to do the following with our vegetable bag needs. Since we are trying not to use items like plastic wrap and plastic bags, we won't be getting those bags at the grocery store and reusing them.

1. Use paper bags, like what you have for mushrooms at the grocery store if we don't have anything to put our fruit in.
2. Get a small mesh vegetable bag that can hold everything from apples and oranges to nectarines and honeydew melons.
   
3. Buying bags that have been made from recycled goods. The RDKB here sells bags that are made from recycled juice containers, they look great and are awesome to use.

One of our Green Friends, Mother's Going Green (http://www.mothersgoinggreen.blogspot.com/) did a blog this week about the types of plastic that are used in the world. Each bag has a symbol (much like the recycle symbol) with a number in it. I took note today of what number is on the plastic bags at the store. For that type of plastic, Mother's Going Green said it was made of high density polyethylene, which is used in everything from milk containers to cereal box liners. It is apparently safe to use, but that is not conclusive. Regardless of the health issues that may be related, it takes 1.75 kilograms of petroleum to make just one kilogram of high density polyethylene. With higher prices for oil these days, don't be surprised if you suddenly have to start paying for those bags.

Got any suggestions for what we can use? Send us an e-mail at crwbaird@gmail.com or leave us a comment!

Day 62 of our Green Year: Plastic Wrap Elimination

Did you know that oil prices are going up? Unless you live under a rock on Mars, you probably do. Well, when oil prices go up, so does absolutely everything else with oil and oil byproducts with it. Most are made from petroleum based products and that is not only bad for your pocket book, but for the environment as well. Typically, plastic wrap is made from polyvinylidene chloride, or polyvinyl chloride (which both end up getting in close contact with your food.
These chemicals are very toxic when they are produced, used and incinerated. Now, they are very rigid plastics, so those who manufacture plastic wrap will put in phthalates, which can cause hormonal disruption, development problems, and oh ya, that also comes in close contact with the food you eat.

As a result, Layla and I are banning plastic wrap in our house. No more of it at all. We came to the conclusion of why we would ban plastic bags, but have plastic wrap that is only used for awhile then thrown away. So, we are getting rid of plastic wrap for that reason, as well as the environmental impact it causes when it is made, and the horrible impact it has on our bodies when we ingest food that has been in contact with these chemicals for hours, or days.

Instead, we are choosing to use some alternatives.

1. One thing we do is take dishes and use those as containers. They are not perfect, but they do work okay. This means taking a bowl and putting it over a plate of food, or using another plate as a lid on a plate of food. This is simple, we can keep doing it and it is environmentally healthy.
2. Reusable containers are a great fit. We already have some for take out and Subway, so we are going to get some more and use that for food in the fridge. Also reusable, so that is a big plus.

For now, we are going to hold off on aluminum foil. We banned aluminum cans, and having aluminum foil seems like a step in the wrong direction. Layla and I think just using the containers and other dishes should work fine for us instead.

Thank you as well to Darren at the Weekender for doing a story on Our Green Year in an upcoming issue of the paper.

Day 3 of our Green Year: Going From Plastic to Cloth

We are beginning our third day of our Green Year by scrapping buying plastic bags, and instead using cloth bags. These bags (modeled by our dog Niko) were bought (we have four) for .99 cents each from a local store, except for the big one which we got for free from our local city.
We calculated today that we use about eight plastic bags per week in our weekly shopping (food and otherwise), and that amounts to 32 plastic bags per month, or 384 plastic bags per year. We are a family of two, so a family of four will use 768 plastic bags per year on average.

The cloth bags we have can not only hold more, they have longer usage lives and they cause no ill effects to the environment. Sadly, even though these bags can last a decade or so for use, plastic bags will exist in our landfills and elsewhere for about 500 to 1,000 years, despite being used for five minutes on average. Many of the plastic bags used actually end up in oceans, where they get in the stomachs of marine animals and slowly kill them horribly.

Thankfully, there will now be 384 less plastic bags in the landfills and oceans because of four cloth bags that cost us three dollars.

Reduction on our Carbon Footprint: 384 Plastic Bags in Landfills From Our House (.0029 tonnes or 6.4 pounds of waste)