My goodness, it's been almost two months since I posted!
Come back soon for the wrap up of my first year of the plastic challenge.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Friday, June 8, 2012
Plastic Challenge: Week 50
It
just adds up so quickly! Actually a lot of this is from some tidying up
last weekend, just as the plastic challenge week started. Also not the
healthiest week food-wise.
Tally: 46 items, 8.2 ounces
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Please Ignore the Irony
After using about 40 straws over the 49 weeks I've been doing the plastic challenge, I finally got a reusable straw from Glass Dharmra!
And promptly stuck it in a disposable plastic cup.
Somehow requesting no straw at restaurants makes me very self-conscious; more so than almost any other plastic-reducing action. I even feel like it might be harder with my glass straw. It's one thing to just imply I don't like using straws; but to say "no straw, thanks, I brought my own" seems like a much stranger statement than the fairly common "no bag, thanks, I brought my own".
What environmental decision is the hardest for you to carry out?
Friday, June 1, 2012
Plastic Challenge: Week 49
A bit of improvement from the last several weeks. Two notes:
(1) Going forward I'm counting all produce stickers from a week as one item. Most of my produce is from Organics to You deliveries; some has stickers, some doesn't, it seems completely random. Although it would possible, albeit challenging, to find produce without stickers or other packaging, right now healthy eating is a very high priority, and this ensures a much more varied and healthy selection than I would buy for myself.
(2) Ok, after all the eating out I've done lately, and all the straws I've acquired, I finally ordered a glass straw!
Tally: 27 items, 3.4 ounces
(1) Going forward I'm counting all produce stickers from a week as one item. Most of my produce is from Organics to You deliveries; some has stickers, some doesn't, it seems completely random. Although it would possible, albeit challenging, to find produce without stickers or other packaging, right now healthy eating is a very high priority, and this ensures a much more varied and healthy selection than I would buy for myself.
(2) Ok, after all the eating out I've done lately, and all the straws I've acquired, I finally ordered a glass straw!
Tally: 27 items, 3.4 ounces
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Stop Recycling
Recycling is not the point. It's not green, eco-friendly, or sustainable. Recycling uses resources that don't need to be used if you reduce or reuse before you resort to recycling.
(Ok, not seriously, but do other stuff too!!!!)
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They're listed in that order for a reason.
Immediately after linking to facebook my previous post about two new bag bans, I saw a post by My Plastic-free Life about an Illinois bill about to be voted on that would effectively ban plastic bag bans. You can see a summary of SB3442 here and the full text here.
From a quick read through the bill, the overall point seems to be to make manufacturers take responsibility for their product and provide opportunities to increase recycling. However, it also includes a provision that only allows the state to regulate the collection and recycling bags , including that "home rule units" (municipalities, I guess) with less than 2,000,000 people cannot ban or tax plastic bags.
(Ok, not seriously, but do other stuff too!!!!)
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They're listed in that order for a reason.
Immediately after linking to facebook my previous post about two new bag bans, I saw a post by My Plastic-free Life about an Illinois bill about to be voted on that would effectively ban plastic bag bans. You can see a summary of SB3442 here and the full text here.
From a quick read through the bill, the overall point seems to be to make manufacturers take responsibility for their product and provide opportunities to increase recycling. However, it also includes a provision that only allows the state to regulate the collection and recycling bags , including that "home rule units" (municipalities, I guess) with less than 2,000,000 people cannot ban or tax plastic bags.
Coming Soon: Disposable Clothing
Two new plastic bag bans last week!
Los Angeles is now the largest city with a ban. In addition to getting rid of plastic bags (over a 6- to 12-month phase out), stores will also have to charge 10 cents for paper bags.
Even better, an entire state is now plastic bag free! Three of the four counties in Hawaii already had bans; now Honolulu county has joined, and as an extra bonus, paper bags must now contain at least 40% recycled material.
I love/hate reading comments on articles about this topic. Especially comments about the "health concerns". A few weeks ago, an Oregon soccer team had an outbreak of norovirus. One of the girls spend an evening being sick in a hotel bathroom, then another girl grabbed a reusable bag out of said (contaminated) bathroom to carry cookies, which was then passed around on the ride home. Tests showed that the bag was indeed the carrier of the virus.
Google "reusable bag health risk" and you'll find numerous articles about the alleged hazards. Fortunately, most contain, obliquely, a grain of common sense, stating that the issue arises because most users never wash their bags. Yet the conclusion reached from that is that the bags themselves are harmful.
Let's see... if you put raw meat on a cutting board, you wash it to avoid cross-contamination, yes? If you touch raw meat with your hands, you also wash your hands to avoid cross-contamination? But if you put raw meat in a bag, it doesn't make sense to wash it to avoid cross-contamination.
The clothing analogy comes up often in response to such health concerns. Even if the logical flaw wasn't already obvious, I think it presents a good way to get the message across - to paraphrase a comment from an Oregonian article that I can't find at the moment:
Los Angeles is now the largest city with a ban. In addition to getting rid of plastic bags (over a 6- to 12-month phase out), stores will also have to charge 10 cents for paper bags.
Even better, an entire state is now plastic bag free! Three of the four counties in Hawaii already had bans; now Honolulu county has joined, and as an extra bonus, paper bags must now contain at least 40% recycled material.
I love/hate reading comments on articles about this topic. Especially comments about the "health concerns". A few weeks ago, an Oregon soccer team had an outbreak of norovirus. One of the girls spend an evening being sick in a hotel bathroom, then another girl grabbed a reusable bag out of said (contaminated) bathroom to carry cookies, which was then passed around on the ride home. Tests showed that the bag was indeed the carrier of the virus.
Google "reusable bag health risk" and you'll find numerous articles about the alleged hazards. Fortunately, most contain, obliquely, a grain of common sense, stating that the issue arises because most users never wash their bags. Yet the conclusion reached from that is that the bags themselves are harmful.
Let's see... if you put raw meat on a cutting board, you wash it to avoid cross-contamination, yes? If you touch raw meat with your hands, you also wash your hands to avoid cross-contamination? But if you put raw meat in a bag, it doesn't make sense to wash it to avoid cross-contamination.
It's too much work to wash and reuse a bag, so we have to use a disposable bag once and then throw it away. Just like we all wear plastic clothes and throw them away after wearing them once, instead of washing and reusing fabric clothing.It's even more fun, though, when you combine all this with one of the plastic bag manufacturers' arguments for the benefits of their bags - they can be reused! Helix Poly even suggests you use them to carry your lunch. But that's not dangerous...
Sunday, May 27, 2012
$10.8 Billion Kept Out of the Landfill
According to a recent statistic release from the IRS, in 2009, individual taxpayers deducted a total of $31.8 billion of noncash donations. Of that amount, $9.7 billion was donations of corporate stock. $7.6 billion was clothing and $3.2 billion was household items.
As you probably know, if
you itemize deductions on your tax return, you can deduct charitable
contributions, cash or noncash. The total you can deduct is generally
limited to 50% of your adjusted gross income, and to clear up a common
misconception, there isn't an additional limitation on noncash deductions - you
merely have to fill out an additional form (Form 8283)
and provide a few details of your donation if your total exceeds $500.
(It's fascinating, though, how often taxpayers happen to have donated
$450 or $495 worth of items...)
The deduction is generally limited to the fair market value of the item. There are many guides to determining the appropriate value (including IRS Publication 561) of your donations, but that value tends to be about 10 - 25% of the original cost - so we're talking about donations of items that originally cost somewhere between $40 - $100 billion! In just one year! That's a lot of stuff that is happily getting a new life, instead of wasting away in a landfill (figuratively speaking... landfills actually aren't very conducive to biodegration).
Any reuse is awesome, of course! But for a tax deduction, you need to be giving your items to a qualifying tax-exempt organization. Most such organizations will indicate on their website that they are a qualifying 501(c)(3) organization; they must also state this on the receipt they give you to document your donation. To confirm that a charity is in good standing with the IRS and qualifies for tax-deductible donations, you can check on the IRS's website.
Goodwill and the Salvation Army are common donation sites. There are also a myriad of other organizations, local and national, that often accept specialized items. Miss Minimalist has a list of 101 places to donate stuff.
See IRS Publication 526 or a professional tax preparer for additional details on the rules and documentation requirements.
 | |
| $1,173 of donations last winter (Cat not included) |
The deduction is generally limited to the fair market value of the item. There are many guides to determining the appropriate value (including IRS Publication 561) of your donations, but that value tends to be about 10 - 25% of the original cost - so we're talking about donations of items that originally cost somewhere between $40 - $100 billion! In just one year! That's a lot of stuff that is happily getting a new life, instead of wasting away in a landfill (figuratively speaking... landfills actually aren't very conducive to biodegration).
Any reuse is awesome, of course! But for a tax deduction, you need to be giving your items to a qualifying tax-exempt organization. Most such organizations will indicate on their website that they are a qualifying 501(c)(3) organization; they must also state this on the receipt they give you to document your donation. To confirm that a charity is in good standing with the IRS and qualifies for tax-deductible donations, you can check on the IRS's website.
Goodwill and the Salvation Army are common donation sites. There are also a myriad of other organizations, local and national, that often accept specialized items. Miss Minimalist has a list of 101 places to donate stuff.
See IRS Publication 526 or a professional tax preparer for additional details on the rules and documentation requirements.
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