BiG TeA PaRtY Sustainable Living

GREEN, IT’S THE NEW BLACK

BY ELIZABETH FIEND 1/8/8

Pollution and degradation of the environment happens in so many, many unpredictable ways. It’s not just big business and the Feds — yours, mine, everyone’s personal, everyday actions have unforeseeable consequences on the environment as well. Everything is interrelated to extents we can’t even imagine.

Rwanda has banned the use of plastic bags for environmental reasons. The bags are trashy, don’t disintegrate, and who would have guessed they would do so much harm to marine life? Plastic bags are made from non-renewable natural resources like oil. Rwanda has switched to raffia bags, woven from the dried leaves of tropical palms. F*cking Rwanda, the home of genocide and government sponsored rape their doing environmental stuff?

So why can’t we switch too? Oil. We love it. We want to use it in as many different and crazy ways as we can. We want double bags too. Every purchase, no matter how lightweight, put it in a double bag please. You wouldn’t want to be one of those people who bring a reusable cloth bag to the store? Or would you?
Sustainability it’s a new buzz word. You’ll be hearing it more and more often, and hopefully you’ll start living it. A sustainable lifestyle means that your actions won’t have negative consequences on future generations. Sounds impossible.

Yeah well it’s not easy that’s for sure.

Ladies, you on The Pill? Well you’re screwing the environment. Say what?!?! It seems that female hormones from birth control pills have a gender-bending effect on fish. If you’re on the pill you’ve got hormones in your urine and they get flushed down the toilet into rivers (and our drinking water). A third of the fishes in English rivers are changing sex due to this bizarre addition of female hormones to river water. Weird, huh? If you’re not having sex on a consistent basis, get off The Pill. There are other, healthier methods of birth control if you’re not doin’ it steady.

You know that alternative medicine you’ve switched to cuz the pharmaceutical industry is so screwed up? Well, you’re messin’ up the environment. An upswing in use of alternative medicines has fueled billions of dollars in the illegal trade of some of the world’s most endangered plants. And, especially in the case of Chinese medicine, endangered animal species as well. Read the ingredients; know the source of your alternative treatments.

Have you cut down on red meat? Are you’re trying to decrease the amount of “bad” fat you eat and increase your intake of the heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids? Fantastic! So you’ve switched over to eating more fish right? Bad move. The oceans, you know where the fish live, they’re really polluted. But that’s not all folks. We’re over-fishing like crazy. Ecologists have predicting that we’ll actually run out of seafood in our lifetime if we don’t scale back both on the pollution and the amount of fish we kill each year. Become a flexitarian, someone who’s vegetarian at least part of the time.

What could be next?

Mothers milk, it’s the best thing for your baby. But startling new studies have found in breast milk trace amounts not only of Teflon, but rocket fuel as well! Don’t even bother to switch to cow milk. The Centers for Disease Control and Protection says Teflon and rocket fuel are in moo juice too. It’s grim. What to do?

Let’s forget it all and go party.

Green is the new black, at least in the Netherlands. Rotterdam’s new Off Corso is a sustainable night club. Get this, the dance floor in this club generates energy! Is that like the coolest thing, like, ever? Dancing on the floor which is spring-loaded generates enough energy to run the clubs sound and light systems. Opening night featured “biological beer,” what ever that is, and club goers could customize their outfits with fair-trade clothing accessories. On tap for the future are toilets that use rain water, walls that will change color with the increase/decrease of body heat and the “relax roof,” Garden of Delight, a roof top garden where you can munch on fair trade Oke fruit. Except for the fact that the clubbers depicted in the ad for this club are the most squeaky-clean-cut group of people I’ve ever seen, I so want to go there. Who has frequent flyer miles? Call me, ok?

If you can’t reuse, at least recycle.

In the UK you can now recycle your drink bottles, cans and plastics in reverse vending machines (RVMs). Instead of spewing out crappy junk food the company reVend & Spend’s new innovation can identify, collect, sort and process used beverage containers for recycling. A drinker deposits the used beverage container into a RVM. The machine then reads the bar code on the container to figure out what its made of and then sorts, crushes and shreds it. Currently the machines, which run on only 40 watts of electricity a day, can hold 1000 containers. The RVMs can also be fitted to monitors usage and publish recycling statistics. This feel-good feature can be used by schools or organizations to hold contests and grant awards for the most recycling. I feel so good already! The machines can also be fitted to issue coupons and vouchers.

In the U.S. individuals and small startup companies are doing a lot, too. We’re just not as hip and fun as they are across the ocean. Lindsay Smith, a former Hollywood screenwriter, has developed and is marketing rubber sidewalks. The sidewalks are supposed to be nice and bouncy to the feet and they allow trees to grow without roots upending the sidewalks (supposedly a major problem in the ‘burbs’). But the biggest bonus is that these Rubber sidewalks are made entirely out of recycled tires. If you don’t already know it, old tires are a huge burden on the environment. Burning them is super toxic so they end up lying around junk yards collecting rain water. Yeah so? These rain water filled tires are a MAJOR breading ground for mosquitoes.

Remember, how I said everything is interrelated in ways we can’t even imagine? Three words, West Nile Virus. The more old tires, the more mosquitoes — they bite you, you could get sick. Maybe die. The tire/mosquito thingy is such a big deal that even Philly has started a program to get rid of old tires.

Unfortunately it’s not at all green.

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