simple.green.organic.happy.

Category: Conscious Consumerism: Shopping & Reviews

  • Green Cleaning 101 (again!)

    Green Cleaning 101 (again!)

    child cleaning table

    This post contains recycled content. It originally ran on May 12th, soon after I started this blog, but in light of today’s video on DelawareMoms.com, I thought I’d republish it.

    Many thanks to Patti Petitte for getting me involved with this video! And for not making me seem too much like a goober.

    Cleaning your house with environmentally friendly household products saves you money, cuts down on clutter, makes your life much less complicated, and cuts down dramatically on chemical exposure. It is the epitome of simple, green, organic, happy living.

    I am not going to beat you over the head with statistics about the chemicals involved in household cleansers. I am only going to say that with lead paint on our toys, pollution in our air, traces of prescription drugs in our tapwater and residual pesticides in our clothing and linens, I am not going to use something to “clean” my house that is labelled Warning: Toxic. Keep out of the reach of children.

    To me, that says, Poison. Do not keep in house.

    Switching over to safer cleaning was easy. It made my life simpler and freed up a whole shelf in my linen closet. I can now delegate a fair portion of the cleaning to my children without fearing that they will sear their lungs or go blind. My husband enjoys the “mad scientist” element of mixing up his own cleansers. And you can customize the fragrances, strengths, and appearance to your liking.

    Here’s what we use:

    Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. Vegetable-based and biodegradable, it is ultra-concentrated and will last forever.

    • Use it straight for: handwashing, clothing, dishes, bathing and shampooing of pets and humans ( remember that a little goes a long way!)
    • Add a teaspoon to a spray bottle filled with water for all-purpose cleaning: tabletops, counters, fingerprints on walls, spot treatment on carpets, everyday bathroom cleaning.
    • Use the tea tree or eucalyptus varieties for extra antiseptic qualities, or
    • Use the fragrance-free baby variety and add 20 drops of your own essential oils for scent.
    • In general, the longer you allow this to sit after spraying, the less “elbow grease” required.
    • These soaps do not foam up like you may be used to, which saves considerable amounts of time and water during rinsing.

    Dr. Bronner’s Sal Suds is an all-purpose cleanser that has that familiar scent of pine. It is specifically made for surface cleaning and is probably a better choice if you do not plan to use it as a hand or bath soap.

    • This is our floor cleaner, again using one teaspoon in a spray bottle filled with hot water.

    20 Mule Team Borax is excellent for heavy-duty bathroom cleaning.

    • Just pour some onto a sponge or rag and scrub away. It is non-abrasive and does not cause your hands to become red and swollen, like what I used to use.
    • Pour some into toilet bowl and let sit overnight, give a quick swish in the morning.
    • You can also add borax to your laundry to boost your detergent’s cleaning and whitening power.

    Vinegar and water in a spray bottle:

    • works as a general disinfectant (vinegar smell dissipates when dry, or add 20 drops of essential oil for scent and extra antiseptic qualities.)
    • is great for cutting through bacon grease residue on your stovetop.

    Club soda in a spray bottle:

    • Is a great mirror and window cleaner without the horrible fumes.
    • keeps stains from setting.

    Baking soda is known to soak up odors in the fridge. Also:

    • use instead of a Brillo to scrub pots and pans (if it’s really bad, pour baking soda on when pan is still hot and let sit throughout meal or overnight.)
    • sprinkle onto carpets and let sit overnight to absorb pet odors, vacuum in morning.
    • for kitchen sink drain maintenance, pour in some baking soda, then pour in vinegar for exciting foamy action; follow up with a kettle of boiling water.

    Lemon juice quickly gets the onion smell off your hands so you can rub your teary eyes. Or:

    • Freeze lemon juice in ice-cube trays and run through your garbage disposal to keep it sharp and smelling fresh. (Lemon peel and regular ice cubes also does the trick.)
    • Combine lemon juice and water in a bowl and microwave for a minute; allow to cool; wipe microwave clean.
    • One part lemon juice to two parts olive oil can be used as a natural wood cleaner.
    • Not a cleaning tip, but good to know: Dip cut apple slices into lemony water to keep them from browning in kids’ lunchboxes.

    Houseplants are an easy way help keep your air clean and fresh, and they just make you feel better about yourself.

    • I highly recommend an aloe plant in your bedroom, because they release extra oxygen at night, when you’re breathing deeply. After a full year of extreme negligence, ours is still alive, lush and enormous; and you can use the aloe as an emergency lotion or sunburn treatment.

    Spray bottles and a bucket to keep everything together can be found at your local dollar store. Dr. Bronner’s and essential oils are available online and can be found at health and organic stores; we get ours from Trader Joe’s.

    I cut old towels into rags in lieu of sponges, and wrap one around our old Swiffer for mopping.

    “Our house is clean enough to be healthy,
    and dirty enough to be happy.”
    -Anonymous

    Further reading:

    Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck
    Clean House, Clean Planet by Karen Logan offers up cost analysis in addition to recipes
    How to Grow Fresh Air by B.C. Wolverton classifies 50 houseplants by how effectively they clean your air and by ease of upkeep.

    For a comprehensive list of essential oils and their properties, click here.

    This post was first in a three part series. You may also like:
    Green Cleaning 101: Family Edition, or
    Green Cleaning and Social Responsibility.

  • Book Review: Go Green, Live Rich by David Bach

    Got someone in your life who balks at “going green”? I think I’ve found the book for you.

    Why do people fight the environmental movement?

    Because they see it as a movement, that’s why.

    How do you win over someone who thinks that “being green” is nothing but an annoying, touchy-feely, feel-good philosophy touted by a bunch of bleeding hearts and tree-huggers standing smugly in their pulpits?

    A cantankerous uncle, perhaps. Maybe a high-schooler that feels “the whole save-the-Earth, go-green thing has become a trend that has to go” (that’s an actual quote from my local newspaper!).

    This book is a good place to start.

    David Bach is the bestselling author of The Automatic Millionaire:A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich and Smart Couples Finish Rich: 9 Steps to Creating a Rich Future for You and Your Partner, as well as several other personal finance books.

    I’ve read The Automatic Millionaire and found it to be practical and inspiring. In short, Bach recommends “paying yourself first”; setting aside a percentage of your income from an early age and allowing time, careful investing, and the power of compound interest do the rest.

    Coining the now-familiar phrase “the latte factor”, Bach drives home the point that saving money is something anyone can do, no matter what their salary may be, and with little difficulty: those little dollars a day add up over time, and add up big.

    It’s simple, it’s obvious, it’s proven, and very few people do it. Bach spends an entire book hammering away at this one point and ultimately changed the way I look at spending and saving.

    So I was curious to see if he would prove as persuasive with Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth and Get Rich Trying.

    Go Green, Live Rich is an easy read, a fun flip-through, with lovely photography throughout. Each tip is a page or two long, highlights how much money can be saved by adopting it, and includes “Go Green Action Tips” for further reference. The list of 50 tips is fairly standard, beginning with Calculate Your Carbon Footprint, passing through old friends like Switch to Compact Fluorescent Bulbs and Grow Your Own.

    There are tips like Take a Volunteer Vacation and Carbon Offsets; these are gathered into sections titled Make Green a Family Value and Give Green, it’s nice to see these emphasized.

    The first indication that Go Green, Live Rich is a little different from your standard “beginner’s guide to green living” is the heading BECOMING A GREEN MILLIONAIRE ON A FEW DOLLARS A DAY.

    Bach makes the valid point that many people believe that being eco-conscious is a choice affordable only to the affluent. Who wants to pay more for organic produce or recycled-content paper? Can someone who is most decidedly not wealthy, or even affluent, live a sustainable and environmentally-friendly lifestyle without going broke?

    Well, we do it. On a plumber’s salary. But David Bach goes so far as to say that going green will make you rich.

    How?

    First up is a redefining of what it means to be rich. Bach describes “living rich” in these terms:

    “living a life in line with your deepest values is a gift we give ourselves every single day. There is peace in knowing that the houses we live in, the way we work and travel, and our daily habits are serving the planet, our true home, not destroying it.”

    I made the same argument a while back on my book blog– which is being sorely neglected now that I’m reviewing books over here all the time- when I clumsily point out:

    When we fix our beliefs firmly in our minds, and consciously apply those beliefs to our actions; when we stop living for tomorrow and instead look at our lives as a series of right nows; when every action consciously reflects what we believe, that’s living.

    The second argument is more likely to appeal to your cantankerous uncle. It applies the same principles illustrated in The Automatic Millionaire.

    Let’s say you make four changes in your life based on tips found in this book.
    Annually, you could:

    • Save $884 by improving your fuel economy.

    • Save $129 on power by sealing air leaks in your home.

    • Save $85 by turning your thermostat up or down by three degrees.

    • Save $1,560 by packing your own lunch.

    “That’s a total of $3,758 per year, or approximately $10 a day of green savings.

    And here’s the best part: If you were to invest that $10 a day (instead of finding new things to spend it on), and you earn a 10 percent annual return(some of the green funds you’ll learn about later have earned far higher returns), in 30 years you would have….$678,146.

    With just four of the tips in this book you could earn nearly $700,000 for your future, all while living a greener lifestyle today.”

    If that isn’t persuasive, practical incentive for living an ecologically minded lifestyle, I don’t know what is.

    For the purposes of The Blogging Bookworm:

    I’d rate this book 5 out of 5 for the newly green or the not-yet green for its concise, practical, non-preachy treatment of living an ecologically responsible life from an unexpected (read: non-hippie) source.

    I would also recommend that deeper greens give it a flip through, even though you’ve probably already seen, if not implemented, nearly all of these tips.

    We have to keep in mind where we started, with CFLs and recycling. Our “green roots”, so to speak.

    Remember that you didn’t always grow your own food, hang out your laundry, take navy showers, bake your own bread, write your state representative, raise chickens, heat your water with solar power, or whatever it is that you do.

    It started with awareness, followed by one action. Then another, and another, and then a forever striving to do more.

    Green bloggers often get caught up in green competitions, a la Ed Begley Jr and Bill Nye ( I will continue to link to this article until everyone has read it), which is great; these challenges provide encouragement and a sense of community, as well as motivation to stretch ourselves. But I think many of us began blogging as a way of saying, “I went green, and you can do it too.” Do your posts still carry this intention, reflect this encouragement?

    Books like Go Green, Live Rich serve as a touchstone to our green beginnings, a reminder that a very important aspect of being ecologically responsible is to spread awareness in a way that is accessible and achievable.

    The real wealth found in this book is in its attempts to spread eco-consciousness in a new and universal way.

    What new ways can we, as individuals and as a blogging community, use to attract the not-yet green?

    In what ways have you found success?

    What are your thoughts on the ethics of “get rich” as a motivation to live sustainably?

    Non-bloggers, not-yet greens, please chime in! What sort of information and inspiration do you look for? Your input is most valuable!

  • Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; the "Classic that Launched the Environmental Movement"

    Jeez, with a title like that, who can resist?

    Silent Spring is a book that most everyone has heard about; even my seven year old knew about Rachel Carson, the spring without birdsong, and the effects of DDT on eagle’s eggs.

    It is comprehensive and admittedly somewhat exhausting; Carson explores the hazards of pesticide abuse from every conceivable angle, with the chemical, biological, and historical research to back her every step of the way.

    Some fast soundbites that made my hair stand on end:

    • Ten years after the use of arsenic spray on tobacco was halted, the arsenic levels in cigarettes made from American tobacco increased by more than 300 percent. It has not gone away but rather continues to accumulate.
    • Since pesticides do not wash away but rather cling to leaves, grass, etc, as well as seep into the earth and groundwater, when earthworms process these items, the poisons become concentrated within them. The robin population in sprayed areas was decimated the following spring, when a lethal dose was delivered in 11 earthworms– about how many a robin will consume in fifteen minutes.
    • Many pesticides would be stored in the body within the fatty tissue, lurking undetected until a period of stress or a loss in weight would cause these tissues to be metabolised, releasing the poisons into the system.

    The whole book is like that. It’s scary and infuriating.

    It’s important to bear in mind what a radical idea Carson was setting forth at the time that she wrote Silent Spring. Chemical companies asserted that the pesticides they provided were tolerable within limits; Carson countered that there were no satisfying studies that explored the long-term effects that occur when varying chemicals accumulate residually in the body, and more frighteningly, begin to interact with each other on a cellular level.

    While DDT and other pesticides like it have been banned, I think this alarm should still be sounding: why aren’t people more concerned about the residual, cumulative, interactive qualities of the chemicals we willingly expose ourselves to everyday? In our cleaning products, our foods, our clothing, our water, our car upholstery…in short, in everything.

    From Afflenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic:

    Out of 75,000 chemicals now in common commercial use,
    only 1,200 to 1,500 have been tested for carcinogenicity.

     


    Why don’t we hold the companies that produce these things more accountable? Why don’t we demand stronger regulation? Why doesn’t everyone buy organic whenever possible? Why do we turn our heads and hold our breath and hope the problem will go away?

    Rachel Carson was also a female scientist in 1962, writing a scientific thesis in the form of an emotional appeal to the public at large. Chew on that for a moment.

    Reviewers mocked her research:

    “To identify the person whose views you are quoting is, according to this reviewer, name-dropping….My critic also profoundly disapproved of my bibliography. The very fact that it gave complete and specific references for each important statement was extremely distasteful to him. This was padding to impress the uninitiated with its length.”

    Consider also how she was leaving herself open to public ridicule from her field: using the imagery of dead robins to compel the masses to take notice. Scientists were supposed to be objective observers, writing technical, scientific essays for other eminent scientists. I’m sure that many dismissed her work without even taking the time to examine it, as the treacly overwrought passions of a woman. “Oh, dear, the poor birds.” As Carson herself articulated,

    “One obvious way to try to weaken a movement is to discredit the person who champions it.”

    This attitude seems familiar today as well; some people dismiss the environmental movement by undermining the science- for example, 14% don’t think global warming is an issue, and another 23% aren’t sure– and others prefer to cast environmentalists as treehuggers, bleeding hearts who just like to find issues to preach about.

    The point that I am making is that Rachel Carson didn’t care about that. I think people are waiting for another Martin Luther King, another Gandhi, another JFK, someone who is going to be the spokesman, the leader. Rachel Carson looked at the world around her, identified a problem, defied the condescension of her peers, stepped up proudly on her soapbox, and spoke compellingly from her heart to everyone that would listen.

    And people responded. A movement was born.

    What we can learn from Rachel Carson is the importance of our voice, as individuals.

    We achieve nothing if we do not appeal to everyone- every person- to take a look at the world around them and observe the changes that are undeniable.

    To compel them, through the example of our actions and the strength of our convictions, to step up.

    To see the interconnectedness of all things, to demand action and accountability.

    Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy- no panacea. But I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
    –from a speech Carson gave in 1954

    For the purposes of the Bookworm Challenge, I would rate Silent Spring 4 out of 5 stars for its historical context, and recommend it to the “deeply green”.

    For the “not-quite-as-hardcore-green”, I would recommend Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson , a collection of excerpts from Carson’s essays, published writings, letters, notes and speeches. This book captures her intelligent spirit in manageable bites without having to slog through the sometimes dry scientific analysis of Silent Spring.

    For parents, I highly recommend The Sense of Wonder. The subtitle reads, “Words and pictures to help you keep alive your child’s inborn sense of wonder, and renew your own delight in the mysteries of earth, sea, and sky.” This was one of Carson’s essays, first published as “Help Your Child to Wonder”, which she had intended to expand into a book; an inspiration to revisit the natural world through a child’s perspective. This particular edition is an oversized hardback, includes lovely photography, and is appropriate for sharing with a grade-school-aged child; I think I may start giving out copies as birthday presents, or maybe end-of-year gifts for teachers.

    I’m still working through the 800+ pages of John Muir’s Nature Writings, but am liberally peppering his words throughout everything I write; what an inspiration this man is to me. I would guess a formal review of his life and essays will be ready sometime mid-July.

    Thankfully, the Bookworm Challenge has been extended for as long as we bloggers want to keep on reading, and the resulting reviews, thoughts, etc. now reside at their own site, The Blogging Bookworm. Inch through the stacks, or join in on the fun.

    I really feel that it’s done me no end of good. I’ll keep reading no matter what (like anyone could stop me!) and I’ll keep blogging about it until the overwhelming majority petitions me to stop.

    What should I read next? Taking suggestions for late July and August…