wow. I am SO glad I bought a camelbak

So - I've been grousing lately about how I want a stainless steel water bottle - my latest reminder was from the Think Outside The Bottle people, who were offering some logo-ed bottles for purchase.

But now...

oh, now.

SIGG, the big name-brand face to the stainless steel water bottle craze, which took off after the fuss over BPA in water bottles like Nalgenes (and prompted me to buy a Camelbak), has apparently been coating the inside of their bottles with... ::drumroll:: BPA!

I saw the story on Salon.com today, and I'm disappointed but not surprised.

One of the biggest challenges for Green Me is that I feel kind of powerless about stuff like this. I just finished reading The Ominvore's Dilemma (a post on that to come!), and it made me feel trapped in the same way this SIGG thing has done. Little ole me is just another block in the wall (like this lady).

I've got bigger personal fish to fry these days, so another Corporate Accountability Scandal doesn't faze me much. Sometimes, all you can do is all you can do.

So you should make a point to do the following: add SIGG to the list of products you don't buy.

Guest Post on Just Move Monday for the Zaftig Chicks

Over the past two months I've been doing probably a million, bajillion things, but one of the less-stressful ones has been to read some of the blogs on the fat-o-sphere feed.

That's how i came to know of Bianca & Sylvia, the Zaftig Chicks.

As a way to fight the stress of the past two months, i've been hot-yoga-ing a lot, and when the girls asked if anyone wanted to guest-contribute a blog post, it seemed like a nice opportunity to write about my practice. You can check it out here.

Meanwhile, although I haven't been posting anything here, I HAVE been tweeting, and those tweets relate to green things, including the chickens (now there are 15!). The garden has been producing the first tomatoes of the season, and my belly is READY to give them a home... I'll definitely share more as Dallas' harvests come in.

I've been doing a little "activist" stuff, too. My friend Molly and I went to check out the new TN headquarters of Repower America and then I went with a couple strangers to visit the offices of the two TN senators to tell them that I support the ACES act.

ALSO - I give a hearty thumbs-up to the Murfreesboro toothpaste I got from The Green Wagon, as well as the castile soap shampoo (i can't remember the name of it) that you can buy by the ounce (!). They'll be opening their East Nashville location oh-so-very soon, so you'll have 100% more opportunities to buy green!

Meanwhile, think good thoughts for me as I embark upon a quest for better living through altering my chemical composition with the help of the Pharmaceutical-Industrial Complex :(

another very un-green project at work.

Yesterday, we had a VERY un-green (does that means it’s “red” since that’s opposite on the color wheel?) project that national marketing asked us to do. We were supposed to print off every piece of communication that we have with students from the first time we talk to them until the last time we talk with them... email templates, day-one packets, phone scripts, direct mail pieces, everything.

That's right. print off emails. awesome



I thought you all would enjoy the ridiculous stack of paper I generated. As you can see, I am sad. What’s pictured is only the Operations part, this doesn’t count what our Marketing department did. We figure we used about a ream of paper for the project and then we had to mail it to national.

Wow.

The Green Wagon ROCKS

If you haven't yet stopped in to check out how awesome Jen Casale's Green Wagon is, you are missing out!

Check out the über-cute pants I got for my valentine this year...
They're made by a lady in Lebanon, TN, from old sweaters!

Go Check out The Green Wagon!!!

You guys, this is very exciting!

My friend Jen Casale is opening her store, The Green Wagon, today at 10 AM.

I am sure that this place is going to be AMAZING. Jen is brilliant, creative, and all sorts of superlatives.

Go check it out and buy something!

good vs. evil

So, I've run into two products today, both of which deserve a mention.
First, Brunswick Beeworks
is a new local honey supplier! The closest local honey they have at Whole Foods is from Goodlettsville - and Brunswick makes candles and skin stuff!
Whoohoo!

Second, there's a Slate article about Proctor & Gamble's Olay Body Wash Plus Spa Exfoliating Ribbons. YUCK. I read a while back about the Giant Sea of Plastic and was freaked out, but this Olay stuff is actually DELIBERATELY putting microplastic out there! We're not talking about plastic trash that's breaking down, this stuff is MADE like this and put in something that we're using to wash our bodies and then flushing "away".
Yuck yuck yuck.

E2A: I sent that article over to Beth at Fake Plastic Fish, and lo and behold, she already knew about it! Check out her blog post on it, from nearly a year ago!, because it's got some great resources.

So much going on in the 'ville!

In case you missed it, last Sunday was Earth Hour, where you were supposed to turn out your lights for an hour, but apparently the folks down in Australia didn't take March Madness into consideration when choosing a Sunday. Sadly, we did not participate due to the pressing need to watch the Elite Eight games.

Down in Williamson County, the kids at Hillsboro elementary/middle are participating in the Free the Children Water Project. The thought of all the bottles of coke and PowerAde that are not being trashed warms the cockles of me 'eart it does... but they're still drinking water out of bottles:

According to the scorecard, students can save up to $1.50 per glass by drinking water rather than milk, soda or juice and up to $1 per bottle on sports drinks. Every time they drink a glass or bottle of water, they put that savings into a cup. At the end of the two weeks, the money will be collected. (emphasis mine)

I don't know anything about the Free the Children thing, but the project sounds like a good idea to me, at least to raise awareness... but I wish they were thinking about the bottled water part of it as well (see Think Outside the Bottle for why)

In other news, there's finally an answer to the question of what will be done with the old Wild Oats building... a Trader Joe's is moving in! I think I've talked before about how I miss the old Wild Oats - I liked how small and homey it felt compared to the new Whole Foods. Not to say I don't like the WF, but I miss the way things were. I'm excited to see what a Trader Joe's is like, finally, and maybe I'll be going there instead of WF soon.

Also, in case you haven't checked out the Greener Nashville site or you don't get their eblasts, there is a big Green Business expo going on over at Lipscomb today.

That's it for this week, folks! Stay dry and warm, and let me know if you want to buy a condo!

EPA air standards & Williamson county

Driving into work this morning on my insanely long commute really pinched this morning because of a story i heard on NPR - Apparently Williamson county is one of 345 counties in the US that is now above the new smog limit that's just been set by the EPA.

Besides the obvious (dirty air = yuck!), what bothers me about it all is this:

"The EPA's new smog limit is 75 parts per billion of ozone... The EPA's independent science advisory panel unanimously had said the standard should be no higher than 70 parts per billion...

Industry groups, which had said before the announcement that the limit shouldn't be lowered at all, said they were disappointed with the decision.

The new standard "could have a devastating effect on manufacturing employment," said John Engler, chief of the National Association of Manufacturers. "

ARGH!!!!!!! If you are doing something that is hurting/killing people, then you either need to stop or find another, non-lethal way! Good god! They're "disappointed"?!?!?!?!?!

Well, I'm disappointed that little kids in big cities have asthma at an alarmingly disproportionate rate! I'm disappointed that when i use a sponge to clean off my window sills or outdoor furniture, there's black nastiness that reminds me of what's in my LUNGS (read some more about air quality and health here). I know that Nashville isn't the Bronx, but if I remember correctly from my Geology class back in the day, Nashville is ituated in a 'geographic bowl', where, due to the topography, pollutants get trapped and sort of settle over the city. So there are air quality concerns here that are on my mind. But Industry is disappointed, so let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Good news abounds as we head into March

Well, today is a red-letter day in my greening little world - it is my last day at my current job, meaning that I will be starting my new job on Monday! I told you before about some of the green-issues I had with my job, but another one was that I was still driving too much for my tastes - about 20 miles round trip a day - make that up to 40 if i went home or out for lunch.

The new job (can you hear me squealing with excitement?) is only .6 miles from my intended new condo (still waiting on the old one to sell before I can get into the new one, but even if the world ended and I moved back in, it's only 3.3 miles from the old one!)! I WILL GET TO WALK TO WORK!

I cannot tell you how exciting this is. As much as I love the little Prius, she's been put through her paces with these 40 mile drives back and forth from Murfreesboro, and walking to work will seem like HEAVEN (I hear Sinatra crooning faintly in the background...)

And that 40 mile drive is weighing even more heavily on me with the rising gas prices (gas in the 'boro hit $3.09 last weekend, the highest I've seen it down there - the highest I've ever seen was $3.33 on the corner of Belmont and 21st after Katrina). And timely as ever, my uncle popped this in my inbox this morning - Volkswagen is unveiling a hybrid that's supposed to get 69.9 mpg.

So a happy Leap Day to you all! VU Baseball began last week, and the Music City Classic is underway as I type. Come on Spring, get sprung already!

Ben & Jerry to speak at Vanderbilt Oct. 2

"An Evening of Social Responsibility, Radical Business Philosophy and Free Dessert for All"

Tuesday, October 2, 2007, at 7 p.m.

Student Life Center ballroom

Tickets: Free-$10, available at Sarratt Box Office and at the door

The Ben & Jerry's brand was build on the idea of being a socially-responsible business. Though over the years that commitment has wavered, the founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are well-known for trying to drive social change through corporate practices.

You can check out more info on that here.

While I am inclined to be skeptical of "corporate social responsibility" - because I'm a cynic and because, from what I've learned about publicly-held corporations and the quarterly earnings set-up, I figure that numbers all-too-often trump the quality of those numbers.

Anyhow, Ben & Jerry's is at least talking about being socially responsible, which is a start. And I'd love to hear what they have to say about how to do it.