Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Recycling Does A Milk Carton Good

I was reading a recent issue of National Geographic’s The Green Guide (Spring 2008) and on the last page of the magazine was an image hundreds of milk cartons lining a street to demonstrate how much milk American’s consume. The image was taken from National Geographic Channel documentary Human Footprint.

According to the movie, America consumes 989,985,594,240 half gallons of milk over the course of a lifetime and it takes more than one trillion kilowatt-hours of energy to produce, ship and landfill the milk cartons. That amount of energy emits 740,674,244 tons of greenhouse gases. Amazingly, only a tiny fraction of the cartons are recycled.

That got me thinking. How many milk cartons does my household go through over a short period of time, say a week? More importantly, why are milk cartons not recycled? They are made of paper aren’t they? Even more puzzling is the fact that on the side of some of the cartons I buy, it says “please recycle”. I want to, but my town will not take them. So I decided to do some research on how to recycle a milk carton, and why my town won’t do it. I thought the information would be readily available. I was wrong.

Initially I was going to save my cartons for one week, assuming this would be plenty of time to get enough information to write on the subject. Well, do a “Google” search on “milk carton recycling” and you will basically come up with… nothing. Four weeks and 30 cartons later, I am finally writing about it.

This is what I discovered…

Milk cartons ARE recyclable, however, according to an EPA report of MSW (Municipal Solid Waste) provided to me by the National Recycling Coalition, in 2006, 510,000 tons of milk cartons were generated in the United States and less than 0.05% (5,000 tons) were recycled.

In 2006, only a little more than 550 towns across the country recycled milk cartons (source: Organic Valley). To put this into perspective, there are 556 municipalities in New Jersey. Doing a non-scientific search on the internet of various towns across the country, I discovered you cannot recycle milk cartons in San Diego, DC, the entire state of Pennsylvania, Los Angeles and Austin but you can in New York City and Boulder, CO.

But why?

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WIRED Magazine's "Environmentalism"

“Attention Environmentalists: Keep your SUVs. Forget organics. Go nuclear. Screw the spotted owl.” Wow, if that is not an attention getting headline I don’t know what is. Well that is what is stated on the cover of the June issue of WIRED magazine. The headline continues “If you’re serious about global warming only one thing matters: Cutting Carbon. That means facing some inconvenient truths.”

So what is this all about? Yes our climate crisis is important but forget organics, drive an SUV… huh? According to WIRED magazine, “The war on greenhouse gasses is too important to be left to the environmentalist” and we need to push everything aside and just focus on our reducing our CO2 emission. Forget about everything else? Our health, cleaning up toxic areas, erosion, our culture and work only on global warming?

This single minded way of looking at the environment is split up into “10 tenets” of what WIRED magazine calls “the new environmental apostasy.”

Here’s what WIRED says:

(1) Live in Cities. WIRED posits that urban dwellers emit less greenhouse gases than those living in suburban sprawl. Well this is true. As reported by Reuters on May 30th in a story entitled Big US Carbon Footprint Lie East of the Mississippi, “metropolitan areas, where people drive shorter distances and use less electricity in their homes, are greener. On average, an urban dweller’s carbon footprint was 86 percent of a suburban or rural resident’s.” So we should all move to cities? Is this realistic? Cram everyone into NY, LA, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and Denver? LA where you can only see the surrounding mountains when it rains and the smog settles? What about health issues? Also, “green” goes beyond just CO2 emissions. Cities can’t sustain themselves. Central Park isn’t a farm, and Staten Island isn’t used as a giant diary. So yes, urban areas may emit less greenhouse gasses per person, but they are still massive heat islands, net consumers of food, oil and other things that are generated by the generation of CO2, NO2 and SO2.

(2) A/C is OK. According to WIRED it takes more energy to raise the thermostat in New England to 70 degrees when it is zero outside then it takes to lower the temperature in Phoenix to 70 degrees when it is 110 degrees outside. Therefore using the A/C emits less greenhouse gases in heating a house in winter. Well how about all the greenhouse gases emitted from shipping all the food that does not growing 110 degree weather to feed those people using the A/C or all the water that needs to be pumped into the swimming pools to cool down those sweating people in Arizona.

(3) Organics are not the answer. WIRED magazine’s argument here is organic dairies do not produce as much milk as industrial dailies. Organically fed animals take longer to fatten up before going to market. More time breathing means more time to burp, fart and poop emitting more greenhouse gases e.g. methane. Organic farmers do not produce as much produce per acre as industrial farmers. Even so, organic farming has become big business delivering “wholesome” food to moms like me across many thousands of miles; think grapes from Chile or Strawberries from California. Well this is one that rips my heart out. Don’t eat organic? Are they kidding? First, don’t we need to be healthy and alive to save the environment? Organic produce and meats are significantly more nutritious than industrial foods. (To read more about the nutritional difference of organic over industrial produce read my past post “Another Point of the Organic Industry!“) The pesticides and fertilizers that are used on industrial farms are ALL made out of fossil fuels, degrading the land and polluting the water from runoff. And the same trucks and planes that are hauling the organic foods are also hauling their industrial counterparts. So organic or industrial? Go organic. Now I will agree with WIRED on one point. Buy local. But local industrial is worse than shipped organic. WIRED’s reporters would have us eat the pesticide laden lettuces grown locally. Yuck! Not for me and my family.

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Green Your Zip Code

Sometimes someone comes up with an idea and you hit yourself on the head and say “Wow” I wish I thought of that…so simple and pure genius. Well that is what I think about a new program call ZipGoesGreen.com. Not only is it great but it is GREEN.

So what is it you ask? ZipGoesGreen.com is a unique program that helps your town raise funds for their environmental initiatives. Basically, the company will put your town’s zip code on reuseable water bottles and grocery bags and/or magnets. The product says your town’s zip code and the words “goes green” after it. So say you live in Maplewood, NJ (the hometown of the man behind the program), the bag or water bottle would say “07040 goes green.”

I first spotted a water bottle at meeting at my son’s school and quickly looked up the website on my phone under the table. As a member of my town’s “Sustainable Task Force” working to green our town, I quickly wanted to find out what a local zip code was doing on a water bottle.

What I learned was 25% percent of the sales of a town’s products goes directly to the organization tied to the program. It is a fast and easy way to raise awareness and needed funds for any local environmental program. The money raised could just go to pay to rent a table at the town’s street fair where you can sell the product. Resident’s using these products will feel like they have taken a step to help a local initiative and be a part of a community that is working to be more sustainable.

ZipGoesGreen products can help local communities minimize waste, assists in funding green and other town initiatives and serves as an ongoing, street-level ad campaign for the greening of the town. Brilliant!

“Like so many critically important social and political movements, much of the energy and conviction related to environmental issues is being harnessed and organized at the local level. ZipGoesGreen is a unique initiative where towns and local organizations partner with us to collaborate on raising funds to support their green efforts. Our mission is to deliver the simplest and most creatively compelling way to help raise funds to support you and your neighbors’ local green initiatives – the initiatives that are shaping America’s response to the environmental issues that we face,” said Mike Aaron, President of ZipGoesGreen.

If you have any role in your local environmental initiatives or know someone who does, pass this along. To sign up for ZipGoesGreen.com or learn more about the program, go to the website, email customerservice@zipgoesgreen.com or call 973-821-4213.

I am working on getting it for my zip.

Also, if you know of any other ingenious green ideas like this, please pass them my way.

To read more of my rants and raves, check out my blog Green Luvin’.

Global Warming, Eating Meat and the Importance of the Local Farm Movement — Directly from a Farmer

In my quest to green my life, I have been on a mission to eat more sustainably. I’ve tried to buy only locally grown and organic produce and have searched for grass-fed meats. Well, during my quest I have befriended Shannon Hayes, a sustainable farmer in Upstate New York. This journey to find better, healthier and more environmentally friendly meat can be read in one of my older post entitled “Grass-Fed Meat.”

Shannon has a wealth of information on today’s food issues and I thought Eco Chick readers might enjoy what she has to say about global warming, eating meat and the importance of the local farm movement. I hope you find it has informative and timely as I did.

Compare Apples to Apples When You’re Talking About Rib Eyes
By Shannon Hayes, farmer and host of grassfedcooking.com

After decades of hunching over in shame around environmentalist vegetarians, small grass-based meat farmers were finally given a chance hold our heads high by investigative journalists and nutritional advocates like Jo Robinson, Michael Pollan and Sally Fallon. In the last 10 years, Grass-fed meats have been lauded for their health benefits, their contributions to local economies and animal welfare, and most especially, for their environmental benefits.

…Until recently. A study released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization started a buzz in November of 2006 suggesting that livestock production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. According to a story in the New York Times, in 2007, PETA commissioned a Hummer and outfitted it with a driver wearing a chicken suit to travel around to environmental rallies, proclaiming meat as the number one cause of global warming. And this month, a story in Environmental Science and Technology reports on a new study which suggests that, rather than eating locally, we should just remove red meat and dairy from our diet once per week and replace it with chicken, fish or eggs, and have at least one day per week entirely meat-free. The result? Customers ordinarily seeking beef are suddenly asking for turkey burgers and chicken sausage; or they are dropping meat from their diets all together.

That’s pretty grim news for my family. Three generations of us garner a living from our small grass-based farm tucked up in the northern foothills of the Appalachian mountain chain. We’ve managed to build an exclusively local market for our products, making us an integral part of our rural economy. We’ve also managed to bring three additional farms back into viable agricultural production with the help of folks dedicated to buying locally.

…Which leads to the next piece of news being circulated: that these “small dietary shifts” of giving up meat can accomplish the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally. The subtext here seriously stings: “Forget about those looney meat farmers in the hills, don’t fret about canning local tomatoes, and return your faith to the conventional supermarket. Just buy less red meat and go vegetarian once per week..” As a grass-based meat farmer, I’ve got a beef with that — not to mention a serious steak in the matter (in this case, a rib eye, which I plan to lay across my grill later today).

Truth be told, these studies aren’t wrong. They aren’t exactly right, either, but I’ll get to that in a second.
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Truvia? Coming soon to supermarkets everywhere.

Today our food is over-processed and contains artificial ingredients and sweeteners. Reading the ingredients labels on most foods in the supermarkets makes me feel illiterate, Dimonowhat? Polyglycolichuh?

Years ago everything contained sugar. Then saccharin (Sweet’N Low) came into vogue as a “dietetic” alternative to plain cane or beet sugar–remember TaB? Then, when that was found to cause cancer the big switch was to aspartame, (NutraSweet or Equal). In 1999 sucralose was introduced to the market and the Splenda symbol appeared on every processed, low calorie food on the market–my husband, until recently used Splenda in his coffee everyday.

So when I heard that Cargill, the company that in March, CondeNast Portfolio listed as one of “The Toxic Ten” (one of the worst corporate polluters in America) and Coca Cola, who has basically put America on an intravenous (IV) line of high fructose corn syrup, were coming out with a new sweetener, you can bet I was a little skeptical. Like we need another zero-calorie, chemical, no-value sweetener on the market.

Well, this new sweetener is called Truvia. Truvia is made of rebiana, a sweetener derived from the leaves of stevia plant. Native to South and Central America, stevia is grown for its sweet leaves. The stevia extract turns out to be more than 300 times sweeter than sugar. Stevia leaves are harvested and dried, and are steeped in fresh water in a process similar to that of making tea. According to Cargill and Coke, Truvia is a natural sweetener. However, what the companies fail to explain is how the steeped leaves then get to the consumer in a bag looking like a table sweetener. It must be processed in some way, no? So I am not sure how natural Truvia really is.

Cargill and Coke are currently waiting FDA approval to sell stevia as a sweetener. It is currently only allowed to be used as a supplement in the U.S. — supplements are not regulated by the FDA, and as such are not widely accepted by the public. Stevia has been used in Japan for over 100 years.

Wanting to know more about Truvia, I jumped on the opportunity to listened in on a “webinar,” (web conference call), with Coke and Cargill last week.

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