New Year’s · Eco-Chick

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Recycle Your Toxic Electronics!

Did you get a new PDA, mobile phone, laptop, iPod, or other fun gadget for Christmas? If you did, make sure to recycle your old unit. There’s toxic heavy metals and other stuff that can end up in our air and water if it’s just tossed in the garbage. Making it really simple to make sure this stuff doesn’t end up in landfills, or as e-waste in China is Staples’ Eco Easy campaign.

Some not-so-great facts about electronics recycling (or current lack thereof):

+ Only 10 to 15 percent of electronics are currently recycled
+ From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, household waste increases by more than 25 percent.
+ An estimated 133,000 computers are discarded every day in the U.S.
+ There are 750 million cell phones and PDAs in America and that each year 1/3rd are thrown out in favor of new ones.

Staples recycles the following in all of their stores whether you bought the item there or not:

cell phones, chargers, computers and peripherals, CRT and LCD monitors, digital cameras, fax machines, inkjet and toner cartridges, keyboards,
mice, pagers, PDAs, printers, rechargeable batteries, and “all-in-ones”

Kudos to Staples for being the first national retailer to address the problem of e-waste and taking such a bold step to address it! So before you are ready to throw out your old Sony laptops or Samsung phones, keep Staples in mind and help protect the environment!

batteries, car, Christmas, dress, electronics, farm, garbage, giving, New Year, New Year's, News, recycle, recycled, Recycling, waste, water

Champagne Cork Contest at DWR!

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by Starre Vartan · 12/23/07

Do you have designing hands? Get some creativity in your holiday (this would be fun to make into a competition among family or friends too!) by creating a chair for Design Within Reach’s annual Champagne Chair Contest! No, not full-size ones….miniatures made from what would normally be thrown away from your celebratory Champagne during Christmas and New Year’s:

Create an original miniature chair using only the foil, label, cage and cork from no more than two Champagne bottles. Chairs will be judged by a panel of industry experts and the winners will embark on a nation-wide tour. The winning designers will receive DWR Gift Cards.
In an effort to minimize the mountains of packaging waste generated in the past, submissions should be made digitally. All entries must be received, via email, by 5pm (PT) on Monday, January 7, 2008.

What a fun idea…and if you don’t win, you can give your chairs to any dollhouse-having kid for extra seating.

car, Christmas, contest, design, designer, designers, dwr, eating, Eco-Chick, Hair, holiday, New Year, New Year's, oil, sales, Target, waste

New Year's GreenSolutions

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by Starre Vartan · 12/29/06

Right after Christmas I always start thinking about how I need a serious cleanse from all the holiday eating and drinking, not to mention all the junk clogging up my brain from seeing people I haven’t seen in so long, travelling all over the East Coast and generally ignoring healthy routines and work. Unlike many Hipper Than Thou writers and other media folks, I love me some good New Year’s resolutions. The cold bare branches of January offer a clean slate- one that I’m in dire need of! Every year I try to lower my impact on the environment, so here is the section of the resolutions to do with the beautiful Earth I so love:

90% of my clothing purchases must be reduced, reused, and/or recycled.
-I love clothes, and before 2006, (and before Jill Danyelle’s amazing blog fiftyRX3, which enlightened me tremendously) I figured that I would just ignore the environmental impact of my clothes, since so much of my life was eco-friendly. Now I have no excuse, with whole brick-and-mortar and online stores dedicated to ecofashion, crafting, and vintage clothes.

Offset CO2 from travelling; make carbon credit purchases part of travel budget.
-Last year I barely travelled at all (for me); this year I will be spending around 2 months on the road, and I will be taking some long flights. I want to visit my Dad in Australia, for example. I can’t NOT fly, but I can buy some credits for my journeys. Credits can be bought from sites like Uniglobe or Carbon Planet, which support alternative energy sources like wind power. Or you could pay to have a tree planted for every flight at Treeflights.

Line dry my washing as often as humanly possible.
-A few months ago I wrote this article for E Magazine about line drying clothes instead of using the dryer. In it, I wrote:

“Six to 10 percent of residential energy use goes towards the electric dryer. If Americans, or even just New Englanders, would use the clothesline or wooden drying racks, the savings would be enough to close several power plants.”

Put ALL my electronic devices on a power strip so I can shut them off and stop energy vampires from wasting electricity.
-OK, the last time I wrote about this, I put power strips in about half the places in my house where it is applicable. This month I’m going to finish the job!

Volunteer somewhere on a regular basis.
-I’ve mostly worked for non-profits, so I figured I didn’t need to also do volunteer work. Now that I’m a full-time student again, I need to do something to give back concretely. I’m not sure what I’ll do yet, but I’ll report back on what I find. I’ll probably start with Volunteer Match, which Ann wrote about back in June.

A HAPPY (AND GREEN) NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL!

Australia, budget, car, carbon, Christmas, clothes, clothing, eating, Eco-Chick, ecofashion, electric, electricity, Energy, farm, Fashion, Greensolutions, health, holiday, Home, junk, magazine, media, New Year, New Year's, Plants, recycle, recycled, reduce, reuse, solutions, Tea, travel, vintage, wind power, wood

Thank You for Not Smoking

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by Starre Vartan · 12/22/06

While, admittedly, there was a brief time I smoked cigarettes regularly (hey, I was living in Spain, give me a break), I’ve always found it EXTREMELY maddening that not only do smokers foul the air, but they toss their butts all over the damn place. I live next to the Long Island Sound, and there’s nothing more disgusting than digging a hole with your feet in the sun-warmed beach sand and finding a cache of used butts.

Hey, I understand, you smokers are addicted. Fine, I know you can barely smoke anywhere now anyway, and I feel for you, or I would if you weren’t such damn slobs about the whole thing. My good friend Danielle loves her a cig, but never litters them – she keeps a small portable ashtray (check this one out from Butts and Gum) or finds a trash can. I applaud her, and all the smokers who roll their own or dispose of their butts in a way that keeps birds and marine mammals from eating them, or going into the sewer, or polluting the Earth (cigararettes, we all know, have a host of toxic chemicals in them. Not so good for your body, but also, those chemicals get concentrated in the butts, and when you litter them, that nastiness gets in the soil and water-ugh!)

Horrifyingly enough, since everyone is smoking outside now, the environmental toll of smoking has increased, because people are throwing more butts around the streets and outdoor areas, instead of ashtrays, according to this commentary on E Magazine’s weekly newsletter. Here’s the disturbing info:

The paper and tobacco of cigarette butts may be biodegradable, but the filters are not, and persist in the environment as long as other forms of plastic. These filters are composed of a bundle of 12,000 cellulose acetate fibers and are reported to take between 18 months and 10 years to decompose, depending on the environment they’re in. Once decomposed, they remain chemically present in the environment, as they contain up to 4,000 chemicals including hydrogen, cyanide and arsenic. Toxological data has shown that chemicals from discarded cigarette butts are capable of leaching into surrounding waterways. One particular problem is that these leached chemicals are deadly to the water flea Daphnia magna, a small crustacean at the lower end of, but crucial to, the aquatic food chain.
The saddest environmental impact of cigarette butts is their role in the deaths of thousands of marine mammals and birds every year. These wild creatures mistake the butts for food. Once ingested, the butts can lead to starvation or malnutrition if they block the intestinal track, and can also prevent breathing by blocking vital air passages. In 2003, the United Nations International Maritime Organization reported that cigarette litter adversely affected 177 species of marine animals and 111 species of seabirds through ingestion.

If you smoke, please consider giving it up for New Year’s! And if you must smoke, try rolling your own- you’ll smoke less and without a filter there’s not so much waste.