Wasteless Wednesday~ 7 Bright Green Sites!

This Wasteless Wednesday we are sharing seven sites that focus on not only wasting less, but all sorts of ways to live greener, simpler and eco-friendlier! Here are some of their pertinent articles of late~

1. GOOD features several categories, one of which is 'Environment'. Last summer, they proposed 'The Good 30-Day Challenge: Waste Less'~

2. Small Notebook for a simple home is a blog that offers tips to "simplify your home, your finances, your family life and your time." Here's one that helps you and your kids to simplify their toys! 

3. Prairie EcoThrifter encourages you to 'Go Green'~ 'Save Money'~ 'Have Fun' and they recently offered Tips for Wasting Less Food!

4. Green Living Tips has lots of tips on living greener~ here's ways to make less NOISE! 

5. National Geographic has a lot invested in keeping us greener! They've been sharing their vision of our planet since 1888! They also offer a huge selection of articles on their website devoted to wasting less and saving more! Spring is here and they have some 'Organic Pest Control' for your garden~

6. The Daily Green, sponsored by Good Housekeeping, has several categories to choose from for green living~ They also have "10 Idiot-Proof Eco-Tips" for Earth Day!

7. And CARE 2 wants us to Waste Less but learn these "5 Ways to Increase Water and Food Security"~ 

So there you go~ Take action and start clicking! I promise you'll find way more than a week's worth of tips on these sites, but try to at least check out one each day this week! And, of course, try to Waste Less!

See you next Wasteless Wednesday!

Countdown to Christmas Giveaway Extravaganza~ Day 3!

You still have time to enter our first two Countdown to Christmas Giveaways~ and now you have another chance to enter and win our prize for Day 3!

Since today is usually Sustainable Sundays and Bee from The Wooden Bee so kindly features our members, we will be featuring her instead! And she is generously offering a set of her DIY wine cork coasters kits! I was lucky enough to win a set on her blog, and I loved them. They are easy to put together in their well-crafted wooden frames and a wonderful way to reuse wine corks!

Bee and her husband hated to see the waste of precious scraps of beautiful wood from maple, cherry and other species and decided to do something about it~ they partnered with a cabinet company and began upcycling these scraps into beautiful one-of-a-kind, handmade creations for your home. The Wooden Bee set up shop on Etsy, the perfect venue for artfully made goods, and have been successfully selling their wooden decor and wine cork kits for over a year now!

Upcyclers, our Etsy team whose members Love 2 Upcycle, are proud to have Bee as one of our leaders and value her efforts to further the upcycling movement. Her articles on "Greener Shopping" are packed with valuable and well researched information for every consumer. She also posts upcycled tutorials and, as mentioned earlier, her weekly series, Sustainable Sundays, which have become one of our most popular features. Her constant guidance and support on our Etsy discussion threads are a source of encouragement for everyone!

The Wooden Bee has several creations made especially for the holidays and others that reflect their love for family and the home! Here's a little peek~ be sure to check out their other products too!

It's simple to enter our Giveaways and you can enter each one if you'd like!

First, be sure you are a follower of this blog, Love 2 Upcycle~ not a follower? Just look to the left and click. Voila! You are a follower. But you haven't entered yet.

Now, you can choose 4 of the following ways to enter, up to 4 times!

1. Check out The Wooden Bee favorite her shop and add them to your circle.
Then tell us here in a comment about your Favorite item in her shop!
2. Follow Bee's blog: The Wooden Bee
3. Become a fan of The Wooden Bee on Facebook!
4. Tweet or share this Giveaway!
5. Pin one your favorite items from The Wooden Bee to Pinterest!

Remember, only 4 entries count, and each one must be left in a separate comment! If you don't have an email listed on your bio, leave it here in one of your comments. Deadline to enter is Midnight, December 22nd!

Winner will be randomly drawn using Random.org's generator.

Good Luck and Merry Christmas!

Would you like to Sponsor a Giveaway on Love 2 Upcycle? You don't have to be a member of Upcyclers to be a sponsor, all Etsy sellers of upcycled or eco-friendly products are welcome! But of course, we'd love for you to join the team!

Greener Shopping: Plastics - part 2

Last week I wrote about plastic resin codes.  This week, I’m going to further discuss what we, the consumer, can do to wisely use and reduce plastics in our daily lives.  If take three small steps to understand plastic, we can make better choices for our health and the health of the planet.

Recycling is a big part of using plastics.  The first thing you can do is find out what you can recycle locally.  Not all recycling programs take all seven resin codes so check with your county to see available options.

Sustainable living options aren’t huge here in the South, so I am excited to say that our curbside recycling program takes all seven codes, everything but Styrofoam and plastic bags!  Our local zoo will recycle Styrofoam, and of course grocery stores and office supply stores will recycle the plastic bags. Realizing that I could recycle all the plastic I was using was a big start to a greener shopping list!

The second step is reducing the amount of plastic we use. I’ve spent the last two years trying to find ways to reduce the plastic in our life. I thought I’d share a few of them that have been successful with our family of four:

Reduce sandwich bag use.  When our daughter started school we invested in some adorable reusable cloth sandwich bags on Etsy.  They have been great and easy to clean.  I still use sandwich bags for things like freezing the fish that we catch but I am using at least 5 less bags a week, so that’s 260+ plastic sandwich a year that don’t go into the environment, (and I don’t have to pay for them).   Sandwich bag shown in photo was created by Upcyclers team member Greener Route.

Replace plastic with glass when possible. Each time my plastic salad dressing bottle was empty, I would replace it with a glass salad dressing bottle.  Sometimes there isn’t an option for glass (i.e. mayo, yogurt, cream cheese, etc), but I found I could find most condiments were available in a glass container.   

Stop using plastic water bottles. Use stainless steel water bottles or other reusable bottle options. This was one of the first things I tried to tackle, and it was easier that I thought it would be!

Use cloth bags.  Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard of this popular way of reducing plastic.   Plastic bags are offered to shoppers everywhere.  I use my cloth bags for more than grocery shopping though.  I try to keep different sized bags in my car so when I’m out running errands I can keep from using plastic everywhere I go.    A quick trip to the pharmacy I grab a small cloth bag I keep in my purse.  A trip to the local library and I grab the medium sized bag that is behind the seat of my car.  At the farmers market, I pull out my reusable produce bags.  When I forget them (because sometimes they bring the items in to the house and they don’t go back out), I ask for paper or just carry the items without a bag.  Produce bag shown in photo was created by Upcyclers team member TNTees. 

Upcycle plastic containers for non-food related tasks. We store crayons, toys, screws, beads, and an assortment of other household items in our leftover plastic containers. My favorite plastic containers to upcycle: yogurt, spinach, and nut.

Start small and pick one way you can reduce plastic in your life.  I didn’t change everything at once.  I would integrate one new method, and then I would move on to the next one.  

The third step is using plastic smarter.  We can’t eliminate all the plastic in our daily lives.  My two year old isn’t going to use a glass sippy cup, so I make sure that the plastic cups she does use are BPA free and have a resin code 2, 4 or 5 on them.  I make sure my food storage containers and other plastic wares display these less toxic resin codes on them as well.

If there is NO resin code on your plastic containers, call the manufacture and ask. Since the resin codes are only for recycling, this would tell me that the manufacture doesn’t care about the environment and recycling the plastic they are creating!

To help remember the resin codes, I hang a list on the inside of my kitchen cabinet ----->

See what else you can do to reduce and wisely use plastic, by visiting Healthy Child, Healthy World’s list of plastic solutions: http://healthychild.org/5steps/5_steps_1/

Whether it is buying organic, handmade or reducing plastic use, becoming ethical consumers is something that everyone should look into. Does value or values determine your purchases? Educating yourself about the products you buy & their affect on the environment is vital to our future and the future of our planet.

Greener Shopping: Plastics 101

Conscious Consumerism:

Plastics 101, or is it Plastics 1-7

Plastic is everywhere. The word plastic means capable of being shaped or molded. And it has shaped itself into almost every aspect of our daily lives.  However, scientists are finding that an unseen cost to using plastics may be the health of our planet and our bodies. The production and disposal of plastic contribute to an array of environmental problems.  If we take some time to understand plastic, we can became a wiser about using it, and therefore make better choices for our health and our environment.

A Small Chemistry lesson… Plastics are typically polymers of high molecular mass, and may contain other substances to improve performance and/or reduce production costs. ~Wikipedia

In 1988 The Society of the Plastics (SPI) Industry developed a set of symbols placed on plastics to identify the polymer type. The resin identification coding system is used internationally to allow efficient separation of different polymer types for recycling. The most common plastics have a resin code in a universal recycling symbol often found on the bottom of the product. It is an arbitrarily-assigned number that has no other meaning aside from identifying the specific plastic.

While doing my plastic research, I thought The Healthy ChildHealthy World Organization summarized the safety of the resin codes the best:

PET or PETE (Polyethylene Terephthalate): AVOID
Common Uses: Soda Bottles, Water Bottles, Cooking Oil Bottles
Concerns: Can leach antimony and phthalates.

HDPE (High Density Polyethylene): SAFER
Common Uses: Milk Jugs, Plastic Bags, Yogurt Cups

PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride, aka Vinyl): AVOID
Common Uses: Condiment Bottles, Cling Wrap, Teething Rings, Toys, Shower Curtains
Concerns: Can leach lead and phthalates among other things. Can also off-gas toxic chemicals.

LDPE (Low Density Polyethylene): SAFER
Common Uses: Produce Bags, Food Storage Containers

PP (Polypropylene): SAFER
Common Uses: Bottle Caps, Storage Containers, Dishware

PS (Polystyrene, aka Styrofoam): AVOID
Common Uses: Meat Trays, Foam Food Containers & Cups
Concerns: Can leach carcinogenic styrene and estrogenic alkylphenols 

Other this is a catch-all category which includes:
PC (Polycarbonate): AVOID - can leach Bisphenol-A (BPA). It also includes ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene), SAN (Styrene Acrylonitrile), Acrylic, and Polyamide. These plastics can be a safer option because they are typically very durable and resistant to high heat resulting in less leaching. Their drawbacks are that they are not typically recyclable and some need additional safety research. New plant-based, biodegradable plastics like PLA (Polylactic Acid) also fall into the #7 category.

Now go look at what number is on all of your food containers.  What are they? While 2, 4, 5 are the safer, they are sometimes hard to find. For instance when it comes to condiments, I can’t find a ketchup or mayonnaise bottle without a one on the bottom.

If there is NO resin code on your plastic containers, call the manufacture and ask.  Since the resin codes are only for recycling, this would tell me that the manufacture doesn’t care about the environment and recycling the plastic they are creating!!!

To further understand plastic and its numbers, let’s look at the second part of recycling it…what is plastic being recycled into?  That ketchup bottle with a resin code of one isn't turned into another ketchup bottle. It is recycled into polyester fibres, which are a base material for the production of clothing, pillows and carpets.

Here’s a quick summary of what the resin codes tells us the plastic can become:

Polyester fibres, thermoformed sheet, strapping, and soft drink bottles.

Bottles, grocery bags, milk jugs, recycling bins, agricultural pipe, playground equipment, and plastic lumber (like outdoor deck flooring).

Pipe, fencing, shower curtains, lawn chairs and non-food bottles

Plastic bags, 6 pack rings, dispensing bottles, tubing, and various molded laboratory equipment

Auto parts, industrial fibers, food containers, and dishware

Desk accessories, cafeteria trays, plastic utensils, toys, and insulation board and other expanded polystyrene products (e.g., Styrofoam)

Bottles, headlight lenses, and safety shields/glasses, (and may leak bisphenol A in the food & environment).

Whether it is upcycling, buying handmade or reducing plastic use, becoming ethical consumers is something that everyone should look into. Does value or values determine your purchases? Educating yourself about the products you buy & their affect on the environment is vital to our future and the future of our planet. 

Look for our next article to discuss safer options that we, the consumers, have to reduce, reuse and recycle the plastic in our lives.