Mini Soapbox

Last week we had our Earth Day assembly and we had the folks at 5 Gyres come talk to us about the problem of ocean pollution in the 5 Gyres of our Earth.  A gyre is a giant circular oceanic surface current, and our Earth has 5.  So what is happening is all the plastic that the earth consumes and tosses ends up getting caught up in these gyres and causing all kinds of problems because plastic is made to be everlasting and disposable.  They showed us that birds and fish end up eating a lot of these plastic items and it is really causing a problem.  Recycling isn't really a solution because recycling plastic takes a lot of effort and expense.  In other words it isn't really cost effective to do so.  In fact most of our plastic that we recycle gets sent in big bales over to China.  What do they do with it?  No one really knows...

Personally I think it gets recycled back to us in the form of annoying you-hate-but-child loves Happy Meal Toys that sit in your closet in a big bin, yet your child doesn't want to play with 5 days after they get them, but yet if you try to throw them away or sell them they turn into said child's most prize posession and you turn into the mean mother who tried to throw away your child's "whole life"...evil I tell you pollution evil.

There is no way to clean up the plastic that is already stuck in the gyres, so the only thing left to do is to reduce our use of plastic.

So...I decided that I wanted to do my part.  I already use a stainless steel water bottle and refuse to use or buy disposable plastic water bottles.  Our family use reusable lunch boxes and reusable containers.  The place I fall short is in the area of plastic baggies.  I  use them for everything.  Since that assembly I started to use our tupperware instead of baggies, but that just can be very bulky and hard to pack.  Plus the tupperware is so much bigger than necessary so I am having to wash dishes and run the diswasher more often.  I decided that I wanted to look into plastic bag alternatives.  Here are some that I found.

Fresh Snack Packs  These are reusable durable and washable wrap around baggies made out of EVA plastic and are phthalate, lead, BPA and PVC free. They come in a few different sizes. They are still made of plastic, but not disposable.

Lunch Skins  These are made of thick cotton fabric coated with a food safe polyurathane liner.  They are grease proof and moisture proof and they are diswasher safe.  They have many different sizes as well. 

Snack Taxis These are basically the same as the Lunck Skins but offer some larger options.  They reccomend hand washing and air drying to promote durability, but say they can be laundered as well.

Flip and Tumble Reusable Produce Bags  This is another big problem with me is those plastic produce bags that you use at the grocery store.  Here is an alternative to that.  They are polyester and can be machine washed. 

Reusablebags.com has many many more items to help you become a greener person.  I am going to do my part. 

What do you do to make your life a little greener?  Please share, all 6 1/2 of us want to know!!

More Later

- A Ro