14 Carat Cadmium

What’s the best way to give your daughter Liver Disease? Serve her a whiskey sour before naptime? Let her teeth on a rusty battery? Nope. All you need to do is let her wear cheap jewelry.

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Throwing Things Out of Windows

I’m fortunate to come from a rural part of New Jersey about midway between Philadelphia and New York.  It’s easy enough to work or play in the city and nice to come home to quiet farmland—especially in the summer. Horse country is prime bike-riding territory, and it’s much nicer than inhaling the summer city stench.

Since I’ve become more aware of the single-use-disposable problem, I’ve begun noticing all of the trash along my route. Plastic bottles, soda cans, and fast food bags abound where turtles, grasshoppers, and butterflies ought to be. 

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Plastic Sushi Grass

What reason does this little piece of plastic grass serve? Decoration, duh.  After all, nothing increases the delicious presentation index like a little polyethylene terephthalate. 

But in this case, our petroleum product has an actual purpose and history.  The story behind plastic sushi grass (known on tatami mats as haran or baran) also has a story. Alice Gordenker, an American living in Tokyo and writer for The Japan Times, tells it nicely with the help of Ayao Okumura, a chef and food consultant.

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Low Quality Living

I’m reading Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel, and so far I’m struck not by the toxic effects on the environment that I expected but by the love story.  To me, plastics are like people. They can be good, like bullet proof vests and the police officers who wear them, or bad, like the many cheap, single use products and people who toss these products out the car window when they’ve finished with them. 

Plastics have a pretty bad rep thanks to all of the environmental damage they do.  If there was a cotton candy to plankton ratio of 46 to 1, we probably wouldn’t like cotton candy, either. But what doesn’t get as much press is that one day, long long ago, plastic was envisioned as a solution to many of the problems inherent in other materials.

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Germs vs. Suds

I was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week and saw this sign in the cafeteria.

Now I want the last creepy guy’s mouth germs off of my water bottle as much as the next guy. But this seems excessive. Using one cup for less than a minute to fill up a water bottle and then throwing it out can’t possibly be the only solution for thirsty museum-goers. 

I’m just spit-balling here, but maybe putting a sign on the soda fountain saying “Please minimize the spread of germs by holding your water bottle at a safe distance from the fountain.” It’s got to do at least as much good as the laminated sign around the corner from and out of side of the soda fountains.

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Public Praise

One time in the fourth grade, I picked up a piece of trash on the way back from gym class and put it in the recycling bin. My teacher rewarded me with a glitter pen. This would have been cooler. (Treehugger)

New York Electronics Recycling Day

Two weekends ago, on a Sunday so beautiful I claimed that spring had finally arrived in the Northeast (for the third time in three weeks), one side of Union Square was cordoned off for the Lower East Side Ecology Center's Electronic Waste Recycling Day. Electronics are designed to be used more than once. And technology develops and improves rapidly--so rapidly that we should send software engineers to the Olympics for the 40 meter dash.

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