Tom Watson's EcoConsumer Blog

Addicted

posted by: Tom Watson on Nov. 14, 2009

People are passionate about plastic.

Tuesday night they showed the documentary film "Addicted to Plastic" at the City of Issaquah's Sustainability Movie Night. The auditorium was full, with about 150 people of all ages attending. I was flattered to be on the panel for the discussion after the movie, along with Heather Trim of People for Puget Sound and Anna Davis of the Washington Toxics Coalition.

The film was well-done, and more balanced than I expected. But it still painted a pretty dark picture of the environmental effects of plastic, especially in the oceans. The majority of the audience seemed to be in the "avoid plastic as much as possible" camp, as was my fellow panel member Heather.

Of course I didn't articulate these ideas nearly as well on Tuesday night as I can now in writing, but I don't think the problem is that our society is "addicted to plastic." It's more that we are "addicted to convenience" and "addicted to consuming." In my view, two of our greatest environmental problems are global warming and the proliferation of toxics in products. Plastics are only a hazard when they contribute to those problems, and they often do, but not always. In some cases the use of plastics instead of a heavier material such as glass, in packaging for example, could actually help reduce global warming.

Though I would have liked to see a few serious defenders of plastics to balance the crowd, we still had a great, thought-provoking discussion after the movie. I was really impressed with the Issaquah residents attending, and the City of Issaquah for putting it on.

Note to those organizing environmental events, wherever you are: Showing a movie is an excellent way to draw a crowd. A speaker might attract a few people, unless it's a big name, but a film will get a lot more, especially younger people. Then you can discuss it afterwards, to get the audience involved.

So what's my addiction? Environmental outreach. And just like any other addiction, it's not always healthy for me. But I'm a happy addict, and I sure wouldn't trade it for any other addiction.

Guilt and sugar

posted by: Tom Watson on Nov. 11, 2009

A few days ago we got an official-looking letter in the mail from the "Residence Hall Student Association" addressed to "The Parents of G. Watson." Since our daughter is now living in a dorm at the University of Washington, I figured I better open it. At the top it said:

"TO: UW Parents
SUBJECT: Send your student a Final Exams CARE Package"

So, the idea is for parents, many of whom are living some distance away, to use this service to send a basket of treats to their son or daughter to help them get through finals in December.

On its face that's not such a bad idea, except in this case they are way over-priced, include some truly crappy junk food, and are being marketed with an almost-comical hard sell. At first I thought it was a joke or parody, like something out of the Onion. But it's real.

The baskets range from $20 to $55. Here are some excerpts from the sales pitch:

- "A generous selection of tasty treats delivered on campus is always appreciated. Plus, you get to add a personal note sending your love and encouragement."

- "We're aiming for 100 percent parent participation this quarter! The success of this program helps us to support all our student activities."

- Contents of the baskets include "tasty and wholesome foods" and "high energy success snacks."

So what are those tasty, wholesome, success foods they'll send to your student, depending on the basket you choose? Here are just a few: Dum Dum Lollipops; Nabisco Oreo Cakesters; Kellogg's Pop-Tarts; Laffy Taffy by Wonka; Animal Crackers; Double Bubble Assorted Gum Balls; Andy Capp Cheddar Fries; Corn Nuts; Gummy Buddy Bears. More than 40 items like that (including three or four that are almost actually wholesome, like raisins and instant oatmeal) are listed overall, and hey, for 55 bucks you can send your kid all of them! That's the "Husky Spirit" Care Package!

I just hope there are not many parents that are so guilt-ridden, or whatever you would have to be, to fall for this scam. Apparently this is some national company that buys the address lists of parents of students in dorms, and then gives a little share of its profits back to the dorm students groups.

It seems like a no-brainer to me that universities should not be supporting or condoning this kind of scheme. Although I must admit that my wife and daughter and I have really had a fun time mocking it.

The sound of green

posted by: Tom Watson on Nov. 8, 2009

My current favorite ad for a green product is an online ad for Amtrak. You might think that riding the train is more of a green activity, but I think you can also look at it as a green product that they're trying to sell. Anyway, a couple times I have seen - on the Seattle Times website, I believe, but I'm sure it is on other sites as well - a skinny Amtrak ad that says something like, "Let's take the train" and just has a big button that says, "Horn." When you click on the button, you get that classic train horn/whistle sound, and you can make the horn blast as long as you want.

I wish I could direct you to that ad but of course I can't find it when I'm looking for it, so you'll just have to come across it. When you do, blow the horn. It will make you smile. It's almost therapeutic.

It's also a brilliant way to market a green product because it's fun, it uses sound, and it takes advantage of the product's romantic history.

Funny - right now as I'm sitting in the back of my house typing this, I hear a train horn in the distance. Kinda makes me want to take the train.

Honesty time

posted by: Tom Watson on Nov. 1, 2009

I try to be realistic and honest about green products, so I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes reusable products require you to spend a little more time than disposable products. It sounds obvious, but often that point gets ignored in the hype about green products. In our busy and overscheduled modern world, time matters, so let's delve into this issue a little deeper.

Here's an example: Water bottles. I think single-serving water bottles are ridiculous in most situations. Dasani and Aquafina and several other top brands are simply filtered tap water, and we have great tap water here, right out of our faucets. So it makes sense to reduce waste and save money by using reusable water bottles. You probably know all that.

But what often gets neglected is that reusable water bottles need some attention. If you're not careful they can easily get moldy inside. They can harbor bacteria. You need to clean them out regularly, following the specific directions for your type of bottle, whether it's plastic, glass or metal (maybe it's okay to put it in the dishwasher, maybe not). You might need a bottle brush. You should usually let the bottle dry completely between cleanings.

This shouldn't be a huge problem or take lots of time, but it takes a little. You'd be surprised how many people never clean their reusable water bottles, even when they sometimes use them for juice or something else. Eventually the bottles get moldy, they can't get the mold out, and they have to throw them away.

So you could say that's a slight disdavantage to the reusable bottle - you have to take the time to clean it once in awhile. You also have to keep track of it so you don't lose it, which is not as easy as it sounds. You don't have either one of those issues with the single-serving bottles. Those certainly aren't deal breakers for me, considering the environmental and financial advantages of reusable water bottles, but they might be for some folks.

Another example is a product I talked about a few blog postings ago - a razor protector that fits over the blades on your razor, so the blades won't corrode and will last a lot longer. Now, I still love this product and it's still saving me money, because I don't buy new blades nearly as often. But something I didn't say before, because I hadn't really realized it, is that shaving in the morning now probably takes me about about eight minutes instead of six minutes. I have to make more passes over my face, and I need to clean and dry the blade with a kleenex and a towel. Once again, this doesn't bother me, but just the other day a woman at work, talking about changing her commute, said, "I'd kill my own mother for 20 more minutes of sleep in the morning." I think she was joking, but it reminded me of how precious time can be, especially in the morning.

Sometimes a green product or activity takes more time one way but saves it another way. I walk to work and it takes me longer than it would to drive (25-30 minutes each way vs. 10-15, door to door). But walking also gives me enough exercise that I don't have to go to the gym or get exercise other ways, so that saves me time.

You hear about "life-cycle analysis" or "cradle-to-grave" assessment of the impact of products and activities. That's a great trend, but let's not forget time on the consumer end when we do that kind of analysis. For me, and for many of you, I know that time is the most valuable commodity of all.

posted by: Tom Watson on Nov. 11, 2009

A little correction on my posting above - It turns out my friend at work actually said, "I'd sell my own mother for 20 more minutes of sleep in the morning." Not "I'd kill my own mother for 20 more minutes of sleep in the morning."

posted by: John on Nov. 8, 2009

Tom, this is a great blog, thanks for sharing your ideas and thoughts on all things eco. I'll be sharing this site with my friends.
- John, Wikaniko eco products, UK

Disposables won't die

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 30, 2009

I had thought the disposable products trend was waning. After a spate of new disposables for years - from razors to wipes to toilet bowl brushes - they really seemed to taper off. Well, then there was Colgate's Wisp disposable toothbrush introduced last spring, but I thought, okay, maybe that's just an anomaly. I was still thinking that consumers were largely shunning disposables now, for green reasons and because they are so much more expensive than durable items.

But then this week I heard about the new disposable grills. Maybe you have seen these. Several major supermarket chains in the Seattle area carry them. Now, it's bad enough that they have created a disposable version of a product that was never disposable before. But what really gets me is that they are trying to portray this product as "green." Just look at their website. "Environmentally friendly." "100% natural charcoal." Givve me a break. I don't care how "natural" the charcoal is, and I don't care if you can recycle the grill when you're done (and I'll bet that very few of them get recycled, especially since many residential curbside recycling programs don't take scrap metal). It's just a huge waste of resources to use a metal product of that size only once.

If you need a small portable grill, buy or borrow a durable one or a camping stove! Let's hope that consumers see though this so-called "environmentally friendly" product. I understand people wanting to use some convenience products, and I use some myself. But this one smells, and it's not just the "natural" charcoal.

Actions speak, but how loud?

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 25, 2009

Yesterday I was a shopper, and then I stood around. But was I also an activist while I was doing those things? I think I was. But you decide:

In the morning I went to Madison Market, a co-op grocery store near our house. I shop there very occasionally, but don't do my main grocery buying there (I'm the primary grocery shopper in our household) because they don't carry all the kinds of groceries we need, and because produce and many other items there are fairly expensive. We are also not a member of the co-op. (For the record, my regular grocery store is another neighborhood store, not part of a big chain, and they carry a fair amount of organic and locally-produced products. We also get a lot of produce at the farmers market, and grow our own.)

But yesterday there was an innovative "Agent Green" promotion at Madison Market where 25 percent of all sales at the store that day went toward energy-efficiency improvements for the store. Agent Green describes itself as "an organized mob that helps local businesses live their values," and by encouraging people to shop at Madison Market who might not have normally gone there that day (like me), they help to fund the store's energy conservation projects.

So yesterday I did part of my shopping at Madison Market, and I felt good about it. It's still basically the co-op funding the work on its own, but if the promotion increased the day's take a little more than normal, that's great.

OK, that was the shopping part. The standing around part was in the afternoon. I took the bus to a climate action rally at Seattle Center, sponsored by 350.org, an effort to halt global warming by reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million. They had rallies all over the world yesterday, and at many of them a central part of it was some kind of cool photo with the numbers 350. At Seattle Center they chalked out a diagram and we stood on our spots, and here's what it looked like from the Space Needle, which we were right next to.

I love that photo, and I believe they also got some from a helicopter that will hopefully be posted online soon. Now that I have seen that photo and reports online about all the rallies around the world, and seeing an article in today's New York Times about it, I feel pretty good about the whole thing. But yesterday, when I was actually at the rally, I was a little underwhelmed. The crowd did not seem that big, the speakers were a mixed bag, and I just wondered if it was really doing any good for the several hundred of us who were there to even be there.

Now I'm glad I went. It definitely helped send a message. As organizer Bill McKibben said, there weren't a lot of celebrities or big-name public officials involved in this international effort yesterday - it was really a showing by ordinary people around the world that they care about this issue. That was really refreshing to me, and impressive.

So, that was my day of rather passive activism. Will it make a damn bit of difference? I can only hope so. If not, I've certainly wasted my time in worse ways.

Make it work

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 18, 2009

I'm usually not a big fan of technology solving environmental problems. Instead of inventing fancy ways to zap garbage to make it go away, for example, I think it makes more sense to just not generate so much trash in the first place.

But sometimes little things could be improved, by simple technology, to make green behaviors easier. Take buying in bulk. I buy my coffee in bulk at my neighborhood grocery store, grinding the beans with their grinder there. It's a good way to get exactly the amount I want, and reduce packaging waste. When you use a grinder at the store it also means you don't need your own grinder at home. Unfortunately, the dispenser for the bulk coffee is terrible, and I inevitably spill some of the beans or get too many. How hard would it be to devise a dispenser that worked well? Just a little thing like that - a crappy system for dispensing a bulk product - can cause a lot of waste.

Drying your hands in a restroom is another example. I have seen research that hand dryers are more sanitary than using paper towels, and you prevent all that paper waste. But standard hand dryers take way too long. I also actually think that cloth roll towels - the rolls are washed and replaced by a service - could be a viable method for restrooms, but the rare ones you still see now are the old-fashioned kind, probably unchanged in the way they work from the 1950s. Why not invent a better, more up-to-date system for cloth roll towels?

At least there have been some advances in hand dryers in restrooms, like the Dyson Airblade and other new models where you put your hands all the way into an opening, and they use very high pressure to dry your hands quickly. I also recently wrote about another little change that could make a big difference reducing waste - a razor blade-protector device that keeps the blades from corroding and makes them last much longer.

Here's one more change I'd like to see: Can't they make jeans that don't get holes by the top of the pockets? You see that happen on jeans all the time, and it's really hard to sew or patch them there, so you end up getting rid of them. Just reinforcing that one little area could cut waste and save people money.

Yes, we do need to look at the big picture and the big problems. But solving some of these little problems could add up to a big benefit for the environment.

What's it all about?

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 16, 2009

What's my work really about? What is this blog about? Inspired by my favorite blogger, Penelope Trunk (who writes about careers, not the environment), I thought I'd take a whack at it.

The first answer that comes to mind for me is, "Helping people have a better life." I know that sounds soppy and Pollyanna-ish, but I really think that's what my work is all about. Becuase I think that reducing our impact on the environment means having a better life. Better meaning more enjoyable, for the most part. Better because we are not leaving a mess for future generations. Better because life revolving around nature and beauty is better than life revolving around money and things.

But maybe I should refine it just a bit. I like this one even better: "What is my work about? Helping people have fun while having a better, greener life." Because what I really want to do is entertain people, make them laugh, show or tell them something interesting, all as a way of helping them learn the environment-related stuff that they want or need to know. And that's the goal of this blog too.

What about you? What is your work about?

Wearing of the green

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 16, 2009

Next week there is a big international conference in Seattle for the sustainable textiles industry. Most people don't even know such an industry exists. But it does, and it's growing. Because my EcoConsumer column in the Seattle Times last Saturday was about the green clothing movement, I've been doing a lot of research about it lately, and I will be attending that conference.

As I mentioned in the column, the Northwest is a leader in the sustainable clothing industry, with companies including REI, Nike, Nordstrom and Greensource all making impressive progress in the use of organic cotton and other sustainable fabrics.

Some of the comments I got about that article, whether on the Times website or e-mailed to me directly, were pretty interesting (and okay, some of them were dumb, like "Avoid chemicals in clothing - go nekkid"). One reader from Richland, WA, strongly recommended buying clothes at thrift stores, which I also covered in the article as one of the best ways to go green with your clothes purchases. A friend from West Seattle wrote to say he thought I should have mentioned hemp, since he just bought a shirt at REI that he loves that's 55 percent organic hemp and 45 percent organic cotton ("very nice color and it looks much like linen").

A woman left me a long phone message hammering me for not being critical enough of the textile industry using fire retardants and other toxic chemicals in fabrics. And from the opposite perspective, a Seattle guy wrote a long diatribe, ending with, "I suppose using less chemical pesticides and fertilizer is a good thing, but to present it as some huge environmental solution to global warming, and making non-organic fabrics sound like poison, is nothing more than marketing. Thanks Seattle Times for once again not putting any research or thought into what you publish." Oooh, a dagger to the heart! But at least he took the time to write, and share his views. You can read his full comment and most of the others on the Times website. And I'm glad that I'm ticking people off from both sides, That makes me think I must be doing something right!

But back to the sustainable textiles conference next week. I've already heard from a vendor who wants to talk to me about King County buying organic cotton or recycled polyester uniforms for our employees. I'll talk to him, although I already let him know that I don't really have any purchasing influence, and that price is the big concern now for all purchasing, since we are in such a budget crunch.

The goal of course, which was also mentioned in my Times article, is for sustainable clothing and the standard not-so-sustainable clothing to be the same price. We're getting closer to that, but it will take all of us as consumers to help reach that goal - we've gotta buy the stuff.

Unlucky break

posted by: Tom Watson on Oct. 10, 2009

Of all the times to drop and break a compact fluorescent light bulb, of course I had to do it when I was giving a presentation to little kids.

This happened last Thursday, at the Spice of Life class at a building at Magnuson Park in Seattle. It was kind of a weird class, for homeschool kids, where I had to do the whole class myself with no input or direction at all, and it was just me and the kids for an hour. No parents were in the room, although a couple of them walked by in the hall a few times.

There were about 12 kids, ages 5 to 8. They were really great. Although it surprised me, it was actually pretty nice not to have any parents there. I started off by pulling different things out of my bag and asking whether they thought they could be recycled - a glass bottle, aluminum can, plastic bottle, junk mail, a used paper cupcake cup (OK to go in with the food waste/yard waste). They enjoyed this game, and got a lot of them right. It was going great until I asked them if a CFL bulb could be recycled, and it slipped out of my hand and broke on the linoleum floor.

I couldn't believe I did that, but I stayed calm and I think I handled the clean-up pretty well. Where it broke wasn't that close to the kids, and it was a big airy room, with a door open. I got a wet paper towel and wiped up the shards. A parent came by and got me some plastic bags, and I double-bagged the pieces and the paper towel. A parent wanted to sweep it up, but I had read that you shouldn't sweep or vacuum the pieces, so I declined. I moved the kids to the other side of the room from where I dropped the bulb, and I opened up a door in the room that went directly outside, to let more air in. After the class I put the bag in the garbage (which is also recommended). I put it in the bin on the loading dock back at my office.

You often hear that the amount of mercury in a CFL - and in case you didn't know, mercury is a potent poison and that's why CFLs need to be recycled, and why we should try to avoid breaking them - is about as much as the amount of ink on the tip of a pen. And when it breaks, that tiny amount gets dispersed into the air. So I wasn't super worried, and the kids didn't care. But I still felt bad.

Anyway, we moved on from there. After the recycling quiz I segued into telling them about different green products, like reusable water bottles, reusable shoping bags, compostable bags for food waste, a dog leash made from a used mountain climbing rope, and a crank radio. They loved the crank radio, and knew quite a bit about other types of alternative energy sources like solar and wind. Most of them had crank radios or flashlights at home. The kids were really bright and chatty, asked questions, told things about themselves. One girl lived on a boat. When I talked about compost, several kids had stories about eating dirt.

I ended by reading them The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss. That had been suggested by a friend who is a waste reduction educator in Vancouver WA (thank you Twitter), and it turned out to be a brilliant idea. Though I love Dr. Seuss I had never read that one before, and had always wanted to because it's supposedly his big "green" statement. I had even practiced reading it out loud, as my friend suggested, and that helped a lot with some of the tricky wordplay. It's maybe a little more forced and not quite as perfect as some of the other classic Dr. Seuss, but I enjoyed reading it, and the kids loved it.

So there you go. A memorable presentation for me. I definitely should talk to groups of kids more often, because it really makes me appreciate life. But next time I'll hold on to the damn CFL bulb a little tighter.