1000 Flowers for the Planet

Tuesday, 5 November 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #31 Buy Only Free-Range Meat

I thought if I bought organic food that I was also buying food from farmers who give the best possible lives to their animals. However, when I came across a website for a butcher in my home town who sells only ‘free-range’ meat, I learned more about the industry and found that there was a difference between organic and free-range. Organic meat does not guarantee a good life for the animal concerned, whereas free-range does. The butcher I discovered sells only meat that he is positive has come from an animal that has been permitted to roam freely and act naturally. He also says that grass fed beef is better for our health than grain-fed beef and had links to information to prove his point. His meat is sourced locally meaning the food miles are minimised. This butcher also runs his entire business in an environmentally friendly way to ensure his impact on this planet is minimal.

If the meat is a little higher in cost than you would pay at the supermarket, it’s worth it, and we should probably eat smaller portions than we do anyway.

So sit at your computer for a while and see if you too can source locally produced free-range meat, and be good to the creatures who feed us.

Monday, 4 November 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #30 Buy Locally Made

Our ancestors used to so this more than we do now – the local butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. People were able to live in smaller communities around which they grew their food and within which they provided their own services. Since the Industrial Revolution we have purchased more and more goods from further afield, yet there is a growing desire to return to buying locally produced goods. This is particularly true of food, as people become more concerned about issues such as genetic modification and chemical fertilisers, as well as increased allergies and skin conditions.

I know we have always been globalised in one way or another, and that won’t change as long as we have different skills and resources to offer one another. But our basics can and probably should come from a local source.

What is ‘local’? It starts in the back yard, extends next to your community – your village, your town, your city – then your state, province or county, then your country. I’m a firm believer that if you can produce or provide your own goods and services then you should, and you should be free to do so as well, without reference to anyone else.

Sunday, 3 November 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #29 Reduce Paper Usage

It’s probably impossible to prevent every single piece of paper coming into our lives, but we can certainly work at reducing the amount that passes through our hands. This week I’ve given you a few suggestions for saving this precious resource and I intend to revisit this topic in the future with even more ideas. For now, have a look at this website for a few more tips:

http://www.visionofearth.org/live-green/31-ways-to-reduce-paper-usage/

Saturday, 2 November 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #28 Go Paperless

Firstly let me clarify that I mean ‘not using paper in the first instance’ as opposed to ‘avoiding having a piece of paper’. Many of the websites I’ve read to gather ideas for this Flower talk about avoiding paper. For example, one suggestion is to take a snapshot (I suppose that means a photo on your smart phone) of a receipt when you make a purchase and not take the receipt home. Another was to scan a document for electronic storage and then throw away the document. This does not prevent the creation of paper usage in the first instance and defeats the objective. In fact, to present ideas such as these as environmental solutions is irresponsible.

Let’s make this one a challenge. For one week (two if you can and a lifetime would be even better), unplug the printer, remove all pieces of paper, pens and pencils and put them away for now, then see how you go NOT using paper. See if you can find solutions to the problems you think you face. Yesterday’s Flower will help.

Also look at every paper item that comes into your house uninvited and think of a way to prevent it happening in the future. If you’re holding something you don’t have time to read, ask whoever delivered it to you to remove you from their database or cancel the subscription. It will feel so much better not to have all that paperwork around demanding your attention unnecessarily. De-clutter. It will feel good.

Do you really have time to read the newspaper? What percentage of all those pages would you actually read? Can you hear about what’s happening around you in some other way – radio, TV?

Try to feel sad when you put a piece of paper in your recycling bin – just for a while to see if you can change your mindset. If you feel sad, perhaps you can take the next step to thinking about how that piece of paper came into your life in the first place and then how you could have avoided it.

An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.

Friday, 1 November 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #27 Fully Utilise Your Home Computer

Since households became users of home computers our paper consumption has sky-rocketed. Yet computers are the very tools that should replace paper. On our computers we can use word processors (replacing typewriters), spreadsheets (replacing accounting journals), desktop publishing programs (replacing literal cut and paste artwork), databases (replacing card systems), emails (replacing snail mail), and presentation programs (replacing posters), just to name the major tools. Everything can be stored on our computer and a backup copy made in case of a breakdown. These days we can store immense amounts of data on very small devices – so small they’d fit in your handbag. There’s no need for large filing cabinets and no need to print everything.

It takes a different mindset but it can be done. Next time you sit in front of your computer, look at it as a storage device for your files. Unhook the printer for a week or two and challenge yourself not to print anything to see how well you can cope without paper. You may actually find you end up better organised. Now wouldn’t that be nice!

Thursday, 31 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #26 Use Both Sides of the Paper

Not quite like yesterday’s Flower. Sometimes we do only need to print on one side of the paper, but then that piece of paper may eventually no longer be required. Don’t throw it in the recycling bin yet – use the other side for another task e.g. printing something else for short term use such as something that needs to be proof read; cut it into quarters to use as note paper; give it to a child to draw on; shred it and use it in the nesting boxes for your chooks (Flower #3).

Let me know any other ideas you have.

Wednesday, 30 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #25 Print 2-Sided

If you have to print a multi-paged document (2 or more pages) then learn how to print on both sides of the paper. At home this may take a bit more time if you have to print one side then return the paper to the feed tray to print the other side, but it’s worth it (and may even make you reconsider printing at all). At work I find this very easy as the printer has 2-sided printing as a preference. And while I’m at it, I choose to print greyscale only and save colour printing for special things.

Tuesday, 29 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #24 Refuse Junk Mail

For the next week I am presenting ideas for using less paper.

A very easy way to reduce the amount of paper coming into your home in the first instance is to refuse junk mail. These days we have advertisements coming at us from every angle. Most of them we have no control over. However, we can control junk mail by putting a sign on our letterbox stating “No Junk Mail”. This is how it works in Australia. How does it work in your country?

Recently, despite the sign on our letterbox (mailbox), the delivery person found a loophole by putting the junk mail inside our free local newspaper, which she also delivered. It took a few phone calls to find out who was responsible, but in the end I was able to ask for this practice to cease. I had received ‘25’ multi-paged advertising brochures in that newspaper. I may not be able to stop companies from printing their brochures, but if enough people refuse receipt of them, eventually they may stop wasting paper.

Monday, 28 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #23 Turn Off Lights

Are you sitting in every room in which a light is switched on? Then if not, go and turn that light off. When our daughter is out for the evening, we don’t leave the outside light on awaiting her return – we turn it on either just before she is due home or before we go to bed. That way it’s not on for a whole evening unnecessarily. We turn the kitchen light off once the dishes are done and we’ve retired to the lounge room for the evening. It’s simply a matter of thinking about what you’re doing and only using the lights you actually need.

Flick that switch – off.

Sunday, 27 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #22 Buy Fair Trade

Fair Trade – “it is about ensuring the choices we make have a positive impact on our lives, the lives of others and the environment.”

I found this quote on http://www.fta.org.au/frequently-asked-questions.html where you will find plenty of information to bring you up to speed on this humanitarian and environmental action we can all take. But as I read through the site I became somewhat confused. There are two phrases: Fair Trade and Fairtrade. Yes, there’s a difference, but it took me a bit of reading to work it all out, and even now I’m a bit fuzzy. A reasonable explanation can be read at http://www.thefairtradestore.co.uk/blog/2011/12/29/what-is-the-difference-between-fair-trade-and-fairtrade/ and you can find more information at http://fairtrade.com.au/. Sometimes you need to do the research for yourself.

Explore Fair Trade purchasing whenever you can and see what a difference we can make to our fellow human beings.

Saturday, 26 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #21 Share Your Magazines

Magazines have quite an environmental footprint. For this Flower I shall only be talking about printed magazines as opposed to electronic magazines, which have their own set of environmental issues.

Print magazines begin as trees which need to be harvested, transported, produced into paper, transported and finally printed using inks. That’s the production part only. They’re then transported (again) to a point of sale where you can decide whether or not you buy one (or more). So far there are a lot of resources that have been used.

My first suggestion is to stop and think about whether you need to buy a magazine in the first place. They’re considered a throw-away item, unlike a book, which has a greater chance of being retained on the bookshelf. Magazines have short life-spans by their very nature. They’re designed to read once and be replaced by the next juicy copy that catches your eye with a headline. This is how companies make money.

I recognise that many, many people rely on magazines for their employment. If you feel you have to buy magazines, at least share them with your friends when you’ve finished reading them, and ensure multiple uses before they end up in landfill.

Hopefully they’ll be recycled though.

Friday, 25 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #20 Use a Clothesline

There are several benefits to using a clothes line for drying your clothes. This will save you money that would otherwise be spent on electricity used to run a clothes dryer. Not using a clothes dryer will also cause less wear and tear on the fabrics, produce zero static, prevent shrinkage, reduce the need for ironing and produces no greenhouse gas emissions. Your clothes will smell fresher and have more body. Mum used to say the sun put healthy stuff into the clothes, and whilst maybe not scientifically true, they definitely smell nicer.

If the weather is wet you can still hang your clothes under a veranda or indoors on a clothes horse. If you have ducted heating the clothes horse can be placed over a vent to aid drying. If you live in an apartment, put the clothes horse near a window where it will benefit from the sunshine.

Here in Australia we have a wonderful Aussie invention called a Hills Hoist, a clothes line that rotates in the wind and can be raised higher or lower by turning a handle. We also have back yards here in Oz and plenty of opportunity to dry our clothes in the warm Aussie sun. Countries with less space and snowy winters have different challenges, I know, and not everyone can hang their clothes outside, but those of us who can, should.

Thursday, 24 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #19 Recycle Spectacles

I thought this would be an easy one, but it’s not. Things are never straight-forward.

For years my local hospital has collected unwanted spectacles for distribution to developing countries where those people who are unable to purchase spectacles for themselves may gain the benefit of aided sight. Lions Australia have a wonderful article at http://lionsclubs.org.au/activities/health/vision-hearing/lions-recycle-for-sight-australia/

detailing how you can recycle your old spectacles and benefit someone in need.

However, whilst researching for this Flower I also came across an article at

http://www.scienceinpublic.com.au/other/recycled-glasses, telling people not to send recycled glasses to developing countries and why. The claims here are that this is not a cost saving exercise and people in need of spectacles can be better served by the provision of proper eye examinations and a new pair of glasses, something the article claims can be provided at a cost of $10 per person.

I’ll have to leave this one with you to ponder for yourself. Or let me know of another way to recycle spectacles.

Wednesday, 23 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #18 Reject Plastic Bags

Plastic bags were introduced into supermarkets in 1977.

Australians use over 3.65 billion plastic bags a year

Europe throws away 4 billion plastic bags a year

Americans use 100 billion plastic bags each year (another website put this figure at 350 billion)

Around the world 500 billion to 1 trillion! bags are used every minute

In many cases it’s difficult to know the date for when this information was uploaded to the net, but who cares which is correct – the figures are staggering at best.)

It takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to decompose.

If you think using paper bags is the answer, think again! It takes more energy, a lot more water and produces more greenhouse gases to produce paper bags compared with plastic bags. So get out those baskets, reusable bags and cotton totes and use them.

Tuesday, 22 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #17 Live Simply

"Live simply so others may simply live"

Mahatma Gandhi

Sunday, 20 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #16 Grow Vegetables

If you have the space to do so, consider growing your own vegetables. The advantages of doing so are great and many:
organic food - food grown without poisons can only be a good thing for your health. And you'll prevent urban run-off whereby poisons would otherwise leach into the soil and eventually be washed into our drainage systems and into water systems (rivers and oceans)
no food miles for transportation
quality control
quantity control - grow only what you need or can reasonably share
fresh food - can't get any fresher
convenient food - walk into the back yard and pick what you'll eat for dinner
cheaper
family bonding - the whole family can be involved, spend time together, children can learn how things grow - all healthy emotional stuff
satisfaction from self-sufficiency
sustainable

You can probably think of more reasons for yourself.

I found a terrific sight for major English speaking countries at: www.gardenate.com where you can find out what to plant at any given time of the year.

Friday, 18 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #15 Create a Worm Farm

Here’s another option for dealing with your organic waste. By creating a worm farm you return kitchen waste to the environment via the industrious worms who turn it into castings and worm tea ready for use on your garden, where it has further benefits of being environmentally friendly, promotes plant growth and increases their immune systems. Some cool information is available at:

http://www.reducelandfill.org/AboutUs/WhyCompost.aspx

Thursday, 17 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #14 Buy Cards Without Plastic

Recently I needed to purchase a card for a wedding I was attending. Sadly I found it’s becoming harder to find a nice card that isn’t packaged in plastic. I do understand that it is probably for the protection of the product from being shop soiled and damaged, which wastes good product in the end. However, I’d rather not buy plastic packaging if I can avoid it, so I limit my search to those cards in the shop that come a la naturale. When I was growing up there was a definite etiquette to card-giving. If you were attending an event, such as a wedding or birthday party, you would be giving a gift, and so a small gift tag was all that was required on the parcel. A large greeting card for the occasion would be sent in the event of an inability to attend, and this would be posted through the mail (that’s snail mail, of course). When writing in the card, the names for multiple persons would be written in the order of head of the house first, wife second then children in order of age. The sender would sign off using the name of the related person first, then spouse, then children in order of age. E.G. If I was sending a card to my parents I would sign off with my name first, then my husband’s. Likewise if I was sending a card to my parents-in-law I would sign of my husband’s name first, then mine. There was also a lot of etiquette about addressing the envelope too, but it’s rather involved. Perhaps you could do an internet search for modern etiquette, but in the meantime, buy greeting cards without the little plastic cover.

Wednesday, 16 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #13 Drink Tap Water

Personally, I gave up drinking out of a bottle when I was one year old. However, I do still drink water. I obtain very cheap water from my tap and I like to drink it out of a glass, like a grown-up. Fortunately I find my local water to be very clean and tasty and perhaps that’s not the case with everyone. But I do think people have gone overboard with the whole ‘water’ thing, sucking away on their bottles in meetings, during conversation, walking down the street – anywhere they happen to be. It seems to me that some giant corporation somewhere along the line did some fantastic marketing and convinced a lot of people that they ‘needed’ to have water with them wherever they went. Guess who the winner was in that scenario.

Buying bottled water is an immense waste of resources, both yours and the planet’s – crude oil to produce plastic containers, production, further packaging, transportation, single use, your hard-earned money, finished off with a nice touch of landfill. What a recipe for disaster!

Did you know that a litre of bottled water is more expensive than a litre of petrol? How does your hip pocket feel? Get some facts and figures on the Do Something website at:

http://www.gotap.com.au/Did%20you%20know/Facts.aspx

In Australia we use 50 million litres of oil to manufacture and distribute bottled water, and in the U.S.A. their landfills are overflowing with 2 million tons of discarded water bottles, aside from anything else. Get some interesting U.S statistics at:

http://thewaterproject.org/bottled_water_wasteful.asp

Tuesday, 15 October 2013

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #12 Cut Up Plastic Rings Before Recycling

Whenever you are about to discard a piece of plastic ring, please cut it at least once before tossing it in the rubbish. What plastic rings? The six-pack rings are one common type that are particularly hazardous. I like peanut butter and the plastic jar has a large ring left after I’ve broken the seal. There are other examples, all of which can cause environmental threats to wildlife and ecosystems. If they can’t be avoided all together, then take a few seconds of your time to cut them in half before tossing them away. Whilst this seems like a small thing to do, every little bit counts. We do need to sweat the small stuff. I read an informative and passionate piece about this topic at:

http://voices.yahoo.com/plastic-six-pack-rings-environmental-threats-6709100.html

See the results of plastic rings in the environment at:

https://sites.google.com/site/friendsforenvironment/ecology-news/pacificoceanplasticwastedump