Green Options

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We try not to do takeout meals often at our house except for our weekly pizza. There’s always a lot of packaging waste with takeout food and the nutrition value is usually poor. Somewhere along the line however, we started the tradition of getting Chinese takeout on the first day of school. And yesterday was it.

I’ve been paying much closer attention to the amount of food waste that my family of four produces lately.  As I wrote about in The Shocking Statistics of Food Waste, about 30% of the food produced in America gets thrown away. The environmental impact of wasted food is immense.

As I cleared the table after dinner last night, I thought about the three cups or so of white rice that came with our takeout that nobody touched. Nobody ever touches it. It usually gets put in the refrigerator only to be thrown away a week later.

It’s perfectly good rice so I decided to spend a little time finding some recipes that could use it up. Here are five recipes that you can make using leftover, cooked white rice next time you faced with one or more of those uneaten containers.

Garlic Rice - This is a simple Philippine fried recipe that calls for adding pantry staples plus some ground pork, but after reading comments made on the recipe from users, the pork can be omitted and vegetables such as mushrooms and green peppers can be added.

On Sunday, September 7, Philadelphians and those from surrounding communities (including me) will be celebrating all things green at GreenFest Philly. The festival coordinators expect about 20,000 people and their reusable water bottles to descend upon the Headhouse Square section of the city located on Second Street between Lombard and South Streets.

The theme for this year’s festival is water quality. There will be a Water Quality Symposium where speakers will cover topics such as Residential Water Use and What’s Happening In Your River? (that would be the Delaware River for those unfamiliar with the region). There will also be several short films at the EcoFilm Forum that will cover water topics.

While water is the theme of this year’s festival there will be much more going on. 200 exhibitors will display their green causes/services/merchandise. There will be plenty of kids activities and even a Sweet Green Organic Pastry/Dessert Contest. Oh, YUM! And much, much more.

How far should farmers go to ensure that consumers get their salad in a bag? According to an Associated Press article Calif. farmers use guns, poison to protect crops, some farmers are using some extreme, possibly unnecessary practices to keep E.coli and other bacteria out of their fields of greens.

It’s understandable that farmers would want to make sure that deadly contaminants do not taint their crops given that in 2006 three people were killed and about 200 others became ill after eating fresh spinach contaminated with E.coli. That scare ended up costing California spinach growers about $80 million in sales that year.

One of the possible causes for the 2006 deadly outbreak could have been wildlife such as deer or wild pigs who defecated near crops, although the exact cause was never determined. In response to the outbreak, the farmers, the packers, and the shippers created new standards to help head off another contamination outbreak. According to the report, however, none of the standards directly related to wildlife. Many farmers, however, aren’t taking any chances at losing their crops so they are taking measures way beyond the new standards. Measures like:

taking gun-safety classes to safely shoot animals that could carry bacteria
removing natural habitat, in hopes of keeping wildlife away, by uprooting native trees and plants
poisoning frogs that may carry salmonella on their feet who can get caught in harvesting machinery
trapping wildlife
fencing in their crops to keep wildlife out

Last week, I wrote about the paper waste associated with catalogs in Catalog Waste Part 1: NOW is the Time to Cancel Unwanted Catalogs and Stop Paper Waste. If you’re receiving catalogs that you don’t want, cancel them and seriously curb your paper consumption in one easy step.

But, what if you don’t want to cancel all of the catalogs you receive? Sometimes, there are catalogs that you actually do use and want to continue receiving. Do you have to be content with receiving many, many copies of the catalog when one a year or one a season would suffice? Do you have to be content with the catalog companies using 100% virgin paper?

No, you don’t. Here are some things you can do:

Call the companies of the catalogs that you do wish to receive and tell them that you would only like to receive a certain number of mailings a year. Not all companies are set up to do this yet, but more and more companies are offering this option. If a company comes out with an “early fall catalog” and a “fall catalog” and a “late fall catalog” (this is common with clothing companies), most likely the items inside the catalog are the same, but the picture on the cover is different and the pages have been rearranged. You can request that you be sent one catalog a season. Or, if you just want a catalog to shop from for the holidays, request only one mailing a year at the beginning of holiday season.

Actually, the best time to cancel unwanted catalogs was probably about two months ago before the first waves of attack came, but now is the time to stop future attacks. What attacks am I talking about? The dreaded onslaught of holiday catalogs. The first should arrive right after Labor Day if they haven’t started coming already. Catalog companies will continue to send several copies of the same catalog (trying to trick consumers with a different cover) until a few days before Christmas.

Then there will be, perhaps, a two week lull. After that will come the post-holiday sale catalogs. Because nobody gets everything they want for the holidays, catalog companies are kind enough to slash prices so that you can buy yourself what you really wanted. How do I know all this?

I’m a former catalog junkie.

That was before my month long campaign to rid my house of catalogs, and unfortunately, it was before Catalog Choice.

Have you seen the Planet Green program Greensburg? The program follows the town of Greensburg, Kansas as they rebuild, in a very green way, after a tornado in May 2007 ripped through the town and devastated it. Nearly the entire community was destroyed.

Sunchips is helping the town of Greensburg to rebuild. Their first initiative was to donate $1 million to help build a solar-powered business incubator. It will eventually house 10 local businesses and help Greensburg residents return to their homes (many of them newly replaced).

Now Sunchips is taking another step to help Greensburg. When the tornado hit, it didn’t just destroy homes. It also destroyed the tree canopy in Greensburg. So a Facebook application was created called SunChips Greensburg widget that will allow Facebook users to add the widget to their profiles. For each widget that is added, SunChips will donate $1 towards replanting the tree canopy in Greensburg. The goal is to raise $50,000.

Last year at my twice monthly morning mother’s group, we were treated to garbage bags full of day old bagels, breads, cookies, and other baked goods courtesy of a local Panera Bread. How did we get them? All we had to do was ask. There was so much that  I would bring reusable bags and take home bagels, loaves of Italian, ciabatta, and focaccia bread, and often a few cookies. Many of the woman did the same. If our group hadn’t taken them, chances are they would have been thrown in the trash. Before you get all self-righteous about the waste of food by restaurants, think back to the last time you cleaned out your refrigerator. What did you throw out? How about the last time you ate in a restaurant? What did you leave on your plate? Last week at World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, some shocking food waste statistics were presented. What place does food waste talk have at a water conference? It takes a lot of water to produce the food that is ultimately wasted.

I’ve read a lot of books in the past year about going, being, living, embracing… green. I haven’t felt I’ve wasted my time reading any of them, but every so often one of them will stand out above the rest. I just finished reading J. Matthew Sleeth’s book Serve God Save the Planet, and it is one of those books.

For much of the later half of the 20th century, there was a divide between American Christians and environmentalists. There were individual Christians who were involved in environmentalism, but the mainstream church in America ignored the subject. Over the past decade that has been changing, and mainstream Christians are beginning to wake up and smell the shade grown, organic coffee. Books like Sleeth’s are much needed in explaining the hows and whys of it all to Christians who are trying to figure out their place in what to many of them is a new green world.

I found Sleeth’s book so engaging because he’s attempting to live the life  that I am attempting to live, too. He and his family have considerably downshifted. They continually purge their lives of stuff, live more simply, grow their own food, and seek new ways to help the planet all while realizing that they have a responsibility to the people on the planet, too.

Early on in the book, Sleeth refutes many of the reasons he hears Christians and others using to not care for the planet - reasons from “God gave us dominion over everything.” (which some use to abuse the earth instead of care for it) to “I bought my SUV because its bigger, weighs more, sits up higher, and is safer in a crash. If I’m going to be in a wreck, I want my family to be safe.” to “Tree huggers worship nature. I don’t want to be involved with them.”

Last week, I wrote about the Back to School Shopping Madness that leads families to spend an average of $527.08 on back to school things. While the average family may be spending over $500, the average college freshman spends $1285 getting ready to move into the dorm. Much of that is spent on items they already have at home and would be able to take the dorm. The new stuff is not necessary.

But there are some things that college students could be taking with them that will help them live a more sustainable life while in the dorms. If you must shop, think about picking up these items (unless you have them already of course - then resist the urge to buy new ones).

Power strips for your electrical devices - College students are going to have computers, printers, mobile phone chargers, and other electrical appliances that draw power even when they aren’t in use. Bringing enough power strips to handle all your devices will make it easy to turn them all off when not in use.

Travel coffee mugs with lids - If a college student hasn’t discovered coffee yet, chances are he or she will by finals time. A few durable travel mugs can save hundreds of paper/styrofoam cups over a semester. Don’t just use them for coffee taken from the dorm room. If you go to a coffee house, take it with you.

Reusable water bottles -Plastic bottles with lids, or better yet stainless steel bottles (such as SIGG or Kleen Canteens), are easy to carry around - most backpacks now have a place just for water bottles. Not only will it help save a lot of disposable water/beverage bottles, it will save the user a ton of money, too.

Looking for a way to reduce your paper waste but keep your favorite magazines? Zinio may be a solution for you. It’s a digital magazine service that lets you view your magazines on your computer instead of receiving them in print format.

Zinio gives you instant access to the magazines that you have purchased through their website in one of two ways.

The first way is just click and read. There is no software to download or install. You view the magazine from their website from a library of magazines that you have set up. To view the magazines, you need to be connected to the Internet.

The second way is to download and install the Zinio Reader and copy the magazines onto your computer. Then you can download the magazines onto your computer and have them available anytime whether you’re connected to the Internet or not.