Green Options

Funny what turns me on and this one hits the spot! It’s a biodegradable shower cap that can be used again, composted, or thrown straight to the trash. Guilt free is the key emotion here.

gDiapers fans are no doubt excited to see that they have some new and adorable options for flushable diapers. Their web site is now boasting several new prints for their “little g” pants including Ga, Ga Pink, Goo Goo Blue, Good Vibe Girl and Good Vibe Stripe, which are pretty snazzy if I do say so myself. It has no doubt been hard to compete with the cuteness of cloth diapers but they are certainly making strides.

The little g pants are the outer shell of the gDiaper system or the diaper cover that holds the flushable inserts.  The inserts are the disposable and absorbent inner liners that you toss (flush, throw away or compost). You reuse the gDiaper pants again and again. For about 40 years there have been only two basic choices in diapering. Cloth or disposable. gDiapers offers consumers a third option….a hybrid cloth diaper with a disposable element.

I’ve deservedly ranted about Starbucks a lot lately. (See Starbucks: Wasting Up to 6 Million Gallons of Water Every Day and Where Do You Draw the Line?)

Let me ask you and them another question, What about the eco-impact of disposable paper coffee cups? Disposable coffee cups are responsible for the deaths of over 6.5 million trees each year. In 2006 it’s estimated that 16 billion found their way into the trash creating over 250 million pounds of solid waste.

Editor’s note: With warmer weather just around the corner in the Northern Hemisphere, many of us will start looking for opportunities to cook out and picnic. This week, Life Goggles takes a look at an earth-friendly disposable plate from India… made from leaves. This post was originally published on Monday, March 3, 2008.

Ganesha is an alternative trading outfit that markets the traditional industries of India, working directly with the producers. We’ve more about them in our Paisley Park Jute Shopper Product Review.

The sent Life Goggles a pack of 20 leaf plates to test. But where do you start testing a plate? Kev did an excellent review of some plates made from potato starch, so I did what any self-respecting blogger would do: I copied him.

But as it turns out, these are quite different products. These disposable plates are made from sal and siali leaves, from the forests of Orissa, East India. And as you’d expect, leaves can’t hold that much weight, so doing a test like Kev’s weight bearing experiment with apples was a no-goer; in fact it struggles with a knife and fork on it. For an easy comparison, think of the leaf plates as a replacement for paper plates at parties or barbecues, but bigger. They’re about 30cm (12″) in diameter.

Whoo-hoo!  Seventh Generation now sells chlorine-free training pants!  We hope they work as well as the diapers.

If you steer clear of Styrofoam, crave non-disposable cutlery, and believe that beer in plastic cups is a discredit to your pursuit of fizzy-cool hoppiness, never fear. Become a garbage-free gourmand, and even improve your city with a daily dose of activism.

Why avoid disposables? Try getting an Italian to enjoy his espresso from the ridged lip of a Styrofoam cup and he’ll tell you all about the importance of real cups

[...]

Pile of Plastic Silverware

Americans alone use and dispose of enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times. Lets break this down, mathematically first (then we can physically break down the paper and plastics). If the circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles (a bit longer than measured at the poles), and there are 365 days in the year,

[...]