By Kelly Rand •
June 19, 2008
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We’ve already covered the mysteries of fusing plastic, but did you also know that you can knit with it too?! To continue my what to do with my overflowing bag of plastic bags kick, here is a quick tutorial on making your own plastic yarn or “plarn.”
1) Gather your bags. I separated mine by color, but why not go crazy and mix and match?
2) Start by cutting off the handles and the bottom of the bag. The result will be a nice smooth rectangle, as the bottom gatherings will have been removed.
By Paul Smith •
April 22, 2008
How do you get your kids to care more about and take action on improving the environment, when the world they’re focused on is on their iPod, their Wii, their phone, and online? If you’re SustainLane, you meet them where they are, and create a web based animation series and also show it on TV, on Earth Day Television.
Gorilla in the Greenhouse, an episodic show premiering today, doesn’t preach at kids, but instead engages them on their terms and empowers them to take action. 
Animated by the people behind such web classics as The Meatrix, it features four smart kids and a wise green gorilla, facing the big green challenges of our day, with inventiveness, action, and most importantly, a rockin’ song.
Not many people could pull off making a catchy tune about a garbage island in the Pacific Ocean, but in the first episode, “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” they show otherwise. With people such as Ralph Guggenheim, one of Pixar’s founders producing, this moves beyond merely being entertainment to being a bridge to further conversation with your children about things happening in the real world, and what can be done about them.
Whole Foods Markets will stop using disposable plastic grocery bags on Earth Day, April 22, 2008. Banning plastic bags is undoubtedly good for the environment–is it also a boon for Whole Foods?
According to the Whole Foods Market website, Americans toss out about 100 billion plastic bags annually (we recycle a pitiful 0.6% of our plastic bags), crowding landfills with an energy-consuming product (it takes 430,000,000 gallons of crude oil to make the 100 billion bags) that lasts for at least 1,000 years. Whole Foods estimates that their action will save 100 million plastic bags in 2008, alone.
By drawing attention to their company policies that are good for the earth, Whole Foods also gets some good press. Was this part of their plan?
It’s no longer a hazy shade of winter for most of us. When spring rears her beautiful head, I get the urge to clean and shop. Shedding the long sleeves reminds me that I have wrists, and should put something pretty on them too.
Luckily, some clever crafters on Etsy are using widely discarded materials to make unique bangles!…
By Emma Henderson •
March 14, 2008
After a long running campaign to ban plastic bags in the U.K, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced this week a plan to introduce a tax on plastic bags.
Fantastic news! We can rid the country of an ugly, harmful menace and give ourselves a big slap on the back whilst carrying our shopping home in natural resuable bags. Great!
Or… is it really all that great? Am I the only one who might be a little bit sad to see them go? I won’t miss the bags themselves but I will miss the creativity they inspire.
Plastic bags apparently do not kill hundreds of thousands of seabirds and other animals, according to the Times in the U.K. The paper traces the bag’s deadly reputation to a misquoted study that blamed discarded fishing nets for killing numerous animals.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
By Martín Cagliani •
February 26, 2008
I’m traveling trough Patagonia, Argentina, and exploring how eco-friendly the Patagonians are.
I drove through route 3. It runs across Argentina from north to south, next to the Atlantic coast. Here you can see a beautiful landscape, steppe to one side and deep blue ocean to the other.
Patagonia: it’s a land of dinosaurs, oil and strong winds. The latter is responsible for a horrifying realization–how dirty it is! The last time I visited Patagonia was six years ago, and I didn’t see the mass amount of plastic bags everywhere.
By Janel Sterbentz •
February 16, 2008
On March 27th 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the US to ban plastic bags in major supermarkets and pharmacies. Only biodegradable plastic and recyclable paper are allowed. Whole Foods recently announced that by April of this year it would end the use of plastic bags in all of its 270 stores in the US, Canada and the UK.
New York and New Jersey require retailers that use plastic bags to offer a recycling program, the city of Oakland, California, is considering a ban, and China announced a countrywide free plastic bag prohibition in January. Ireland took the lead in Europe, taxing plastic bags in 2002. Customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. The Irish government says the tax cut the use of disposable bags by 90 percent! The tax also raised millions of dollars in revenue.
By Jennifer Lance •
January 8, 2008
Starting on June 1, ultra-thin plastic bags will be banned in China. Furthermore, supermarkets and shops will no longer be able to give out free plastic bags to shoppers. According to Reuters, “Chinese people use up to 3 billion plastic bags a day and the country has to refine 5 million tonnes (37 million barrels) of crude oil every year to make plastics used for packaging…”
Image courtesy of English People’s [...]
The city of New York is the latest government considering restrictions on plastic shopping bags, with a proposal in the works to require large stores to offer in-house recycling and reusable bags for sale. But is action like that enough to stop the plastic bag scourge?
From Africa to Canada, Australia to Ireland, and in the oceans in between, plastic bag trash has become a pestilence seemingly without end. And
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By Max Lindberg •
September 5, 2007
I couldn’t pass this one up. Reuben Miller sent this to me from his Stumble site and it just seemed like too good an idea to pass up.
Imagine, driving, or riding, or whatever your shopping cart to the grocery store, detach the bike and wheel the cart into the store. Once at the checkout, no need for bags: just load the groceries into the cart, attach it to your bike
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