Earth Friendly Shopping

 We would like to join Trans Fair USA in honoring October as Fair Trade Month.

According to The Gourmet Retailer Fair Trade certification has been gaining steam in the last several years.

Retail sales of Fair Trade Certified coffee alone grew tenfold between 2001 and 2006 to $730 million, according to TransFair USA

So far this year, 284 Fair Trade Certified products — typically coffee, tea, herbs, cocoa and chocolate, fruit, sugar, rice, spices and even cut flowers — were launched in the United States compared with 130 last year and 17 in 2003

We are big believers in Fair Trade Certification.  After all, how can you call yourself environmental if you are exploiting workers?   We spend a lot of time looking for Fair trade chocolate, fair trade coffee, and fair trade tea.

TransFair explains the principles of Fair trade

Fair Trade Certification empowers farmers and farm workers to lift themselves out of poverty by investing in their farms and communities, protecting the environment, and developing the business skills necessary to compete in the global marketplace.

Fair Trade is much more than a fair price!  Fair Trade principles include:

• Fair price: Democratically organized farmer groups receive a guaranteed minimum floor price and an additional premium for certified organic products. Farmer organizations are also eligible for pre-harvest credit.
• Fair labor conditions: Workers on Fair Trade farms enjoy freedom of association, safe working conditions, and living wages. Forced child labor is strictly prohibited.
• Direct trade: With Fair Trade, importers purchase from Fair Trade producer groups as directly as possible, eliminating unnecessary middlemen and empowering farmers to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global marketplace.
• Democratic and transparent organizations: Fair Trade farmers and farm workers decide democratically how to invest Fair Trade revenues.
• Community development: Fair Trade farmers and farm workers invest Fair Trade premiums in social and business development projects like scholarship programs, quality improvement trainings, and organic certification.
• Environmental sustainability: Harmful agrochemicals and GMOs are strictly prohibited in favor of environmentally sustainable farming methods that protect farmers’ health and preserve valuable ecosystems for future generations.

Way Cool

Every year at Halloween, we face a dilemma.  We love the neighborhood kids coming to our door.  On the other hand,  we have giving kids candies filled with high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors, and all sorts of other yucky stuff.

So, we were really thrilled to find these Organic Lollipops from Yummy Earth Organics in time for Halloween!.  

Yummy Earth was founded by two daddies who wanted to feed their babies a diet rich in delicious organic foods free of yucky chemicals, pesticides and dyes. YummyEarth tastes much better than mass produced chemical candy because the flavors are handcrafted with real fruit extracts. and other planet friendly natural organic ingredients were chosen, with NO chemical colors, artificial flavors, or corn syrup. The fabulous colors come from organic black carrots, organic wheat grass juice, and organic pumpkin! We are just as pleased with what’s in YummyEarth as what is not. YummyEarth is not only certified organic for the USDA and European Union, but our products are also kosher parve, gluten-free, peanut-free and nut-free, and have no corn syrup. Just fabulous award winning taste!

More and more studies are showing the ill effects on children who consume artificial flavors and colors, especially those with asthma, ADHD, autism. When you’re going to let your child have a treat, choose one that’s safe!

Yummy Earth Organic Lollipops are available in Eight delicious flavors:

• wet-face watermelon
  
• too berry blueberry
  
• sour apple tart
  
• pomegranate pucker
• mango tango
  
• googly grape
  
• strawberry smash
  
• very very cherry 

A one pound bag with 70 pops is $7.99

Are you ready?  Here it is:

I am a firm believer in the concept that a lot of people, doing little things, adds up to a big difference.  With that in mind, we keep looking for ways to cut our energy use and reduce our carbon footprint.

When I was growing up, on Long Island, we didn’t have a dryer.  In the summer my mom hung the clothes outside, and in the winter we ran lines in the basement.  Mrs.  EFS, on the other hand, had grown up with a dryer and had no experience hanging clothes outside to dry, so this one was up to me.

I did an online search for clothes hangers, and they seemed expensive.  Up to $150 or so.    So, I toured our local hardware store, and found this beauty for $79.  Set up was a bit of a challenge.  I really didn’t want to dig up the lawn,  didn’t want to jack hammer into cement,  and had a little trouble finding a enough room.

So, finally figured out the right spot, dug a hole, set in some fence post cement and set it up.   We have been using it about a month.  This clothes line can handle between two and three loads of laundry.

After a month of using the line, our natural gas bill went down about $20.  We  don’t use it for every load, every time, but we do use it frequently.  I try to start the weekend laundry early in the day,  and do jeans, sweats, and towels first, so that they have a chance to dry.  I usually find that the first things I hang up are almost dry by the end of the day, and we  cut down several dryer loads each week.

Will this solve the energy crisis?  Prevent global warming?  Help me lose 20 lbs? Obviously not, but lots of people doing little things can have a big impact.

Ordinarily,  I really don’t care much about the ads on this site.  The goal is for me to generate enough revenue to pay the direct cost of the web host.  (who by the way is Hostasaurus.com – they host several sites for me, and are really good.  – Shout out to Dave and Jen)

Anyway, most of the ads on this site are  automatically generated by ad “aggregators”   So, companies such as Google, Adbrite, and XY7, sell a bunch of ads,  and buy a bunch of adspace from little companies like us.  We put some code on the site, and they feed the ads.  We almost never have any input into the content of the ads.

But this morning, I get on and see an ad from “stop the bag tax”  -  and I had to find out more.

The site, run by the Progressive Bag Affiliates of the American Chemistry Council and The California Film Extruders and Converters Association  aims to convince you to write your politicians not to pass the proposed tax on plastic bags currently in the CA legislature.

The ads include misleading statements such as

BUT WILL THIS SAVE THE PLANET?

NO. Plastic bags are fully recyclable.  Grocery stores already make it easy to recycle with convenient recycle bins.

The bags may actually be recyclable, but very few are actually recycled. According to San Francisco Environment Department spokesperson Mark Westlund

 We’ve had in store recycling in San Francisco for over 10 years, and it’s never really been successful,” says Westlund, who estimates that the city achieved only a 1 percent recycling rate of plastic bags at the stores. “People have to pack up the bags, bring them into the store and drop them off. I think you’d be more inclined to bring your own bag than do that.”

Instead, plastic bags wind up in landfill or worse, floating out into the rivers and oceans.  We have written before about the great plastic patch.   Here is more info about plastic bags

Plastic bags contain chemical additives which can be harmful to human health and the environment. Among the chemicals contained in plastic bags are lead, cadmium, mercury, and the carcinogen diethylhexyl phthalate.

Producing plastic bags requires petroleum and sometimes natural gas. Californians Against Waste says that if the state of California alone cut out half of the plastic bag use over 2,000 barrels of oil would be saved, and 73,000 tons of garbage would be eliminated from landfills. According to the Worldwatch Institute, it takes 430,000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags.

The World Watch Institute estimates that plastic bags cost U.S. retailers $4 billion annually. Retailers in turn pass the cost of the ‘free’ plastic bags on to consumers in the form of higher product prices. WSJ Target, the second largest retailer in the U.S., purchases 1.8 billion bags per year.

Plastic bags are toxic to animals. An estimated 100,000 birds, marine mammals, whales, and sea turtles die from eating plastic bags every year. The animals either choke on the bags or suffer from intestinal blockages. 

Bring your OWN

Update – I am not going to link to the site – If the ad is still up, well, I can’t really advocate that you click on it (that would violate my agreement with Google) – but if you were really curious, and really wanted to….

 As the cost of oil and natural gas has soared, many have called for new Nuclear Power Plants to be built in our country.  Often, proponents of Nuclear power point to France, where 80% of electrical power is generated at Nuclear plants.    But, as Mother Jones points out, the safety record of the French nuclear plants leaves much to be concerned about.

Recently, two fuel rods got “snagged”  during maintenance.

Over the summer, there were a series of radioactive spills at the plant, poisoning the groundwater and the rivers.  How many years will the people who live in this region be at risk?

The high cost of oil makes nuclear seem like a good idea.  But don’t be fooled.  The extreme danger posed by nuclear power plants is real, and has not gone away