My Green summer kick off...

SO, there has been so much progress in my attempt to go GREEN! Not just on a personal tip, but efforts have sauntered into my workplace as well. Here are some highlights:

In life...

• There is nothing I love to do more then be outside and sit in the sunshine!!! I've been waiting on the DC weather to get it together, but recently been chilling on the water front, hiking and bike riding! I know that's probably not technically going green, but I'm just saying, being outside... being with/in nature helps me want to get it together. Preserve what we've still got for my future kids... The Botanical Garden has a great outdoor exhibit on conservation and preservation. I'll try to take some pics but encourage you to stop through...
• We got our recycling bin! We now recycle so much of our waste products that I think we’re going to have to order another bin!!! My roomy has also dedicated herself to the cause… Hopefully the Mayor will let us have two bins!
• I've also started a mini garden on our sun-porch... I'll put pictures up soon. It was going really well at first, but there have been some technical difficulties. You'll see in the pics.

At work...

• My office has been a big job to tackle, but we’re slowly but surely getting there… I work on Capitol Hill and the CAO (Chief Administrative Office) is working with Speaker Pelosi to Green the Capitol. The two biggest shifts have been the food service provider and the new office recycling program.
• The new food service (in addition to having WAY better food) uses all compostable materials!!!! How neat is it that everything from the forks to the containers are made out of plant products. The plastic looking containers are really made out of corn. I have to admit the utensils tasted a little funny at first, but it feels good know it’s biodegradable…
• Our office was the WORST at recycling when I started here last year… every time I would walk by a bin marked “paper” and see bottles, plastics and wrappers, I would cringe! So, I signed us up to be a pilot for the new recycling program and we’ve been doing all right… Some folks have a hard time paying attention to the signage… but we’re getting the hang of it. And our intern (shout out to my boo Q!) put up extra instruction signs to assist! I’ve also recruited a few other offices to join the recycling program as well… (shouts out to Mike for hooking my up with them!)
• I also joined something called “The Green Team.” I’m still not really sure what they do yet… but I get emails occasionally so I’ll keep you posted.
• On another tip, I’ve recently taken on environmental justice and climate change issues so I'm embarking on my own personal research… I attended that annual Environmental Justice Conference at Howard Universities Law School and we just hosted a staff briefing on Climate Change 101. I'm doing so much reading I feel like I'm back in school! (Which I need to work on anyway) I’ll have more detailed entries on those soon…

Til next time...

Peace & Green,

Irene

And... I'm back

So, I've been asked "When's the next post?" by a few too many people, so I'm back! and will keep you posted...

Carbon Footprint?

I keep hearing about it, but what the heck is a carbon footprint? Well, I found a little info @ http://www.carbonfootprint.com/

I haven't calculated mine yet, but will keep you posted. How did you score?

Can a girl get a bin???

So, as I work on my domestic skills...

I'm trying to step our recycling game up at the crib. We moved in a few months ago and have cans, bottles and newspapers piled up with no where to put them!

Trashing them would break my heart because growing up in Portland, Oregon recycling was a BIG deal. Maybe not for everyone, but my neighborhood took it pretty seriously.

My theory is that life is really lived on the weekends. It's time to rest, chill with your family, catch up with friends, and in my moms house growing up, it was the day we got things done. Before we got too seriously into our Saturday cartoons, we had to clean, I mean CLEAN CLEAN the entire house, do yard work, probably do some shopping, and most definitely make a trip to the local recycling drop off.

Thriftway (ya'll don't know about that out here...) was the local grocery store in Sellwood (where I grew up) and if not every Saturday, at least once a month we brought all of our recyclables to be sorted.

You see, every plastic or metal anything should have a little triangle on it that has a number. The Gatorade bottle I’m looking at now has a 1 in its triangle. That number indicates how it could be recycled, thus the reason for the sort. Folks would show up with bags upon bags full of stuff, spend time sorting it out and handing it over. As a young kid trying to spend my Saturdays in front the TV, it was a little annoying, but it was also pretty normal! You just did it. At that time, it wasn't considered living Green. It was just living! And trying to do good by the earth. Maybe it’s an Oregonian thing…

So, I'd like to get a little mini program going at the crib. I don't think you have to sort things as much as you used to, so I'm investigating the DC program. After three or four attempts to get a bin today, I finally called Mayor Fenty's 311 hot line and they put in an order for our bin. Let the domestic recycling begin!

Peace & Green ~ Irene

What You Can Do Right Now to Help Your Planet

I wouldn't consider myself a follower, but I'm definitely down with Oprah. Here are some going green tips I got off Oprah.com. I'm good with 1, 2, 4, 8 & 11. Need to work on 5, 7 & 11. 6 might take a litte work...

What You Can Do Right Now to Help Your Planet

Ice caps are melting, coral reefs are shrinking, islands are sinking…. What to do? We can go directly to despair—or we can learn how to be a part of the solution. Eco-activists, Laurie David and Matthew Modine share effective, and inexpensive ideas with O writer Aimee Lee Ball that—really!—can make a world of difference.

1. A Mug of Your Own Every year Americans throw away 25 billion polystyrene cups and 25 billion individual water bottles, most of which end up in landfills. Instead buy a reusable to-go mug and a bottle that you can refill with filtered tap water. Bring your own (to a coffee shop, a meeting), and you cut down on Styrofoam.

2. Want a Lick? A cone beats a cup. Why? "You're eating your silverware instead of using plastic," says Matthew Modine, a passionate promoter of earth-friendly policies. "It's all about consuming less, using fewer of the resources needed to make products and packaging."

3. Clean Without Chemicals Natural cleansers like vinegar and baking soda do a great job without harming the planet. "And," Matthew says, "a little vegetable oil and lemon juice makes a great wood polish."

4. Bag It Get reusable cloth bags for the grocery store and the dry cleaner. More than 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away every year.

5. Stop Junk Mail Every year 100 million trees are chopped down for junk mail sent to American homes. Contact the direct marketing association at dmachoice.org/mps to remove your name from mailing lists of their members.

6. A Better TP Recycled toilet paper is scratchier that three-ply, but it's much softer on the environment. "It's like switching from whole milk to skim," says O writer Aimee Lee Ball. "After a while the beloved original seems over-the-top."

7. How Many People Does It Take To… Compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) use four times less energy than incandescent ones. If every American family substituted five CFL bulbs for incandescent, it would be equivalent to taking eight million cars off the road for a year. Ball says "They cost a little more up front, but they last up to 15 times longer."

8. De-Lint the Dryer Lint builds up after every dryer cycle, reducing the machine's efficiency. Removing it does a lot to decrease its usually massive energy use.

9. Pick Safe Paints According to the Environmental Protection Agency, architectural coatings such as paints and varnishes are the second-largest source of fumes from volatile organic compounds, substances that evaporate at room temperature and react in sunlight to form photochemical smog. Look for cans with "No VOC." We'll all breathe easier. (If you don't use the whole can, you can find out how to recycle the rest.)

10. Shorten Your Showers Low-flow showerheads would be a big improvement. "If they're well designed, the pressure should still feel good," says Laurie David, another prominent activist in Hollywood. "For every two minutes you shave off your shower, you save 10 gallons of water."

11. Shut Down The average computer left on all day uses nearly 1,000 kilowatt hours of electricity a year, producing more than a ton of carbon emissions. So turn off your computer anytime you're not on it, and eliminate the screen saver function, which uses more energy than the sleep mode.

All that glitters ain't natural...

The sun has a way of touching things. Making them shine. Making them stand out. In human nature, when things stand out, they tend to stir things up. Get you thinking. I guess that’s what was going on here…

But not in a good way.

You see, a friend and I decided to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day by participating in a service project. I have an affinity for the outdoors, so we spent the cold January day cleaning a park in S.E., Washington, D.C. I love service projects; they make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside! But not today… I was angry!!!

It was that day I decided I needed to be an environmentalist. Yes I said it, a Black girl is trying to go enviro… green… all natural (well not all natural, but I’m damn sure going to try!!!).

As we cleaned trash that day, I was enraged by the things we were picking up. Everything from bottles and newspapers, to tires and hair glue! Who is putting their weave in on the sidewalk and then chucks the evidence in a bush!!!! It broke my heart to see plastic bags entangled in the trees. A random mattress dumped on the side of the road. Candy wrappers hidden in the grass.

But I felt some type of way when I saw that plastic shinning in the sun. When I reached down to pick it up and realized it was embedded in the wall of the streams bed. Next to a Pepsi can with a label I’m sure they have not produced for at least 15 years! That means for 15 years that Pepsi can and that piece of plastic had been not only embedding themselves into the side of the wall, but that no one had bothered to pick them up!!! Are you serious?!?!?!?!

Yes, apparently we are.

During the intro session, we were told that small, dirty streams like this feed into the Potomac River. That tons upon tons of garbage, waste, dangerous liquids flowed from these unsuspecting neighborhoods into one of the dirtiest rivers in the nation (I don’t really know that, but it looks bad enough to me!!!!).

So, here I am. Trying to do my part to save the world. Just a little Black girl trying to go Green. This blog with chronicle my Going Green adventures. My stories and experiences. I'll post a couple times a week, so I hope you’ll join me…

Peace & Green ~ Irene