Now, Here’s Someone Who Knows How to Recycle!

Check out this link:   Hardware by Renee. This woman makes purses out of recycled tires. I don’t even carry a purse and I totally want one. In fact, I already bought two as gifts for others. Give it a look!

Candy Bars and Comfort Food

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the actual cost of a candy bar. I decided to try to find out what the candy folks were lobbying for, just to see where my money is going.

Here’s just one example. In 2005, California was considering a law that would require candy manufacturers importing candy from Mexico to both test for and eliminate lead in their candy and candy wrappers. You read that right — lead. I’d had no idea this was a problem.

The candy lobby — the National Confectioners Association — lobbied against it. Yep, you read THAT right too — the candy manufacturers who sell candy to children wanted to win the right to continue FEEDING THEM LEAD.

So, you say, well, who cares about candy from MEXICO, because I eat Hershey and M&Ms. Well, guess what? Once the sugar subsidy in this country got too ridiculous, American candymakers started outsourcing to — you guessed it — Mexico. Including Hershey and M&M Mars, both of whom have facilities there.

Now, the law in California passed, despite the candy lobby’s efforts. But — that’s California. Who knows what they’re feeding us elsewhere? That’s bad — but to me, the worse thing is that given something that should be a moral imperative — we’re talking about a known poison being given to an audience that consists largely of children — the candy lobby picked the wrong side. And used my money to fund it.

Rather puts a hole in the idea of candy as comfort food for me!

Marketing Coolness

I watched Frontline’s “The Merchants of Cool” this week and in some ways it was chilling. It was about the lengths to which corporate America goes to market to the huge group that is the American teenager. The amount of money that group has to spend is staggering, and the amount it talks others (read “parents”) into spending is likewise staggering.

So these companies have to figure out what is going to be cool next and how to market it. Enter the mook and the midriff. The mook is male, and feel free to think of some of the gross and humiliating things you see young males do in movies these days — those are mooks. The guy diving into the sewer for fun or shoving beans up his nose or — like Eric Cartman, making his friends eat their own dead parents unbeknownst to them — those are mooks. Midriffs — well, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (people South Park refers to as stupid spoiled whores) personify this.

It was fascinating, to say the least.

But the question that is most compelling to me and one which it can’t yet answer is “what kind of consumers are these kids going to be 20 years from now?” Will they still be spoiled and rushing off to buy every “latest new thing” whether they need it or not? Will they still be susceptible to marketing, or will thought have intruded into the process? Will they be the brainwashed automatons the corporations would like them to be, or will they be responsible citizens of Earth?

You ever notice how sometimes several things you are reading or watching seem to coalesce? I’m also reading a book called “The High Price of Materialism” by Tim Kasser. Among his findings: people who focus heavily on materialism are less happy, less fulfilled, and more likely to participate in anti-social or unhealthy behaviors. Not surprising, because most of us have heard ideas to that effect. But Kasser actually did studies to find out if that widely-held impression was just that, or if it had validity. It’s valid.

So another compelling question is this: Are we as a society, with the help of corporate America, deliberately raising a generation of people who will be unhappier, more likely to be anti-social or engage in unhealthy behaviors, and unable to fight their way out of it because the only tool they’ve been given for coping is to acquire more and more of what they don’t really need?

How Stupid Are They, Anyway?

I just watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” (which I recommend), which is about the efforts of GM to kill demand for and sales of its own electric cars in California. You read that right.

Here’s the thing I don’t understand — which leads to the title of this piece. Clearly, the oil industry has an interest in eliminating electric cars. No surprise there, and if the conclusions drawn in this documentary had been that Big Oil was the ringleader in shutting down the electric car, you and I would not be having this conversation. But the ringleader was not, apparently, big oil — it was the automobile industry itself.

Oil, as should be painfully obvious to everyone over the age of three, is finite, and de facto, running out — albeit not immediately. So it’s in the automobile industry’s best interests to get cars out there that don’t rely on oil, so that regardless of what happens to the oil industry, the automobile industry can survive. You would think this would be obvious, also, but if actions speak louder than words, this salient point has escaped the notice of the bigwigs at GM.

The documentarians did point out that with the electric car, the automobile industry loses a ton of after-market repair and parts money. I suspect this is nothing compared to what they will lose when the oil runs out, unless they’ve gotten off their dead asses and retooled — this time without shooting themselves in the foot afterward.

Oh, and postscript — Bush & Co. waste a lot of breath talking about “free market” this and “market forces” that — usually when justifying doing nothing about the healthcare system. But in “Who Killed the Electric Car,” it was not only the industrial giants in the oil and automotive arenas who were working to shut progress down — the feds got in on it too.

In a truly free market system, all products can be introduced and they stand or fall based on their own merits — hence, “free market” and “market forces.” I guess the Bush Administration’s definitions of these two phrases include the words “unless we need to legally shape the market to impress our friends.”

No More Junk Mail (Eventually)

We recycle paper, of course. But recycling paper is actually only a start. A better option for some of the paper we recycle is for it not to show up at our houses in the first place. Every day I stand over the recycle bin tossing in paper junk mail (including ripping the plastic windows off envelopes so the remainder can be recycled). Some of it is unsolicited, and some of it is duplication because Scott and I have both wound up on the same mailing lists. Into the bin it goes.

This may save some trees, but it does nothing to reduce the amount of fossil fuel that was burned to create and ship the mail to us to begin with. Today I added us to DirectMail.com’s Mail Preference List, a free service that takes you off mailing lists so you don’t receive the junk mail you don’t want. I added both of us, and made sure that for the stuff we want, only one of us was included in the “keep sending this to us” section, to eliminate the duplication.

Other things we have done to eliminate needless paper from arriving at the house:

Fluidity

Two items crossed my desk this week. One was a survey about a new water product that allegedly isn’t as heavy as tea but has the “health benefits” of tea built into it. (Read: yet another flavored fortified water.) The other was a news story on CNN about an order given by the mayor of San Francisco banning the city government from buying bottled water, even for water coolers. (HOORAY for them!)

Now, I buy bottled water once in a while, but it’s for two reasons. One, I have a supply in stock for hurricane preparedness (I live in Florida) which will sit there indefinitely until we need it. Two, I buy a large bottle and then reuse it over and over again (for taking water with me to the gym) until the bottle begins to fail structurally or develops other problems, at which time I replace it and recycle the old. I suspect the water companies figured this habit out, though, because Evian bottles fail rapidly, and so do those from my local store brand. At the moment I’m using a Fiji bottle, and it’s holding up well. But I’m thinking I’m not going to do that anymore — I’ll just buy a durable plastic bottle from Rubbermaid or someone similar, and use it permanently.

One thing this habit of drinking the bottled water and then refilling with tap has taught me is that my tap water tastes better than some bottled water. For example, by comparison with my tap water, Evian tastes positively chemical to me. I’d heard about the studies comparing the quality of bottled water vs. tap but this morning I actually went out and read up on it (allaboutwater.org and the NRDC’s study of bottled water) and was stunned to see that not only is bottled water less well regulated (FDA regulations for bottled water are less stringent than EPA regulations for tap), it failed the microbe-content test in nearly 20 percent of samples studied!

Yikes!

Guys, I’m Just Going To Say It.

I know all you men out there have convinced yourselves that we don’t really think this, but we do.

Yep. When we see you driving SUVs and Hummers and so forth, we all of us, without exception,  think you’re compensating for, shall we say, a lack of stature, an inability to perform, a tendency to… disappoint.

I had my doubts that we all thought that. Then, as I was walking along the street with one of my many nun friends, a Hummer drove by, and she said, “Bet that guy’s sporting a limp roll of dimes, tops.”

Nuf said.

The Cost of a Candy Bar

I’m standing in the grocery store today and I catch myself doing something I’ve caught myself doing before — trying to talk myself into buying a candy bar, even though I’m not hungry and I don’t actually crave one. It’s amazing how often I give in, too. As if I’ll regret not having bought it when I leave without it (which has, I’ll admit, happened). But I long ago learned that five minutes worth of discipline in the grocery store saves hours of discipline later on, so I try to ignore the self-destructive voices urging me toward chocolate, with spotty success.

Historically this has largely been for health/diet reasons. I lost 50 lbs during 2000, and have kept most of it off (although lately I’ve been fighting some creepage-back). And I think that’s how most people typically evaluate many food choices – in terms of health. Recently, though, I’ve started to think of candy bars in larger terms.

Making Thoughtful Consumerism Easier

Kellogg has taken a first step toward ceasing marketing of unhealthy products to children under 12, including in schools, according to a report on ABC News. They’re also embarking on a new-but-flawed labeling program for their foods that will give people nutritional information on the front of the box (I say flawed because the labeling information will be based on a 2,000 calorie [read adult] diet, even though many of the products are intended primarily for children, who require far fewer calories.) It’s a start.

Kudos to Kellogg for taking this first step without forcing a long court battle and without hiding behind the lack of federal regulation, of course, and like they, I hope other companies will jump on. But the darts and laurels procession doesn’t stop there:

If They Won’t Fund Education, Let’s Do It Ourselves

I first saw this on ABC’s World News Tonight. It’s a program called “Donors Choose,” which helps teachers whose budgets don’t cover their projects find donors willing to help out. You go to the site, you find a project you think worthy, you donate what you can. Every little bit helps.