Whenever my coworkers ask me if I think something is healthy (because of the “odd” things I eat they have deemed me some sort of health food manual) I get flash backs to Food Inc. The movie did not vastly change my life (I have been a vegetarian for more than 5 years mostly because meat freaks me out. To me its like chewing on your own arm… too weird and just not right. I have also been hyperaware of our food system in the United States), but it did make me more outspoken about the horrendous industry that controls the vast majority of what people eat.

Whether you think you know almost everything there is about our food system or you have no idea what “factory farming” means, Food Inc. is not only shocking and interesting, but also a documentary you will most likely never forget. (Do not fear the word documentary. I promise it is interesting to even those who hate “all documentaries” (I have tested this statement on friends and family).

My battle with laundry soap has been life long. I am allergic to most brands to the point where I would sometimes get rashes after putting on clean clothes. My mom would struggle to find a detergent that would not give me or her an allergic reaction, and it seemed like as soon as we found one it would be discontinued.

As we changed our household to being more environmentally friendly in every aspect, one of the first things to go was our laundry soap. All of the detergents, coloring, optical brighteners, bleach, and other chemicals are not only terrible for your clothing, but also for your health and your local environment. Wastewater treatment plants are unable to filter out all of the chemicals we put down our drains. These chemicals are pumped out with the grey water into our local environments.

In my hometown the grey water is pumped into the ocean. This means that all of the chemicals in our cleaning products, including laundry soap, are being directly pumped into local habitats where animals absorb them or eat foods laced with these materials. This is especially dangerous in areas near the ocean or lakes where the local wildlife bioaccumulates or carries these chemicals until we eat them and absorb them as well.

Instead of “cleaning” our clothes with a laundry list (pun intended) of chemicals, my family decided to start making our own soap. Although you can easily buy environmentally friendly soap, it is expensive, and often comes in wasteful, non-recyclable packaging. By making our own laundry soap we have ditched the dyes and other harmful chemicals. We also know exactly what is going in to it, its significantly cheaper, we are not allergic to it, and our clothes come out clean.

Homemade laundry soap ingredients:

1 (or more depending on how much you wish to make) bar Fels-Naptha or Ivory bar soap
Washing Soda
Borax

2. For every 1 cup of grated bar soap, add 1/2 cup of Washing Soda

3. and 1/2 cup Borax

One of the best things about this recipe is that you can choose how much soap you want to make. When I am at school I make a significantly smaller amount because of storage issues. At home we all pitch in to try to make as much as possible (your arms and hands get tired from grating the soap) so we do not have to do it again for a while.

Sometimes I feel like my largest tests of will (other than when I am making a dessert and I would rather keep eating it than finish baking it) is when I am grocery shopping. It’s not because I only want to buy items that are terrible for me or I am counting calories, but rather that every item I want (because most of our fruits and vegetables comes from a local delivery service or the farmers market) comes in endless amounts of packaging.

Normally I hate naming the places I am talking about, but this time for clarity I will. Stores like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods irk me with their packaging. I love trail mix, crackers, and other snacks, and yet they all come in at least a plastic bag and sometimes even a box. The frozen food is in a plastic container, wrapped in plastic, in a cardboard box. Are they serious? There is no point to this piles and piles of packaging. As soon as the item is gone, or moved into a reusable container, the entire thing is meant to just be thrown out. We even put fresh fruits and vegetables in Styrofoam and then wrap it in plastic. Why are we paying to full our garbage cans and our already over flowing landfills?

When I am walking down the isles and I see something I would like to eat I always ask myself how much packaging it has, how much is recyclable, could I do without it? More often than not I walk away from some food item that I would enjoy because of the packaging. I am not willing to take home healthy food (or otherwise : ) ) that is going to send plastic to the landfill. However, it makes shopping for food so frustrating.

When I shop at Whole Foods I can get things in bulk with my canvas bags, but I worry about cleanliness, and sometimes the selection is not that great. I just wish packaging were better sourced, or not used at all. What if we all used reusable containers and brought in what we wanted? What if we didn’t double or triple package things? What if our food was not sealed in plastic? What if all stores didn’t package food?

Today GOOD highlighted a grocery store, In.gredients in Austin Texas that promises to be the nation’s first “package-free, zero waste grocery store.” According to the article:

“The idea is so simple, it’s surprising that no one in the United States has implemented it yet. (The United Kingdom, on the other hand, got the bulk food-only Unpackaged in London last year). Just like many people bring tote bags to the grocery store, shoppers at In.gredients will be encouraged to bring their own containers to pack up items like grains, oils, and dairy. If a shopper doesn’t have his own containers, the store will provide compostable ones. It’s as if the specialty bulk food section rebelled and took over the rest of a traditional grocery store. In.gredients will replace unhealthy, over-packaged junk with local, organic, and natural foods, and moonlight as a community center with cooking classes, gardening workshops, and art shows on the side.

“Truth be told, what’s normal in the grocery business isn’t healthy for consumers or the  environment,” In.gredients co-founder Christian Lane said in a press release. Americans add 570 million pounds of food packaging to their landfills each day, while pre-packaged foods force consumers to buy more than they need, stuffing their bellies and their trash bins: 27 percent of food brought into U.S. kitchens ends up getting tossed out.

I hope they get the funding they need to open and the support to stay open. I also hope we can get one close to my home in the Bay Area. While we wait there are some easy things you can do to cut down on the packaging you send to the landfill:

1. Avoid all of the isles that do not have fresh food. Focus on your fruits, vegetables, and freshly baked goods.

2. Shop at farmers markets and bring your own containers and totes. Give back any baskets or bags after putting your food into your own containers.

Yesterday as I was sweating through my shirt at work and trying to keep my sunscreen out of my eyes I couldn’t help but wonder what this summer would do for belief in global warming. It seems like any time it snows, people in the United States decide climate change isn’t real. I have tried to explain the global warming trends to my grandfather until I was blue, and yet he still disagrees with me because he got snow at his house and cities across the East were buried in snow this winter.

Image courtesy of Nirmala’s Mind

And yet that snow, and this warming trend across the United States are both part of climate change. In the United States we will have areas of cooling, warming, and desertification. It is not that every single place in the world will warm and no longer experience cool weather or snow. Instead it is the change in climate of that location due to increases in greenhouse gasses that are raising the earths average temperatures.

Image courtesy of Is it getting warmer

Sadly, I still cannot help but wish that as summers heat up and people get annoyed with the heat that they will, at least for the summer, consider that climate change is an issue they should be concerned about.

For the next school year I will be living in a University owned townhouse. This is a first for SCU, and the new student housing will be finished with construction in August. Needless to say I am excited to move in.

However, for the first time I will have a kitchen. Because I am the one the most interested in cooking/baking, and I want to be able to start building a sustainable kitchen that will last me well into my future, I have taken over the responsibility of our entire kitchen. This means I am in charge of all cooking utensils, plates, forks, drying racks, dish towels, ect. The list feels endless.

What is most important to me is that I buy items that will last me years after I graduate. I want the shopping I do now to not just be on plastic junk that I will throw out when I graduate. This poses a bit of a challenge, however, because I am trying to buy quality items that will last. There are some costs that are unavoidable (my amazing mixer that will last me more than 20 years (based on how long my parents has lasted, and I have the updated model of theirs : ) ). And yet there are also some items that extremely cheap can also be sustainable and beautiful.

I have been thinking about what to do about drinking glasses for a few weeks now. My main concerns were durability, quality, quantity, and of course, price. My roommates and I are not the kind of college students that will be throwing major ragers in our condo next year (many of us do not even drink), but I am expecting us to accidentally knock things over and drop things. I am a complete klutz on my own, so adding in the fact that there will be six of us living in a relatively small space, I am expecting us to break some things.

My solution to all of my concerns: canning jars. They are durable, super duper cheap- each jar is about $1. For 12 “glasses” I paid a little over $12. This is perfect because if we ever have guests over, we can easily feed everyone without having to use plastic or throw away. They are easily replaceable, washable, and easy to drink out of. If we break them we can cheaply and easily replace them. They are also beautiful and add a little personality to our kitchen.

Another bonus is their potential for sustainability. After I graduate if I no longer want to use them as drinking glasses I can use them for canning, vases, food storage, and many other things.

These are cheap, easy, readily available, and a perfect solution for anyone who is trying to supply a kitchen on a budget. You can find them at any grocery store as well as large chains that try to sell a bit of everything (I hate giving any suggestions to go to these places, but for clarity I mean places like Target. I just try to encourage people to support their local business owners before huge chains with questionable ethics and environmental standards… thats a whole other story…). In the next few weeks I will be off to some used stores to see what other quality items I can score for our kitchen. Check back soon.

I have to admit, I am not very creative when it comes to creating things or decorating. I have been itching for something to organize my jewelry, but I did not really know how. I almost gave away one of my bulletin boards that I have had since I was a kid when I realized it had potential to be something better. My DIM (Do It Myself) project this weekend was to turn this hideous piece into something functional and beautiful.

I simply used white push pins that I already had lying around my room to hold everything up.

It took us four weeks and countless hours editing to make our short e-waste documentary. I hope you enjoy it.

About three weeks ago I visited an e-waste recycling facility for a documentary I was making with two other girls for a class (I will post it soon : ) ). Before going I thought e-waste was recycled by having people disassemble each item by hand, pulling out all of the important materials, and separating them all meticulously. Oh how naïve I was.

In reality, my imagined method of e-waste would have us completely buried in mounds of it. It would take forever for workers to break down each and every item. However, it would be significantly more efficient at material recovery. So what really happens with e-waste? Just saying this makes me shudder: it goes through a shredder.

Although the majority of the e-waste does go through this shredder, anything with a cathode ray tube (CRT) are recycled by hand (including older TVs and computer monitors). Computer towers and laptops are also recycled by hand because the parts in them are more valuable when sent off individually (all of the circuit boards, cd drives, fans, ect. are piled together and sent to different companies for different purposes, but unless they are still in excellent working conditions, they will be melted down and turned into something else).

For more information about responsible recycling near you check this out.

Thank you to ESC Refining for allowing my group to film part of our documentary as well as to answering all of our questions.