Goal For The Green

From de-cluttering and organizing to deep-cleaning your home, Spring Cleaning is a rite of passage for home owners. Spring comes and goes, and our homes look and smell cleaner than they have all year long.

To make way for Spring and Summer festivities, a good thorough cleaning is in order. There are easy ways to stay green while getting clean.      

De-Clutter is a Must

While de-cluttering your home, don’t throw everything out. There are many individuals who need clothing, furniture and canned foods. While going through your home, keep donation locations and local charities in mind. Sort everything of importance and utilize a “three-box” rule: keep, toss/donate, store. For everything you want to keep, find a new home for (but be careful not to make a “new” clutter hotspot). Donation items can be taken to a local charity as soon as possible. Some Salvation Army locations will pickup the items for you, as long as you schedule a pickup. For all those items you wish to keep and have no room for (or are too sentimental to donate and toss), find a local storage facility center. Companies like Unclebobs.com have over 400 storage facility centers across the U.S.

Sometimes Store Bought Isn’t Always Better

The Queen of Clean, Linda Cobb, has been informing thousands of people everywhere through TV sets, magazines and books how simple and easy cleaning can be without spending thousands on store and name-brand products. In her book, “A Queen For All Seasons,” she outlines the importance of simple household products when it comes to cleaning.

Baking soda is a wonderful deodorizer and mild abrasive. This is great to use in the refrigerator for smells and spills. White vinegar is an all-purpose cleaner. It’s great for whitening clothes, cleaning stains, and getting rid of soap scum and mildew. Club soda works on all sorts of spills while lemon juice is a natural bleach.

Air Freshener

Store-bought air fresheners smell wonderful but they may contain toxic chemicals including formaldehyde and benzene, according to National Geographic’s Green Living. Instead of spending money and putting dangerous chemicals in the air, make your own with easy-to-find and eco-friendly ingredients. Simply combine a few drops of vanilla, almond, lavender or other extract with a cup of water in a spray bottle and spritz away.

Be Conscious of What You Toss

I never knew why, but when I was a young girl my father always told me to never throw batteries away in the trash — and I never did. Still don’t to this day. The only difference is now I understand why I shouldn’t toss them in the trash. They contain metals such as alkaline, zinc, nickel and cadmium. Batteries aren’t the only things that cause harm if disposed of incorrectly.

• Electronics: Old TVs, DVD players, laptops and printers should never be tossed in the dumpster. Instead, take them to an e-waste center.
• CFL light bulbs: They’re great for the environment — sort of. They contain trace amounts of mercury. The mercury can leak if not properly disposed. Take them to your local Household Hazardous Waste (HHW) center, where they can be disposed of properly.
• Smoke detectors: According to The National Association of State Fire Marshals, smoke detectors should be replaced every 10 years. BrightNest.com states that ionization smoke detectors should be mailed back to the manufacturer due to the small amount of radiation they emit. For Photoelectric smoke detectors, any electronics recycling facility will take them.
• Paint: Oil-based paints contain a number of chemicals and should never be thrown in the trash. Take them to a local charity or your local HHW facility.

While there are two sides to every story, I am happy to share this important information with you. You can now determine if you feel you have been green-washed, and how you can live your own version of a “green and sustainable” lifestyle.

Non-Profit Initiates Next Stage of Its Mission to Stop Green-washing
Two Sides Urges Leading U.S. Companies to End Misleading Claims About Print and Paper

On March 12, 2013 in CHICAGO,IL (via Marketwire) – Two Sides today announced the next stage of its nationwide initiative to urge major U.S. banks, utilities and telecommunication companies to end the use of misleading marketing claims about the sustainability of print and paper. Phase Two will include a second round of communication intended to initiate productive discussion with CEOs and senior management in the target industries, reminding them of their responsibility to adhere to best practices for environmental marketing as outlined in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s recently revised Green Guides.

Greenwashing (Photo credit: anitasarkeesian

Last year, Two Sides contacted senior bank, utility and telecom executives, encouraging them to follow the yet-to-be-released FTC Green Guides, which say that environmental marketing claims should not exaggerate environmental impacts and must be substantiated. While some responded positively, many of the nation’s top banks, utilities and telecoms continue to tell their customers that switching to online billing and communication is better for the environment than print and paper with no verifiable supporting evidence. With the release of the updated Green Guides in October 2012, the FTC made it official that unqualified environmental language would be viewed as deceptive marketing, strengthening the Two Sides call for change.

Two Sides has NO desire for negative publicity

“Two Sides has no desire to cause unnecessary negative publicity for these companies or to undermine their cost-saving and efficiency reasons for driving customers towards e-billing, but claims that print and paper are environmentally unfriendly need to stop,” says Two Sides President Phil Riebel. “Rather than call these respected companies out publicly with greenwashing complaints to the FTC, we’d much prefer to amicably work with them behind the scenes to help develop messaging that meets the Green Guides standards for environmental marketing,” he says. “However, we’re prepared to use the strongest means necessary to put an end to the use of unsupported environmental claims that are potentially damaging to the paper, printing and mailing sectors which support millions of U.S. jobs.”

Two Sides conducted a similar campaign to get companies in the United Kingdom to drop or revise unsupported environmental claims about printed media with great success. More than 80 percent of the U.K. companies approached — including well-known names like British Telecom, Barclaycard, Vodafone and EON Energy — worked with Two Sides to eliminate misleading or factually incorrect environmental claims about the use of print and paper.

Two Sides states that print and paper have their own story to tell

“The fact is, print and paper products made in the U.S. have a great environmental story to tell,” Riebel says. “Paper comes from a renewable resource — trees grown in responsibly managed forests — and it’s recycled more than any other commodity, including plastics, metals and glass. The continuing demand for sustainably sourced paper gives U.S. landowners a financial incentive to continue managing their lands responsibly and keep them forested rather than selling them for development,which is the number one cause of deforestation in the United States. Thanks in great part to the sustainable forestry practices advanced by the paper and forest products industry, the volume of growing trees in U.S. forests has increased nearly 50 percent over the last half century and the total acres of forestland has remained essentially unchanged for 100 years.”

The direct impact of electronic products and services replacing paper is far from negligible, and the trade-offs between the two depends on how often we use the different technologies and how we dispose of the products. Both electronic and print media are important, and both have environmental impacts that must be taken into consideration.

Electronic communication has a significant and growing carbon footprint due to the energy requirements of a vast worldwide network of servers necessary to store information for immediate access. Electronic communication also relies on significant amounts of fossil-fuel energy and non-renewable raw materials for processing and manufacturing. With electronic waste becoming the fastest growing waste stream in the world and related environmental and health concerns escalating rapidly in many countries, promoting “going paperless” as the best environmental choice is unfounded.

It’s also important to note that equating electronic billing and statements with “going paperless” is misleading. When traditional bills and statements are converted to electronic communication, much of that paper is replaced by home or office printing by those who prefer or require a permanent hard copy. Furthermore, a recent study by NACHA, the Electronic Payments Association, showed that up to 40 percent of consumers receive both electronic and paper statements.

“Some of the major U.S. companies in the financial, telecom and utility sectors are to be commended for implementing sustainability initiatives that focus on true performance measurement and factual environmental claims, but others are lagging behind in terms of credible messaging,” Riebel says. “Two Sides is committed to help change this, and our experience to date shows that we’ve been successful in finding mutually acceptable solutions.”

About Two Sides

Two Sides is an independent, non-profit organization created to promote the responsible production, use and sustainability of print and paper. Started in Europe in 2008, Two Sides is now active in more than 12 countries. The organization has more than 1,000 members that span the entire print and paper supply chain, including pulp and paper producers, paper distributors, ink and chemical manufacturers, printers, equipment manufacturers and publishers. For more information about Two Sides, visit the Two Sides website at www.twosides.us. Together we are working toward greener tomorrows.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, nearly 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, 96.5 percent of which is in the oceans. The safety and health of the oceanic ecosystem is essential to help our planet thrive. Collectively, our current way of life is doing little to help the ocean ecosystem thrive. In fact, we’re actually doing more harm than good.

According to Greenpeace International, just off the coast of California, reaching all the way to Hawaii, is a trash vortex that covers an area the size of the state of Texas. In this floating mass, you can find everything from plastic bags, toothbrushes, garbage wrappers, polystyrene packaging, plastic drums, discarded bottles, disposable lighters and traffic cones. Greenpeace International notes that for every 100 million tons of plastic produced annually, roughly 10 percent of it ends up in the ocean.

This begs the question: why does so much trash end up in the ocean? Are people just too lazy to properly dispose of their trash? Are landfills too full? If so, landfill expansion from an environmental remediation company could help. Just last year, a Delaware landfill expansion was completed after 20 years that “extended the life of the landfill by about 20 years,” according to Sevenson Environmental CEO, Michael Elia, who oversaw the project.

There’s plenty you can do every day to help protect our planet’s oceans:

Use Less Energy

One the of ocean’s most serious problems is acidification. As the ocean grows more acidic, it becomes uninhabitable for coral, fish and other types of marine life. According to a recent article on the Daily Green, this is happening as a result of an excess of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is a byproduct from burning fossil fuels. You can curb your energy usage by:

• Using energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs
• Taking public transportation or carpooling to work
• Upgrading to high-efficiency appliances

Use Fertilizer Sparingly

If you live near the ocean or in a coastal community, be careful to use fertilizer sparingly. The Daily Green notes that excess fertilizer eventually finds its way into the ocean, where it then depletes marine oxygen levels. Low oxygen levels create dead zones, destroying marine life in close proximity. Instead of using harsh fertilizer, consider making your own compost to fertilize your garden.

Upgrade to Reusable Bags

Plastic bags are harmful to birds and marine animals. As a main component of the trash vortex, plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by sea turtles, ocean mammals and sea birds, which can cause deadly digestive blockages, according to the Daily Green. Instead of using plastic bags, bring your own reusable tote bags to the grocery store or shopping center. Keep a small bag in your purse or in the glove compartment of your car so that you always have a reusable tote on hand.

Buy Sustainably Caught Seafood

Industrial farm fishing practices are wreaking havoc on marine habitats around the world. According to a recent article on Huffington Post, about 50 percent of all fish caught by industrial fishermen end up being wasted, dead and discarded in the sea. Exercise your purchasing power by avoiding farmed fish. Instead, choose fish that’s advertised as being diver-caught, wild or line-caught.