Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, sustainable | Tags: beauty, chemical, cosmetics, diy, eco, green, home, mask, paraben, scrub, sustainable
It’s not like I’m some crazy Birkenstock wearing woman who uses The Rock on her underarms. I like lipstick as much as the next girl—I just like to know mine’s lead-free. Think I’m kidding? Go to the Environmental Working Group’s Cosmetics Safety Database and search your brand of lipstick. More than 60% contain lead, which is a neurotoxin. And most women eat about nine pounds of the stuff over their lifetimes. But seriously, there are so many awesome beauty products that are totally chemical free these days, why would you want to use anything else?
At www.EcoStiletto.com, I feature beauty options that just might get you off chemicals altogether. But for the DIYers among us (read: me), I whipped up a facial scrub/mask recipe that you can make in minutes and delivers a serious glow.
How? Go to the kitchen and grab sugar, eggs, honey and instant oatmeal. Go on, I’ll wait!
A little background: I love scrubs but don’t like that most of them contain oil. I like things that can be used on my face, hair and body—and oil isn’t one of them, no matter how pure, it still gives me zits and always ends up in my hair. So I created this Essential DIY Scrub & Mask that I’m totally addicted to—used it for three days straight (okay I’m a little obsessive) and seriously my skin was NEVER better. My blackheads were gone, my giant pores were smaller and my skin felt super soft and clean. Try it!
Essential DIY Scrub & Mask:
Six tablespoons raw organic sugar
One free range organic egg white
One tablespoon organic honey
One packet plain instant organic oatmeal
Strain the egg white into a bowl (or mortar, if you’ve got one), then blend in the sugar with a fork (or pestle). Blend in the honey, and then the oatmeal (leave it uncooked). Now rub the mask into your skin in small circles.
Some people think that sugar can be too harsh for the face, so if your skin is sensitive, please be gentle. I, on the other hand, have alligator skin. I like to put some muscle into it.
Once you’ve thoroughly exfoliated your face, just clump some more of the scrub onto it and let it dry for 10 to 20 minutes. (Make sure you’re wearing not-so-nice clothes, as it sometimes does fall off a bit.) Wash off, and presto, glow-o!
You can also use the scrub in the bath or shower—because it lacks oil, you don’t have to worry about slippage. Make sure your pipes can handle the small amount of oatmeal involved. And keep any excess in the fridge—it’ll keep for a few days, but after that, toss it. (If you use it straight outta the fridge you might need to dilute with a little water for better spreadability, just fyi.)
The secret ingredient to this recipe is honey. Honey is a natural emollient, which means it helps the skin trap moisture. When I visit my family in Santa Fe, I always stick a bunch of organic honey sticks in my carry on. At night, I crack open one of those sticks and slather the stuff on my face. I leave it on for 10 minutes or so and wash it off. (It helps if I haven’t already had dessert. Yum.) It leaves my skin super dewy and soft, minus pore-clogging oil.
Sugar is a natural exfoliant, as is oatmeal, which also has colloidal—or soothing—properties. I’ve used whipped egg whites on my skin for years to cleanse and minimize pores—recently I heard that egg whites also increase the production of collagen, which is something I didn’t care about as a tweenager. I’m not a beauty scientists so I can’t tell you exactly how it breaks down. But for those of you who are trying this right now, tell me how you look in 20 minutes. It works, right?
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, sustainable | Tags: california, eco, ecostiletto, fashion, fur, green, los angeles, peta, sarnoff, sustainable, vegan
“There’s always a way to wear fur”
–Anna Wintour, Editor-in-Chief, American Vogue
“Anna is the most powerful woman in the U.S.”
–Andre Leon Talley, Editor-at-Large, American Vogue
“Nobody was wearing fur until Anna put it on the cover in the ‘90s.”
–Tom Florio, Publisher, American Vogue
Are you sensing a pattern here?
Yesterday, I saw a matinee of “The September Issue.” I ditched my life for 90 minutes of escapism, hoping to understand a little better what makes this fashion industry tick.
But five minutes in, the escape was over. I grabbed my notebook and pen and started scratching out notes in the dark. I was appalled. Appalled. What started out as a lighthearted look at fashion’s bible quickly degraded to a revelation of the industry’s dark side.
I’ve been a journalist for more than a decade. I have a master’s degree in the subject. I spend hours agonizing over how to honestly present Ecostiletto’s sponsored newsletters and dedicated emails. And, as a result, I’ve spent a year wondering when my little start-up will actually start.
Yet at Vogue, where last year’s September issue weighed in at record 644 pages of ads (versus 196 of editorial) there is clearly zero separation of church and state. No wonder Tom Florio is happy.
Anna Wintour is filmed as she interacts with retailers and manufacturers—Nieman Marcus, the Gap, Mango—which are an obvious influence on her editorial choices. Anna’s resident jester, Andre Leon Talley, takes his tennis lesson wearing a Louis Vuitton scarf and Piaget watch—both perennial Vogue advertisers. And after the first 10 minutes of watching her flamboyant outfits, you have to wonder if Wintour’s salary is subsidized by the Fur Commission.
Apparently, back in the wonder years of 2007, the demand had even outstripped the supply for luxury fashion—but fashion desired product placement, as well, which “The September Issue” was happy to supply. About midway through the movie, even Wintour’s instruction to her driver to take her to Starbuck’s seems like an obvious plant.
This is a magazine that has clearly been bought and sold by the commerce it supports—with no question of the consequences. Beknighted designer Thakoon is photographed threading up a dress for the Gap, but there’s no mention of what third-world hands will stitch the thousands of copies to be sold in Gap stores. Florio nods to Wintour’s support of fur without a hint of irony. And $50,000 in editorial is scrapped because it doesn’t show enough of the clothes.
I can image that, for some, “The September Issue” is an exciting, insider’s view of a glamorous industry. For me, it was a testament to how far we’ve come in a year. This September, I celebrate the eco-friendly shows of designers like Mr. Larkin at New York Fashion Week. I look forward to Portland’s forthcoming all-sustainable fashion week. And I toy with the idea of joining The Great American Apparel Diet, in which participants pledge to buy no clothing or accessories for an entire year.
We’ve come a long way, baby.
Image from “The September Issue.”
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: animal, cooking, eating, eco, fashion, food, green, meals, meat, pescatarian, peta, sustainable, vegan, vegetarian
A friend of mine forwarded me a recent pic of Alicia Silverstone* the other day. The subject line was simple: Body by vegan. And yes, it got my attention. Because even though I try to work out two or three times a week, there remains that stubborn five pounds of fat that took hold right around my belly button while I was pregnant with The Barnacle (read: baby) and never came off. Now I know that I’m active and healthy, and I knock wood daily for that. But there is a vain teenager inside of every woman. And on the day that my friend sent me Alicia Silverstone’s picture, that teen spoke up. I wanted to have a body by vegan. Desperately.
My friend happens to be a vegan, mind you. And she also happens to have a smokin’ bod, which may have less to do with the fact that she doesn’t eat animal products, and more to do with the fact that when you don’t eat animal products there is really very little that you can eat. She’s also 25.
Bitch.
And my raw foodie friends say that this type of diet—which also happens to fall into the vegan category—means that you have more energy throughout the day, because your body isn’t taxed by processing high density foods like meat. In fact, Ani Phyo, raw food chef extraordinaire and author of Ani’s Raw Food Desserts, swears that eating her chocolate ganache cake (which you can now buy boxed) is actually good for your body. Go figure.
There’s also the environmental factor: Livestock produce methane, which is a major greenhouse gas that some experts say contributes more to global warming than carbon dioxide. “You can’t be an environmentalist and eat meat,” is a PETA-popular phrase.
Here’s what you can eat if you’re a vegan: Vegetables. Fruit. Rice or soy milk. Bread made from weird grains. Fake cheese made from soy. Tofu made from soy. Meat made from soy. And lots and lots of nuts.
Here’s what my family eats: Whole wheat pasta made with eggs, whole wheat pizza made with cheese, bean-and-cheese burritos, grilled fish (wild-caught), chicken and hamburgers (grass-fed and organic), scrambled eggs. Give or take a few vegetables and fruit.
Fight, much? Soy barbecue “ribs” may taste like heaven to me, but to my kids they’re just plain weird.
So my body by vegan has to wait. In the mean time, I’ve gone pescatarian, and cut down my family’s meat and fish consumption. We’re still experimenting with tofu. And eating lots and lots of nuts.
Have you ever attacked the last five pounds? Gone vegan? Tell me about it!
*This photo is courtesy of 944 magazine’s April 2009 cover shoot, styled by the extraordinary Monica Schweiger, who contributes EcoStiletto.com’s fashion page. Stiletto-size me!
My 10-year-old had his first school dance on Friday. Streamers, balloons, frowning chaperones, the works. But of course he downplayed it. My son is against anything that might be misinterpreted as vanity. He lives in shorts and flip-flops, refuses to cut his hair, and frequently will attempt to wear the shirt he slept in to school the next day.
Ah, the tween years.
Gabe’s not yet into girls, and although some of his friends are “dating” each other, there’s no one calling our house yet—except the fifth-grade basketball bully who crank-called a message from “Lisa” the day before the dance. My son did, however, arrive at the event in his favorite worn-out Green Day t-shirt, only to make us take him home to change into a button-down, long-sleeved shirt I’d made him wear for Thanksgiving last year.
Guess he’s not that not into girls.
I only wish I’d found these Fat Tie t-shirts a few years ago—or that they made them big enough for Gabriel’s next dance. Crafted from organic cotton and soy ink with the motto “Dress Smart. Start Early.” in mind, they’re silk-screened with a cool, retro-looking tie silk that transforms the basic tee into something super hip.
And they’re organic cotton, as opposed to conventional, which takes approximately one-third of a pound of pesticides to make enough cotton for a t-shirt. (And two-thirds of a pound for a pair of jeans. But that’s another story, and one that you can watch me talk for a minute more about here.)
Chemical-free chic masquerading as your basic sleep shirt. That’s my 10-year-old’s fashion formula.
What’s yours?
Filed under: eco-friendly, fashion, green, sustainable | Tags: california, cotton, denim, eco, ecostiletto, fashion, green, jeans, los angeles, organic, sarnoff, sustainable
I’ve always been a bit insecure in the butt department. Not that my posterior is particularly gigantic, but in the words of the fashion magazines that I devoured as a teenager, this was my “problem area.” I’ve long outgrown those mind-warping glossies and accepted that not all of us are long, lanky and lean—no matter how many hours we spend on the treadmill. But when I find a pair of jeans that lengthens my legs and minimizes my rear in the miraculous way that only good denim can, I wear them. And wear them. And wear them, until the thighs are threadbare and the hems tattered. And then I start looking for a new pair to replace them, because by this time the manufacturer has certainly stopped making the style I love, and any remnant pairs have probably been chopped up and made into eco-friendly home insulation.
Which brings us to today. The thighs of my favorite Levi’s are so thin, I’m afraid they’ll split when I bend down to pick up the Barnacle (read: Baby). So I’m on the hunt for a new pair. And given what I now know about denim…
• Most denim is made of cotton, which is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world and accounts for 25% of all pesticides used in the U.S., according to the Sustainable Cotton Project.
• It takes about two-thirds of a pound of pesticides to make enough cotton for one pair of jeans. (Put a pound of flour in a bowl for a scary visual on that one.)
• Pesticides like diuron and acephate used in cotton production are considered carcinogenic by the Environmental Protection Agency (not the most alarmist of organizations).
• Cotton production introduces these chemicals into the water table and food chain.
• 67 million birds die each year from pesticide poisoning; the chemicals have also been linked to mutant frogs found with extra legs and eyes.
…the denim I’m searching for must be made of organic cotton, hemp or bamboo, all of which are grown without pesticides or insecticides. In fact, bamboo absorbs five times as many green house gases and produces 35% more oxygen than the equivalent amount of trees!
But all the oxygen in the world won’t make me squeeze into pants that make my butt look big. I tried on a pair of Linda Loudermilk’s ridiculously soft bamboo denim jeans last week, but they made my thighs look like sausages and gapped at the waist. Obviously destined for the long-and-lean category.
I’ve always been a Levi’s girl, but their organic cotton “green tab” line is so difficult to find. They seem to have phased them out online, and even at the Levi’s store, only a few styles are available at a time.
Green from the get-go organic cotton Del Fortes are super cute, but difficult to locate offline. And although I know I can send them back, I’m afraid I’d have to buy eight online to actually find a pair that fits.
I’m heartened by the fact that oh-so-popular J Brand has introduced their eco-friendly Green Label and am heading off to the nearest haute boutique to try on a pair. After all, if I’m only buying one pair of $200 jeans every three years, that breaks down to just about twenty-two cents a day!
And as for my all-time favorite jeans, the fits-so-good AG Angel by Adriano Goldschmeid? (Pictured above and no that’s not my butt.) Although their marketing department assures me that organic denim is in the works, it’s not in stores yet. I’ll just have to wait.
And be really, really careful when I bend down.
P.S. When I do replace my old jeans, no way am I throwing them in the trash. The average American throws out 68 pounds of clothes and textiles every year, only to have 2.5 billion pounds of the stuff diverted by the American textile industry for repurposing. Me? I’m recycling my denim into shorts, a skirt or, at the very least, patches. Because my new jeans are sure to wear thin someday. And I’ll definitely need something to shore them up while I search for a new pair.
Do you have a favorite pair of green jeans? I so need to know about them!
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, parenting, sustainable, travel, vacation
What do you do when you have three kids and your husband just got back from a 20-day business trip? You take a vacation. What do you do when you have three kids and in-laws who can only take about 24-hours of them? You take a staycation. It’s cheaper, shorter and surprisingly more eco-conscious—no matter where you stay!
Now for those of you unfamiliar with the term, a staycation is when you take a vacation without ever leaving your hometown. I was surprised to find that this term has been included in Webster’s Dictionary since 2003, and is defined as a “stay-at-home vacation,” of which common activities include, “use of the backyard pool, visits to local parks and museums, and attendance at local festivals.” I’m guessing that the staycation will grow in popularity this year as the crash cuts short many families’ standing reservations for cross-country travel.
Since we did, in fact, drive to our staycation, it wasn’t as low on the carbon footprint scale as diving into a (preferably saltwater) backyard pool, not that we have one. But compare our 20-mile trek in a 30-mpg car to anything in an airplane, which emits carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide at heights that make these emissions twice as destructive to global warming as those emitted on the ground, and we look pretty damn light. In fact, according to TerraPass, one jaunt across the Atlantic can produce as much ozone-depleting pollution as the average driver does in a year.
But I digress. All green-mindedness aside, the goal of our staycation was to relax, reconnect and celebrate our (gulp) 12-year anniversary. Oh, who am I fooling? We’ve got three kids: The goal of our staycation was to sleep.
And sleep we did. In a giant, four-poster, enormous bed that looks like it belongs in a fairytale, during one truly fairytale weekend at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, CA. (Check out the pic and tell me you wouldn’t take that over Sleeping Beauty’s castle.)
Now, granted, the Langham is not marketing itself as a “green” hotel, like some of the others we’ve come across: The Starwood Element chain, for example, the amazing Ambrose in Santa Monica or the Hotel Felix, which will become Chicago’s first LEED-certified hotel when it opens this March.
But even at a hotel like the Langham, known for luxury rather than eco-mindedness, poolside drinks were served in compostable veggie plastic, an incredible meal in the hotel’s signature Dining Room included local and sustainable grown elements, amenities include an organic perfume blending bar by Ajne and visitors were encouraged to reuse and recycle. Yes, plastic mini bottles of water are still offered when you pick up your car from valet. No, the beautiful, old-fashioned, red-tiled roof is not yet adorned with solar panels. But the times they are a-changing.
And we feel well rested, indeed.
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, parenting | Tags: beauty, california, carbon footprint, clean, clothes, clothing, eco, eco-friendly, environment, environmental, fashion, global warming, green, greener, hemp, landfill, leather, los angeles, mommy, organic, parenting, PVC, recycled, recycling, sustainable
Is green really the new black? In 2006, $32.8 billion was spent on healthy and eco-friendly food, beverage, personal care, and household products. In 2008, $7 billion was spent on natural and organic personal care products alone. And the natural household products category is projected to grow to $1.48 billion in 2011 (an increase of 119% from 2006).
Apparently, even in today’s economy, green is the new green.
But that doesn’t mean it has to cost you more money to go there. As demand grows and the supply of sustainable materials gets stronger, the cost of eco-friendly products goes down until they compete with the mainstream stand-bys on the shelves.
A few months ago, I tested organic versus conventional kids’ lunches and found six cents difference in favor of the organic version: Check out the video to see how that breaks down. By now you’d probably save a whole dime to go green at lunchtime, and you’d certainly prevent your kids from ingesting a whole heckuva lot of pesticides.
But the fastest way to go green and save some green at the same time? Make your own.
DIY FASHION
Denim trends change faster than lip color—but tossing your jeans because they’re last year’s boot cut means you’re adding to the four millions tons of textile waste that hit our landfills every year, according to TextileRecycle.org. Instead, reincarnate them for pennies by turning them into something eco-fabulous, following step-by-step instructions from Born-Again Vintage: 25 Ways to Deconstruct, Reinvent and Recycle Your Wardrobe (Potter Craft, December 2008). With one pair of jeans, you get three new additions to your wardrobe, with little more cost than thread (and elbow grease). First, cut off the legs, seam rip the center seam and fray the cuff to make a cute mini. Next, take one of the discarded legs, turn it inside out and sew up the sides. Add a zipper and strap and you’ve got a retro denim tote. With the leftovers, make a headband accented by a tricked-out denim flower. And you thought your sewing skills maxed out in seventh grade Home Ec.
HAUT LIPGLOSS AT HUMBLE PRICES
Got a double boiler, an organic mint candy and a beet? You’ve got the season’s hottest eco-friendly lip gloss, according to eHow. You’ll need:
Beeswax
Sweet almond oil
Double boiler
A Vitamin E capsule
An organic mint hard candy
Essential oil (optional)
A fresh beet
A small sealable container
Melt 2 tsp. of beeswax and 2 tbsp. of cold pressed or extra virgin sweet almond oil in a double boiler. It is important that you heat the mixture slowly, as excess temperatures can destroy the healing elements of natural oils. Make sure that the mixture never gets so hot that it is uncomfortable to touch.
Remove from heat and stir in two to four drops of oil squeezed from a vitamin E capsule. Vitamin E has antioxidant properties that will nourish and protect your lips, but it is also a natural preservative for your natural lip gloss.
Melt a very small piece of organic peppermint candy into the wax and oil mixture.
Slice a piece of raw beet and add it to the mixture. Add more or less depending on how deep you want the color, but make sure to fish out the pieces before it cools. The amount of dye you add to your lip gloss will depend on your personal choice; however, you should make the shade in the pot slightly darker than the desired finished color.
Stir the mixture occasionally as you allow it to cool. While still slightly warm, transfer your natural lip gloss into a small sealable container, allowing it to cool completely before sealing.
A CLEAN HOUSE FOR PENNIES
I’m addicted to Susan Carpenter’s Realist Idealist column in the Los Angeles Times, mainly because she’s so damned skeptical it makes me laugh. But last week’s column—about four simple, environmentally friendly ingredients that can clean your house from top to bottom—made her a believer.
The truth is, our grandmothers cleaned with white distilled vinegar, baking soda, castile soap and water for hundreds of years until the chemical industry began marketing expensive alternatives, which resulted in 85,000 new chemicals into our households over the past 50 years, according to Healthy Child, Healthy World. No wonder our kids have asthma.
Susan bought a $2 bottle of white distilled vinegar (a disinfectant and deodorant), $1 worth of baking soda (a deodorant and mild abrasive) and a $10 jug of castile soap (made of 100% vegetable oil). With a little water, she mixed it up in recycled cleaning product containers and scrubbed away at windows, toilets, tubs, floors and sinks. Adding a squeeze of lemon juice (a disinfectant) and a dash of olive oil (a lubricant) to the castile soap, she dusted and shined her wood furniture. That’s a $13 investment that yields materials to keep your house clean for months.
What are your money-saving tips in the fashion, beauty or lifestyle departments? Do any of them happen to be green, too? Tell me about it!
Filed under: beauty, eco-friendly, fashion, green, organic, parenting, sustainable | Tags: california, carbon footprint, clothes, clothing, eco, eco-friendly, environment, environmental, fashion, global warming, green, greener, hemp, landfill, leather, los angeles, mommy, organic, PVC, recycled, recycling, sustainable
I’m turning thirtysomething this year. And though until now I’ve gotten by on the bare-bones makeup routine, I took a long, hard look in the mirror this morning and realized I need to grow up and break out the big guns. Blush. Highlighter. Maybe even some—egads—shadow. Because these days, my natural look needs a little, shall we say, assistance.
With that said, what’s working still does its job. I’ve got my go-to mascara, my favorite lip gloss and the concealer that got me through last month’s break out. This is no time to be messing with the basics, right? Wrong. I’m viewing a looming 4-0 as the perfect opportunity to create an entirely new look, and if I’m starting from scratch, it might as well be green.
The truth is, that go-to drugstore concealer and eyeliner I’ve been hanging to to contain parabens, which have been found in breast cancer tissue. And the mascara? It might just be formulated with mercury, a known neurotoxin, according to the Skin Deep Database (www.cosmeticsdatabase.com), a resource for cosmetic ingredients that was created by the non-profit Environmental Working Group.
I tossed the lipgloss after I learned that the average American woman will ingest more than four pounds of petroleum over her lifetime just by licking her conventionally lipsticked lips. And that, frighteningly, last year the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics released an aptly-named “Poison Kiss” report alleging 61 percent of brand-name lipsticks contain lead in excess of .1 parts per million, the FDA’s limit for lead in candy. (The FDA has no limit for lead in lipstick. Go figure.) Ick!
Then I went to the woman who knows from eco-beauty, Josie Maran (www.josiemarancosmetics.com), who was the face of Maybelline for 10 years until she got sick and tired of promoting chemicals and launched her own line. Her lip glosses taste like Dulche de Leche, but you can lick your lips all you want—there’s not an ounce or petroleum (or lead, for that matter) in the lot. And her mascara is to die for, but without mercury or any neurotoxins to speak of, you don’t have to worry about dying to wear it.
For shadow, I wanted to try mineral since it’s reputed to stick around longer and lord knows I have little time for touch ups. I adore the aptly-named tints in mineral master Alima’s new Silver Screen collections—Garbo is the perfect neutral, and Bette a retro blue. Minerals are also key in my new chemical-free concealer. You can’t beat Alima’s $1 sample sizes to get your color right (www.alimapure.com).
Tarte’s new offerings are chemical-free, and their signature Berrylicious Cheek Stain (www.tartecosmetics.com) is totally clean. It gives a sexy flush without looking weird and is so easy to apply: Just touch the stick to your cheeks, then rub with your fingers to blend. Now they’re paired the Stain with Rise & Shine, which, on one end, is this amazing stain, and on the other is a perfectly slick but not sticky gloss. And it’s pocket sized—or purse-sized, if you’re a grown-up like me.
Are you hitting a milestone this year? Or thinking about greening your look? Tell me about it!
Filed under: eco-friendly, fashion, organic, parenting | Tags: california, carbon footprint, clothes, clothing, eco, eco-friendly, environment, environmental, fashion, global warming, green, greener, hemp, landfill, leather, los angeles, mommy, organic, PVC, recycled, recycling, sustainable
Window shop or just plain rack 'em up: You decide.
I’ve always been a pretty sustainably-minded person. My father is a professor at UCLA whose specialty is Native American literature; I grew up going to pow-wows and taking cross-country trips to the Badlands. My nickname in college was, embarrassingly, “Flower.”
But, like most of us, my eco-focus stopped at water conservation and recycling. I bought conventional cleaning products because that’s what I was used to—even though I saw the “natural” cleaners on the same shelf, I wrote their claims off as marketing rather than turning over the bottles and comparing the labels.
I didn’t really make the connection between the environmental impact of how I lived until I met Christopher Gavigan at Healthy Child, Healthy World. I was nine months pregnant with my third child, and we met to talk about my helping with publicity and marketing efforts for the organization once the baby was born.
We sat in his no-VOC painted office filled with oxygen-emitting plants and as he explained to me what his mission and focus was I basically had a panic attack. We talked about lead and VOCs in paint, furniture and carpets; I was in the process of remodeling my house and had been living and working as the workmen stripped old paint and installed new carpets. He told me about pesticides and how they work their way up the food chain; I vowed to eat less meat and make it organic, and to buy locally produced food as much as possible.
I went home and got rid of all my chemical cleaning products after learning how much they contributed to indoor air pollution. When my baby was born, I took Christopher’s advice and used BPH-free bottles (after breast feeding first, of course). With the other two babies I had used disposable diapers; with this one I alternated between cloth, flushable inserts and chlorine-free disposables in a pinch.
I started doing my own research. And I quickly realized how much of an impact what I bought for myself and my family could have on the environment—and the marketplace. For example, most clothing is made of cotton, which is one of the most heavily sprayed crops in the world, accounting for 25 percent of all pesticides used in the U.S. according to the Sustainable Cotton Project. It takes an astounding one-third of a pound of pesticide to make one t-shirt and two-thirds to make a pair of jeans. (Dump a pound of flour into a bowl and keep that visual in mind the next time you go shopping.)
Let’s say one manufacturer makes the decision to buy conventional cotton, and a second manufacturer decides to make a similar t-shirt in organic cotton. They make the shirts, and put them side-by-side in a store. Now if everyone in that store has made the decision to not buy conventional cotton t-shirts but buy organic cotton instead, that regular cotton t-shirt will go unsold and the other will sell out. The next time the first manufacturer goes to make his shirts, hopefully he’ll choose organic cotton. The organic cotton farmer will have more business. There will be more competition in organic cotton and the price will go down. And so on.
This analogy could be applied to food, makeup, furniture, clothing, cars—I was astounded at how simple and easy it was for me to think outside of the conventional box when it came to shopping. Just putting a fresh perspective on it also helped me look closer at whether I truly needed something, or just wanted it. When I did end up in a shopping situation, I looked at labels and origin and typically ended up putting back on the rack what I might in the past have purchased.
Has going green helped reduce your shopping habit? Tell me about it!
