Earth Blog

Important news from the world of children’s entertainment! A world I should know nothing about (since I have no children) but I am all too familiar with as more of my friends start to have children or their children discover the magic world of television.

Yesterday the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Earth Hour announced that Pocoyo, the monochromatically dressed and be-hatted toddler with a group of anthropomorphic friends, would be serving his a third term as Earth Hour's Global Kids' Ambassador.

This year’s Earth Hour campaign includes the “I Will If You Will” challenge reminiscent of those school yard rejoinders like “I know you are but what am I?” and “I triple dog dare you!”

The EPA says: “One in every ten homes has a leak that is wasting at least 90 gallons of water per day.”

How do you know if your home is one of the ones leaking enough water to fill up a fish tank commonly found in people’s living rooms? It starts with your water bill and knowing how much water on average your home and its occupants use.

Now that auto pay has become the preferred method of bill paying in many homes it can  be all too easy to ignore the bottom line, blissfully unaware you have a leak. During the winter or seasonal equivalent in your state if water usage for a family of four exceeds 12,000 gallons a month you probably have leak somewhere.

March is National Nutrition Month®. This year the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (the Academy) chose “Eat Right, Your Way, Every Day” to be the theme.

Let’s celebrate the 40th anniversary of National Nutrition Month® with a round-up  of nutritional topics suitable for discussion at lunch time or the dinner hour and some tips from the Academy and one from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Yesterday I went to our local H ampersand M in search of a pair of black ankle boots with metal toe caps I saw in a magazine. They resemble this pair from Zara.

The H&M had the boots but spending anything over $20 for a pair of shoes I would only sporadically wear was not practical. Furthermore after seeing them up close I discovered I wasn’t as enamored with them as I thought.

Now had I known that I could have brought in a bag of old clothes and received a discount on those boots I would probably be wearing them right now with my pajamas. I’m beginning to regret not snapping up those shoes. Don’t judge me.

We all know kids say the darndest things. I’ve got two here right now that I am caring for while their mother, a friend, handles an emergency.  Neither of the two boys, ages five and three, quite understand the meaning of the phrase “inside voice.” The three year old keeps chanting the word “cheeseburger” while he eats a banana.

But sometime kids say helpful things and according to a group of researchers at Imperial College London this means the lessons children learn about protecting the environment can be passed up to adults.

The entire study called “Child-orientated environmental education influences adult knowledge and household behaviour” is available online at IOP Science but can also be found in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The National Day of Unplugging website asks: “Do you have multiple cell phones? Take your ipad to the beach on vacation? Ever find it hard to get through a conversation without posting an update to Facebook? Is your computer always on?”

Do people have multiple cell phones? Most of the time I can barely stand my one phone and you mean to tell me some people have more than one cell phone? Are these people doctors? Does the President of the United States even have more than one cell phone? A pair of pants really only has two good pockets for a cell phone so if you have more than two where is the third one kept? Good grief, we are a technologically addicted society, aren’t we?

Last year for Super Bowl XLVI I wrote about Lucas Oil Stadium’s sustainability efforts year-round and for the game in Indianapolis.

This year the Mercedes-Benz Superdome setting of tomorrow’s Harbowl, aka Super Bowl XLVII, between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers is going to be green too! In fact the bad puns like this year’s theme “Geaux Green” (“green” the game; “green” the fans; and “green” the community) designated by the New Orleans Host Committee (NOHC) started last April.

The committee announced the theme and launched the Environmental Program for Super Bowl XLVII last spring with a tree planting done in partnership with Hike for KaTREEna.  Over 100,000 trees were lost after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the state in 2005.

“Swedes have grown accustomed to the idea that babies cannot be potty trained, but that parents need to wait until they are mature, usually when they decide that they no longer want diapers,” said a recent University of Gothenburg study that explored the potty training process.

I guess we can say that the general view of potty training in America is about the same as the Swedish: most parents potty train their children at two or three years of age or when they deem them mature enough. The child usually doesn’t get to help decide when that is and sometimes the parents sick of handling diapers will expedite the process.

One article I found said the average child will end up using a total of 6,000-7,000 disposable diapers by age two. That article, written in 2010, also broke down the cost per diaper of several diaper brands and the cost per year from birth to age two: $1,000-$2,240. Cloth diapers have become popular again with parents who say they are saving money and diverting diapers from landfills.

The American Journal of Health Promotion has published an Oregon State University (OSU) study that tells us what we already knew about exercise, in particular “lifestyle exercising,” and I love it because I am lazy. Are you lazy? Good. Keep reading.

Lifestyle exercises are all the little eco-friendly things you can do during the day (taking the stairs, standing at your desk, parking farther away from store entrances) that may in the long run end up being just as beneficial as a period of routine, sustained, structured exercise or as I call it “thirty minutes to an hour of my day without coffee and the Internet.”

Doctoral candidate John Taylor, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Department of Crop Sciences,  was skeptical about the lists of urban gardens that were being circulated by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Taylor told the university’s news office that of the NGO lists he saw one reported almost 700 urban gardens in Chicago.

700 urban gardens may seem like a lot but when you start to think about the size and population of the city that one list didn’t seem accurate to Taylor. He surmised that there were actually more than what the lists presented. The content of the lists weren’t always accurate either and Taylor said some of the greenery was just well, greenery: planter boxes or landscaping that did not produce food, at least not food for humans.

So Taylor partnered with Assistant Professor Sarah T. Lovell at the same department to obtain a more accurate count of urban gardens with the help of everyone’s favorite time-waster and map on the Internet- Google Earth.

Lately there hasn’t been a lot of happy news coming out of Staples Center in Downtown Los Angeles if you follow Lakers basketball. Don’t lie and tell me you’re a Clippers fan the other basketball team that plays there. No one is a Clippers fan. But the good news is the next time Jack Nicholson gets up (Adam Sandler not available at all games) and walks out in disgust he can throw his trash away sustainably thanks to new recycling stations designed by GreenDrop!

“Partnering with GreenDrop allows Staples Center to incorporate a convenient waste-diversion system that patrons can easily utilize without increasing operational costs,” explained Lee Zeidman the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Staples Center. “We evaluated other containers, but GreenDrop was the best option for the arena’s recycling needs.”

The GreenDrop is the best option for sports arenas because the containers were designed in part by a sports arena. They were even designed to have advertising slapped on them. In Los Angeles this means ads for Smart Water, Pechanga Resort & Casino, and Carl’s Jr.

The Dream Lab is a program sponsored by the British Council. In 2008 they asked universities in the UK to create competitions that would help develop science and design education in China.  Kingston University answered the call and was selected by the British Council to run their contest focused on how farming, cooking, and eating will change during the next four decades.

“The competition wasn't simply about food,"  said Professor Catherine McDermott, a Kingston University curating expert and the project’s leader, "It was also about biotechnology and the massive advances being made in farming techniques and considering how designers - the very people who create our restaurants and kitchens - react to these changes."

A team of students from Dalian Nationalities University, in northern China, took the theme and ran with it to design a contest-winning “eco-kitchen” that sounds less like an organic garden and sustainable kitchen and more like something out of the Jetsons.

If you live in Orange County and would like to fill at least one Sunday a month with an activity for your child/children here is your chance:

The University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) Orange County Master Gardeners program is presenting the The Great Park Food + Farm Lab: a series of twelve garden themed workshops on the second Sunday of every month at the Orange County Great Park in Irvine.

Parking and admission are free and the workshops are too! The programs is designed for kids (and their families) of all ages and it begins next week on January the 13th.

There isn't much time left until Christmas morning so let's cut the chit-chat. Here are eight last minute stocking stuffer ideas appropriate for kids and adults:

Baked goods

Set aside a few cookies, or pieces of fudge, whatever you are already baking. Wrap them in foil or in a bag, if you are feeling energetic add some ribbon.

Fruit

Fruit, available in a variety of festive colors, is part of a healthy and balanced diet. Experts say it can lower the risk of osteoporosis and fruit is full of nutrients. Fruit will make you feel less guilty about the cookies you just put in the stocking.

If diamonds are a girl’s best friend then you are going to want to purchase an ethical diamond so it will provide a girl with sound moral advice. Consider the ethical diamond to be the Chuck Klosterman-New York Times Magazine’s current Ethicist- of diamonds. Wait, that’s not right.

Once again let’s turn to an expert, but not Klosterman, to help us wade through the implications of our purchases this gift-giving season.

Trina Hamilton, a University of Buffalo expert in corporate responsibility, and her students surveyed 94 retailers who promote themselves as sellers of conflict free diamonds. Of those retailers 13 were selling ethical options from countries other than Canada giving consumers more choices about how to spend their money.

Our neighbors to the north have been the popular country for options that are not “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds.”

Today is the first day of December now there are 24 days between us and Christmas. It’s the perfect time to panic about all the stuff you still need to buy. There are a few ways to handle the problem: chant “Buying Nothing” to your friends and family every time the gift-buying subject pops up or let the professionals tell you how to do it.
 
Two professors at Ohio’s Baldwin Wallace University have some tips for buying toys because they understand that you want the children you are purchasing for to be more excited about the gift and not the box and wrapping paper the gift was lovingly packaged in.

Dale Grubb a professor of psychology at the university said, "Most people have experienced the heartbreak of gift failure. Often, it is because the item is too highly structured. When a toy is overly limited in its function, it fails to sustain a child's interest. To help prevent this scenario, ask yourself, 'what could the child do with this?’

This is the weekend after Black Friday so yesterday was Small Business Saturday. Tomorrow is Cyber Monday and now I’m hearing about Fair Trade Tuesday. The media was adding “Gray Thursday” into the mix before the onslaught of weekend consumerism had even begun. I guess today hadn’t been deemed a shopping day yet and is still a traditional day of rest.

If you aren’t in a food coma you are in a shopping coma. Has the high that comes with making all those purchases worn off yet? Are you looking at the stuff you amassed and wondering “What was wrong with our “old” television again?” or “I now own over 500 Blu -Ray DVDs? That can’t be right.” But I know how it is because I am a recovering shopaholic.

The first thing I noticed about Beth Terry’s book Plastic Free is how compact and stalwart it is compared to the standard hardcover book the latest fiction bestseller is packaged in by the big publishing houses.

The second thing I noticed is that the book lacks a traditional spine because in the quest to live plastic free Terry and the publishers at Skyhorse have gone to great lengths to eliminate plastic in their publication.

The book is not 100 percent plastic-less but they’ve come quite close and even the glue they used contains no plastic.

The third thing I noticed, and you will too if you have done the fiscally smart thing and checked it out from the library, is that the well-meaning library technicians had wrapped it in the clear plastic to protect the plain brown paper wrapping that is the cover. The shiny layer of plastic sort of defeats the message of the book, but what can you do?

Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan is “weathering all manner of inconvenience and insult in the name of forging a more eco-friendly life” as Grist’s “Greenie Pig.” The last post I read by her was about the “No New Stuff” challenge she took in May.

She was wrapping up a month long quest to not buy anything new: she had to decide whether to go without, repurpose items or shop secondhand for stuff aside from toiletries. On the last day of her challenge she was contemplating whether or not to buy hair mousse even though she had inadequate mousse at home to use. Later on in the post she let it slip that she also uses a hair dryer-none of that sounded green to me. Mousse? Hair dryers? A Jedi craves not these things.

What is nanosilver and why is it in our clothes?

Nanosilver is added to clothing and textiles by the manufacturer to act as a antimicrobial. When you wash your clothing the nanosilver releases toxic silver ions that enter the waste water and cannot be recovered at water treatment plants or broken down completely in nature -similar to the way plastic photodegrades and never quite disappears.

For example Newegg.com is selling a beanie: the “ABSOLUTE OUTDOOR XSYSTEM FLEECE BEANIE MOSSY OAK INFINITY OSFM” that is listed as containing Nano-Silver to prevent odor because when you are hunting the only smell you should be emitting is the stuff you willingly doused yourself in to repel or attract the animal you intend to kill.

Rickard Arvidsson (pictured above right at the Ryaverket waste water treatment plant), a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, conducted a study that suggests: “If everyone buys one silver nanoparticle -treated sock a year, the silver concentration in waste water treatment plant sludge can double.” Well, that can’t be good.