We’re Melting

By Susan Lutz

Forests are dying. Polar bears starving, ice caps shrinking. The list grows. We’ve spent a lifetime stomping on the planet and now world leaders gather in the hopes of finding a solution before we hit the tipping point. Can we pull back? Can we save ourselves?

I read positive stories: a community garden in Haiti becomes a center of growth and revitalization; the price of solar power is dropping fast and becoming an extremely viable alternative energy source; climate adapted strategies are manifesting and working to stabilize wildlife. Around towns, I see trees being planted, youth conversing about important issues. This is great. And there are many more examples of success and ideas which are moving us forward.

Yet, I read bad news, too: the UK starts to cut millions of dollars from its renewable resources; the threat of disease increases due to insects gaining the ability to live longer and travel farther; the sea level is rising; and of course, we’ve all seen the pictures of the polar bears starving. Some days, it’s hard to read the news. Some days it does seem like we’re just going to tip over and sink.

I recently heard a lecture on the cause and effect of our actions and the impact our choices have on climate change. The most interesting, and most powerful, I thought, was this: What are we willing to give up? In this country, the majority of cars during rush hour consist of single drivers. Bottled water and soda fill our vending machines, and we don’t give a second thought to the short pleasure we get versus the amount of toxins in each bottle. We like our stuff. We like our creams, cars, deals online, new phones, and processed, over-packaged foods.

The summit on climate change brings together world leaders. The model of coming together to talk; understanding our differences; taking note of those suffering the most; and, moving forward with dialogue. Regardless of how difficult the task is, it is one we must implement from the highest of offices to the grass-roots level.

We wait too long to act. We wait to change gun laws until terror steps into our cafes (if even then). We wait to ban trophy hunting and poaching and watch as species become threatened and face habitat loss and even become extinct. We’re slowly melting under the take-the-money-and-run philosophy of getting what we need, now, and forgetting how it will hurt us in the future.

When my son picked up an acorn the other day, he thought it was the grandest of discoveries. I held it up and told him it was amazing. We carried it with us as if it were a piece of gold. Our food supply, our land, our water – they truly are gold. We must realize this now, or we will watch as the world melts and slowly slips away.

Just One Word: Plastics

At times it feels we’re just doomed to suffer in the toxic choices of our every day lives.

By Susan Lutz

I snapped the glow stick. The green, fluorescent light lit the way – the kids on Halloween safer because of the glow. The plastic glass I bought for my son this summer had the Minions on it. If I put it in the freezer, it would keep the contents cold long through the summer day. At times, it feels as if everything is toxic; everything is plastic. At times it feels we’re just doomed to suffer in the toxic choices of our every day lives.

There isn’t a day that passes by that I don’t feel guilty about a dangerous, toxic, or bad-for-me product our family consumes or uses. We occasionally buy water in plastic bottles. I go to the grocery store and sometimes forget my cloth reusable bags. After a few weeks, I’m stunned at the pile of plastic bags in the corner. I dutifully recycle my paper, plastics, and metals, yet I know recycling isn’t a solution, just a band-aid to a bigger problem.

So many of our conveniences trace back to our love of plastics. I recently watched The Graduate again and was stunned by the accuracy and the irony of the iconic line said to Benjamin as he debated what to do with his future:

I want to say one word to you. Just one word…Plastics.

The benefits of plastics and many other chemically based products made in our society are far reaching. Medical, educational, and at-home use of plastics grew leaps and bounds: think bags for blood transfusions, the parts in computers, the covers on our phones, the stuff that holds pens together, the fibers in our clothes, and so on…..

How do we turn things around? Just passing the tetra boxes in the grocery store makes me sad. I wonder if it’s impossible to change the course we’re on. I can’t predict what we’ll do to our planet, and ourselves, but I can obtain peace of mind and enough good habits to overall lessen my carbon footprint and instead chip away at improving our lives and obtaining a better balance of our existence.

What if we all used plastics less than we did the day before? I reuse glass bottles as my daily water bottles when out and about. Though not perfect (they sometimes break!), I feel it’s a tiny step I want to take in reducing my own personal toxic footprint on the planet.

I forgive myself when I don’t make it – when I forget to recycle or when I buy face paint with lead in it for Halloween. (I threw it out and made a DIY face paint from zinc oxide and chlorophyll!). But more times than I fail, I succeed. I’ll remember next year how to make the green face paint. As the end of the year and the holiday rolls around, I’ll buy less. And I see wonderful strides in our community. I see vegetable trays at children’s gatherings and a lot less candy floating around. If we all bought plastic water bottles once in a while or used the same computer two extra years, we’d make a huge dent in reducing the toxicity in our environment.

Make choices knowing that they make a long, long impact on our planet. Now, there’s just one word we must think about. One word to take us to our new level: consciousness.

Kill the K-Cup Before It Kills Us

By Susan Lutz

In the hospital, I waited for my son to get out of a simple procedure; we’d be home by the end of the day. I looked at the counter, hoping for some coffee. And, there it was. Packaged. Flavor injected. Plastic. The K-cup – the new, killer coffee that’s killing the coffee with its convenient, single-serving delivery system. Coffee drinkers loaded up and bought them, about 9 billion a year, filling a need we didn’t even know we had.

Billions of cups mean billions of little plastic, worthless-after-one use, go-in-the-trash cups. And the cost doesn’t seem to matter. Folgers coffee, in one of those K-cups, measures out to $50.00 a serving. For a few years, I owned a coffee shop; I wasn’t making that kind of margin. Even the priciest of coffees from the most exotic of places doesn’t garner that price.

The profit is not going to the farmers either. Is the coffee organic? Fair trade? Mostly no, though suppliers are putting out organic and fair trade. Our desire for this product is insatiable. I spent time with the people working the coffee fields. It’s a tough life. Many do not have medical coverage, are exposed to chemicals and treated poorly. Many are women and children. We love our coffee. We treat it almost as if it is a right rather than a privilege. Before the hospital waiting room, I had never seen these machines in action. I thought they were a luxury. But, I lived in Central America where most things are luxuries, including roofs that don’t leak and enough food to feed a family.

An hour went by as I waited for my son. I was hungry and the coffee looked so tempting. I put the K-cup into the spot, pushed a button and got just water. I walked down the hall to the bathroom and dumped out the water. I tried again and got the worst coffee I’d ever tasted. I went to the bathroom and dumped it out. When I threw away the little cup, I felt miserable. I had no coffee, I was in a hospital, and now I just added to the billions of little, non-recyclable trash mounding in landfills.

There’s a campaign to KILLTHEKCUP with a pretty intense video about the destruction of our planet from the killer K-cup. I saw an interview with Kevin Sullivan, chief technology officer at Keurig Green Mountain, maker of coffee machines on CBS Sunday Morning. He said the company was beginning to find ways to make the product recycle by 2020:

“We’ve been hard at work to solve that problem,” said Sullivan. “We introduced a system called Vue that has cups that are, in fact, recyclable. We have a company objective that everything will be recyclable by the year 2020. We certainly aren’t going to wait that long. I think we’re going to start that much sooner, and hopefully convert sooner than that.”

I was stunned. By 2020 the company will have little plastic k-cups that are recyclable? Do the math. Let’s say, for simplicity, 9 billion cups are sold a year, starting in 2015 and going until 2019 (we’ll just ignore the damage already done and we’ll ignore growth or decline in sales):

9 billion x 5 = 45 billion little, useless plastic cups filling up our needs to get something quick, fast, and with no regard for others. Getting the k-cup recyclable is, in this day and age, a non-negotiable item. But why after the fact? Why not create the product with some consciousness before the damage is done? Did Kevin Sullivan ever hear of climate change? We cause climate change in every choice we make. It’s not just the billowing smoke from factory smoke stacks. It’s us, our decisions to use or reuse or to choose sustainable with our spending power. There’s plenty of other single serving machines out there that cost the same or less than the Keurig coffee system. Are we that tight for time we can’t spend another minute tamping down a bit of coffee in a reusable machine?

My son and I went home. He was sleepy, but up and playing like little kids do by early evening. I made a cup of coffee when I got home, a single, grounds-only, cup of coffee. It was worth the wait.

#1527: Farm to School

According the the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood obesity has more than doubled in children and quadrupled in adolescents within the past 30 years. Enter the National Farm to School Network, which is working to bring local, fresh foods to school across the U.S., in an effort to reduce obesity, and bring healthy food choices to cafeteria menus. My guest this week is Jaime Lockwood, Development Director at the Farm to School Network, which helps connect local farmers with schools, chefs to cafeterias, and students to gardens. We talk about the importance of the Farm to School Act of 2015, and discuss how chefs inspire healthy eating, environmental awareness, and fitness via wellnessintheschools.org. Jaime is also a board member of Urban Tree Connection, an organization based in Philadelphia, that works to educate and develop community driven greening and gardening projects on vacant land. For more information visit farmtoschool.org. and urbantreeconnection.org

#1527: Farm to School by The Many Shades Of Green on Mixcloud

End the Use of the Tiny, Terrible Microbead

By Susan Lutz

Scrub some natural face cleanser on at the end of the day. Feels wonderful. A shea butter body cream can only be good, right? Read the ingredients. Many of the cosmetics on the shelf today contain microbeads. What’s a microbead? I hadn’t heard of them either. Yet, they are now so proliferate in many of the products we use, approximately 69 NGOs from 33 countries are supporting the campaign to end the use of the microbead, according to beatthemicrobead.org.

What exactly is a microbead? Imagine a teeny, tiny bead of plastic. Now, image something smaller. Microbeads replace more natural ingredients, especially in health and body care products like scrubs, creams, and toothpaste. The tiny beads, less then 1mm, are composed of polyethylene, polypropylene, polymethyl methacrylate, or nylon, in short, plastic. Use a microbead for seconds, rinse, and it goes down the drain to stay in the environment forever. The cycle of water pulls the plastic fibers all the way to the oceans. They don’t break down. Instead, they mush into plastic-like goo; floating, unnoticed by a fish that eats a smaller fish – tasty, yet environmentally deadly. Catch the bigger fish and the contaminant ends up back on our table, in our mouths. See anyone pick up a tiny piece of plastic on the ground and eat it? That’s exactly what’s happening.

How did this happen? And, right under our nose? All of these ingredients are approved and “safe” to use. Safe bet companies are making money on the short-term benefit of making a product cheaper, getting it on the shelf quicker, and selling more than we really need. Natural ingredients take more time, most likely more investment – in the short run. (And, I’m not even talking about organic ingredients yet, just “natural” like putting in more real shea butter instead of cutting the real product with these tiny plastic beads.)

Step in a movement to end those tiny, terrible microbeads. Like so many other products we discover for the quick, availability and cheaper price, we buy it: plastic bags, the k-cup, or processed food. The ramifications of our choices always, not sometimes, but always come back to bite us in the bags and beads. Without seeing the long-term effect before we eat too much sugar or throw all or allow GMO modification of our food, we suffer the consequences of our choices and have to work to not only end the use of the danger, but also find ways to reinvent how to educate, make healthy choices, and show our children things like tiny microbeads just are a bad decision.

A movement has started to ban the microbead. Annie Leonard, founder of The Story of Stuff, began an idea to look at our prolific use of stuff. Her animated movies are short, great for anyone – I’ve showed them to my kids – and poignant. She’s always working on a solution. Pointing out the problem is one thing, doing something about yet another. Learn what products carry microbeads and stop using them. Check out sites that offer more information on microbeads and how to join a campaign to ban the bead.

So, let’s get started, below is a list of companies and products as posted from beatthemicrobead.org that contain microbeads. You can get the full list, for many countries, on their site.

A few examples of products with microbeads as listed by beathemicrobead.org:

Ahava: Dead Sea Essentials-Relaxing Almond Exfoliating Body Cleanser – Polyethylene (PE)

CVS Pharmacy: Oil Free Scrub – Polyethylene (PE)

Neutrogena/Johnson & Johnson: Deep clean gentle Scrub (oil free) – Polyethylene (PE)

Note the brands; be familiar with the all the chemical names of the microbead. Changing brands, really going natural or organic is a choice not just for better skin or whiter teeth, but a choice that makes a difference for our children and our planet.

#1510: Eco Artist, Donna Sharrett

My guest this week is the multi-talented artist Donna Sharrett, whose most recent exhibit, Love Songs, captivated art lovers with a beautifully crafted array of pieces that were intricately assembled using materials donated and re-used. This collection of artwork was formed from Donna’s memories, as she re-used fabric, jewelry, dirt, guitar strings and other items to create these beautiful pieces. We also talk about how Patti Smith was in some small way part of the exhibit via her song, Dancing Barefoot. Donna is also a master gardener and started the Community Garden in Ossining, NY. Art and the environment are interconnected, and Donna is a prime example how that connection is made. For more information go to donnasharrett.com

#1503: Raising Veg Kids

My guest this week is Robyn Moore, creator of RaisingVegKids.com and Family Coordinator for Education for the Solutionary School, which is set to open in NYC in 2016. Education is the key to preparing students to be more ethical and humane, as our culture needs to create problem solvers and thinkers. Part of that process is teaching children and their parents to be stewards of the planet, and to eat a cleaner, more plant based diet, which will lead to a healthier society. Whether vegan, vegetarian, or paleo, balance is an essential part of eating and living. For more information go to raisingvegkids.com and humaneeducation.org

#1502: Not in a Dumpster

We welcome back friend of the show, and a super green human, Eva Radke, founder of Film Biz Recycling, an organization that diverts set materials from film, television and theatre, and recycles, reuses, redistributes and re-purposes those items. “Not in a Dumpster” is the mantra of Film Biz Recycling, and there are exciting new projects which are on the horizon for the coming year. The prop shop is a great place to find clothes, furniture and collectibles that have been used to dress sets such as 30 Rock, Gossip Girls, The Amazing Spiderman 2 and many more. To find out all the great things Film Biz Recycling is doing, and to get information about the prop shop, go to filmbizrecycling.org

The Green Stream: Beware of US Food Politics

By Mikey Kohlberg

The need is greater than ever to be involved in the growing sustainability and food movement. The threats that our agriculture industry pose on climate change and human survival are blatantly obvious at this point, yet it seems that many US politicians have forsaken their duty as representatives of the common good of America while instead succumbing to the pressures of politics and corporate interest. For the sake of being concise, I won’t get into the details of the destruction that Monsanto Company and similar operations are causing to humanity and to nature. For a summary of these details, click here.

Today, I am focusing more on the dilemma of Michael R. Taylor slithering his way from atop multiple powerful positions working for Monsanto Company to holding America’s health in the palm of his hand as head honcho of the FDA. And last but not least, I hope to begin to show you all how gravely this affects us all.

To start off I want to ask a question. When did it become acceptable in this country to let someone switch so freely between the position of corporate lobbyist/lawyer and policy maker in the same field? That is what FDA Deputy Commissioner for Food and Veterinary Medicine Michael R.Taylor did. Also, do me a quick favor and google the relationship he has had with King & Spalding, a law firm that has a history of representing Monsanto. This, my friends has been called by Marion Nestle, who wrote Food Politics, “a classic example of the revolving door.”

There are those who argue for Taylor’s innocence however. Bill Marler who wrote Mike Taylor and the Myth of the Monsanto Man, claims that after knowing of him (not directly knowing him) for nearly 20 years, he is convinced Taylor is non-partial to Monsanto. Taylor himself is quoted in the article saying, “The government has clear rules about what a person can and cannot work on under those circumstances (potential partiality to an industry),” Marler then establishes his line that Taylor “follows those rules very carefully.” Marler continues to explain that when Taylor held the Deputy Commissioner for Policy (FDA) in the mid-’90s, the FDA Ethics Counsel said that he could work on general policy matters, such as policies for food labeling, but that he was precluded from any involvement in specific product approvals of interest to Monsanto. HOLD ON!

Seeing as one of the biggest US food policy issues right now is the requirement of food companies to label GMO foods, this seems like an issue that former Monsanto lawyer and VP of public policy at the largest GMO company in the world should not be engaging in! American health is at stake!

Also, according to PF Louis in his article Biotech industry at war over GMOs; millions of dollars funneled to lawmakers, “Monsanto Mike (Taylor) was able to influence the approval of rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone), which forces cows to yield more milk while causing infections that require antibiotics. So many milk and other dairy products became contaminated with the synthetic hormone rBGH, antibiotics, and infected cow blood and puss.” If you are unaware of the futility that over antibiotic use in factory farms is causing modern medicine please check out some of these links. I encourage you to explore the topic in more detail.

Long story short, America’s reckless agricultural techniques and lack of quality governmental oversight has created a situation in which Americans are falsely assured by their own government about the safety of their food. It is a situation that still has its solutions though. What we need is mass education which will contribute to a snowballing in consumer awareness about the importance of the local and sustainable food movement. It has started to take hold around the world but with EVERONE’S help, we will begin to change. Their have been sparks of change so far, but we need to keep the passion strong to get the fire roaring. As we eat locally and buy from small farms, food becomes much healthier, less mysterious, and more tasty. While food transportation costs and emissions are reduced, air becomes cleaner in cities and communities become stronger through community farms and other CSA projects. If you take away one thing from this blog, let it be to buy food that comes from within 100 miles of where you live!

I want to end this Green Stream blog with a note of optimism, because although there are many problems with our current food regulatory system and agricultural sector, there is much we all can do.

Buy local and Stay Green!

Find out more info about eating clean and stayed tuned for The Many Shades of Green’s interview with Ashley Spivak from Clean Plates!

#1446: Happy Greengiving

It’s that time of year again, when consumerism and family collide into what we call the holiday season. To help you incorporate sustainable choices into your gift giving, decorations and food, we’ve invited Elissa Olin from Green in BKLYN, Ashley Spivak from Clean Plates and Eva Radke of Film Biz Recycling to share their tips and ideas. greeninbklyn.com, cleanplates.com & filmbizrecycling.org

#1428: Gennaro Brooks-Church, EcoBrooklyn

A river runs through it, and it is up on the roof. Tune in to find out how my guest Gennaro Brooks-Church, Director of EcoBrooklyn, created a river on a roof, which uses gray water and rain water filtration systems to cut down on water use, while creating a beautiful waterscape. We also discuss ways to keep your home more energy efficient, by using less waste, via reusable materials and installing passive heating and cooling systems. Water is a precious commodity, and we talk about the sewage/water issues affecting the neighborhoods closest to the Gowanus Canal. Gennaro is building green to keep his “Build It Forward” mantra alive for future generations. For more info go to www.ecobrooklyn.com

#1428: Gennaro Brooks-Church, EcoBrooklyn

#1415: Recyclebank

Americans do not recycle enough and landfills are clogged with unnecessary waste. Enter Recyclebank, a model company that rewards towns, businesses and individuals for increasing their recycling capacities. Erika Diamond, Vice President of Community Solutions, explains that behavioral change is possible when incentives and rewards are put into place to promote positive behavior. Recyclebank is working to increase recycling rates, which will reduce waste disposal via education, gamification and public/private partnerships, to get communities to participate in green actions thus making the planet cleaner and safer. To find out how you can get involved, go to www.recyclebank.com

#1415: Recyclebank