Lesson My Impact #6: Coffee and Knitting

It turns out, people, that if you order a BOX of coffee from Einstein Brothers (for your office or your long trip home from Florida) and you drink all the coffee and break down the box to recycle it, of course, INSIDE the box is an AMAZING bag.

It's silver.

It's thick enough to keep the coffee warm and away from things that don't need to be wet, but not too thick to push a needle and thread through.

What I am saying is that you can add a strap, people!  This strap can hang on a hook, or even your shoulder.
You can wind a ball of yarn and throw it in the bag, then pull the working string through the hole that the coffee used to come out of.
I know, be amazed.
Now your yarn won't get all knotty!

Then you can start knitting yourself a hat.
Pick one of those mindless patterns where you just go 'round and 'round because, after all, you drank all that coffee so there is none left to help get you through a hard pattern with dropping and yarn-overing and or using a cable to do that cable thing.

Then you can call your friend who works for the Laura Crandall Brown Ovarian Cancer Foundation and find out when they are putting packets together with Chemo Caps and Port Pillows.

Get all of your other friends to make one cap each, a few pillow ports for fun, and Voila! We are caffeined-up happy knitting sewing encouragers for all of our sisters fighting Ovarian Cancer!

Go team!

*If you will knit one chemo cap for an adult-sized head, let me know.

**A port pillow is a small pillow with velcro attached that clasps around the chest strap seat belt in a car so that the seatbelt doesn't press uncomfortably on the port usually embedded to attach the chemo tubing during treatment. Here is a pattern:

http://www.abbieandeveline.com/2014/09/12/my-recipe-for-portacath-pillows/

Lesson My Impact #5: Wearing Nicaragua, Costa Rica and "Overseas"

Today I am wearing the countries Nicaragua (t-shirt), Costa Rica (shorts) and "Overseas" (flip flops).

I am wearing Frisky flip flops and on their web site they claim:

Our products are manufactured overseas with quality control located in each factory to insure excellence and inspect all production to maintain the utmost in integrity and uniformity. All products are made from high quality and environmentally friendly materials. Products are produced in compliance with all U.S. regulations and labor laws. 

But Frisky never states what "overseas" means. So I sent them an email thanking them for their product and asking which countries. Still waiting to hear back.

I just read the book Where Am I Wearing? A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes by Kelsey Timmerman.

Srsly, y'all.

"What are we to do as consumers? If we buy garments made in some developing country, we are contributing to an industry built on laborers whose wages and quality of life would be unacceptable to us. But if we don't, the laborers might lose their jobs. My conclusion, after visiting the people who made my favorite clothes, is that we should try to be engaged consumers, not mindless pocketbooks throwing dollars at the cheapest possible fashionable clothes we can find."

I added the bold on the above quote. I heard Bono of U2 state once that we vote with every dollar. I love that. And believe it. I worry about being paralyzed by it...and how to teach it to my children. I am disgusted that my children wear clothes made by other children.

"My own conclusion, after visiting Bangladesh, is that we should not be ashamed that our clothes are made by children so much as ashamed that we live in a world where child labor is often necessary for survival.

Child labor or not, the working conditions in Bangladesh's garment and textile industries are the living conditions of the country.

This is the culture of poverty."

Timmerman's work and curiosity aligns with Susan Bissell's lifetime work of advocating and protecting children all over the world.

I met Susan while she was writing her dissertation decades ago and she was the first to widen my perspective about sweatshops, child labor, and all of the thousands of hands my cheap pair of jeans passed through to end up in my closet.

If I buy the jeans, I affect the workers - whatever their ages.

If I remove myself from the consumer market, I affect the workers...and their job security.

I have to figure out how to be an engaged consumer right where I am.

It's summertime in my house, which means the children are home all the time. All. The. Time. It has been a great reminder to me that I am not teaching them enough about the Wear and Care of the Home. I got all fired up for this to be a Teaching Summer, involving the laundry and perhaps the dishwasher.

It did not work. So I quit. I removed myself from the Wear and Care of the Home, thinking that maybe if I stepped down, at least one kid would step up.

Instead, they started a game of naming the roaches.

I am not kidding.

Engaged consumer, engaged Wear and Care.

Timmerman also notes, 

"Hope is in short supply in impoverished nations. Ask kids what they want to do when they grow up and the they'll look at you funny. They know what they are going to do. They are going to do what their moms and dads do - just try to get by."

"'If they pay $45 for jeans,' Ai says, 'it helps us. If people don't buy, I'm unhappy because I wouldn't have a job.' Ai laughs at the simplicity of the logic.

Is it that simple? Does an uneducated, 24-year-old garment worker hold the answer to how I should behave as a consumer?

To buy or not to buy, that is the question."

"There isn't a single worker who makes my clothes who lives a life that I would find acceptable. I'm not sure we can handle knowing how most of the world lives, and corporations understand this."

Why can't we handle knowing how most of the world lives? 

Why can't our daily work involve and include tiny steps towards closing the gaps between how we live, what our children hope for, and what we wear?

I am wide open for this revolution.

It started years ago, was boosted by this book, and now I have this morning to take my first tiny steps.

Join me?

www.whereamiwearing.com

Lesson My Impact #4: Eat to Feed Your Compost

I have been trying to eat to feed my compost.



If I don't have to take out the tupperware containers under my sink every other day to add my food scraps to the compost bin, then I'm not eating how I need to eat, nor feeding my family anything that at one time was alive.



I've been adding my wet scraps then layering with dry leaves from the yard.
I used to do this in an old trash can, then moved it to an open concept with pallets zip-tied together.
Then I inherited this roly-poly number that is awesome.

I have yet to use the compost yet, or have a thriving garden. Who knows this year could be MY YEAR.

(If you have any composting tips, I'd love to hear/read them!)

Lesson My Impact #3: Pouches

Terracycle to the rescue again!

They have a Go-Go Squeeze Brigade!

Can you imagine if nursery schools and preschools and lunch rooms would collect empty pouches and mail them in??

That would be a lot of pouches saved from the land fill.


TBH, the Drink Pouch Brigade is pretty amazing too. Capri Sun and Honest Kids empty drink pouches can be mailed in and recycled into more pouches (through a shredding then melting process they show you on the web site - scroll to the very bottom of this page).

I used to cut off the tops and rinse and dry them, but now you can just mail the whole flattened pouch in with the straw still in and everything!!

Thank you, Terracycle, for trying to make saving the earth as convenient as possible.

The work involved for me (AND YOU) is collecting, bagging, packaging, printing the label, and scheduling a UPS pick up or just dropping it off at UPS.

The only cash costs for you are the packaging supplies, printer ink and driving to UPS. Which means it's basically totally worth it.

If YOU collect, I will ship!! We can be a team! Go team!
Let me know...

Lesson My Impact #2

I love Burt's Bees products. ALL of them.
I also love fresh herbs.

I remain conflicted about buying small containers of products I love, and then chunking the containers to the trash.
So when it got cold outside, I transferred some parsley to my empty face scrub tubes and when it's time to water them, I can just flip the bottom cap open and let the extra water drip out. It's like it's MADE for this!

I am also loving Preserve Products which recycle Burt's Bees chapstick tubes!!!
Their web site says:
We accept clean Burt's Bees lip balm, tinted lip balm and lip shimmer tubes along with Burt's Bees Face Care airless pump packages and all plastic caps.

There is a receptacle in the lobby of Whole Foods here, or you can find a bin near you here.  Or, love the postal system, you can mail them in.

Hooray!

Lesson My Impact #1*

This is a bag of empty Colgate tubes of toothpaste, used Colgate toothbrushes, and the boxes they came in:

I got on the Google.

Then I got on www.terracycle.com.

Then I set up an account in the Colgate Brigade.

Then I clicked on 

 "Ship Us Your Waste"

Then Terracycle emailed me a shipping label.

I went to my email and printed out the shipping label and taped it on the (used) large envelope I found in the Used Envelope Place in the drawer. 

Turns out UPS has a store right by Publix!

And we were out of turkey and bread!

Dropped the old Colgate items to ship for free to Terracycle, then got my family some lunch meat.

Boom.

* For those of you grammar geekies out there, Hello I am one of you! I stressed over the use of Less, Lessen, or Lower for this post. Upon further reading about "measurable quantities of time and distance" and whatnot, I became clear that what I mean to say is that I want to have less of an impact on the environment and I want to lower the measurable quantities of my existing impact. I want to find the lesson in the lessen-ing (do you see what I did there??)   So lessen away, my friends. I'll join you in your efforts.