Could plastic be the worst kind of petroleum-related disaster, even worse than the oil spills we've all grown to know and love?
Take a trip with VBS.tv in the video above to visit the North Pacific Gyre, an area bigger than Texas where much of our trash ends up floating around, where it kills wildlife and likely makes its way back to us. Nothing like a little Bisphenol A in our systems!
To watch the whole series of 12 videos, visit VBS.tv.
I received an order of business cards for Adopt An Animal the other day from Natural Printing, and they look great! (Check out the design below.) This is the first time I've designed and ordered business cards for myself, and I'm quite pleased with the final product. I originally thought about using a service such as VistaPrint to get free cards, but they didn't offer 100% recycled (as far as I could tell), and I couldn't quickly figure out a way to simply upload the custom card I designed myself instead of using their templates (such was the case with similar free-business-card sites.) I found a few other places online offering recycled cards, but most required huge orders and were considerably expensive. Natural Printing allowed me to order a relatively small number of 100% recycled cards (don't be fooled by the rather unattractive example) for a relatively cheap price ($60.) Sure, it was more expensive than VistaPrint's free cards, obviously, but with Natural Printing, I got exactly what I wanted, quickly, and supported a small business at the same time.
This being my first business card design, I was a bit apprehensive that I may have set up the printing layout incorrectly. Natural Printing's website gives guidelines on how to set up your design's layout so it prints correctly, and though the directions are easy to follow, Mark from Natural Printing let me know of a minor problem shortly after I submitted my order - the version of Adobe Illustrator I was using (CS2 12.0.1) was too high, even though it's a few years old. So I saved the design as a PDF, sent him the update, and quickly heard back from that my design was good to go. About a week and a half later, the little box showed up, stuffed with perfectly aligned little cards.
I chose to use a one-sided design. I originally thought about including Adopt An Animal's services on the back of the card, but I realized that many times when people give me business cards, I write notes on the blank side about the organization or the person I met. I could've used lighter ink on the card's backside had I used it, but chose to go the simpler one-sided route. I also figure that it's a good idea to use matte printing, because glossy cards are virtually impossible to write on.
The one minor issue I have with my order is that the heavy-duty, pure-white cards say nothing about being 100% recycled, which I think would be a nice feature and selling point for Natural Printing. I'll probably let Mark know about this and see what he says, but in the meantime, if I order more cards, I might just put a small watermark on the bottom mentioning this fact. It might look a little self-congratulatory ("Hey, I use recycled products!"), but with so many business cards floating around out there, people may as well start printing them on recycled paper!
I just received a free Home Energy Efficiency Kit from my local electricity provider, Indianapolis Power & Light (IPL.) As Napoleon Dynamite would say, it's flippin' sweet!
After I found out about it from Shawndra (whom I met once at the only Irvington Green Initiative meeting I've been to :P ), I ordered a kit online at IPL's website (click here to order one ASAP if you're an IPL customer) less than two weeks ago, and it was on my doorstep when I got home today. I pretended I wasn't excited about it and let it sit on my kitchen counter for awhile, but couldn't resist the urge to open it before my wife got home.
Inside were two compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), a hot water gauge to check water heater temperatures, a refrigerator thermometer, an awesome luminescent night light that emits a nice light-green glow for only pennies a year (even if left on for 24 hours a day, every day!), switch and outlet draft-stoppers (glad I bought and installed these a few weeks back :P ), a water flow meter bag to determine faucet/showerhead efficiency, and finally my favorite thing (barely edging out the night light): a "Spoiler" low-flow water saving showerhead. I haven't installed any of it yet because I wanted to show my wife the nifty package. Well, I lie: I just couldn't help myself from testing and installing the night light.
It's cool of IPL to offer all this for free (though it's probably wrapped up in my monthly electricity bill somehow). Hopefully it will offer people who don't know much about saving energy an idea of where to start. There are many things we can do to improve efficiency, without going as far as installing solar panels or moving to the Arctic tundra and living off the land (good luck with that.)
I can't help wondering, though, why IPL is offering all this for free. It's the third in a short series of things that made me go "hmm..." (ah, how I miss C + C Music Factory.) The first, part of IPL's "ongoing commitment to protect and preserve the environment," was their installation of a new 565-foot stack and scrubber that reduces sulphur-dioxide emissions. The old one was big, but the new stack looks friggin' huge and sends off an impressive, relatively clean, white, mostly water plume, especially on clear days. Check out the picture below.
Okay, so that seems like a good idea. I haven't done much research, but it has to be an improvement on the original stack. Anyway, the second thing that made me go "hmm..." was IPL's offering of a renewable power option (click for info and to enroll), which I signed up for last year. You can specify how much of your energy you'd like to come from renewable sources (10% through 100%), and then IPL's magic Green Power Option elves send electricity from Midwestern wind farms or Indiana landfill gas generation plants (sounds pleasant) to your home. I don't really understand how the whole "sending electricity from somewhere distant" process works (that's my phrase, by the way, not IPL's), but it sounds somewhat like what Enron was doing when they were trading and shifting energy between states and rather distant regions (check out Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for an entertaining and informative look into what happened.)
I'm not blaming IPL for anything. From what I can tell (I admittedly haven't done a lot of research on their history), they're making some good moves towards going greener. But I can't help being somewhat suspicious when members (or at least acquaintances) of the carbon cabal shed their smoky appearances for green.
If IPL is indeed charging full speed ahead toward a clean future, kudos to them. If not, well, no one likes to be greenwashed, even if if they don't yet know what the term means.