Waste

I bike by this about 3 times a week. This is a picture of Ballona Creek, a bike bath that goes down to the ocean. Ballona Creek comes from way east...miles and miles and it just flows down collecting more trash each mile. Lucikly there is a net that is about 1 mile from the ocean, it traps all the plastic and styrafoam so that it doesn't go into our ocean. It so amazing how much trash accumulates in the nets.

I usually TIVO Oprah. Most of the time I'm not that interested in the show, but sometimes she has a great show. This week she had 2 shows on how much we waste. Time, food, plastic bottles, electricity, gas, money, etc... It was amazing and made me re-think how we live. We only have 1 car and actually have been biking to work each day, so we only drive our car when we have to, which hasn't been a lot. We are only using $40.00 worth of gas each week (which I think is really good). We recycle, but then Oprah showed that plastic (which I thought would be recycled) doesn't really get recycled like we thought. Most of it stays around forever. We bought a Brita water pitcher and are getting SIGG bottles so that we won't be using plastic bottles. So many kids bring in a plastic water bottle with them for class and then they never drink it and just throw it away, so wasteful.

Oprah also showed how much food we waste. People that buy food and don't eat it and just throw it away. So, I have decided that I won't throw anything away. We are big on leftovers (which are great if the original meal was good) and for fresh produce I shop every other day, so I don't buy something and have it go bad.

We also changed our light bulbs to the new CVS light bulbs, we wash our clothes in cold water and I have re-useable bags for the grocery store, so I don't come home with those plastic bags that will last forever. It makes me sad to think of where this world is going. How much waste we have, how many landfills we have, how many tons of garbage each of us produce. I am not sure that most people really think about where there trash goes. Most of it doesn't go anywhere but to a landfill and it will stay around for thousands of years. We even use biodegradable bags for picking up our pooches poo.

Seeing these shows really made the think...about how we live and what we are doing to this world. We are going to do our best to make our footprints smaller. It's the least we can do.

Comments

[Lesley]

That's one of the good things about France - hardly any of the supermarkets give plastic bags any more, so we are forced into being environment-conscious.

[Alisa Rosseter]

Lesley - good to hear from you. When we take vacations we don't stay in hotels, we always rent apartments or houses, so we can get the feel of living there. Our first trip to France we were at the market and bought food for a few days and I'm getting ready to pay and Bruce is standing at the end with a confused look on his face...no bags? We didn't know what to do, how were we going to get our grocerys home...luckily they had some cardboard boxes for us to use. I love how you have to bring your own bags to the supermarket, sure wish we did that here in the US. Here in Santa Monica they have banned plastic bags. I think I'll be bringing my re-usuable bags with me to france.