EcoHeidi Borchers

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I just don’t get it.

I also want to take an adventure to CBU and talk about flying monkeys. Some people might really admire that (/insidejoke).

I had this picture hanging in my room freshman year!

I love it.

From Olsens Anonymous.

But what you may not realize is that these last three feet are vastly important in other ways.  Because the last three feet is also where the rubber meets the road.

• It could be the difference between tossing your sock towards the hamper or missing the basket entirely
• It could be the difference between your current score and the score you need to beat the all-time-champ score on your favorite video game
• It could be the difference between tripping over a heavy item for days or having hubby lift it into it’s proper place. 

OR 

• It could be the distance between the sink and the trash can in my kitchen.

Perhaps this last one is, in fact, the most important one.  Because it’s these last three feet that perplex me the most.

You see, practically every time hubby has a can of soda he carries the empty can to the kitchen and places it gingerly into the sink.  Yes, the sink.  I should also probably mention that it’s not 3 walkable feet to our trash cans……it’s 3 reachable feet.  As in, hubby would need to turn to the side, open a cabinet door and toss – or perhaps even drop - the can into the recycling bin.  It’s 3 feet from top to bottom.  It does not, by any means, require additional work to throw something away.  Unless of course you feel that opening a cabinet is too taxing.  Or you have some sort of physical disability that prevents you from turning left.  And hubby, as far as I can tell,  is in pretty good shape and has no physical ailments.

So why, you may ask, does the soda can make it into the sink but not the trash?  I wish I knew. 

Even though I’ve been in sales for many, many years, it seems that I just can’t close this deal.  I just keep losing hubby in those ever-so-important last three feet.  So every day, I take the empty can out of the sink and toss it into the trash.  This is one hubby trait  that I think I’ll be dealing with forever.

I’m one lucky gal……………   

Pepsi Throwback is, er, back. This is Pepsi Cola the way it was originally formulated, with lots and lots of sugar. And this is a good thing, because for once Pepsi doesn’t have all those nasty chemicals in it, just good, natural sugar.

Huh?

Wait a minute, wasn’t sugar bad for you? Didn’t we get rid of sugar in soda because it rotted children’s teeth faster than Elmo rotted their brains? Didn’t sugar cause obesity? And what about all the lab rats that got cancer from sugar?

Well we got rid of all that nasty sugar and replaced it with nice, factory-fresh, new-car smelling chemicals, most of which have more bonds in a single molecule than their names have letters. Many of these chemicals have been found to be able to wipe out small towns with only a single teaspoon in the water supply.

See what has happened? With all the chemicals and strange substances in our food, the public has swung so far the other way that even a repeat offender like sugar looks good. Following this trend, I’m waiting for Coca Cola Throwback, produced from the original formula which included cocaine. That’s not an urban legend, that’s true.

So throw back some Throwback. You’ll never miss the chemicals. You get enough of them in your tap water anyway.

—————–

While I’m on the subject, I have to give credit where credit is due. Pepsi got the cans right. Those Throwback cans have character. They are colorful and easily identifiable.

Today’s Pepsi logo is squashed, tilted on its side, and it seems to be sneering at you. The font is a boring lower case Arial and the names are printed so small (and sideways) so that the only way to tell regular from diet from caffeine free from Max is to bring a secret decoder color chart with you to the store. Making matters worse, stores stock bottles of caffeine free right next to Max, which has roughly double the caffeine of regular Pepsi. What genius put them in bottle of near-duplicate design?

One day soon, a poor, colorblind old man will die from a caffeine induced heart attack because he couldn’t tell one bottle from another. I look forward to the lawsuit.

Soda Can Christmas Tree

Cardboard Christmas Tree

Recycled Paper Christmas Tree

Magazines Christmas Tree

Disposable Forks Christmas Tree

Plastic Bottles Christmas Tree

Ecologismo.com

A 16-year study at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Centre has found that children are still brought to the hospitals for swallowing the safety tabs from canned soda or other beverages given them.

The safety tabs are especially found mostly in teens despite having it redesigned by beverage companies to fold back upon opening but stay attached to the containers.

“I think we all know if you fiddle with these stay tabs, you can easily break them off,” Dr. Lane Donnelly, who led the study, said during the Radiological Society of North America meeting in Chicago.

Donnelly believes children play and eventually break off the tab, drop it into the soda can and accidentally swallow the tab. The detached tabs have jagged edges that could injure the stomach or intestine.

Parents are advised to be aware of this problem when giving kids canned soda or other beverages.

It will also be beneficial if beverage companies consider a new design that makes the tabs harder to break off when fiddling with it.

“Do not dispair, fair maiden! I have attended DIYfri at  TACtile Art Center, and I know how to use those sundry items to create a fully working camp stove.”

“Sir Knight! You have saved me!”

“But while we’re on the subject, why were you carrying around two soda cans, a hammer, a nail, and some denatured alcohol?”

“Narrative Necessity?”

Materials:

2 Soda cans, preferably washed

A hammer, if you have one handy and don’t want to share

Bottom line is that matchy-matchy is NOT OKAY.

This is one of those pieces you buy one or two of and then promise me that you won’t buy thousands of them and make matching outfits. I swear on my hair (that means business) I will hunt down if you do.

Growing up during the late 50s and 60s, I had to come inside for Kool-Aid or water from a glass. When I bought a soda from a gas station cooler, it was glass and returned for a deposit. I do not long for those days, but I am tired of picking up discarded water and soda bottles/cans in my neighborhood. Recycle them. Reuse them.

Ms. Juel works in additive sculpture and found-art manipulation. Her sculpture is constructed from long filaments cut from aluminum cans, then woven or wrapped into a mesh covered armature. In describing her work, she says, “The colors from the cans provide an interesting palette.”

With this method, Ms. Juel is able to stop and start work when time permits, so the medium is appropriate to her world.  Born in Niagara Falls, N.Y., she attended Houghton College and Northwestern University. After teaching high school English for six years, she began to take courses in studio arts at the University of Minnesota. Ms. Juel’s work has appeared in galleries and exhibitions in Minnesota, New Jersey  and New York.

Recycled underwear

From Environmental Graffiti comes this bit of news…

There’s recycling and then there’s recycling madness. Designer Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch has a penchant for using almost anything she can get her hands on. From a young age she would visit hardware shops with her dad and since has always found some way of combing unlikely materials into usable pieces 

Neatorama recently featured one of Ingrid’s designs, a set of underwear made from recycled soda cans. One can only imagine the chaffing!

Recycled Underwear

I have been green for a while now. You know: Caring about the environment.

My parents are Green Nazis. My father recycles everything that he can. Newspapers, junk mail, real mail scraps (he actually punches out the little plastic windows so he can put the envelope in the paper container).

He recycles cans, motor oil, batteries, old tires. He strips wire so that he can recycle the copper inside.

He’s retired. And insane. But it keeps him happy.

My mother is the Container Queen. If it’s a container, then dammit it stays. Clean it out and find a use for it. My father finally talked her into recycling the egg cartons. That doesn’t stop her, though. She has a stash of them in a cabinet. Ok…it’s more like a deadly trap waiting to spring itself on unsuspecting house guests when they go routing through the kitchen cabinets with undetermined intentions. Always causes hilarity. Especially when my mother won’t let them help her pick them all up. On average I’d say that at least 78% of them leave shortly after the ‘incident’.

You know what she has? Baby food jars. Yes. And those little baby food plastic containers. They were salvaged when my nephews and nieces needed pureed nutrition. The oldest is now in 5th grade and my mother is still looking for the perfect use for the glass jars. She did find an actual use for the plastic ones. She gardens and will start her little seedlings in these things. I was quite impressed with her burst of ingenuity. Then she mentioned that she saw it on HGTV. Oh well. It was still cool that she found a use.

Just like all the coffee cans. And plastic coffee containers. She dumped a bunch of the plastic containers on my sister. She took those, and a dump load of New Jersey soil with her back to Maryland where she lives now. She started to grow tomatoes in the soil. She was very excited when the dirt yielded it’s harvest. Nothing like a Jersey tomato.

Unfortunately, my sister left behind all of the margarine containers. I guess that they were too small to transport any useful quantity of dirt. Slowly, Mother finds uses for them. One used to sit on the sink with a sponge in it. That lasted until I got so disgusted by the whole presentation of the dried, slimy looking sponge contained inside it’s little jail. I envisioned it as a visitor’s center with all of the germs gathering and fermenting together, trying to figure out where they’d like to travel to next. I’ll tell you were they went…right into the garbage.

And then there are the bags. The plastic bags that grocery stores give you at the checkout. Or the big retailers give you. Or the ones that are soaked with Kung Pao sauce when your Chinese food gets to your house. Yup. Those are the bags that my mother collects. She has developed an amazing technique too. She takes one bag and uses it as the “main storage compartment”. Then she crumples up more bags as tight as she can get them and places them in the main bag. After she gets an entire warehouse of crumpled bags into the main bag, she ties up the bag and it goes into an assembly line, of sorts…waiting it’s turn in the queue line and daydreaming of it’s new purpose in life.

They really are insane, you know. But there is a lesson to be learned. Even though none of us can be as nuts as my parents are for recycling, being Green is good.

Go get on out there and put a can in a recycling container or newspapers in a paper bag. Even if you only do it once, it makes a difference!!!

Uh, Oh…I know heart disease is bad and all but I love my Fanta.

Man! I know I got wasted last night, but does this hangover feel different? Or is it just me?

Maybe our food doesn’t travel as far as we think it does? Thanks, Slate.

–Nick

We all need to pay more attention to whether we recycle all our plastic bottles and other recyclable materials. Most streets do not have recycling containers on them. When you buy a bottle of water as you are leaving the gym, soda with lunch or even just a drink because you are thirsty if there is not a recycling container around you take it with you. It is not just limited to plastic and aluminum recycling, there are even fewer newspaper recycling containers on the street.

Do not just limit this practice to the occasional bottle of water but all the plastic and glass bottles and other recyclable items (like the newspaper you read at Starbucks on Sunday) you get while you are out and about. This is definately not the most ideal thing to do. Carry around your garbage! There are more places putting recycling containers but right now they are not everywhere.

Here are some facts as to why you should do this from Recycling Revolution:

• Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
• A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose — and even longer if it’s in the landfill.
• The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
• A typical family consumes 182 gallons of soda, 29 gallons of juice, 104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That’s a lot of containers — make sure they’re recycled!
• A used aluminum can is recycled and back on the grocery shelf as a new can, in as little as 60 days. That’s closed loop recycling at its finest!
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
• An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now!
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year.
• There is no limit to the amount of times an aluminum can be recycled.
• If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!

If you are in the mall look in the food court area. Some towns will have recycling on the street near restaurants that serve sodas in cans and bottles. If all else fails and you cannot find a place to put it bring it home with you and put it in your home recycling bin. Remember it is good for the environment so even though it is more of an inconvenience it is worth it!

Statistics are a useful tool in understanding our world, although it has been said that 43% of all statistics are meaningless, so caveat collector. Loosely put, a statistical outlier is as an ‘occasional or infrequent observation in data that differs significally from its co-data’. Collectors turn the statistical world on its head. On Planet Collector, outliers rule. Weird is normal. Up is down. Expect the unexpected.

Try this. If you ask some people to name the top ten things that “people collect”, this is more or less the list you’d likely get back:

Books | Coins | Comics | DVDs | Music | Toys | Stamps | Sports Memorabilia (Your results may vary. Serving suggestion only.)

Look at the list again. Yes, I know there are only eight items there, but this only serves to strengthen my next point. There exists quite a narrow view on what humans out there actually collect – this is the middle-of-the-road stuff that one might assume fills a home’s spare room. And, the 20 million people who collect stamps would probably agree.

Look at the list again. Read between the lines, those little pipe characters that hide somewhere on the Eastern key-Bord. Each of those pipes represents a huge iceberg, and the text either side represents the thumb-sized tip of that mountain of ice. For every ‘normal’ collection type, there’re thousands of outliers, quietly sitting under the surface, lurking just off our radars. You’ll only find the outliers if you go looking. And the more you look, the more you find, and the more you’re surprised. You might know an outlier without having ever realised it. Don’t panic. They may otherwise be quite normal.

I’m talking about people who collect Gundam, jars, butterflies, flags, vintage walkie-talkies, speeding tickets, Durutti Column, newspapers, shells, frogs, autographs, soda cans, Atari, smurfs, costumes, Babylon 5, number plates, fountain pens, Toby mugs, kites, Warhammer, fishing flies, Asuka and Rei, beetles, Blythe, earrings, and coat-hangers.

Yes, there is someone out there who collects coat-hangers. In fact, there are three suspension de vêtements enthusiasts:

1. Bob Browning (see photo).

2. Penelope Cruz – yes, she apparently collects coat-hangers.

3. Someone in a remote Norwegian fishing village.

I’d like all three to join Kollecta. I’ll tackle the third person, if anyone out there knows Bob or Penny, please let me know.

[ www.kollecta.com/Collector/Barney ]

First seen in 2002, these emails are entirely without substance, and have been used to send spam, transport viruses and simply to cause panic. The text of the email varies, but the most common version we’ve seen in 2005 is as follows:

This incident happened recently in North Texas . We need to be even more careful everywhere. A woman went boating one Sunday, taking with her some cans of coke which she put in the refrigerator of the boat. On Monday she was taken into Intensive Care Unit and on Wednesday she died.

The autopsy revealed a certain Leptospirose caused by the can of coke from which she had drunk, not using a glass. A test showed that the can was infected by dried rat urine and hence the disease Leptospirosis.

Rat urine contains toxic and deathly substances. It is highly recommended to wash thoroughly the upper part of soda cans before drinking out of them as they have been stocked in warehouses and transported straight to the shops without being cleaned

A study at NYCU showed that the tops of soda cans are more contaminated than public toilets (i.e).. full of germs and bacteria. So wash them with water before putting them to the mouth to avoid any kind of fatal accident.

Please forward this message to all the people you care about.

The email evolves over time, and currently we are seeing a rise in circulation in the USA, referring to deaths in several states. If you receive one of these messages, please delete it and ignore what it says. You are more at risk of being hit by lightning while riding a camel than contracting leptospirosis from a commercial drinks container.

Official position of the LIC:

While there is a theoretical risk of human infection from residual rat urine on cans or bottles, the statistical risk is extremely small. Leptospira require constant immersion in water to survive, and so drying of the surface for any length of time will permanently kill the bacteria. Given that drinking containers are non-porous, surface moisture dries very quickly and cannot possibly contaminate the contents.

Drinking from a can or bottle that has been exposed to rat urine presents a risk in theory only. There are no reported cases in the literature of human infection being unequivocally traced to cans or bottles and no medical studies have been performed into leptospira on drinks containers, or into the relative bacterial levels of drinks containers and public toilets.

The emails usually report a study by ‘NYCU’. There is no such University (it is an acronym for News You Can Use) and is in no way connected to New York University.

Hey, remember these?

I spent this past Sunday afternoon loafing a bit, recovering from my Friday exam, clicking through E-bay looking for a dresser for my room. I then noticed that there are a number of people who are selling vintage, unopened cans of soda and beer – such as the one above (RC cola – that was a childhood favorite!). Or, just the empty cans. Or, just the pop tops and pull tabs off the cans. Some of these are fetching pretty good prices.

I now realize I shouldn’t have emptied out that case of Tab that was lying around (someone should write the history of Tab, if it hasn’t been written already – that was a soft drink to end all soft drinks).

I’m old enough to indulge in that masochistic habit of reminding myself how old I am. This can of soda, with its disposable pull-tab, does the trick. The ring tab should be pretty obvious, but it takes a moment of nostalgic recollection to remember that little thing used to be a cultural icon of a sort. Reading up, I learned that it was invented by Ermal Cleon Fraze of Dayton, Ohio back in 1962. He had gone to a picnic and forgotten his can opener, and then realized that there had to be a better way. Within a few years, the technology had become widespread, and beer and soda became immediately consumable – no need for a can opener to delay the quenching of our collective thirst.

The problem with these disposable ring tabs was that it took some technique – if you pulled too hard on the ring, which you often did, it would come flying off but the tab would stay in place, and you’d have to go back to the kitchen and get the can opener out, after all. Or, the tab would fall into the soda, and then you’d face the danger of swallowing it if you weren’t careful. But the real problem was that these things quickly became the 1970s equivalent of today’s plastic grocery bag: cluttering up the streets and highways, school yards, parking lots, beaches – wherever anyone and a canned beverage could travel – and strangling marine life, to boot. Wherever you’d go, you would see these things lying around, collecting by the dozens, if not hundreds. Kids in particular would pick them up and play with them, driving their parents crazy.

At the same time, I have vague recollections of using these tabs to make friendship rings and bracelets – whole cohorts of elementary school art teachers were probably trained on soda can art. The current pop-in non-disposable pull-tab was invented in the 1970s and became popular during the 1980s. While these tend to stay on the can, like they’re supposed to, they’re don’t have quite the cache that the old disposable pull-tab cans seem to have among a certain segment of the population that recalls them with a peculiar fondness. Remembrance of things of America’s mid-20th century past, I suppose…when our great industrial “pop” culture (hahaha, oh I really should stop) was really getting going.