The Night Time Trash People
We all know kids rebel. As a Green Mom, I’d like to believe that my children will absorb at least some of our family’s eco-friendly habits. But sometimes I worry that my green parenting practices might lead my eldest son to rebel like Alex P. Keaton.
So you can imagine how I felt when I overheard this conversation between Big Boy and his cousin, as my DH, his brother, the wives and kids enjoyed a picnic dinner at DC’s Southwest waterfront.
Big Boy: “There’s a lot of trash around here.”
Bigger Boy Cousin: “Let’s pick it up!”
Big Boy: “Awesome, dude. Let’s be the Night Time Trash People. We’ll run around picking up trash.”
Laughing, screaming noise, as two six-year-olds and a nine-year-old run around picking up trash.
On the walk back to metro, Bigger Boy Cousin says, ”You know, there’s too much trash in the world and it’s really bad for the environment.”
Big Boy: “Yeah, because it weighs so much, it could like split the Earth in half. Then the continents would just split down the middle with a big crack.”
Bigger Boy Cousin: “Yeah, and then the world would heat up too much and there would be no oxygen and we would just vaporize and die.”
Big Boy: “Yeah, then we’d just float around like floating skeletons like aliens or something. Cool. We’d all be alien floating skeletons.”
At this point, I made a mental note to make sure that we weren’t terrorizing the kids with overheard tales of looming eco-tragedies.
The next morning, Big Boy informed me that he needed to make posters telling people to recycle. He wants to hang them on trees all around the neighborhood.
I wondered about the wisdom of hanging posters from trees. But off he ran, soon to come back with 60 copies expertly run off on my office printer. NOT double-sided. I took a deep breath, and decided his heart was in the right place.
And we’re off to hang posters. Anyone need about forty extras?
— Lynn
Copyright 2008 OrganicMania
Filed under Green Ideas & Stuff, Green moms | Wordpress Comments (2) |More on Clorox: Take Back the Filter!
As a relative newcomer to the world of online green organizing, I’m a bit atypical. After having spent 20 years in corporate marketing for high tech firms, I understand Big Business, and no, I don’t think all corporations are evil as some environmentalists believe. In fact, there’s not much I see in stark black versus white contrast – I see the shades of gray.
So when I hear about “campaigns” against various companies, I tend to cringe. I know that these “grassroots campaigns” are often well coordinated PR campaigns led by sophisticated organizations (sometimes competitors) with very definite agendas.
But the campaign to convince Clorox to recycle Brita water filters in North America is different. It’s led by a reasonable woman, someone who is a true activist and yet has a regular job with a real company — Beth Terry of the blog Fake Plastic Fish.
The first thing I asked myself when I heard about the campaign was, “Well, has she asked Clorox about their position?”
And of course she had. In fact, Beth had sent Clorox letters prior to starting the campaign, and she later posted the response letters from Clorox on her campaign website here. And since then, Beth has talked with Clorox representatives about their position that the refill cartridges are not recyclable – despite the fact that Brita filters are recycled in Europe!
Clorox is spending a lot of money going after green consumers through its acquisition of Burt’s Bees, its launch of Green Works cleaners, and its campaign to reduce plastic water bottle usage in favor of using Brita filtered water. As the saying goes, if you’re going to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. If Clorox truly is “going green,” it needs to re-examine its current business practices.
From the campaign website:
In August of 2007, Clorox and Nalgene teamed up for their FilterForGood campaign, encouraging people to buy a reusable Nalgene bottle and fill it with Brita filtered water in order to reduce plastic bottle waste. According to Clorox’s letter, “One pour-through filter can effectively replace 300 standard bottles of water (16.9oz)” and “…in 2006 Americans used about 50 billion plastic water bottles.”
So, if all 50 billion water bottles were replaced by Brita filter systems, that would mean 167 million plastic filter cartridges sent to the landfill! We’re all for giving up bottled water. But we think there’s a better way than substituting one kind of plastic waste for another.
What can you do? Join us in asking Clorox to develop a recycling program for Brita filters in the US and Canada. Check out Take Back the Filter to learn more about how you can help by signing the online petition, writing a letter to Clorox, sending in your used Brita filters, blogging about the issue, or donating to offset campaign expenses. And here’s some more ideas for how you can help spread the word.
More info available here at the campaign Facebook page too.
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