No Impact Man

My ultra cool reusable water bottle

Wait. Déja vu, right? You saw that picture of the jar yesterday in my post entitled “my ultra cool reusable cup?” Guess what? My cup and my water bottle? They are the same thing! Two for the price of one. Double economy!

I dip with my jar into the nearest deli and ask them to fill it from the tap, or into a restaurant. I get all the water I want and not a single plastic bottle ends up in the trash. Of course, I could buy some sort of a nalgene bottle but then I wouldn't qualify for the “ultra cool"  description (and I'd be breaking the No Impact no buying anything new rule). Plus, by using the jar, in addition to getting to add the words ultra cool, as I said yesterday, I do a positive thing by taking something—the jar—out of the trash or recycling stream, saving energy (remember, what makes it ultra-cool is that it would have ended up in the landfill or the recycling truck--buying a new jar or a steel bottle for the purpose takes energy and materials).

Here are some reasons, taken from the Earth Policy Institute, that I avoid bottled water:

• Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline.
• In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. Nearly a quarter of all bottled water crosses national borders to reach consumers, transported by boat, train, and truck.
• Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 U.S. cars for a year. Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.
• According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade.
• The rapid growth in this industry means that water extraction is concentrated in communities where bottling plants are located. Farmers, fishers, and others who depend on water for their livelihoods suffer from the concentrated water extraction when water tables drop quickly.
• Tap water is more strictly regulated for health standards than bottled water.

Need more convincing? Check out Lighter Footstep's Five Reasons to Not Drink Bottled Water.

By the way, Idyllopus, a writer who apparently would rather procrastinate by writing mean things about me on her blog than finish her next book (and I mean that in the most understanding way), posted this funny video about making your own reusable cup. She doesn't say where you can get the Toys R Us catalog if you have canceled your junkmail (PS sorry, Idyllopus, but I'm with your son on liking the second version of the video better).

Lousy Videoblog version 2 on making an Origami Cup
Uploaded by idyllopus

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My ultra cool reusable cup

We’ve all read or heard of these studies that say that when you account for the much higher energy of manufacture and of washing a reusable cup, you might as well as use a disposable cup. You would have to use a hell of a lot of disposable cups, such studies say, before you equal the energy use of the reusable cup.

Conclusion? Do nothing. Go back to sleep. Fill up the corner trash can with as many plastic cups as you can muster.

What the studies don’t say is that if a restaurant or café already has a ceramic cup, then the ecological cost of sitting down to drink from the reusable cup is zero. Once the cup is already sitting there, collecting dust, there is no energy of manufacture. It costs nothing—or almost nothing—to use the already extant reusable cup, while 15 minutes later the disposable gets trashed, taking up landfill space and needing to be replaced.

Meanwhile, using the ultra-cool reusable cup—a pre-used jar with a handy lid—actually has a positive (rather than only neutral) environmental impact. By taking a jar out of the trash or recycling stream, it doesn’t need to be shipped or processed. By using cold water to rinse it (and only when really needed), it saves the energy of washing.

By the way, if you like the ultra cool cup, you may also like the green hipster PDA and perhaps even be willing to take the extra step to become a weirdo with a cloth.

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"Without terror, you can't have terrorism"

Today's blog title is a quote from a recent post called Marketing Fear by the astute social thinker Seth Godin.  The picture to the right comes from his blog as an illustration of how a convenience store used the fear of terrorism to market duct tape.

Godin says:

"Marketing with fear is a powerful tool. Fear is a universal emotion, it's viral and people will go to great lengths to make it go away...

...Sometimes, fear is used as a marketing tactic even if it doesn't benefit the prospect at all. That's because news organizations like CNN and various organizations and politicians can benefit...

...Without terror, you can't have terrorism."

His point, as I see it, is that the tactics of terrorists couldn't work if everyone didn't live in terror of them. The whole point of terrorism is to try to frighten people into doing what the terrorists want. So, if our very own marketers and news media make us more scared in order to sell us their products and make us watch their shows, then they are helping the terrorists: "Without terror, you can't have terrorism."

I point this out because, having got rid of the TV and canceled the magazines as part of the No Impact project, I benefit from having unplugged from advertising's intravenously-injected fear, not just of terrorism, but of not fitting in, never having any fun, not being good looking enough and, God forbid, going bald or not having a sufficient erection (to wit, the ads for Rogaine and Viagra).

I feel downright mad that the marketers are trying to scare me and make me feel inadequate. They are trying to make me feel scared in order to control me. This is not my idea; this is a fact of advertising theory. As I type, I am close to tears that all that horrible media toxicity could enter the tender little mind of my two-year-old Isabella.

To me, global warming is a wake up call. It is the straw that breaks the camel's back. It is the canary in the coal mine that might finally call us not just to clean up the planet but to examine whether our culture is really going in the direction we want it to go in.

Some say that slowing growth for the sake of the environment could severely damage our economy. But do we want to preserve the kind of economy that has as its basis the marketing of fear into the minds of our little children? Or should we begin thinking of an alternative way?