Do the children in Guiyu cry dioxin tears?

Just in case you haven't seen this elsewhere (or on TV), check out the 60 Minutes episode about E-waste in Guiyu... and then consider where your e-waste is going to go when you decide to "upgrade". Maybe that phone/tv/computer/gadget can last a little longer? Maybe you could try to *gasp*, FIX it? Now try and find someone to repair it... that's the first hurdle and trust me, it's a HUGE one! Probably the "greenest" job you could make for yourself would be repairing things that would otherwise end up in the trash.



Which reminds me, The Green Festival is coming to San Francisco this Fri, Sat and Sun and I plan to attend. I'll let you know how it goes and what I find out. I PRAY I don't see any single use water bottles there for sale.

New Houbliette Fodder

Thanks to Russ Roca (the Eco Friendly Bicycling Photographer) for the newest resident in the Houbliette. Some of you may have never scrolled to the bottom of my webpage, but at the bottom is the Houbliette (or The Hopper Oubliette). The Houbliette is a place for corporate assholes who abuse all that is good and right in the world and deserve to be shoved down a deep dark hole and forgotten about forever.

So, without further ado, I submit to you THIS video. If you don't "get it", try reading back a little in my blog and see if you can figure out why I put AutoZone on permanent time out.

200th Entry: Cruising

Well, today is my 200th blog entry: Happy Anniversary to me! :)

Much of what I'm doing here is way of taking mental notes for myself... a way of remembering things that I find that I don't want to forget. It's also been a way to make note of the evolution of my thinking. The things I read, the things I see and the things I learn all shape who I become, how I behave and how I think. With that in mind I give you the subject of today's blog entry: Cruising.

I posted back in May about my phone call to Best Foods. I've been making a point to speak out against the things that bother me, and those few who've ever heard me rant about cruise ships know that I'm not a fan. Yes, I have been on a cruise ship. No, I wasn't paying to be there, I was being PAID to be there. Overall the experience wasn't terrible because of the lovely staff I met while I was there, but after seeing the crew quarters, I was rather appalled. "Jail Cell" comes to mind when I think about the room that I saw. Actually, "lurchingly nauseating, poorly ventilated, windowless, and badly lit" also come to mind. Two of our crew were being paid to work on the ship for a couple of shows (I was working for a rock band) so I got to see their quarters for the 5 days they were on the ship. They were being paid better than any of the regular crew so for them it was "tolerable", but ugh... the idea of PAYING to spend time in a jail cell is insane.

I don't see the appeal of the cruise ship: you're on this giant ship with not much to do other than eat and sit around in the sun. To some folks that might sound great, but the whole scene had me creeped out. You've got a bunch of underpaid folks, mostly under 25 from every country under the sun working for shit wages serving overprivileged, overfed, overweight, overly loud tourists with bad hair, bad skin, bad manners and bad attitudes (and their similarly shaped and mannered offspring). Sound fun yet? It gets better. They feed you about 6 giant all-you-can-eat meals a day, so you're constantly so full you just waddle around. I kept looking for the vomit buckets (like in that one Monty Python skit), but I couldn't spot them.

The crowd we played for was rather non-plussed (this was a corporate gig, and the crowds aren't usually "fans" per se, but this crowd was particularly unenthusiastic, no doubt due to the sickeningly large meal they had recently ingested). I wanted to scream at them "Get off your asses and dance/rock you fat f*cks!" but I wisely restrained myself. The band was more used to this kind of response during their corporate shows, but it continued to bother me the entire time I worked for them.

The highlight of the whole shipboard experience was in talking to the catering crew sent to service the backstage area. They were all from Turkey (a country I've never visited nor even met anyone from) and were convincing enough to make me pine for Turkish beach side towns I'd probably never see. They were friendly and funny and genuinely sincere guys: I don't know how they managed to keep from going insane in that job. They were all earning money and seeing the world (they little that they were able while working) and invited me to come visit them back in Turkey. No, not casual "Come to Turkey!" kind of comments, I mean names, phone numbers, names of relatives... real info. Somehow over the years I managed to lose that info and I regret that because I really would have liked to Turkey with a bro-deal.

So I suppose my own cruise line story has been a long winded intro to the ARTICLE that dredged all these memories up. Please read it and have anyone you know who's thinking about going on a cruise read it. The article brings up some safety issues that didn't even occur to me while I was on the ship. I'm not a single woman, but I would be a little concerned about going on cruise after reading the article. As well, the social and environmental impact that cruise ships have on the places they visit is largely unfelt by the tourists, but the denizens of the destinations must deal with the consequences.

The impact our vacation plans can have can be huge even though we might not see it. Perhaps consider a vacation closer to home? I know *I'm* not going on any cruises... at least not on a cruise ship.

I warned y'all

Back in July of 2006 I mentioned that congress had again weakened our safety and consumer rights with the National Uniformity for Food Act (see the blog entry HERE). It looks like it's getting worse because the following snippet was sent to my phone this morning:
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V.USGOV Tainted tomatoes highlight how Congress forfeited some food-safety opportunities in the new farm bill.(KRWB)
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The full text of the article can be seen HERE.

--Sent from my cell phone--

Phone Call to Best Foods

In an ongoing effort to reduce the amount of plastic in my life, I've started contacting the manufacturers of the products I like and asking them to go back to glass/ceramic/paper, reduce packaging, go organic (yeah right!) and otherwise "go green". I'm all for small companies putting out great green products in green packaging, but the way to affect REAL change is to change the behavior of the people who are controlling the majority of the market share (Kraft, ConAgra, Cargill, Safeway, Albertsons... take your pick). Today we're going to use mayonnaise for our example.

I grew up eating mayo on just about every sandwich. I love sandwiches, and I've yet to find a replacement that tastes as good to me as Best Foods Mayonnaise. I know it's not particularly good for me, so I try to put as little on as I can get away with, but I love the stuff. For the sake of argument, we'll call it one of my guilty pleasures (because I'm bothered by the fact that I'm contributing to a multinational corporation with a rather spotty record.

Used to be that mayo always came in glass jars. They were useful for lots of things when you were done storing mayo in them... drinks and fluids of all sorts come to mind (my favorite was lightly used degreaser that I reused). So why the switch to plastic jars? Sure, they break less and weight less so they cost less to ship... but plastic almost NEVER gets recycled, and you can't take one mayonnaise jar and reuse it as another mayo jar or melt it down and make another one (a stupid idea anyway, but at least you can do it). Plastic mayo jars... well, it's hard to every get them really clean. I certainly wouldn't store other edible fluids in them (the washing process tends to scratch the inside of the jar and everyone knows (don't they?) about how plastics degrade when you scrub them... yuck.) The plastic (even after scrubbing) always seems to retain the smell of the mayo... the glass ones never did that.

So I called them to let them know what I think of their plastic packaging... the first thing they said was that they hadn't used glass in 2 years (and I don't think she meant it to sound as flippant as she sounded). I told her that I had only recently become aware of the "eastern garbage patch" and that I didn't want to contribute to that anymore with their mayo jars. She became a lot more polite after that, wrote down my comment and said that she would forward it to the marketing dept. We shall see. If you feel like I do, start calling the people who make the products you like and tell them what you want: the won't know any other way (focus groups are stupid and they know that when people actually volunteer their comments without any pay, that they're getting real data). They need to hear from a LOT of people in order to make changes. I implore you, dear reader, to ask for reduced packaging and packaging that allows for true re-use: if I haven't HAMMERED this point enough, read the article about plastic in the ocean, ok?