Paint Stains

CFLs contain mercury. They cannot work without mercury. At this moment, this is little hope of there ever being a mercury-less compact florescent bulb because the light produced by them comes partly from exciting mercury atoms.

Please do NOT, NOT, NOT, under any circumstances, throw compact florescent bulbs into your trash. Look up how Household Hazardous Waste is disposed of in your county, and follow those instructions. OR, bother your local hardware store or Wal-Mart (*cringe*) and ask them where their CFL disposal/recycling collection box is.

One compact florescent bulb contains about 4 mg of mercury. (As CFLs keep being pushed, sorry if I'm worried that this stuff'll add up. Plus the fact that there'll be more and more of it indoors.)

Half a gram of mercury (the amount in a traditional thermometer) in a 10-acre lake would warrant a fish advisory. One gram in a 20-acre lake will render all its fish unsafe for consumption for a year.

Mercury vaporizes. Commonly. It has a shitload of disastrous effects on people's health.

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Sorry for my peevishness, but all the pushing of CFLs lately do not mention safe disposal of these bulbs for my taste. I almost got into a comments skirmish on DailyKos because of this subject when it came up some months ago that California wanted to ban incandescents... and while I think that's all fine on paper, IMHO it would be STUPID to undertake such legislation, in CA, NJ, Australia or anywhere without some MAJOR education campaigns on how CFLs need to be disposed. naturalliving only made it painfully clear how much this education and knowledge is lacking.

Do your fucking job, mainstream media. I don't want more of this crap in my air in addition to being poisoned by it in my food.

And while we're on the subject of mercury, screw GE. There is no such thing as "clean" coal energy. Are you kidding me?

How do people NOT know that Compact Florescent Bulbs contain neurotoxin mercury and need extra careful disposal?!?!

Flame retardant study raises red flags for health risk
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/070129dust.html

Flame retardants in indoor air and dust. Great. I already knew it before this story but still...

Several months back, there was a local TV reporter who thought he was doing a public service by doing a story (no more than 20 seconds, IIRC) about how flame-retardant children's pyjamas were absolutely required to make sure kids slept safely without catching on fire. Otherwise, kissing them goodnight may be the last time you saw them. (I swear to god, he said something to this effect.) He implied, quite urgently, that if children (and only children) went to bed without flame-retardant treated pyjamas, they would burn to a crisp quietly in the night without ever making a peep to alert you to the fire.

There are so many ways of pointing out what stupid journalism this was, that I'm not going to guide you through the obvious.

"Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. … The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD."

Federal Way schools restrict Gore film
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/299253_inconvenient11.html?source=mypi

Charging towards the Big Melt
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0116-04.htm

Everything in that article had scary statistics, including stuff I didn't know.

The world collectively overshot the Earth's capacity to support all of us back in 1984.

Yeah, we know the American way of life is resource and energy intensive, but even the European way is still unsustainable. Cripes.

How Environmental Pollutants Are Causing Reproductive Problems

It's a bit late, but months ago I culled all my cosmetics/toiletries down to 4 items: a natural shampoo, a natural soap, an organic facial soap, and an organic moisturizer. It decluttered the bathroom cabinet considerably. Unfortunately I did it so quietly that my birthday came and I received more of the stuff I wasn't using anymore, and I struggled with what to do with those kinds of gifts. (I donated them.) I hadn't voiced my change that much, because truth be told, not everyone has understood my pthalate/chemical paranoias when I've spoken about them, and when in those situations, I would simply clam up, and keep my opinions and research to myself.

Until the topic gets a brilliant article in Alternet, anyway.

Green weapons and ammunition are going to make violence environmentally friendly!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2361516,00.html

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/9/9/95436/30123

My tags were: environment, sustainability, boycott, path to 9/11, global warming, water wars, ABC, Disney, Burger King, corporations, shopping, diet, vegetarianism, Buddhist economics, voluntary simplicity, MSM, pollution, toxins, health, GMO, GE foods, organic

I mighta missed a few.

In 1989, a group of international scientists, frustrated with piecemeal and isolated solutions to environmental deterioration, came together to draw up a set of principles to guide societies (citizens and businesses) in a whole-system approach toward social justice and sustainability. They came up with four "system conditions" that have scientific consensus:

(1) Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of dispersed matter mined from the Earth's crust (eg. oil, minerals, coal, etc.)
Right now these substances are being dispersed into the air and onto/into the ground faster than they can be reintegrated (not just buried) into the crust of the Earth. The buildup of the toxins from these dispersed substances continued unabated threatens the health and continuation of all life.

(2) Nature cannot withstand a systematic buildup of long lasting compounds made by humans (eg. PCBs, DDT, teflon, polystyrene)
Like the above, these cannot be reintegrated into the Earth's crust at the same rate we are producing them. Because they are unnatural, these take an even longer time to break down, and at the current rate, the amount of concentration of these unnatural materials in our environment, some yet lacking long-term studies on our health, threatens the health and quality of all life.

(3) Nature cannot take a systematic deterioration of its capacity for renewal (ie. deforestation, overfishing, the loss of fertile land)
The health and quality of life for everyone on this planet depends on nature's capacity to turn our wastes into new resources with processes that recycle everything. We have to allow for these processes to happen instead of letting nature deteriorate beyond the point of it being able to heal itself. The failure to correct the environmental detertioration in the long term means the loss of biodiversity and health for all living things.

(4) Conditions (1) - (3) can be improved by (a) being more efficient in our use of resources on this planet and (b) promoting justice for all people on this planet. Poverty frequently leads the poor to destroy near-irreplaceable resources for short-term gain. Global social stabiility and cooperation is needed to ensure everyone's long-term survival.

I had to retype and rephrase the above in some of my own words from The Natural Step and The Cultural Creatives (When will I stop talking about this book?!) because I can't believe how well The Natural Step (the overall name for the principles of sustainability, the group's findings and suggestions) condenses what is a huge topic of global environmental degradation into 4 easily explainable and demonstrable ideas.

That said, I'm going to try and make all my art producing from this point tree-free, and chlorine-free too, if possible. This week I finally got to experiment with the paper I got from http://www.greenfieldpaper.com, and their Hemp Heritage paper (25% hemp, 75% post-consumer recycled paper) is absolutely amazing. I've also been fighting the strong temptation lately to make my own paper from used paper, but I think my multi-purpose work desk (ie. the kitchen table) cannot only take so many tasks at a time. Ah well. Maybe when I can "expand my operations" into the outdoors during the summer, I'll try it.

Oh, and my site was updated this weekend. With my 2005 Holiday (take that, Bill O'Reilly) and new year card, to boot. It's also for everyone reading this, so here you go, it's...

( ...under this cut )