California bans plastic bags!

Starting sometime in 2015 for grocery stores and 2016 for liquor stores and pharmacies, plastic bags will be outlawed in the state of California.

What the hell kind of place do we live in that we have to do things like make plastic bags illegal? You know they're terrible, I know they're terrible, just get rid of them!

I'm not saying this isn't great, just so strange that things take so long to take effect after it's become apparent we never should have had them to begin with.

In my opinion the greatest thing about this bill is that it includes funding for retraining workers that are in the, uh, plastic bag making line of work, and/or funding for manufacturing plants to switch gears from making single-use plastic bags. Thus proving that it's entirely possible to fundamentally change outdated infrastructures, without uprooting our economic stability on certain industries. This is something that mega corporations would have you believe isn't possible.



>>>Click here to read the full story

Ecobags: Buy produce without plastic (and guilt)

Here's a great way reduce plastic in your life: produce bags from Ecobags. They're lightweight but durable, fairly inexpensive, and save you the guilt of yanking out yet another disposable plastic bag in the produce section.

These Ecobags are 100% cotton, which means one less petroleum by-product. I've seen some great reusable produce bags from other companies, yet they're made out of plastic. Kind of defeats the purpose. I've been using and washing them for quite some time with no signs of wear and tear.

They also come with their tare weight written on a tag, but they're so light it almost doesn't matter if you or your cashier forgets to take it off. This also makes them great for buying in bulk, and it's one more reason to keep them in your car for any trip to the grocery store.

If all that doesn't convince you to make these a household staple, consider this: In 2011, according to the EPA, the United States generated 32 million tons of plastic waste, with only 8 percent of the total amount of plastic being recovered for recycling. With cheap options like this, there's no good reason to stupidly generate this much waste, or we'll be paying for it later on.

You can pick up a set of 3 medium bags for about 7 bucks, or a set of three large bags for just over 13 dollars. And remember, you can find tons of uses for these bags other than just produce. For everything else, Ecobags has a huge variety of other reusable products to help reduce waste (and guilt) in your life.

>>>Click here for a set of 3 medium bags
>>>Click here for a set of 3 large bags
>>>Check out Ecobags.com

Weekly Waste War: Newspaper

Come on, you DO know that your never going to read that 1983 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the one that has a guy on the front that looks like you? I mean, yes, it's memorable, perhaps not as memorable as that potato chip that looked like Jesus (or was it a cheeto?), but still something you feel you should hang on to. And then the week after that was printed on the same day as your mother's birthday, and she demanded you keep that one. And then you kept the next one, and the next one, and the next one.....

If you haven't been swallowed up the cascading waves of newspapers, it's time to swallow your hoarder's pride and do something useful with all that paper.

Weekly waste war: Turn Dryer Lint into waterproof fire starter

This is the first post in what I hope to be a weekly series based on combating (that's right, ass kicking!) waste in your daily life. Even the smallest and easiest things you can do to waste less can have the biggest impact, because everyone can do it, whether you're rich, poor, a moron or a rocket scientist. And it's much more important to look at what we can do and just do it instead of looking at what we can't change or thinking we can't make a difference.

After that incredibly motivating speech, you're probably ready to live 100% sustainable and never waste an ounce of anything in your life, but let's start out small, with dryer Lint. Probably the easiest and most common thing to reuse in your house. It probably has one of the smallest impacts on landfills and such, but it's not just about the waste. It's about turning something that you normally would have no use for into something useful. Whatever it is, this offsets energy and money being spent through what you've created or partially created from reusing something that you thought was useless.