lovely-low-waster

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Local elections and local politics are some of the most important for the environmental cause.

Laws forbidding you from keeping chickens, growing vegetables, or having a pollinator garden? Parks have invasive bushes and giant lawns but no natural space? Town has no sidewalks? Wetland getting sold to a developer?

These are LOCAL laws, LOCAL policies, and LOCAL decision-making!

Which means they can be changed on a local level. It is much easier than changing the whole world, and can start a pattern of other places doing the same thing.

Vote in local elections. Be involved in local politics. Go to town hall meetings. Learn what plans there are for your community.

Do it for the plants, the bugs, the animals, and the humans, which are their caretakers.🕷️🐞🐝🦋🐛☘️🌸🌺🪷🌾🌿🌱🌼🌻🌵🦎🐌🦇🐿️

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You know, rivers catching on fire used to be a regular occurrence.

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Haven’t been active on this account in awhile but wanted to talk about the project pan trend that I’ve seen on other apps. I love the idea and think it’s great people are becoming more aware of their over consumption however I’ve seen a lot of interesting critiques of it too. It seems people don’t understand that the real intend behind it is to use up and clear out product and use them as they are intended instead of stockpiling for the sake of having things. So many people complain about “well I need my three different kinds of x because they serve a different purpose” and that’s totally fine but they’re missing the point. It’s not a problem that you have three different kinds of mascara it’s that you have twelve tubes sitting in the house. It’s the fact that no one needs the option of thirty shower gels that are probably going to expire or decrease in quality because there is too many to use in a realistic period of time. The challenge can also be adapted to your lifestyle and have focuses. If you don’t have a lot of makeup but do over consume skincare great make that your focus. The concept of no buys is not new. Let’s all just do our best to use what we have before needing something new. Don’t waste resources or your own money on things you already have and need to use.

[lovely-low-waster]

tldr: WASH YOUR RECYCLABLES AND IF YOU DON’T KNOW IF IT CAN BE RECYCLED, DON’T PUT IT IN RECYCLING

hey guys! just gonna quick talk about something that i don’t think is discussed enough regarding recycling!

so you know when you finish a pizza and the box says “recycle me!”? well a lot of people are never told that recycling plants cannot recycle dirty cardboard. cardboard cannot be properly cleaned so when it is stained with food grease, the recycling plant will simply send it to the dump! typically, though, food stained cardboard CAN be put in ORGANICS!!!

now you may be thinking “why does it matter who sends it to the dump?”

WRONG!!! recycling plants (where i live, and in many other places) actually have a government mandated QUOTA of what percent of the things that they receive actually get recycled. for example, where i’m from the quota is around 14%. this means that if less than 14% of things sent to recycling plants actually end up being recycled, the government will CUT THEIR FUNDING.

this means that every non-recyclable that we throw in our recycling bins is bringing us further from the quota. if their funding gets cut we either:

1: wont have recycling as an option anymore (bad for the environment)

or

2: will have higher taxes to compensate for the extra money that it takes to fund recycling plants (bad for the people)

so you may be wondering, “woobiz, what *can* i put in my recycling bin?”

the answer is a lot of things! just make sure they are clean (this means rinsing them with water, not necessarily soap, just a good rinse should be enough for most things, should be visibly clean).

- metal cans and foils (foils should be cleaned and bunched into a ball)

- plastics with the numbers 1, 2, and 5 (should show with the recycling symbol)

- clean cardboard and paper

- glass (bottles, containers, etc)

now let’s talk about what CAN’T be recycled!

- anything dirty

- certain plastics (thinner plastics like bags, if you’re not sure, look it up or trash it)

- closed bags (if you have, say, an opaque trash bag full of recyclables and tied closed, the plant will most likely trash it because cutting it open can be a safety hazard if they do not know what is inside)

recyclables should be separated (don’t put plastic inside of a cardboard box or cans inside of a glass container, etc) because the scanners at the recycling plants will have a much harder time identifying the recyclable. you can put them all in the same recycling bin, just make sure they’re empty and separate for the machines.

recycling is great for the environment but it can’t help us to its full potential without education on what can and can’t be recycled. if you’ve read this through, thank you and i hope you learned something about recycling! if you have anything to add, feel free!!!

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Hey. If you have clothes or sheets or other textiles that are still usable? PLEASE don't throw them in the trash. PLEASE don't put them in the recycling bin (they'll just become trash).

Find somewhere to donate them. A lot of donation sites will take torn clothing, because it can be downcycled or cut up for the fabric that's still good.

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picking up litter is worth it!!

individual environmentalism gets a lot of flak in the face of corporate pollution but picking up litter makes a significant, noticeable impact. I spend about an hour a week picking up litter from around my dorm complex and I'm literally outpacing my community's litter production. Just an hour a week from one person is enough to offset nearly 200 people's worth of littering.

it would take less than 100 man-hours of labor per week to keep my whole college campus entirely litter-free. If you got two classrooms' worth of people to spend two hours per week each picking up litter, the whole campus would end up spotless and they'd straight up fucking run out of things to pick up.

If you're looking for some way to make a noticeable and positive impact on the world around you, go pick up some litter.

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Sustainable laundry

If you think about it, doing laundry is more resource-intensive than it first appears. Doing laundry uses energy to get the water to your home, energy to run the washer and dryer, and energy and resources to produce all the laundry products.  Whether you have home laundry appliances or use a laundromat, you can employ techniques to reduce your environmental impact.  And if you’re buying a washer or dryer, do some research so you can buy energy and water efficient models with only the features you need. 

Use cold water.  Modern detergents are designed to work well with cold water and cold water is better for removing most stains.

Choose a washing cycle that is appropriate for the clothing you are washing.  Long vigorous washing cycles will wear out clothing faster, although the longer cycles may be necessary for clothes that are very dirty.  Wash similar items together so you can pick appropriate cycles. 

Don’t overload the washer.  Clothing and detergent can’t circulate enough in an overstuffed washer so your clothes may not get as clean.   

Measure detergent and other cleaning products so you don’t use more than you need.  Using too much detergent can leave a residue on clothes and even allow dirt to settle back on clothing. 

Liquid fabric softeners and dryer sheets may do more harm than good.  The softeners can leave residue on the clothing and the inside of the dryer.  The fabric softeners and dryer sheets also contribute chemicals to the air and water in the environment.  Consider using reusable dryer balls (typically made of wool but also available in rubber or plastic) to help reduce drying time and keep clothing from clumping together in the dryer.   

Clothes dryers use a lot of energy, but there are ways to reduce the energy use.  Choosing a lower temperature can slow the drying process a little, but it cuts energy use significantly and is better for your clothes.  Using a clothes dryer wears your clothing out faster – as proven by the lint in the lint trap.  Clean the lint trap after every use to keep the dryer running efficiently.  Dry similar items together so everything in the load is dry at the same time.   And my favorite recommendation – air dry clothing whenever possible.  When I can’t hang clothing outside to dry, I put it in the dryer for a few minutes to knock out the wrinkles and start the drying process.  Then I hang the clothes in the house to finish air-drying.  You can buy small portable drying racks or use hangers on a shower curtain rod. 

“Baby steps toward sustainability”

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SUPPORT PALESTINIAN BUSINESSES

while it’s important for us to protest, raise awareness, boycott, and pressure our governments… it is also important that we appreciate palestinian people and palestinian culture. they are more than just victims. they are artists, entrepreneurs, fashion designers, movie makers, writers, musicians, scholars—they are people. so let’s celebrate all that makes palestinians who they are by supporting their businesses and showing our appreciation and solidarity.

hirbawi

handmade in palestine

watan studio

hilweh market

sitti soap

yafa queen

nominal jewellery

nurnei

levantinian

dār collective

wear the peace

pali roots

west bank apparel

bella hijabs

anat international

inaash

nöl collective

deerah

darzah

falastini brand

interlink publishing

booklink booksellers

zatoun oil

canaan palestine

knafeh queens

kuvrd

the coffee queens

pali apparel

maamoul press - art, books, clothes, etc

trashy clothing

tatreez and tea

shop palestine

the soap dispensary - the business itself is not palestinian but they are selling “nablus soaps” (made in the 13th century old tradition of soap-making from nablus) and all the proceeds from the sales will be donated to PCRF

NOTE: philz coffee is no longer palestinian owned and have been forbidding employees from wearing pins in support of palestine. take your business elsewhere.

*please follow @/books_palestine on instagram for more fun ways to support palestinians and celebrate palestinian culture

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I love you tailors, I love you recycling center employees, I love you jewelry repair people, I love you tech repair people. I love you plumbers, I love you electricians. I love you all maintenance workers, who make it so things don't have to be fully replaced when they break.

There are so many ways to contribute to the climate movement.

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more eco-friendly holiday decor ideas than a large plastic tree shrouded in non-biodegradable ornaments

try to reuse & craft as much decor elements as you're able

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SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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Weird sustainability hack: collect pumpkins after Halloween and roast them! Thousands (if not millions) of tons of pumpkins go into landfills every year after spooky season

While I didn't purchase any for myself, I put out a message on my local buy-nothing group and was amazed at the number of responses - way more than I could ever use. I ended up with eight, which I'm working on processing: roast the flesh, keep the guts for broth, and roast the seeds

Planning on lots of baked goods (breads, muffins, squares etc), soup, pumpkin butter... I think when people think pumpkin they think pie and that's it. The possibilities are endless!

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Recycling Books, What to do with Old or Damaged Magazines, Textbooks, Etc

Some of us love to get new books and be transported into a new magical realm. Some of us don't enjoy books at all, and prefer to get our information in other ways. Either way, you are likely to have a lot of books, magazines, and textbooks that you may not want. What should you do with these? Let's look at some ways to reuse or recycle them!

Resell them

Selling your excess is always the best way to give your stuff a new life. This is because, unless someone specifically asks you if they can have or borrow a book, people tend to care more about something if they have to spend money on it.

reselling used books is also a good thing to do if you are given a lot of books, or you find a fair amount of them when dumpster diving. I know I find my fair share of them, and selling them helps me to pay bills or rent.

Give them away

YThis may sound odd given what I just said above, but giving them away can be beneficial as well. If someone asks you for a certain book, or you have family or friends that you know may want to read a particular book you have, then giving away your copy might be the best bet.

Also, you can have a small library if you have the ability to put one up where you life. These are small outdoor pantries that hold books that people can put in, or take out.

Cut them up and recycle them!

You cannot recycle books whole due to the covers and glue, but you CAN tear out all of the pages and recycle the pages instead. This can be great if you are recycling a workbook, if the book is otherwise heavily written in it, or if the book is damaged.

Also, some books are filled with hateful or harmful rhetoric. Giving them away or reselling them might just propagate the harmful ideas, so this is another way to give the pages a new life!

Use them for craft projects!

People have been able to take old books and turn them into beautiful works of art! This is a great way to reuse an old worn or vintage book while also stretching your creative muscles! Cutting up magazines for scrapbooking, or making paper beads, is always a fun thing to do as well!

So maybe see what you can make! Or you can try any of the other tips, and more, to make sure that books and magazines get reused or recycled instead of trashed.

***

If you like what you have read and want to support me, you can by using the shop links below! But only buy if you need new supplies, clothes, etc. Don't buy just for the sake of buying.

Upcycleability- My Etsy shop where I sell my upcycled crafts and craft supplies:

UpcycledLucy– My Poshmark to buy used clothing that I salvage from being thrown out

UpcycledLucy– My Mercari where I also sell used clothing, but cheaper

Lucienes– My eBay shop where I sell everything else that I salvage, such as books, games, boxes, and more

5-10% of all sales from the above links go towards 350 dot org, an intersectional activist organization working to fight climate change and get climate justice.

[lovely-low-waster]

Little Ways to Bring Sustainability into Cottagecore. 🍄📚☀️📖☕️

•Make your own bread/baking/food (especially things that can only be found plastic wrapped)

•Make your laundry detergent and dish soap, or buy eco friendly ones

•Buy in bulk with your own containers

•Use glass and metal containers to store things in, as opposed to plastic

•~*C O M P O S T*~

•Buy local and trade with neighbours to keep business small and purposeful

•Reuse, repair, and repurpose old stuff

•Spend more time outside and less time wasting electricity

•Permaculture gardens!!!

•Go thrifting and antiquing before buying new

•Buy cute lil totes (especially from local artists) and stop using plastic bags

•Be mindful of what you’re consuming. Food and fashion wise, and otherwise. Take note of what you truly want or need.

•Hang your clothes on a line to dry

•Learn to hem and mend your own clothing

•Educate yourself on water conservation (especially in gardens)