01.24.10
Posted in Chemicals, Environment, Green Household Products, Green Living, pollution at 8:56 pm by Administrator
In the early 1900’s scientists from different backgrounds, labs and companies were experimenting on their various products. One would pick up on the compounds of another and add or take away a chemical or two and by the 1950’s the fantastic product that we know today as plastics had evolved and was on earth to stay. Plastic material was soon found in every type of industry around the globe.
Plastics in one form or another during its evolution have been and are still good for human use regarding the quality and comforts of life that it offers. I would not want medical professionals to still be sterilizing needles or washing syringes to give me a shot or to be examined by a dentist or doctor without gloves. I want new single use sterilized needles and new gloves. There is too much room for error and too many new germs out there. Imagine taking medicine in a hospital setting without those little plastics disposable cups filled with clean water. What would we do without food storage and freezer bags, plastic wrap for covering cooked foods, individualized wrapped foods for protection and freshness on the store shelf? Imagine how much cleaner our garbage disposal systems and communities are due to using those large plastic garbage bags to dispose of household garbage. How many diseases have decreased because of better sanitation methods due to plastics? I doubt anyone will ever be able to determine a statistic measuring the good that plastics brought into our world. We can only relate somewhat to the great impact that plastics have made. Another thing that would be impossible to do is to list all the types of products made from plastics. The number of items is just immeasurable. No doubt about it, plastics have impacted each of our lives in many positive ways. Plastic is not the enemy in this discussion, but one of the most common products we use that unfortunately is frequently made of some questionable chemical compounds.
As my recycling efforts continue, I have been surprised to find that I recycle more plastics than anything else. I thought as I began recycling that cans would be the most recycled item or maybe paper. I also have been noticing how much plastic and other trash, usually food and drink containers, is left on the side of the road, in parks, parking lots, around and in lakes, oceans, just about everywhere. This fact brought about the question how does the chemicals in plastics affect humans and how does it affect wildlife as they run into it in their habitats?
The answer regarding potential harm to humans has become the subject of many research studies and some will be summarized in the next blog. The harm for animals takes several forms and any type of plastic is potentially dangerous to animals. Sadly, harm to animals could be prevented if humans would only properly dispose of plastics and other trash. The majority of plastic related mishaps with animals involve the animal getting its neck legs, wing, head or other body part caught some way with plastic items and cannot get free. Many animals die because their entanglement remains if a human doesn’t come along to help. For example our golden retriever recently had a bottle cap wedged in his gum. It was in the back of his mouth and by the time it was obvious to us that he needed a vet’s care, the cap was imbedded in the gum with a serious infection and had to be cut out. We had no idea it was even there. Another way animals get into trouble regarding plastics is by ingesting some plastic object or bit of plastic that may end up choking them or harming their digestive system. All animals are susceptible. A quote from Wildlife Stewardship on the website http://www.centerforwildlifeinformation.org emphasizes this, “Animals will eat anything with an odor including aluminum foil, plastic and other food wrapping. These can severely damage an animal’s digestive system and may even facilitate death.”
Examples of animals coming into harms way due to human neglect is birds and marine animals getting caught in fishing line or nets that became hung up and left in trees or caught on something under the water. At http://www.News.NationalGeographic.com, it is stated that 44% of all seabirds eat plastic by accident. I’m sure many other wild birds do the same. Little bits of Styrofoam after all to a wild bird will look like a seed. This site also claims that 267 marine species are affected by plastics that are left in lakes and the oceans. It also stated that larger fish will swallow a grocery bag whole as it looks like a jellyfish.
Another way of potential harm to animals is by how the chemicals within the plastic harm the soil or environment around them. The article, Plastic Breaks Down in Oceans After All–And Fast, on the National Geographic website listed above shares information about this new discovery. It states that unlike what was once believed, plastics do not last for years in the ocean, but the chemicals in plastics begin breaking down within months. The chemical that is harmful once the plastic breaks down is styrene trimer, a polystyrene (plastic) by-product (suspected to be a carcinogen) and bisphenol A (interferes with reproductive systems in lab animals) which is found in hard plastics like water bottles, baby bottles, linings of aluminum cans and other containers. The article described our oceans as “Plastic Soup”, a toxic soup at that.
The oceans are not the only place where environmental hazards exist for animals and humans. Toxic wastes dumped wherever always has the potential to be harmful sooner or later, according to how it was disposed. Also gases and toxic fumes are still polluting our air. While these problems are a major concern and government agencies, researchers and scientists work hard every day to rectify what they can, chemicals remain one of the most serious pollutants. Plastic items just happen to be one if not the most common commodity made from some of these potentially harmful chemical compounds. But most people could not imagine living without at least some plastic items and I’m one of them.
Almost everything has a positive and negative side, chemicals certainly do as well. While chemicals are necessary for many of the comforts of life we enjoy, they also present problems for the environment. Let’s just face it; there will continue to be an ongoing task for society to clean up the environment. We’ve just got to keep at it. All these thoughts bring about the question; is there another cleaner and greener alternative perhaps commodity items made of chemicals that are good, not bad, not harmful, maybe?
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Posted in Children & Electronics, Electronics, Environment, Internet, Technology at 8:35 pm by Administrator
My three year old grandson was “playing” the piano this morning. He looked up and asked me, “Is it plugged in?” I laughed at first, but then my mind started wondering about how his little mind during all of his three years has been inundated with electronics. He has known little else. Even the guitar he asked for last Christmas when he was two, was electronic. This Christmas Santa brought him his first DS game system. Is this good, o.k., or not so good? What will life be like for his children regarding electronics and technology? I cannot even begin to imagine. Who knows, today’s media electronics may then be a thing of the past and a whole new language and technology may exist.
I am old enough to have witnessed the electronic world when it was an infant and watched it grow into the giant it now is in our society. New gadgets come out so frequently that I don’t have time to learn about one before a new one arrives on the scene. I feel I’m falling behind regarding the knowledge and use of recent technologies, regardless of how good and useful they may be. It’s just hard to keep up. I watch my grandchildren experiencing one of these new gadgets for the first time and it seems to come naturally to them regarding how to use it and I’m there asking, “What is it?” Then, “How do you work it?” And they just look at me weird. They really don’t want me to ask them to teach me and I’m not so sure I want to learn either. It’s according to the gadget and what use I have for it. Although, when my now 18 year old grandson was five or so, he taught me how to use the internet. For that I am grateful. I think the internet, even though there are some not so good things out there in cyberspace, overall is a good tool and has enhanced all kinds of communication and education worldwide. As far as children are concerned the internet has a lot of good things for them as well, but they need supervision as it can be a dangerous place without an adult monitoring their use of it.
My first experience with electronics was in fifth or sixth grade when a school mate got on the school bus complaining that Santa gave her a ‘plug in’ radio rather than the handheld transistor one she asked for. Yes, young people, there was a time when you could not walk around with music plugged in your ears listening from your IPod or whatever gadget. Rather radios were plugged into electric outlets. Everyone in the house listened to the same music at the same time as the radio could be heard throughout the house. Parents made the choice of the type music and to which radio station the family listened. Electricity was still the energy source for everything in the home. Then, as now, I asked, “What is it?” I had not heard of a transistor radio and at that time did not see the need for it. All one had to do was ‘plug in’ the radio and it would work fine. The economics of electronics was the same then as now, which ranks in the not so good category. A new gadget comes to the market, as did the transistor radio, and the cost is very high. After several months or years, the price drops as new technologies come along or improvements are made to the original. My family couldn’t afford a transistor radio for several more years after its first appearance. We’d only had our TV for a few years and our radio was an old ‘plug in’ one but worked fine. And from there my electronic world began. Lucky for me, I got my transistor just as the Beatles were coming on the scene; otherwise I would have been listening to Blue Grass and other types of country music, (which was o.k., just not my favorite). I began to see how the transistor had some advantages over the ‘plug in.’
The point here is that I can remember a time in my life when the pace was slower and life was simpler. Now keeping up with it all gives me the feeling of always being behind and trying to catch up with the latest. It can bring on more stress for people my age of ‘50 something,’ if one is not electronic savvy, yet tries to be. I do like learning about it all, until I get to the frustration and stressed out point. Then I put it down for awhile and try again later. If I’ve tried over and over already and I’m still frustrated with the new gadget or software or whatever, I’ve learned to move on to something less stressful. I don’t just give up. One good thing about electronics these days is that I usually have more than one choice and I keep looking and trying until I find one that is more ‘50 something’ friendly.
There is no easy answer for the question, “Is this good, o.k., or not so good?” Media technology is probably all of it: some good, some o.k. and some not so good. My main concern or more of a question: In the long run, how will our children be affected by so much media technology from birth onward? Will they suffer somehow from technology overload? Already many people across almost all age brackets are addicted to the internet and video games. Many children would rather sit and play video games until their thumbs twitch and go numb rather than join a sports team or go outside to play, take a walk, or just enjoy the sun and fresh air. Research has already determined that media electronics which includes video games, TV, the internet, movies and other varieties, already take up most of a child’s waking hours outside of the classroom and some hours in the classroom. The American Academy of Pediatrics developed a program called Media Matters in 1997 due to their concerns about this issue. The program helps build awareness of the effects on children in the areas of time, nutrition (obesity epidemic in children), increased violence and sexual misbehavior. This program also shares with parents and others, ways to manage children’s time and consumption of media technology. Read more details about this program at http://www.pamf.org/children/common/behavioral/electronics.
How will these younger generations that have only known a world with techy everything be able to cope without stress or addiction eventually taking over? Will they keep winding themselves up until they spin out of control? Or will they just learn to cope with it fine as they grow and technology keeps getting more advanced and complex? I like to think the latter will be the case. Sort of like they never knew of another lifestyle, so they just deal with it. I hope for my grandchildren’s sake that this will be so. For some reason I’m doubtful that will be the case unless the child has consistent parental or other adult intervention and attention given to this potential problem.
I started to answer my grandson’s question by explaining the difference between a “pinano” as he calls it, and an organ that is ‘plugged in,’ but then I remembered how such conversations with three year olds usually go. So I decided a more detailed answer could wait until he is more mature, why overload him with more? Today the answer given with a smile was simply, “No sweety, you don’t plug it in.” He was fine with that and continued his little concert. He was doing something fun that was not electronic. I found that it can still be done!
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01.01.10
Posted in Environment, Green Companies, Green Living at 6:24 pm by Administrator
Not quite to the Star Wars era yet, but we are moving in that direction. With my recycling efforts, I’ve found I recycle paper and cardboard more than anything else, with plastics coming in second. So we have a long way to go yet before trees are not used for paper.
I have spent most of December working on re-formatting my children’s book, Friends in the Meadow-Birds, to fit the formatting for an ebook so that all those tens of thousands of people who got their Kindles for Christmas have access to my book as an ebook as well as others. But before I started that project, I looked into the whole thing, ebooks and ereaders. My question is not a simple one, but is this just another electronic gadget, here today, gone tomorrow? If I determined that it was an electronic fad, then I wasn’t going to bother, as aside from Christmas, this project had dominated the whole month. What I found was that authors and publishers are thinking that ebooks and ereaders will change the publishing business similar to what iPod’s did for the music business. So a publishing revolution is just ahead it seems.
Upon further research, I found that the ebooks were a very hot item for Christmas and the ebook store sites are popping up all over the net. You can get many books for free to download, both classics and modern literature. The cost for those books for sale is about one third or less of the printed books. Many are sold for $1.00, which is not far from the royalties made on printed books sold in the major bookstores.
I doubted that my eyes would hold up to reading on an ereader, as they get very upset with me when I stay on the computer all day. So I went to Best Buy to eyeball the ereaders. From the ones that Best Buy carried, I liked the Sony most of all. I was pleased to see that you can adjust the size of the font to however large you need it so as not to strain your eyes. Most ereaders I learned have E-ink and special lighting so that you can read it clearly with little eye strain even in bright lighted situations. Except for physically turning the page, holding the reader was about the same as holding a book. After visiting Best Buy I felt most positive about the idea of ebooks and ereaders.
After this, I was sure I would find something on the internet to discourage my thinking about the positives of the ereaders. I found three very informative articles that were of most interest to me.
I was very curious to know if the ereaders and ebooks have the potential to really make a positive impact on the environment. I found an article on Epublishers Weekly titled “Ebooks Save Millions of Trees: 10 Ideas for sustainable Publishing”, by Michael Pastore. He is both a novelist and non-fiction writer. He has authored a book on the subject, 50 Benefits of Ebooks: A Thinking Person’s Guide to the Digital Reading Revolution. His article answered my questions in just the title. But he went into enough detail that gives hope that ebooks and ereaders are on the cutting edge of the publishing business and that millions of trees each year can be saved. One example he shared is the newspaper, New York Times. One Sunday issues consumes 75,000 trees and one year of the Sunday issues consumes more than 3,900,000 trees. This is one newspaper. There are millions of books published each year. Mr. Pastore shares that each year the publishing industry in the USA consumes 32 million trees for book. Books and newspapers together consume 125 million trees each year and “emit over 40 million metric tons of CO2 annually; equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions of 7.3 million cars.” His 10 ideas for sustainable publishing are good ideas for the publishing industry as well as each household in the country to take to heart. Read his full article at
http://www.epublishersweekly.blogspot.com/2009/09/ebooks-save-millions-of-trees-10-ideas.html.
Feeling even better about the whole idea, I went back to the internet to look for ebook comparisons and guides to buying. I found an article written by the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is titled, “EFF’s ebook-buyer’s Guide to Privacy.” This was the only red flag I found in my research. But it could be a serious one for some people. The article basically says that the ereaders that are made and sold only by certain brands, bookstores, etc., do keep information on the owners, mainly what ebooks have been purchased, what customers are reading at any time and the store can share the information with law enforcement and third parties for marketing efforts or other service providers. Some of the information sent back to the stores reminded me of cookies from different sites that monitor our use of computers, buying habits, etc. The article encourages those purchasing an ereader to read the terms of service agreement very closely before purchasing. If you want strict privacy regarding your ereader, look at what the article calls “open source” ereaders that can download books from a number of sources and does not have a service agreement with anyone, therefore no one is keeping records on the ereader or you. The web address for this article is http://boingboing.net/2009/12/21/effs-ebook-buyers-gu.html. Read it before you buy.
My last question at this point was what was the best one for me to purchase? So the comparison shopping begins. I found a neat chart comparing eight different readers. These included: Amazon KindleDX, Fugitsu FLEPia, Cool-ER, Kindle 2, Sony Reader PRS-700, Sony Reader PRS-505, ASTAK EZ Reader, and IRex Digital ReaderDR1000SW. This will be a hard decision because no one has everything I want. So I will probably wait a year or so while the bugs continue to be worked out and the ereaders become more user friendly. What I want is a reader that the screen size is 6 to 8 inches, has E-Ink with color and great lighting, touch screen, high resolution, weighs about 10 ounces, has a lot of memory or extendable choices, has a long battery life if wireless, but most importantly has as many document format choices as possible. But it must have EPUB, PDF, .Mobi, .PDB, HTML, Javascript, Plain Text, LRF, RTF and more if possible. There must not be a service contract regarding use of it. I do not want to be monitored in any way. You will see when you compare, that right now there is no such critter. But given a year or two of customer feedback, maybe there will be such an ereader or closer to it anyway, and maybe the price will have come down. This chart can be found at http://www.myebookreaderreview.com.
Until then, I can still download as pdf’s and read on the computer. At least I’ll still be saving trees and the environment. Good reading everyone! By the way, I’m getting my eyes checked and new glasses tomorrow. I’m good for another year or so with the computer! But still looking forward to my perfect ereader.
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