Elisa's Green Scene

Better late than never: Zero-waste holiday advice from Whole Foods

Yes, I realize that it's already the day after Christmas (how did that happen, exactly?) But Whole Foods has been featuring a whole series of good advice about reducing waste on their blog Whole Story.

And surely some of that is evergreen advice, right? (No pun intended.)

So check out how to reduce waste when it comes to:

Holiday Cards (My solution: Um, neglect to send them for four years in a row...the horror!)

Holiday wrapping (My solution: OK, I do have one actually useful solution. Toys R Us sells these recycled and recyclable gift bags...they're only $1.49, which is less than normal fancy gift bags, and they can become your recipient's grocery bags moving forward.)

Holiday Lights (My solution: Holiday lights? Those are for looking at at other people's houses.)

Christmas Trees (My solution: You guessed it...stopped getting one somewhere around the turn of the century.)

Holiday Parties (My solution: Go to other people's, and bring vegan food!)

And finally: The Day After. I really like some of the suggestions, particularly: If you get something you don't particularly want, need or like: Donate it or pass it along to someone who does. Why get in the car and drive to the mall and return it to a store that's probably struggling as it is, all to trade it in for something, let's face it, that you probably don't really need, but just like a little more. 

They also have practical advice about batteries and electronics and cell phones. And they even have a gift card recycling program...how odd is that? (Don't stores usually take the gift card when it's used up?)

Anyway, it was a really useful series, one I should have shared ages ago, but as per the title of this post: Better late than never.

Happy holidays to all!

Big Business: Bane or Boon to the Environmental Movement?

About 10 days ago Jared Diamond stirred up a bit of a debate with his NY Times Op-Ed: Will Big Business Save the Earth?

If you read this blog for any period of time, you'll eventually see me talk about how green commerce (products, services, etc.) will never go mainstream until it delivers the same value for the dollar as non-green commerce. You'll see me talk about how I may be a vegan, among other things, but I'm all in favor of baby steps. That taking a few steps towards a more ethical and sustainable lifestyle is better than taking no steps at all. You'll see me argue that absolutism or perfectionism is the enemy of progress.

So, at first glance, Diamond's Op-Ed speaks to me. It makes sense to me that it is only when multi-national conglomerates start not only to care about their environmental impact, but to seek to publicize any positive impact, that we can make mass change and improvements. Part of me does believe that small improvements from a company like Walmart may net out better results for the planet than the small personal improvements from thousands of individuals.

We need both. That's for sure.

Food Politics, however, doles out a cold splash of reality (and incredulity) about Diamond's Op-Ed in: Saving the earth: Coca-Cola?

And the pendulum swings the other way. Crediting companies like Coke for what they plan to do does seem premature. Questioning the motives of for-profit companies in this country, where corporate social responsibility programs still need to somehow contribute to the bottom line in order to be fiduciarily responsible, seems rational, not cynical. 

For me, it's a tough call. How can big companies become more responsible citizens overnight and in one fell swoop? Don't they have to take incremental steps? Not just because they have  fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, but also because they have massive numbers of employees and processes in place...let's be realistic about what it takes to re-direct Titanic companies (and I don't use the metaphor lightly).

So, I'm just a bundle of non-answers and gray areas on this. How about you?

Send BlogHer Diane MacEachern to Copehagen!

The Huffington Post is going to send one citizen journalist to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Change Conference, to represent regular people (and, of course, report back).

I think that person should be Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse.

You can hear more directly from Diane both on her Big Green Purse blog and on her voting page at the HuffPo.

The voting deadline is tomorrow, so visit here, suffer through the clunky HuffPo registration and/or FacebookConnect process and VOTE FOR DIANE! 

She's currently running in about 4th place, so get your vote on.

Gracias!

Amazon giving one free holiday song per day via their MP3 Store:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1000453281

I totally bit.

Vegan handbags at a reasonable price

A couple of years ago I fell in love with the design aesthetic of Matt & Nat vegan handbags. I also loved their startlingly reasonable prices. I paid something like $40-50 per bag. I had a bad customer service experience using their online store, but I still might have shopped for their wares via other online distributors.

But, inexplicably to me anyway, their prices have soared, so after that first multi-bag purchase, I never went back to the well. Bags on sale are running $160 and up, while basic pricing seems to hit the $200 mark. I'm not that kind of gal.

So, always on the hunt for other resources, let me point you to Sparrow Handbags. The pricing seems to stay sub-$100, and while the focus on twill as a primary material means that these bags don't have quite the luxe appearance of a Matt & Nat bag, I'm guessing it means they're a whole lot more eco-friendly than some of the pleather bags I own.

I think i'm going to get this little number on the left. Currently on sale for half off at $49. It's a bargain. One can always use another black bag, and I'll test out the customer service on these guys for you!

'Cause I'm always looking out for my readers like that :)

The Quick Compose test

Cross posted at Healthy Concerns, since I did the same test to both blogs!

Right below this post is my first attempt to use Quick Compose. This seems to be Typepad's way of incorporating Status Updating (i.e. the kind of posting done in Twitter or Facebook) into one's blog.

There are two things that will probably keep me from using this all that regularly:

1. No titles or categories for your Quick post. It's really just the message. No headline. No ability to categorize (that I saw). So it interrupts the visual and formatting flow of your blog, providing less information that is, I think, required.

2. I may try it again, to see if you can post a hyperlink under text, but it didn't seem like it on first glance. It automatically converts any URl you enter as a hyperlink, but as per the test I did, that was a pretty long, gnarly URL. I would have preferred to put that link under text.

Now, it may encourage me to keep this blog a little more active by posting quick thoughts and links so easily.

But the bigger question, then, is this: Would that improve the quality of the blog. The beauty part of sharing ephemeral thoughts on Twitter is that they're just that: Ephemeral. Not too weighty. Fun, sure. Conversational, often. But without the conversational element, do those same thoughts hold up for a blog "post"?

Any of you using this feature? How? Why? Will you continue? What do your readers say?

Over at my personal blog, I review two current bestseller vegan cookbooks, The Conscious Cook and The Kind Diet (with bonus comparison to Skinny Bitch). Check it out: http://homepage.mac.com/elisa_camahort/iblog/C1023857155/E20091128093357/index.html (Also testing new Quick Compose feature on Typepad!)