11/30/16 Update: Â Hurray! Â Despite the disappointing national election results, California has some things to cheer about. Â We passed Prop 67, the single use plastic bag ban! Â Thanks to everyone who voted! A few weeks ago, I did something completely out of my comfort zone. Â I signed up and then showed up to phone bank with […]
Every year I visit the San Francisco Green Festival and wander up and down the aisles of vendor booths, looking for interesting plastic-free products but always finding a ton of plastic packaging. Â Organic foods packaged in plastic. Â Natural drinks in plastic bottles. Â Compostable products shrink-wrapped in plastic. Â But this year, my jaw hit the floor […]
It’s been all over the news for the past two days: Â Six Oregon girls, travelling to an out of town soccer tournament in Seattle, all got sick with norovirus after passing around cookies in a reusable bag. Â Scientists from the Oregon Public Health department did some sleuthing and traced the virus to the reusable bag. […]
Plastic bag recycling rates suck, and recycling is not the answer to the plastic bag problem in the first place. But the plastics industry continues to justify bag production by insisting that voluntary recycling programs are the solution to plastic bag litter and pollution. And this week, after the U.S. EPA released the recycling rates […]
I spent Thanksgiving week in Maryland with my family. Here’s a picture of my dad. He has questions. (Okay, that photo was taken in Hawaii in 2006 — not Maryland in 2011. But it’s nice, isn’t it?) So we were at the local Giant Foods grocery store last week, and after I whipped out my […]
Yesterday morning, I showed up at San Francisco City Hall to testify in favor of broadening the City’s plastic bag ban and discovered that no matter how many times I speak in public, I still get nervous every single time! But sitting in the audience with Eli Saddler from Ocean Health, and looking around at […]
Yesterday, L.A. County voted to ban single-use plastic bags. And this morning, Green Sangha — an organization I’ve been part of since 2007 — released an awesome new video by filmmaker Ben Zolno of New Message Media. Watch, enjoy, and please pass it on to your friends. The message is serious. The medium is total, […]
I’m sick at heart this morning. I was going to write a post about how empowered I felt after taking my washing machine apart and putting it back together again.  But I’m too upset by the actions of the California senate this morning to give a crap about that. UGLY TRUTH Last night, I fell asleep in […]
Probably. I visited a plastic bag factory this past weekend. I took a lot of pictures and asked a lot of questions, and I’ll write more about what I learned in a future post. But I just had to share this tidbit of information right away: most plastic bags (and other plastics, for that matter) […]
Last month, I wrote about California’s plastic bag ban bill (AB 1998), and Fake Plastic Fish reader Old Novice commented that she thought bag bans were a bad idea and would instead favor a bag fee or tax instead. Well, the bill passed the full Assembly as well as the Senate Environmental Quality Committee, and […]