Category: From Macromediocrity

Ecoguilt Calculator

Patagonia has made me feel a little less crazy.
They have a proto-ecoguilt-calculator on their website (thanks to Jeanne for the tip).
I’ve wanted an ecoguilt calculator for a while, and the Patagonia tool is a good start.
It doesn’t do everything I want.
I want to know exactly what karmic burden I am accepting when I buy a product.
I don’t just care about my carbon footprint, although here’s a nice carbon footprint calculator.
I want to know about:

  • Carbon footprint (including materials, production, and shipping)
  • Virtual water
  • Support of local economies
  • Physical safety (in terms of working conditions, solvents, pesticides, other chemicals) of the people involved in production
  • Degree of admirable-ness/ethicalness of the labor practices in the entire supply chain (good marks to living wages; big demerits for child labor, forced labor, or slavery)
  • Whether any animals are involved in production (either as materials or power) and whether those animals are treated well
  • Organic production methods for any agricultural products

I want to be able to compare (for example) these bamboo towels to these organic cotton towels and know which ones are more virtuous overall. Patagonia makes me feel less crazy for wanting to know this stuff. (Not that I need any high-performance outerwear. Really, right now it’s about towels and patio furniture. I have finally accepted that a linen or cotton patio umbrella isn’t practical, so I’m trying to at least get a used one from FreeCycle.)

Pandora!

Pandora Radio![1]

I have three stations already built and I’ve only known about this for 15 minutes, thanks to a tip from Shital [2]. I am agog at the fantastic potential for time-suckage and serendipity and other forms of pleasant weirdness that result from what could (I suppose) be looked at as a simple replacement for the tyranny of MediaPlayer. I’m anticipating that not only will the music be enjoyable and absorbing, but that the process of training the music stream as to my likes and dislikes will be a source of great joy and outrage. I’d like to apologize to Ehren in advance for the about-to-increase exclamations of “What the hell is this supposed to be? Don’t you know anything??!!”

I’m looking forward to getting the taxonomy for the music I like. (Right now it’s ” folk roots | great musicianship | acoustic sonority | demanding instrumental part writing | intricate melodic phrasing | thru composed melodic style | minor key tonality | melodic songwriting | a prominent mandolin part | acoustic rhythm guitars | solo strings | an instrumental arrangement. (np: Chris Thile, “Big Sam Thompson”)

So I will permaybehaps not need any CDs at work ever again. Now I just have to solve the car-music problem. I’ve been listening to the wireless since my 8-track died. (Just kidding. It was a cassette deck. Yes, I do know there’s such a thing as an iPod. Whippersnappers. Get off my lawn.)

[1] Seems kind of an inapt name. (Is inapt a word?) Memorable, sure, but I’m not getting the metaphoric connection to, you know, Pandora who opened the box, or jar, full of either evil or gifts, depending on who you believe. Her. The Greek Eve, the opener.

[2] Shital never updates her own blog, so I don’t know why I thought she might post here ; )

Too busy to blog

Bunch of quick notes:

  • Outdoor birds indoors: I’m in favor. Sparrows in Costco, sparrows in National Airport. “Wild hawk in loading dock!” at my car dealership. More power to them.
  • Blue candy: Generally, I’m against. Blue m&ms, blue sour skittles, wrong wrong all wrong. Exception: Blue Cadbury’s mini eggs. Perfectly fine. Probably because they are a blue that occurs in nature, as opposed to “blue raspberry slush puppy” blue.
  • Pralines: I’m in favor. Especially when there’s a nice cup of cafe au lait to go with.
  • The Vieux Carre: In favor, except I think I’d like it best when there wasn’t much going on. I couldn’t live there, because I would hate the tourists.
  • Virtual water: um, neither pro nor con. It’s just another thing to figure into the eco-guilt equation.
  • Voice mail: You know how when you call your cellphone voicemail, there’s 15 seconds of “instructions” you don’t need? That costs us $100 million dollars a year. $100M we’re paying to the cellphone companies for “You have eight new messages. To listen to your messages, press one… to listen to new messages, press one…”
  • Cellphone 411: Never again. Send your questions as txt to 46645 .
  • 50% of U.S. households don’t have high speed Internet. That. Sucks.

Shame on you, USPS!

Posted by Johanna

As Simone mentioned, I recently ordered stamps through USPS’ Postal Store. Yes, I was lazy. I didn’t want to waste a whole lunch hour standing in line just to buy the stamps for my wedding invites that I have yet to send. And, since I do almost all of my other shopping online, I figured I should branch out and do my postage stamp shopping online, too.

Never again–or at least not until USPS changes their shameful, wasteful ways.

I purchased 21 booklets of stamps (14 booklets of 26¢ stamps and 7 booklets of 41¢ stamps) and each individual booklet came wrapped in cellophane with a cardboard insert three times the size of the stamp booklet. Note: on neither the cellophane nor the cardboard are there recycling instructions. Additionally, the excessive packaging–which I originally thought was for the benefit of stamp collectors–actually is printed with the notice, “PKG NOT SUITABLE FOR PHILATELIC ARCHIVING.” Seriously?!?


To further demonstrate the wastefulness, I actually used a kitchen food scale to measure the weight of the actual products (the stamps) versus the weight of the waste (cellophane and cardboard). The 21 booklets of stamps weighed 1.5 ounces while the waste weighted 12 ounces! The waste weighed EIGHT times as much as the product! And, as you can see, the volume of the waste was also many times more than the volume of the product.


Boo, USPS. Boooooooo.

USPS packaging shocker!

Johanna ordered some stamps online, because she didn’t feel like waiting at the post office. Good so far. When her dozen-or-so panes of stamps arrived, each pane was backed with a piece of cardboard about 6 times bigger than the pane, and then individually wrapped in plastic. We can see how this would be good practice when mailing stamps to collectors, but we feel it is outrageously wasteful otherwise. There should be a “minimal packaging” box we can check. This knowledge makes me very unlikely to ever order stamps online.

(I’ve invited Johanna and Shital to blog here too, what with Ehren scoring an “opportunity for improvement” on his blogging since May.)