8 tips to improve indoor air quality

It used to be that cooking aromas made their way from the kitchen to our bedroom. It was kind of nice if I was baking molasses cookies but not so great if I cooked haddock for supper. I knew that inhaling cooking fumes wasn’t great so last winter we installed a new range hood that vents to the outside and now our bedroom just smells like our dog.

Cooking fumes are just one of the many issues with indoor air quality that most of us live with, without understanding the consequences.

Are new clothes toxic? 4 tips to avoid chemical residue

New clothes are coated with a variety of chemicals to keep them looking crisp.

Late August is likely one of the busiest clothes shopping times of the year. It’s a tradition in many households to get a pile of new back-to-school clothes and even people who aren’t heading to school get in the shopping mode as we approach a new season.

Before you dress your kids, and yourself, in your brand new, never-been-washed clothes, you might like to toss everything in the wash first. And then put them through the wash again. And then again.

Here’s why...

Green routine – 7 healthy habits for you and the planet

7 healthy habits for you and the planet:

September is a good time to start new habits. Because a sense of routine resumes after Labour Day you might be able to slide some healthy changes into your everyday routine without much trouble. If you’re open to this notion, here is a September checklist to consider:

Zero trash goal - know your local recycling guidelines



You might be surprised what can and can't go in the recycling bin. Learn your local do's and don't so you're recycling everything possible.

The curbside recycling discussion has been on the table for a few years now in Rothesay but only recently have discussions turned to the idea of a regional curbside recycling strategy.

As the Fundy Solid Waste Commission contemplates a $4-million investment to replace the roadside blue bins it makes sense to see where municipalities in the region stand on curbside recycling programs.

Being able to put recyclables to the curb every two weeks should improve recycling participation, which has leveled off over the past couple of years.

Aim for zero curbside trash and you'll get pretty close

Recycling can cut your household trash nearly in half and composting can knock off another 40%. Curbside recycling can do wonders for recycling participation.

Review - Ford C-MAX hybrid: love, love, love



The Ford C-MAX hybrid is efficient and fun to drive.



A couple of months ago I was given a Ford C-MAX hybrid car to test drive for two weeks. I have never been into cars but the idea of a hybrid vehicle appealed to me so I was excited for the opportunity. Cars still don’t thrill be but my two weeks with the Ford C-MAX sure did.

It was my first experience with a hybrid so I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had some assumptions: low fuel consumption, lower CO2 emissions and many have self-charging batteries which enhances efficiency too. You’re going to pay a little more for a hybrid vehicle (in some cases a lot more, depending on the make and model) but you’re going to save money on gas and you’ll pollute less.

But there was more that impressed me about the potential of hybrid vehicles.

Eco-friendly summer entertaining

Summer is the season of plastic and disposable dinnerware. I get the practicality of it. With backyard meals, lugging the glass and china out to the deck can feel like a bit of effort and having kids running around the back yard with a cold drink in a breakable glass can be a bit of a worry.

Then there’s the chance that cutlery will get lost in the grass or fall through the cracks in the deck.  If you’re feeding a crowd it just seems easier to use disposable.

Look in any store for outside dishes and the first thing you’ll find are brightly-coloured cups, plates and bowls made of some un-numbered plastic. Disposable dinnerware is often plastic or Styrofoam.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans throw out about 113 billion disposable cups, 29 billion disposable plates and 39 billion disposable utensils each year. That’s a lot of landfill, not to mentions the environmental impact of what goes into making them in the first place.

Summer simplicity doesn’t have to mean disposable. Nor are the only options for eating outside plastic. There are lots of great options for picnic and back-deck dishes that are reusable, non-toxic or at the very least, compostable.

Ten tips to keep your compost bin healthy all summer

We’re on a mission to make our compost bin less smelly this summer and we’d like to prevent another crop of bugs from hatching too. These things don’t make the compost cart unusable but they do make it a little unpleasant during the summer.  

If you’re not composting yet consider this: composting can divert up to 40% of your household waste from the landfill. That means fewer bags sent to the curb every two weeks and it means that all of that food waste can go back into the earth in a productive way. Sure, food will eventually decompose in the landfill but it takes a good long time and it’s unproductive. It’s much better to turn compostables into compost, the ultimate form of recycling.  

Eco-friendly fashion: second hand shopping can be cheap and chic

My second hand clothing finds: frills, cashmere and organic cotton.

Most people can’t resist a good deal, especially when it comes to clothing (me included). That’s what the business of cheap trendy clothes is feeding on. This “fast fashion” makes it easy for people, especially women, to feed their addiction to stylish clothing as each new season approaches. This habit, or hobby, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t sustainable, for ethical and environmental reasons.

The tragedy of the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh reminded the Western world that the appetite for fast fashion has a cost that isn’t coming out of the shopper’s pocket, that there are ethical issues associated with producing ultra-cheap clothes in up-to-the-minute styles.

How to avoide pesticides on produce - the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15

We’re lucky that a greater variety of organic produce is getting easier to find in our local stores and markets. But in a way it makes our grocery shopping harder. Having more choice creates a bit of a dilemma: should we buy only organic produce – a more expensive option – or pick and choose what we do and don’t buy organic?

Nobody wants to hem and haw over whether to buy the organic kiwi, which is why I’m hooked on Environmental Working Group’s annual Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides. The guide lists the produce that has the highest pesticide load when it reaches your table along with the produce with the lowest pesticide load.

 

To make their research easy to use the have created the Dirty Dozen (produce with the highest pesticide load) and the Clean 15 (produce with the lowest pesticide load).

Finding a safe and effective sunscreen



Environmental Working Group's guide to safe and effective sunscreen makes sun safety easy.

When it’s cold out I forget all about sunscreen.  

Even though we half froze over the May long weekend, I noticed on the Sunday night that both of my children had sunburned cheeks from an afternoon spent at an ultimate frisbee tournament.  

It’s the kind of thing I kick myself about because I should know better; sunscreen season is year round not just warm sunny days. 

And so it begins, the annual search for sunscreen that’s safe and effective, a sunscreen that does what it needs to do without being loaded with toxic ingredients that scare me more than sunburns.