July 24, 2007 by Julie.

Ben in the morn with milk from glass bottles that we were able to return to Whole Foods for full deposit of $4.50! Crescent Ridge Dairy! Only garbage we made from this shopping trip were the rings off the plastic bottle caps!

And here are two pictures of our host’s pumpkin plants, all planted at exactly the same time. Guess which ones were supplemented with completely organic fertilizer? If you guessed the ones in the pot, give yourself a high five and then head over to Whole Foods to get some for yourself. But don’t eat it.

Oh how encouraging, people! I love not making trash!!!
Also, so far, our composted leftovers have not had to travel with us for anymore than 3 days. This is better than we hoped! Aunt Lyn had a compost pile in her sideyard, Willie DeCamp totally started a compost behind his house with our refuse, and now in Winchester, Mass, we realize that Whole Foods has a compost bin at the customer service desk. Beautiful.

I have to say that Whole Foods is coming out a glowing advocate for Sustainability in every way. I know that some people take issue with large chains, as do I, but I see Whole Foods supporting local food (esp milk and produce), supporting every kind of household recycling (including batteries and bags from other stores), rewarding the use of cloth/reusable bags, and now providing a place where customers can bring their organic waste to be returned to energy. Last post I wrote about greengrocer, Steve, giving us old bananas for free but I notice that all of their employees smile and offer help and seem generally happy. Yesterday’s cashiers let us weigh our own tupperware before adding ground peanut butter from the bulk bins, so we wouldn’t have to use the little plastic bags. The Bakery lady smiled as we walked away from the counter with a warm loaf of bread in our hot little hands, no paper, no nothing. I wrapped it in cloth when we got home, marveling at the way our efforts are buoyed by such agreeable humans.

Not just at Whole Foods, either. In our no-trash campaign, we have been aided in every single restaurant. Today’s pizza man gave us our pizza on the metal cooking plate (this is getting to be common for us), and rinsed out my water jug before filling it in the tap! The ladies where we had lunch handed us our sandwich wraps right over the sneezeguard, again with no paper or anything. Unfortunately, the ladies couldn’t figure out how to make my wrap stay together without paper so they remade it twice, and the offending broken slathered pitas hit the trash before I could say, AACK! which was far more wasteful than i had anticipated as I had no tupperware to catch the mistake. Pretty sure that’s the same lesson I keep learning - Don’t forget the supplies: tupperware, sealable mug, utensils, hanky, bandana, chicobag. They all fit in my little backpack. I just didn’t bring it.

Hey I really want to encourage any one out there who might consider trying to make less waste in their life - don’t be shy about letting people know what you are doing, and do it with a smile. But don’t do it unless you mean it cause people will help you. And they’ll hold you to it

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

July 24, 2007 by Mark.

YERTians!

This morning we’re on our way to the Hull wind energy facility along the coast of Massachusetts near Boston. We’ll be exploring wind energy and its relative popularity with the locals in this state. I’ve heard that coastal waters are a great place for wind turbines, but beaches traditionally have all sorts of NIMBY restrictions, so it’ll get interesting. Energy or pristine views? Can we have both? We’ll dig into it all this week and share it with you in our MA video pod.

In the meantime, we’ve been assembling our first “on the road” video pod, focusing on coal in Pennsylvania. You’ll see it up later today, after we get back from our day’s excursion. Stay tuned!

With the Wind,

Mark

Posted in Travelog, Mark | 3 Comments »