Talking Plastics and Cotton with K.D.'s Treehouse

Plastics Talk at K.D.'s Treehouse

PLASTICS

There is a plastic swirl out in the ocean as big as Texas.

This is why plastic bags need to be outlawed; they float and sea turtles eat them thinking they are jellyfish, then they die.

93% of us have BPA in our bodies.

Safe plastics are #1, 2, 4, 5. There are no known dangers.

Avoid plastics #3, 6, 7.

• #3 vinyl in cooking oil bottles, clear food packaging, phthalates enter our bodies through food and drink.
• #6 PS in disposable plates, meat trays.
• #7 miscellaneous plastics found in baby bottles, 3-5 gallon water bottles.

Milk cartons are lined with bad plastic, including organic milk. Chemicals leach into the milk we drink.

Better alternatives include stainless steel, ceramics, silicone and bamboo.

• Examples of better alternatives:
• Glass (Life Factory baby bottles)
• Wood (Plan Toys)
• Smart plastics (Green Toys Inc.)
• Lap Top Lunches
• Compostable bib made from potato starch

COTTON

17-25% of all pesticides are used on cotton crops; only 3% of all crops are cotton.

Someone who worked in conventional cotton clothes said he would only let his kids wear the clothes if he washed them 15 times beforehand.

Find clothes without flame retardants.

Parents can register for birthdays, holidays, etc. to minimize other toys.

Resources:

• http://www.badplastics.com/
• http://www.badplastics.com/plastics-facts.html
• http://www.badplastics.com/alternatives-to-plastics.html
• http://www.thedailygreen.com/
• http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/plastic-bottles-toxins-water-bottles-460410?click=main_sr

MEETING : Raw Vegan Foods for the Family with Sharon Wright

Thursday, August 5, 2010

How did Sharon get into Raw Foods? Here's her story. She is opening Green Life Cafe in November in West Columbia with take out and dine in options. Her forte is her desserts.

What can parents do for their kids? Start with desserts, zucchini "pasta," mock tuna salad, "cheese" nuts, raw cereal, flax seed crackers. A raw food meal takes 30 minutes tops!

Recommended appliances: a good blender (Vitamix), juicer (Champion), dehydrator (Excalibur) with Texlfex sheets. All of these can be purchased at 14 Carrot; their prices are better than most places.

Juicing is a great place to start because your body doesn't have to work at difficult digestion. Nutrients go straight to the cells and provide you with energy. The benefits are enormous.

Types of ingredients: organic fruits and vegetables, vinegars, cold pressed olive oils, sprouts. For desserts: coconut butter, cashews, maple syrup, seeds, nuts.

A raw food diet includes lots of greens!

Recommended books:

• Living on Live Food by Alissa Cohen
• How We All Went Raw by Charles Nungesser and Stephen Malachi
• Rawsome!: Maximizing Health, Energy, and Culinary Delight With the Raw Foods Diet by Brigitte Mars
• Books by Ani Phyo
• I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Cafe Gratitude by Terces Engelhart and Orchid
• RAWvolution: Gourmet Living Cuisine by Matt Amsden

Some additional resources:

• http://www.rawmom.com/raw-mom-blog
• http://www.rawfamily.com/
• http://www.thegardendiet.com/
• http://superhealthychildren.com/ - Karen Ranzi's new book is Creating Healthy Children Through Attachment Parenting and Raw Foods

MEETING : Composting with Jane Hiller of Sunoco Recycling

Thursday, July 1, 2010

There are three types of garbage:

1. Good garbage which is organic matter (fruits, veggies, anything from a plant) we can use in our compost
2. Bad garbage is anything we put in landfills (leaky batteries, mercury from light bulbs, anything that stays in the landfill forever and does not decompose
3. Reuseable products; it is important to buy good products we can reuse and recycle

Nobody wants to live next to a landfill.

Whatever is at the bottom of the landfill is toxic.

The methane gas on top is twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide

At the turn of the twentieth century, we had 16 inches of top soil. Today, we only have four inches.  We are not putting good organic material back into our earth. We are cutting down trees and getting rid of forests, so what little top soil we have is being washed into our lakes and rivers. What is worse is good organic garbage that is buried just three feet below the ground is not turning into soil. A banana peel takes three to four weeks to turn into soil, but it will remain a recognizable banana peel in a landfill. We need to compost in our own homes.

Did you know 50% of what we throw away can be composted?  If we all composted, we could have our own fertilizer and less energy would be used and less money spent on picking up our trash.

What else can we do? We can:

• Vote
• Support organizations that are greener
• Care for our personal property

There are many different ways to compost.  Some ways are to:

• Use wooden palettes, building a square, with 1 square as the door to the compost pile
• Use a big black sheet of plastic that forms a circle and encircles the compost
• Use two containers stacked and drilled with holes for vermicomposting: add some sand, soil, newspaper and organic matter, and watch your worms do wonders… and give some worms away to friends

Be sure to:

• Mix wet = green = nitrogen with dry = brown = carbon
• Place dry on top, as bugs are attracted to wet
• Cut pieces as small as possible
• Sprinkle your compost around the plant or mix with potting soil
• Make compost tea by adding a couple of scoops of compost with water, let it steep for a day and water

Also keep in mind:

• So there is less smell and it is less of an attraction to animals, don’t add fats and sugar into the compost pile (i.e. salad dressings)
• Too much of wet and it will smell bad, too much of brown and nothing will break down
• Do not let fresh compost touch your plant as it is nitrogen rich and will burn your plants

Some additional tidbits:

• Home Depot recycles fluorescent light bulbs with mercury in them
• It is against the law to dump mercury bulbs in the garbage

 Thanks to Jane, our kids got to look and touch worms. We, as parents, felt compelled to start composting (or proud that we already do), recycle better and be very proactive in buying better products to lessen our carbon footprint.

Resources:

• Environmental Education Association of South Carolina, Inc.
• Keep The Midlands Beautiful

14 Carrot Whole Foods' Carolina Wildlife Care Event

We had a table at 14 Carrot Whole Foods to support their chosen charity Carolina Wildlife Care (CWC).  The Charity Reward Program gives $2 to CWC for every $250 you spend: $1 on your behalf and $1 that 14 Carrot will match. At the event, CWC had a few animals to show off: a blind owl, an opossum we could pet, a corn snake they took out of the box and a box turtle. Our kids got to have their faces painted too!

Keeping the Midlands Beautiful

Today Christina Hulslander, her son and daughter joined us to scout a possible location for us to keep clean for Keep the Midlands Beautiful. With our kids armed with grabbers, and the baby on my back, we descended upon Earlewood Park off North Main Street in Columbia to have a look at the logistics of Smith Branch Creek.

It runs from somewhere up by Providence Hospital on Forest Drive all the way to the Broad River, just above the point where the canal breaks off. This creek was profiled in The State newspaper as the culprit for the immense amount of garbage that accumulates at the head of the canal. I have a link to a map here. Runoff from urban streets washes into the creek, and flows into the Broad. Obviously, a regular effort in Earlewood Park alone may not alleviate the problem entirely, but based on the amount of trash we saw and collected in the short section we scouted, we helped a lot. Trash was embedded in the creek bed, the banks, tangled in the brush, and hanging in the trees overlooking the creek, apparently lodged there during high water.

Now we just need to decide if the Holistic Moms Network of the Midlands wants to adopt this project on a permanent basis, which would entail cleaning it twice a year. I will try to return and take more pictures, but based on the fun wading through the shallow waters, I think if we left it up to the children, the answer would be a resounding yes!

Recycling Isn't So Easy

Our Recycled Robots

By The Cardinal House

Thanks to Maria our Sprouts group went on a field trip to our recycling plant Sonoco Recycling and it was enlightening!

What my son took home: "I want to make a Tin Man!"  (There was one at the Recycling Education Room.)

What I took home: "I've been doing almost EVERYTHING WRONG!"

Did you know where we live....

• Numbers on the bottom of plastics don't mean a thing?  They recycle plastics as long as they have screw tops and resemble water bottles or milk jugs.  No to salad containers.  No to yogurt containers.  No to any other shapes.
• They don't recycle office or school paper?  Only newspapers and cardboard boxes without wax.
• They don't recycle any type of glass?
• They don't recycle any plastic bags?
• We shouldn't separate stuff by material in plastic bags because they just get thrown away and go back into the landfill?
• What can and cannot be recycled changes all the time -- we need to be kept up to date -- or else we are all just wasting time and money!?

 Hmmm... I need to be more vigilant in what I buy so my family can recycle, reuse and reduce more effectively!

Resources

• Earth 911 - find recycling centers and learn how to recycle
• Environment Green
• The Internet Consumer Recycling Guide
• Recycling in the Midlands - our recycling 'rules'
• Recycling Facts
• Recycling Statistics

UPCOMING MEETING : Everything Baby!

The next meeting will be at 14 Carrot Whole Foods in Lexington from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. The topic? Everything baby!

We will have speakers and members who will discuss and demonstrate holistic baby care, from childbirth to breastfeeding to baby wearing.

At our last meeting we were pleased to see several new people, and we continue to hope the new time and venue will allow more people to come. 14 Carrot Whole Foods is a very child-friendly place, complete with toys for the little ones to play with.

We discussed several issues pertaining to the future direction of the Holistic Moms Network of the Midlands. Chris and Laura are still acting as co-presidents, but we would like to move in the direction of a board, in which different members are responsible for different aspects of the organization. Chris would still like to be in charge of booking speakers for the monthly meetings. Christina Hulslander is in charge of Sprouts, the educational-playgroup co-op that meetings on Mondays and Fridays. Carissa Cox, Tracy Seiler and Christina will run the new blog.

If you have news you would like us to post, please contact Tracy Seiler or Carissa Cox.

The Support I have From HMN

By The Cardinal House

When I was growing up, I always envisioned my future life - and it was a "mainstream" life: a wedding in a church and I was going to wear a white flowing dress, the birth of my child(ren) in a hospital, sending children off to school... Little did I know that when my husband and I chose to marry ourselves in a small dock house (I wore an Indian purple dress too revealing for church and flip flops) - it was a start of a long journey off the main road. When we found out I was pregnant, we shuddered at the thought of a hospital delivery. Nobody but my husband seemed to understand why we needed a home birth. When our son was born, it seemed natural to attachment parent and it was just a natural progression to homeschool. 

Set apart from everyone else in our families, I needed to connect with other mothers who supported me, who understood me, who shared their knowledge with me, and who didn't judge me in a negative way. Having moved to the Midlands and not having friends here nor family of my own, I found the Holistic Moms Network chapter.  And yes, my HMN acquaintances and friends have supported me, taught me, shared knowledge with me.  I am so glad there is a chapter here in the Midlands and that we are striving to keep it alive for our community.  There is always another person who may need our help - just like you all helped me.

If I never said thank you - I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you now.  You have helped me become the wife, the mother and the holistic person I have become today.

Our New Web Site

We are in the process of creating our new web presence, in the hope that it will allow our members to keep track of what Holistic Moms of the Midlands are up to. We encourage all members to take an active role in the organization, by posting comments, sending us articles and links, and of course, attending the monthly meetings.
Our next meeting will be Thursday, May 6, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at 14 Carrot Whole Foods in Lexington.