A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

For some women, skirts inspire feelings of love mixed with hate. EcoSalon West Coast fashion correspondent Rowena Ritchie writes in Skirting The Issues, “Hemlines are the litmus test of fashion history as a cultural study.” Do you agree?

If you’re like most people, you have a mountain of reusable bags that we hope you’re using and not just stockpiling to show how green you are. EcoSalon Editor-in-Chief, Sara Ost pens in her column The Insider’s Guide To Life: the Revolution Will Not Be Bagged, “Most of the time, I’m just amused by how relentless the bag pushers are. Rather than sigh in irritation during my moments of canvas bag forgetfulness, I’ve actually taken to forgetting my reusable bags on purpose just to see if I can be allowed out of the store without a bag for my chives or new d’Orsays. No one has called me crazy to my face. But their eyes say it all.”

We women have all had bad bosses, but your ex-heavy isn’t anything compared to these featured in senior editor Andrea Newell’s article, The Five Worst Companies For Women To Work At. Newell features “Five organizations that have recently been on the wrong end of allegations and legal action by women for gender discrimination and other unfair practices aimed primarily at female employees.”

People walk into your house and say, “You have the most original house of anyone I know.” After they say this, you scan your room overflowing with tropical plants, vintage lamps, a worn-in couch with Danish Mid-Century side tables and think to yourself “Huh?” Christiane Lemieux, founder and creative director of DwellStudio and author of Undecorate, would call your eclecticism a “Love of imperfection and penchant for surprise and unusual juxtapositions.” In Color Outside The Lines, Shelter Editor Leigha Oakes shows us how to break the rules.

Are there vegetables you always see at your farmer’s market or grocery store that you want to try out but are afraid of? In Vanessa Barrington’s Green Plate column, 5 Spring Vegetables To Love Right Now, five of those veggies are tackled with ease.

Image: cogdogblog

ColumnThanks, I brought my hands.

Hi, I’m Sara, and I don’t use bags. Oh, sometimes I use my bags, I just don’t use yours. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Dallas, everywhere I go, I’m not bagging it. Today’s message comes to you from Cape Cod, where I’m embedded with EcoSalon’s DuFault unit, also not-a-bagger. Here, we’ve been eyed suspiciously for buying not one but four avocados and plopping them into a roomy handbag instead of a plastic sack. We’ve bought and returned a sweater without a bag, picked up new earbuds without a bag, even bought a battery – all without a bag.

Sometimes there’s no escaping the bag, even when you bring your own. Social mores ensure that the bottle of wine picked up on the way to the dinner party be brown-bagged inside your bag. At least they don’t try to bag the housewarming orchids at most stores. But on those inevitable days where I forget my Envirosax or my swag of bag from the latest green event, and I’m not in the mood to go fetch it, I simply go bag free. I endure the social ostracism in the name of toned upper arms in addition to my environmental sensitivity.

This concerns people, who, it turns out, really believe in bagging things. I’ve learned even picking up truffles sans-sack warrants a stare, never mind that the chocolate comes in a bag already. Walking down the aisles holding my geranium dish soap, a Pink Lady apple, brie and head of dino kale, you’d think I was juggling obese ferrets on a Ritalin bender. “Do you want a bag? A basket? Hey, how about a cart?” a stock boy will ask, hoping I’m not about to throw a ferret at the wall or launch into my life story. Some days, I want to reassuringly scream, “Hey, guy? I’m not crazy lady!” but restrain myself, knowing this will hardly help my case. What happened to carrying things with our actual arms? Stocking up for the Superbowl I get. You’re going to need a bag or five, maybe even a cart. Stocking up for a wild night of pear and spring greens with goat cheese for dinner? I rest my case.

Most of the time, I’m just amused by how relentless the bag pushers are. Rather than sigh in irritation during my moments of canvas bag forgetfulness, I’ve actually taken to forgetting my reusable bags on purpose just to see if I can be allowed out of the store without a bag for my chives or new d’Orsays. No one has called me crazy to my face. But their eyes say it all.

Don’t take my word for it. You, too, can enjoy confused stares and with any luck, mild arguments.

I can report that the box that was once bulging with pretty gray Restoration Hardware bags and shiny Annual Event sacks is down to just one lonely, wrinkled Fred Segal bag, with no plans to refill. I don’t even get the occasional paper bag “for the recycling” anymore; the bin is outside my front door, and it occurred to me recently that the connection between bagging recyclables for a nine yard walk to the bin and my ever-hopeful aspiring muffin top was more than a little coincidental.

A jug of organic tea, the fresh bundle of tulips, a bag of Feline Pine, a bar of paper-wrapped grapefruit-scented vegetable soap, actual grapefruits: all perfectly capable of getting home without a bag, though you will need hands or the crook of an elbow. Considering the facts on bags, though, there’s really never an excuse to use one in the event you forget your own. You can ask for the paper bags, but if you’re only picking up a few things, why not toss them into your purse or better yet, work those biceps.

Most things, it turns out, just don’t need bags. Why, for example, does a handle of bananas need its own bag, as a recent cashier insisted? I know conventional banana skins are teeming with pesticides but I think the carton of cream can handle cozy company with some organic bananas for the three-minute journey home.

If all the bagging is any indication, humans are pathetically fragile. And if individual items such as detergent and multivitamins are so toxic they need their own baggage, why are we putting them on and in our bodies at all?

Being a resident of San Francisco, I seem to end up at Mollie Stone’s more than I’d like. It’s a grocery store chain that cannot decide if it wants to be Whole Foods or Safeway, and ends up failing at both. (The prices are high and the quality is notoriously inconsistent.) But I am at least morally outraged by the baggers at Mollie Stone’s, who are customer-service-hellbent on bagging things in as many layers of bags as possible, and that counts for something. Think the already-bagged baguette doesn’t need its own bag inside your bag? Think again. That hormone-free rotisserie chicken in the sealed plastic suitcase? Unless you insist, and sometimes anyway, that chicken is getting its own bag.

Whatever happened to wrapping things in twine and brown paper, or just…well, holding them? In a short 40 years of convenience plastic, we’ve become hooked on bagging it. Double bagging it, as if we need one for the road. Separating food from cosmetics, soap from sundries, categorizing our consumption in concentric rounds of poly. If you’ve stopped the bottle, it’s time to stop the bag, too.

This is the latest installment in your editor’s column, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, politics, and anything else. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: taberandrew

Change, whether good or bad, supported or maligned, always begins the same way: with one person, one idea, and one moment of courage. Many people find change suspect because the outcome is unknown; there are too many unforeseeable consequences. They naysay new ideas about old ways of thinking, not realizing how remiss we’d be without the positive progress in equality, health, and the environment that change makes possible. They forget that just years ago, secondhand smoke in offices, restaurants, and other crowded areas was just an accepted aspect of life. But thanks to one city – San Luis Obispo, California – the majority of indoor public spaces in America are now smoke-free, and we’re much healthier for it.

Cities effect change through bans, setting precedents that are sometimes revolutionary and almost always controversial. Over the past few years, a number of U.S. cities have gone the way of San Luis Obispo: initiating bans that are aren’t always popular with everyone but have the power to change things for the better.

1. Santa Clara, California: No Happy Meal Toys

In April 2010, Santa Clara County’s Board of Supervisors decided to prohibit fast-food restaurants from adding toys or other promotional items to kids’ meals. The ban applies only to eateries in certain areas of the county, and only to kids’ meals that have significantly high levels of calories, sodium, fat, and sugar. Fast-food establishments have ninety days to give up the toys or develop more nutritionally sound menu choices for kids. Those supporting the ban feel that offering toys with fast-food meals rewards kids for eating McDonald’s, Burger King, and so on. It lessens the incentive for the fast food industry to target children, which could help curb the increasingly growing rates of childhood obesity in this country.

2. San Francisco, California: No City Money for Bottled Water, No Plastic Bags

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom declared in 2007 that no more of the city’s money would go toward bottled water (as in buying it for government offices or city functions). Other cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, and Salt Lake City, followed suit and cut local-government spending on bottled water. Some went further, like Chicago, which tacked on a five-cent tax to every bottle of water sold, and Concord, Massachusetts, which banned the sale of any bottled water from within its borders starting in January 2011. The anti-bottled water legislation in these two cities is much more extreme, and therefore much more disputed. Banning or reducing bottled water at the government level first seems like a more popular, and therefore possibly more effective, first step.

San Francisco put forth another groundbreaking law in 2007, banning plastic bags from all major supermarkets and pharmacies in the area. The government gave businesses (exempting small ones) a year to switch to paper or compostable bags. NPR estimated that this legislation would reduce plastic-bag usage by five million bags each month. The move inspired similar action in Los Angeles, Paris, and London. In Washington, D.C., residents now pay five cents for paper or plastic bags from stores, restaurants, and pharmacies.

3. North Olmsted, Ohio: No Sweatshop Goods

North Olmstead is a suburb in Cleveland that also happens to be the first area in the country to forbid products made in sweatshops. Mayor Ed Boyle came up with the idea in 2007, creating an ordinance that banned city vendors from buying, renting, or selling anything produced in a work environment with sweatshop-like conditions. Another Cleveland-area city, Bedford Heights, adopted the same ban, and other cities have looked into doing something similar.

4. Los Angeles, California: No New Fast-Food Restaurants

Los Angeles’s City Council made this highly controversial ban in 2008, deciding that South Los Angeles had more than enough fast-food establishments (about four hundred at the time), and put a yearlong moratorium on any new ones opening in the thirty-two-square-mile area. The council wanted to use that year to entice healthier restaurants and grocery stores into the neighborhood; the ban specified eateries that have drive-through windows and/or use heat lamps in lieu of freshly prepared meals. The council also enacted the ban to reduce the higher-than-average obesity rates in South L.A., though opponents argue that’s a form of food policing. But residents can still access hundreds of fast-food joints in the area. The problem is that there are very few grocery stores in comparison; the ban is supposed to close the gap a little and give people in the neighborhood more dining options.

5. New York, New York: No Trans Fat in Restaurants

Even more contested than the L.A. fast-food ban was Manhattan’s infamous trans-fat ban in 2006. The Board of Health voted to eliminate the unhealthy ingredient from all city restaurants by July 2008, giving chefs two years to replace it in their recipes. Even though trans fat is linked to heart disease and increases bad-cholesterol levels, many restaurant owners and citizens feared the ban would make food taste worse. Despite their doubts, a 2009 report in the Annals of Internal Medicine by the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene found that the ban-which reduced the amount of trans fat in NYC restaurants from 50 percent to 2 percent-didn’t hurt restaurant business. Plus, the amount of both trans fat and saturated fat was reduced in french fries by 50 percent, suggesting that restaurants offer more-healthful fare postban.

I always feel a little suspicious when something’s completely eliminated from public use because it can be a slippery slope. Even though I’m vehemently against smoking, I do feel that legislation limiting the right to smoke in cars and homes infringes upon people’s rights. That’s why I understand the outcry against fast-food and trans-fat bans, and even plastics and happy meal toys, to an extent-when does external enforcement of citizens’ personal lives and choices stop? Could these decisions, though meant for the greater good, be used to justify others that go too far? But limiting oneself to that mindset also limits anything good that can come from the restrictions, like healthier people and environments. These specific bans have the potential to do just that, which is why I hope they’re successful and influential, and that they’re not taken too far beyond their intentions.

Article by Vicki Santillano for DivineCaroline. First published May 2010.

Related DivineCaroline posts:

• New Plans to Get America Moving
• You Are What you Eat: Inside America’s Refrigerators
• Six Good Deeds That Take Less Than Five Minutes

Image: kla4067

Did you know that each year Americans throw away around 100 billion polyethylene plastic bags? Less than 0.6 percent of those are recycled. And that Americans buy 28 billion disposable plastic bottles of water a year?

When we’re on the go it’s easy to forget about the real impact of our choices, especially when it comes to plastic. The ease of buying an occasional bottle of water or packing groceries in a plastic bag when you forget your reusable one might not feel like an environmentally detrimental choice, but small choices add up quickly. Fortunately, changes in the industry are slowly happening, making it easier for you to commit to kicking the single-use plastic habit.

Plastic bag bans and fees are a common topic of debate in environmental communities, and Wal-Mart is the latest business to join in the discussion. Starting January 1st, Wal-Mart will institute a pilot program at three stores in California, where no single-use plastic bags will be provided to consumers. Shoppers will instead have a choice between purchasing three different reusable bags, reasonably priced at $1, 50 cents and 15 cents. The pilot program will test how consumers will deal with stores that do not offer free bags. Not providing plastic bags could have a significant impact at large stores like Wal-Mart; the retail giant alone was responsible for handing out 27 billion plastic bags in 2007.

The anti-plastic bag movement is also spreading on regional levels. This week Delaware passed a law that will require larger stores to all offer reusable bags to their consumers. Even in Phuket, Thailand, a group of business owners recently passed an agreement to institute a small fee on plastic bags. Although it is unknown what impact policies like this will have in the long term, it’s certainly a step in the right direction, encouraging consumers to choose reusable bags whenever possible.

The other culprit in single-use plastic waste is bottled water. In a progressive move, Canada-based Naya Spring Water announced this week that it is the first bottled water company to use 100% recycled plastic in its bottles. The company also reportedly recycles 96% of waste from its plant, including paper, cardboard and plastic.

But is buying a recycled plastic bottle water that’s still a single-use item that sustainable? It’s great to recycle materials that otherwise would have gone straight to the landfill, but supporting the purchase of single-use products inevitably leads us to consume more and waste more. In a pinch, opt for the recycled plastic bottle of water, but when possible, keep your reusable drinking vessel in tow.

Photo credits: vieux bandit, zone41

I was overjoyed when the farmers’ markets where I live decided to go one step further than doing away with plastic bags and go zero waste entirely.

Plastic bags are made of crude oil and other petrochemical derivatives, using up an estimated 12 million barrels of oil a year for America’s plastic bag habit (that’s about 330 per person per year). Add to that the hazard of plastic bag waste for animals and you have the makings of a huge environmental problem.

Bags may be a bane, but they are also a boon for food storage. Since I can only reuse the ones that still exist for so long, I thought I better figure out not only how to get my lettuce home from the market but keep it fresh once it’s there.

Lest you think this is an “only in Berkeley” sort of thing, I’m sharing my findings because a bag ban is likely coming your way soon.

The Boulder, Co. farmers’ market is already zero waste, and both the Monterey and Irvine, Calif. farmers’ markets have phased out plastic bags. The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market just announced it is going bag-free and in Europe, you have to pay for a bag if you want one. Cities are saying goodbye to plastic bags everywhere you look (see: Paris, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles).

They don’t just hand them out like Halloween candy these days. And why should it be easy to blithely use something made from oil that harms animal and marine life and doesn’t break down in landfill?

I spoke with Food Policy Media Consultant Naomi Starkman about the bag problem. She has worked with Berkeley’s Ecology Center to communicate the zero waste program to the public.

“It’s been made easy for us to get cheap fast food based on cheap oil for years. All of the packaging it comes in is also largely made of plastic/oil,” says Naomi. “The whole system has lulled us into a sense of ease and complacency. It’s up to us to reject this paradigm and take responsibility for our food system as a whole: from seed to feed.”

Talking with Naomi has made me think hard about kicking my personal bag habit. If you truly care how your food was grown, produced, and transported to you, and if you’re committed to supporting sustainable agriculture, caring about how your food is packaged and stored is the next step to closing the circle.

Together, Naomi and I came up with a few tips for solving the bag dilemma:

First off, make sure you remember to bring your large canvas bags or shopping baskets to the market.

Realize that most things you buy don’t really require a separate bag to carry them home. For instance, potatoes, bunches of sturdy greens, artichokes and asparagus can be carried in your big bag all jumbled up together.

Purchase a few cotton or linen bags to bring to the market with you to carry loose salad greens, sugar snap peas, green beans and other items that really require a bag.

If you’re crafty you can easily make bags out of old t-shirts, pillowcases, or dish towels. If you search Etsy you’ll find lots of great ideas and many items you can buy.

Once you get the produce home, here are some tips for keeping it fresh:

Line the drawers of your refrigerator with wet dish towels or paper towels, lay the items down loose, and cover them with more moist towels.

Store your greens in cloth bags, but with a wet paper towel to keep things fresh.

Herbs keep best outside of the refrigerator in a glass of water. Better yet, grow your own and only snip off what you need.

If you have a lettuce spinner, simply wash your greens when you get them home and then keep them in the salad spinner. They’ll stay fresh and crisp.

Here’s a great solution for berries.

Recognize that food waste is a huge problem and think of the bag dilemma as an opportunity to only buy what you need and to eat all you buy.

And here’s a final great tip from Naomi:

When shopping in the grocery store, buy as much as you can in bulk and carry it home in your storage containers. Simply bring your containers to the store and weigh them before you shop so the checker knows how much to charge you. This saves you the additional step of transferring the food from bag to jar when you get home.

Image: haydnseek

Plastic bags are the curse of modern society. Made from petroleum or natural gas based products, they can take up to a hundred years and more to decompose. Meanwhile, they become serial killers, clogging drains and waterways, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of birds and marine animals who become entangled in or eat the plastic bags.

Plastic bags, however, have also become the icon of convenience shopping and trying to pry this icon from a shopper’s grasp is one of the major issues confronting officials and politicians around the world. Some countries and cities have opted for bag bans, others for bag tax.

But officials in Delhi, where the streets are not lined in gold but littered with plastic bags, have taken a giant leap forward and announced that plastic bags will be outlawed altogether. New guidelines were released earlier this month declaring that the “use, storage, and sale” of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned in Dehli.

Those who ignore these guidelines will a severe fine and risk five years jail time. Draconian, perhaps. But in a city where – by conservative estimates – over 10 million plastic bags are used every day, city officials have decided enough is enough.

They say that they will go soft on everyone initially, giving them time to switch to alternative bags such as jute, paper, and cotton bags. But how they are going to enforce this in the long run is unclear.

As you can imagine, environmentalists are applauding the move while shopkeepers and retailers say it will simply end up costing the consumer.

Image: eflon