Imagine a TV ad featuring a loopy  Zooey Deschanel singing the praises of plastic. Not pretty, nor as comfy as the touch and feel of cotton – which carries its share of pitfalls as well. Still, ubiquitous plastic has functioned as the toxic fabric of our lives for the past sixty years.

Wake up and smell the polymers. Literally.

Synthetics play an inescapable role in our lives, unlike the cotton-coated world portrayed in Deschanel’s ad. Consider:

You awake, clad in polyester pajamas, squeeze toothpaste from a slick tube onto the polyamides nylon bristles of your toothbrush, wash your hair with phthalates-enhanced goo from colorful containers, and comb your tresses with a plastic comb that was (of course) hermetically sealed in plastic casing.

You use a plastic sealed tampon and head to breakfast, descending stairs carpeted in stain-resistant synthetic shag embedded with acid dye blockers to brew coffee through a plastic cone filter. You remove the foil crown from your yogurt container and the chunky green cap from your bottle of Simply Orange. You fry an egg in your non-stick, polytetrafluoroethylene treated pan. You climb into your car – the interior, carpet, dashboard and windshield fabricated with more of that plastic. You don your polycarbonate eye wear and apply a smudge of sunblock from that tube in the glove compartment, and you’re off.

You’re sipping your beverage from a plastic lid, ready to embrace a work milieu stocked with royal blue Papermate pens, a plastic keyboard, a double decker printer and mystery mesh task chairs with sturdy polyurethane arms.

You get the picture, and yes, it isn’t the hopeful one conveyed to college grad Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate in 1967. Plastics, considered king when petroleum was abundant, could become a thing of the past sooner than you think. Here’s another word for you Ben: Tanked!

“It’s not talked about on CNN, but informed people including the CIA and Defense Department know oil supplies are crashing rapidly,” observes conservationist Brad Hoyt about the looming crisis. “We stopped producing the oil we need in the ’70s and those we are exporting it from will stop because they don’t have enough to meet their own needs. What will we do then? We will either have to do without or go to war with Mexico and Saudi Arabia and take their oil.”

Mexico’s exports to the U.S. declined to 0.51 barrels per day from 2005-2008, and in 2010, supply is expected to fall to 2.5, nearly half a million barrels per day less than in 2009. In other words, a major source for manufacturing the fabric of our lives is seriously threatened.

“The possibility that Mexico’s oil and gas exports to the U.S could go to zero within seven years looks very real,” says investment analyst Chris Neddler of Energy & Capital.  “Rising domestic consumption with declining supply puts an ever-tightening squeeze on imports, yet I have found no evidence that policymakers are paying any attention to this critically important dynamic.”

Meanwhile, what many of us cannot ignore is the damage already done from petroleum-based products, especially the Pacific Ocean plastic islands which serve as graveyards of misguided consumption and evidence we are destroying places where we don’t even go.

Human beings have always manipulated materials for everyday objects. Reeds for baskets, clay for dishes, metal for tools and carts. The term plastic is derived from the Greek plastikos, which means fit for molding, something that can be pulled, cast or pressed into various shapes for tubes, bottles, boxes and fibers.

The commercial plastic or celluloid we have come to know and rely on, is largely derived from petroleum, which is a concern since it is basically toxic and something you don’t really want on your skin. Back in 1951, two research chemists discovered polypropylene polyethylene while greasing the wheels for a manufacturing process that begins with drilling and refining to form the powdery polymer compound. From there the compound is molded and cooled and divided into tiny pellets to be shipped to the makers who continue to mold it into almost everything you touch and feel.

Imagine a day without the touch and feel of plastics. If you can, you are way ahead of the pack, and most likely will fare better when the celluloid that engulfed your existence becomes a memory. But don’t  be alarmed. The vast stores of the stuff we have produced the past 10 years, alone, should get us through the hump until those helpful chemists come along with another brilliant idea.

Images: ringoblog, The Find,  Urban Boundaries, Richforth, Ancora

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This is a new SIGG water bottle with a Keith Haring lady liberty design, part of a limited edition series celebrating America, land of the free, home of  thirsty. Perhaps you could score one of these cool designs for free by getting rid of an old SIGG bottle that contains poison, and you can enjoy the benefits without having to worry about exposing your body to a synthetic drug known to disrupt normal endocrine function.

I simply won’t stand for that in a water bottle. How about you?

If you bought a metal SIGG bottle before August of 2008, you have until Halloween to trade it in for a bottle with the new and improved EcoCare liner free of bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic sex hormone chemical linked to cancer and neurological problems. In other words, switch that trick for a treat.

What is the trick in the SIGG exchange program? Last week, Steve Wasik, chief executive officer of SIGG Switzerland, shocked the reusable water world by admitting that the liners were made with an epoxy resin that contains BPA. As Elaine Shannon of the Huffington Post pointed out, this was an about-face from his previous posture that the bottles simply didn’t leech the harmful chemical and were totally safe.

“He decided on his authority, consumers didn’t want or need to know more,” Shannon observes, adding it is difficult to see Wasik’s stance as anything but cynical.

Wasik’s posting on the SIGG website explained that the BPA debate has heated up dramatically in the last 12 months with the conversation progressing from a focus on leeching to the mere presence of BPA in products. He stresses that this dialogue has evolved to the extent that “some states are considering legislation.”

In fact, last May, Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities to ban the sale of baby bottles and sippy cups containing the chemical and the Food and Drug Administration recently announced it would undertake a new BPA review. In 2008, the FDA resisted recommending retailers discontinue using products that contain BPA until it had completed its risk assessment process. “However, concerned consumers should know that several alternatives to polycarbonate baby bottles exist, including glass baby bottles,” the feds said.

Meantime, you have to follow your own instincts and decide if you want to exchange your SIGG or simply find another aluminum or other bottle brand.

In terms of determining if you have the old kind of bottle, SIGG has provided the best kind of crisis PR fact sheet on its site with visuals that show the difference between the bad and good liners.

The EcoCare liner has a dull, pale yellow appearance while the former liner has a shiny copper bronze appearance.

For details on the exchange program and other issues pertaining to the safety of these bottles, go to the My SIGG website.

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“It’s time to change everything we know about paper,” is the mission statement of Sodra Pulp Labs.

And that’s what the Swedish architecture firms that partner with the labs are doing as they wrap their minds around 50 years of research on pulp-based materials.

“Could it be durable? Waterproof? Light and insulating? Hard as Kevlar? We don’t know the answers, but you’re welcome to join us as we find them out,” says the lab.

Well, one thing is for sure: it can be kid-proof, such as the Parapu kids’s chair by the architecture firm Claesson Koivisto Rune. Designed for the Milan Furniture Fair 2009, the chairs are stackable for extra play date seating and are seen as a great way to spare our forests and avoid petroleum-based plastics.

Made of compostable Durapulp (a combo of pulp and biodegradable resin from sugar cane), they are sturdy like their name indicates and a way to keep the well-designed nursery free of that oh- so-yucky chemical smell that can take weeks to air out.

Image via: Inhabitots

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My eccentric Aunt Lorraine could crochet better than most, her intricate hooded baby sweaters ideal for keeping my little ones bundled in warmth. Isn’t that the heartfelt purpose of most woolen handiwork? Yet the magical forms you see here, resulting from thousands of hours of labor, are a commentary on too much warmth – the kind devastating the coral reefs of our marine world.

In 2005, twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim put their heads and needles together to crochet these spectacular models of coral heads, anemone gardens and urchins. Margaret, a science journalist and author of physics books, and Christine, a painter and professor at CAL Arts, ended up with a sophisticated woolly masterpiece described as the “AIDS Memorial Quilt of global warming”.

The sisters, born and raised in Australia, learned early on about the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Queensland. Considered the world’s largest single structure produced by living organisms, the Reef covers some 133,000 square miles and is a huge tourist draw to the northern region. But climate change causes mass coral bleaching which threatens the habitat for sea life.

The sisters have spread the message through their Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, which has traveled to two continents and been exhibited throughout the U.S., most recently at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles.

“The project has brought awareness to hundreds of thousands of people in the six exhibits we have had, but the world continues to warm and we’re still using oil at an alarming rate,” Margaret tells me, adding that this summer will be the worst coral bleaching ever. “One single project cannot change the world’s attitude about using oil. We haven’t turned the tide on global warming but we are doing our bit.”

That bit was aptly introduced in an exhibit at the Andy Warhol Museum in a show on art’s response to global warming. Since then, the reef madness caught on.

Women have responded in droves to an invitation to participate in the show’s collaborative crochet effort, many of them taught to crochet at a workshop.

As a result, the City Reefs installed vary greatly in refinement. Some emerge more “crafty” and whimsical than the museum-quality Bleached Reef in shades of white, Branched Anemone Garden, and Beaded Reef, executed by the sisters and 30 fiber artists who found them on the web.

“The level of skill might be lower in the City Reefs but they have a beauty and vitality of their own,” Margaret points out.

The Wertheims, who grew up learning to knit and crochet, are now focused on a Toxic Reef made entirely of plastic trash (below), hoping to draw attention to The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a massive dump of plastic debris in the North Pacific.

The shameful mass is roughly the size of Texas and contains 3.5 million tons of discarded litter (shoes, toys, bags, bottles, containers). It floats midway between Hawaii and San Francisco.

“My sister and I changed our use of domestic plastic over the past two years, keeping what we amassed for the exhibit,” says Margaret. “We thought we were pretty ecologically aware but were appalled to to see how much we generated.”

They were so shocked they committed to never buying pre-packed fruit and veggies from stores like Trader Joe’s. Water bottles had long been off their list.

“Everything is sold in pre-contained units because it is easy to ship and cuts down on labor,” Margaret says. “But the consequence is it goes in the landfills or the bottom of the ocean and will be embedded in the geological record of our planet. This will be one of our legacies to the future, having created a plastic layer engulfing our planet.”

In their global effort to rescue our oceans through their exhibit, workshops and lectures, the sisters have done their math. In fact, math drives most of what they do.

Their Reef is overseen by their L.A.-based Institute for Figuring, an educational physics lab dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques.

From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.

Margaret, like many mathematicians, sought to model hyperbolic space, surfaces that appear in coral reefs, lettuce leaves, and other natural organisms. In 1997, Daina Taimina of Cornell University, had a pearl of wisdom, discovering this could be done with crochet by increasing the number of stitches in each row (her model is below). Basically, the sisters began crocheting models with friends when they made the discovery.

“A bunch of us were sitting around the coffee table and thought ‘my gosh’ they look like coral reefs,” remembers Margaret. “The reason is that the reefs embody this geometry. It wasn’t just a coincidence.”

The next stop is the Scottsdale Public Library in Arizona through July 11 – and in the near future, the reef will be the first art exhibit ever on display at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum.

While Margaret is “honored” the response has been so huge, she admits “this thing has taken over my life.” Even with fiber artists like Jemima Wyman and others hired to unbox and assemble the reefs, the curating process can take up to two weeks as it all is painstakingly executed by hand.

The biggest wonder, apart from the reef itself, is that the sisters have managed to do it all on a shoestring budget, working from their home-based IFF headquarters. They continue to seek serious funding so that Margaret might get a salary for the exhaustive work, and her reef, like the natural wonder it models, can live on.

Note: images courtesy Institute for Figuring

The post The Crochet Reef: A Phenomenal Stitch in Time appeared first on EcoSalon.

Did you know most yogurt and cottage cheese containers and other polypropylene #5 plastics end up in landfills? The plastic made from our chemical industries cannot be recycled and yet this is the material selected to package so much of our food items (think hummus and ice cream), medicine and restaurant take-out boxes.

A new effort to salvage and reuse the containers has been announced by the company, Preserve, which is creating stylish household products out of 100% recycled plastics.

It’s called the‘ Gimme 5’ recycling program and it lets consumers either ship their containers to Preserve in Cortland, New York, or drop them off at participating Whole Foods Markets. Preserve is offering the program in a partnership with Stonyfield Farm and Organic Valley. The Whole Foods Markets with the convenient drop-off locations are in Northern California, the Midwest and Northwest. Whole Foods in Florida will also get in on the act later this month. Having the recycle bins at the markets makes it easier for us, the consumers, to do the right thing. It can be too easy to toss these food containers in our home recycling bins and hope for the best, not realizing they aren’t breaking down in our lifetime.

In addition to the plastics, Preserve says you can bring in your Brita water pitcher filters, which along with the recycled plastic is used to make toothbrushes, razors and tableware. According to Preserve, when you buy Preserve Plastic instead of the virgin polypropylene you are helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions (64%). We also benefit from reduced water, electricity, oil and coal that is used in making the plastic to house food. To lean more about the “Gimme 5” program and see if the Whole Foods near you is participating, visit Preserve Products.

Image: Thee Erin

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