How Can You Recognize a BPA-Free Bottle After the SIGG Scandal?

They were supposed to be one of the greenest green companies...their signature bottles sold in organic groceries, yoga studios, health centers and more. But today there's a national uproar over the BPA found in the liners of SIGG baby bottles made before 2008.

Sigg Aluminum Baby Bottles Has Trace Amounts of BPA - ABC News
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If the first lesson of green marketing -- transparency -- needed to be demonstrated, there couldn't be a better case study.

• While SIGG was aware of the BPA in the liners since 2006 - and was evidently developing a BPA-free liner - they continued to imply that their bottles were safe and eco-friendly (though they claim they never specifically said they were BPA-free).
• Now, knowing of the contamination, they are giving consumers information to identify and return the pre-2008 bottles for exchange, though customers must pay shipping charges, and SIGG will not refund the purchase price. News stories emphasize - this is not a recall.

The key question of the story, however, is not just SIGG's downfall and questionable ethics, but also the impact on green companies producing similar products with similar claims of safety. Who can be trusted? What level of safety is necessary for consumers to feel comfortable?

The answer, again, lies in transparency: who is willing to provide complete documentation for their claims of safety, and whose claims stand up under questioning?

As an eco-consultant, mom, and health-minded consumer, I advise clients to follow three steps to know if the bottles they purchase are indeed safe for themselves and their children:

• First of all, exercise a healthy curiosity and skepticism regarding unsupported claims.
• It may be tempting to buy a beautiful lined bottle - but do your homework first. Read the product information, ask the tough questions
• Find companies you can trust, who are dedicated to transparency and provide full documentation regarding their products.
• Finally, to seek out companies that have found healthier alternative to using any liners at all in their bottles.

For example, like SIGG, Green Irene offers water bottles....but there's a difference. SIGG's bottles are aluminum, decreasing their weight but also involving the possibility of a chemical reaction with their contents - thus making liners necessary.

Green Irene, on the other hand, offers a selection of food-grade stainless steel bottles that are inert and completely non-reactive to the acid/alkaline level of the water you put in them. And for this reason, they do not need any liner of any kind.

Not only this - one of Green Irene's stainless steel bottles also features a carbon filter that can remove organic and inorganic impurities including harmful organisms, chemicals and heavy metals. (pesticides, detergents, aluminum, radon 222, mercury, etc.)

There's even a Safe Sippy Cup of stainless steel with a lid made of #5 plastic or polypropylene (the safest and most stable of all plastics). All plastics used have been independently tested free of BPA and phthalates.

There is no excuse for companies that misdirect their customers to believe that products are safe when they're not. Every consumer has the right to honest answers to their questions - and safe and healthy products for themselves and their children.

Let's face it: all companies that offer reusable water bottles will - and should - face increased scrutiny in the wake of the SIGG scandal. Only those companies that demonstrate transparent dedication to the consumers' best interest, and provide solid documentation for their claims, will rise to the top.

Slow Down Rising Energy Costs – Without Spending a Penny

As summer's heat dwindles to nippy September nights, it looks like energy is going to remain expensive this winter. The good news? Heating and cooling accounts for up to 50% of the average home and office operating costs, so this is an area where you can save considerably with some simple, sensible adjustments.

It’s easiest to accomplish energy savings with a two-pronged approach: through conservation and efficiency. In other words, through personal and company choices, and changes in your HVAC system. Of these two, behavioral changes require the smallest investment – often hovering around zero – so let’s start there.

A good energy conservation plan often involves steps like these:

• Switching off lights in unused or sunlit rooms - If your building has floor-to-ceiling windows, you may not need overhead lights during the day…and you certainly don’t need them when a room is empty. Turn off the lights you don’t need during the day, and ask your cleaning crew to turn off all the lights when they leave at night.


• Kill the vampires - Roughly 40% of electricity expenditures are from "vampire" fixtures like computer peripherals, cell phone and iPod chargers, coffee makers, gaming systems, and other gadgets that continue to use power while turned off or in standby mode. "Smart strips" let you turn off the vampires while keeping power running to the items that must remain on, such as phones or backup servers.


• Raising the blinds on sunny windows in the winter, lowering them in the summer – This gives your heating and air conditioning system a break by using solar light and heat, or shutting it out. You can nudge your thermostat down or up by a few degrees, and save a few more kilowatts.


• Using the Energy Efficient settings on your major appliances (if possible). Many appliances manufactured within the last 10-20 years offer energy-saving settings that can save you kilowatts over the course of a year.


• Make sure your heating and cooling is going to the rooms where you need it - and not where you don't - By some estimates, 10 to 30% of an HVAC system's energy is lost through leaky ductwork. Even more is lost through vents into closets, basements, garages, etc., and vents blocked by furniture in rooms where the heating or cooling is needed.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of the actions you can take to conserve energy, reduce your bills, and ease your impact on the planet. To discover more tips in a green home or office makeover, or for help with finding recycling resources, contact me at phila@freshgreenimage.com or visit me at http://www.freshgreenimage.com/green-irene.

How Big Is Your Footprint - In the Atmosphere?

When you’re planning to green your home or business, one of the terms you’ll hear often is reducing your carbon footprint. What does this mean, and why is it important?

Your carbon footprint is one way of measuring your impact on the planet. It represents the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are emitted as a result of your lifestyle, business operations, and daily activities. It can include direct factors such as:

• the kind of fuel you use to heat your home


• the efficiency of your HVAC system


• the kind of fuel your car uses, and its efficiency


• the kind of lawnmower, leaf-blower, tiller, etc. you use – gas, electric, or battery-powered?


• and so forth

But your carbon footprint isn’t limited to the gases that are emitted by the machines and appliances you personally operate. Like karma, it also reflects your global impact through things you pay for, but do not do directly. Just to give four examples:

• How Is Your Electricity Generated? The vast majority –-98% percent -- of energy companies use a mix of nonrenewable power sources: coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear energy, and large hydropower. A few other companies, such as CleanCurrents provide energy generated through renewable sources.


• How Much Energy Do You Consume by Turning On the Faucet? Public water supply and treatment facilities use an average of 56 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year – enough to power 5 million homes for that same period. At that rate, running your faucet for just five minutes consumes enough energy to power a 60-watt light bulb for 14 hours – and that’s not even including the energy it would take to heat that water.


• What Happens to Your Trash after Pickup? On the average, each American generates roughly 4.72 pounds of trash per day, of which only about 1.5% is recycled. If the rest is hauled to a landfill, it adds to a toxic cocktail of greenhouse gases including methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, sulfur, mercury and occasionally even radioactive pollutants such as tritium.


• How Far Has Your Food Traveled? In most American supermarkets, we expect to see fresh produce throughout the year, regardless of the season where we live. But what’s the cost of this year-round harvest? You guessed it – the emissions of countless ships, planes and trains as our fruits and veggies are transported to us from around the world. To give you an idea of the impact you can have: just by eating local food once a week, you’ll be saving 2.5 tons of CO2. And of course you won’t just be fighting global warming…you’ll be gaining the whole Farmer’s Market or co-op experience, going to “market day” with your neighbors and local farmers every week.

These are just a few of the many factors that combine to make up your carbon footprint. To discover your own environmental impact, check out the EPA’s carbon calculator.

Once you know the size of your carbon footprint, you'll probably want to take action to reduce it. And you may wonder - are carbon offsets a solution?

Carbon offsets enable you to pay for carbon-neutralizing projects - such as planting trees, for example - to balance out the carbon emissions released through your everyday activities at home, work, traveling, etc. While this might sound like the lazy person's way to a clear green conscience, that's not the idea.

Remember the old saying, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?" That's the principle behind carbon offsets. They're designed to serve as the last step you take after you have eliminated as many sources of carbon emissions from your lifestyle as possible.

Once you've made as many changes as you can to reduce carbon emissions from your home and your workplace, once you've eliminated high-emission forms of travel such as flying and substituted greener solutions - then you can go ahead and use offsets to balance out the remainder.

To learn how you can reduce or eliminate sources of carbon emissions from your lifestyle, come and visit me at my eco-consulting site.

Greening in Grim Times

With the economy in upheaval, Congress visioning and re-visioning industry bailouts and abandoning clean-energy tax credits, the health care debate tug-of-warring this way and that, and the environment under continuing assault, it's sometimes tempting to question - how much good can living green really do?

The luxuries of enviro-heedless daily American living surround us on all sides...high-tech petro-based cosmetics...sweatshop-manufactured designer clothing...toxin-emitting furniture, carpets, cabinets... mountaintops being exploded into rubble to keep our lights on and our computers running.

Even if you're committed to a green lifestyle, the relentless din of this consumerist world view can get wearing. In the midst of a hectic day, does it really matter that much to the planet if you drive to the 7-11 to pick up a pack of Clorox wipes instead of cycling to the health food store for white vinegar to use with your reusable cloth towels?

But there's a deeper question here - it's not a matter of harshly enforcing green discipline. Somewhere over the last sixty years or so, our culture has lost the skills...and joy...and value...of living simply, lightly, in balance with the natural world.

I took my 86-year-old father to Baltimore's Fair Trade coffeehouse and housewares shop, BlueHouse, awhile back. He browsed through the reclaimed-wood furniture, clay-based paints, flip-flop floor mats, recycled-metal utensils, and bamboo salad bowls with wonder.

As we sat with our cups of coffee, he told me, "This reminds me of what we used to do in the Depression, making everything count, not letting anything go to waste. Thing was, then we were all doing it in any way we could, to survive...here it's big business."

I thought of the way that experience shaped his adult life - planting a garden and putting up vegetables in the summer, repairing instead of buying new, sharing tools and odd jobs with neighbors, differentiating sharply between "want" and "need."

And I've come back to his comment again and again as the economic and environmental situations get increasingly dicey.

For decades now, most Americans have not felt a need to look at the world in that way, the way of "waste not, want not." Haven't felt a need to rely on practical ingenuity to make or fix or grow or share what we and our neighbors have or need.

Thanks to a global economy, we've had the products of the world at our fingertips. We've known we can find a dozen brands of whatever we need off the shelf at the grocery or housewares or convenience stores, or at the mall. And if it breaks, popular wisdom says, "Throw it out and get a new one!"

Yes, gurus of green living and simplicity remind us of age-old, earth-friendly ways to live...but let's face it, living green has been a choice, a counter-culture choice, always with the awareness that most of the population was doing it the easy, heedless way. Much as we may believe that the survival of the planet depends on our responsible choices, much as we buy with care and with an eye to the future, our immediate personal and family survival has not depended on our buying green.

More than that: we've had the option of buying wonderful, upscale, green alternative products. Not to denigrate these in any way! They set standards for environmentally responsible manufacturing at home and abroad, they reduce environmental exploitation, carbon and pollutant emissions, they support Fair Trade crafters in Third World cultures, they do (to borrow EBay's phrase) a world of good.

And - that said - how many of them are designed for a boutique economy of high incomes and higher expectations? I am writing with caution here - many of my clients are just such entrepreneurs, offering just such products, banking on the affluence of their clients to drive those products to success. Passionately promoting their healthiness and durability to convince upscale non-green prospects to buy not just a product but a principle.

But while this has contributed to a greater green awareness in upscale circles, it's also contributed to a popular impression that "green" means "trendy alternative" means "expensive" and "optional." Things you purchase to demonstrate your care for the planet and concern for your and your family's optimum health, not necessarily out of immediate need but as preventative medicine - "because you can." In a market of endless options, they have become yet another option, another niche.

How many people within this niche, however, are greening for the same reason that drove my father's generation - survival? Not just their personal physical survival, but for that of the planet and for the coming generations? And how many would feel impoverished if the endless product options now available suddenly...weren't?

What we're missing is the deeper cultural message - the message my father's generation lived, one of saving and sharing and pulling together. Looking past the "alternative" aspect of green products to the deeper principles behind them. Building community spirit to pull everyone through the tough times.

This is the underlying meaning of greening. We talk about the triple bottom line of green business, valuing People, Planet and Profit...we practice it as part of our business model. And I believe that as global fortunes shift, it's time to take it a step deeper. "Green" is not a niche of products or services, it's a way of seeing the world.

This ripples out especially to less-privileged individuals and families - those who are using toxic mainstream products because they are cheap and easily available, not knowing that simple, old-fashioned, non-upscale, non-boutique green options exist. If cultural greening is ever to be accomplished, these are the people to reach - the ones who will tip the balance not necessarily for the market but for the larger goal: the planet.

It's time to green our lives and expectations the old-fashioned way, by joyfully embracing earlier generations' values and life skills of simplicity, sharing and community. Reclaiming the values of ingenuity and creative survival, connection and cohesiveness.

As Sheryl Crow sang, "It's not having what you want, It's wanting what you've got. "

It's time to redefine "Because we can" from a statement of entitlement to a statement of empowerment...and discover a whole new level of meaning for greening.




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