Eye Opener: Photo Essay

Hey Everyone! For my photo eassay I decided to document how much waste a family can accumulate during just one holiday. It was sad to see how much gets thrown away, I had never really taken the time to notice. There could have been better choices made that would have been more environmentally friendly.  I obviously chose Thanksgiving and there were about 20 of us.

Here the first bag of trash that was being taken out at only about 11 am.

These are two aluminum pans being thrown away that were used to cook the dressing. This was a time that I thought reusable pans could have been just as easily used, and would have been much more environmentally friendly.

This is a stack of plates that were used for the appitizers. On multiple occasions I noticed people setting their first plate down, and without thinking grab another plate later. Accumulating even more unnecessary waste.

This is yet another stack of plates, but from dessert. We went through a lot of paper plates.

This is a picture of the garbage can at the end of the night. There had been two bags in it before, but as you can see it was overflowing by the end of the night

This was a fun project to do! Everyone was asking why I was taking pictures of the trash, so when I explained that I was documenting how much trash one family can go through for just one holiday it helped open other people's eyes to this problem. I hope that at Christmas we can make some better decisions.


MckLinky Blog Hop

Eye Opener: Junk on the Brain

Part 1
antiques: A collectable item. Collectable or desired because it may be rare, old, or has unique features. It may also be because of the item's condition.
antiquing: The act of shopping for antiques at garage sales, estate sales, resort towns, antique districts, or international auction houses

junk: waste or recyclable waste that can be used to build new things.
junking: to discard as usless or reuse parts.

flea market: Is a place where inexpensive or secondhand goods are sold. It may be indoors or out; seasonal or year round. They are held in every state in the U.S. and lots of places in Europe.

thirft shop: Is a place where second hand goods are sold and often donated by members of the public. Thirft shops are typically staffed with voluteers.

upcycling: turning used materials into new products, re-use an item that doesn't work item for a alternative purposes, prevent waste, reduce the need for fresh raw materials, lower energy usage and air and water pollution, and to lower green house gas emissions.

resale shop: A shop where secondhand items are being sold.


Part 2
1) The terms above relate to enivronmental health because they are all forms of recycling. Instead of just throwing old items away and allowing them to end up in a landfill the items may be reused by someone new. One man's trash is another man's treasure. :)

2) A local thrift shop in Duluth, MN is Savers. It's located at 1740 Mall Dr. Duluth, MN 55811.  Saver's e-mail address is customercare@savers.com.  And their phone number is (218) 722-1894.

3) I've been to savers before when I needed a costume. I've also gone antiquing with my parents a lot, we have a lot of antiques around out house.  I've also donated a lot of my clothes to GoodWill and to Plato's Closet.


Part 3
From the website Junkmarketstyle.com I found the project called 'Serving up a "light" snack - vintage junk-style!'. I think that this was a really cool idea. The contributer, Kathy Stantz takes antiques and turns them into serving trays. Such as an old, glass lamp fixture flipped upside down. They look really artsy and would be a great conversation starter.
I also found another idea called 'Trundling Along' by Georgia Terrell. In this project an old trundle bed was turned into a picture holder. It would look really interesting hung up on a large wall.

How to Create a "Living Green" Centerpiece by Sue Whitney was a really pretty idea! She just used the bottom of an old bird cage, and placed moss and other plants onto it. But you could use anything for your base. I really like this idea and kind of want to try it when I'm at my parents house.

Eye Opener: CSPI

Eating Green Calculator
My Eating Green Calculator Results are listed below. This asked me how many servings of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, cheese, milk and yogurt I eat each week. My answers were 0 servings for beef, pork,chicken. milk and yogurt. 5 servings a week for cheese. and  egg a week. According to this calulator it would take:
0.1 acres of grain or grass needed for animal feed.
4.3 pounds of fertilizer needed to grow the animal feed.
0 pounds of pesticides
693 pounds of manure would be created.

When I selected 'improve your diet and protect the environment' the only change I made was to eat 2 less servings of cheese a week. So I went from 5 servings to 3. The impact this made is as follows:
-Fat will be decreased by %4
-Saturated fat will be decreased by %10
-Cholesterol will be decreased by %14
-and my fiber will increase by %7
The impact of my possible changes on the environment are as follows:
-2.9 pounds of fertilizer. As compared to 4.3.
-423 pounds of manure. As compared to 693.
I'm not sure if I could honestly take the pledge to eat 2 less servings of cheese each week. I'd like to, but since I already don't eat meat I like being able to eat cheese on a normal basis. I should because I'm semi-lactose intolerant, but I do anyway. 5 servings a week may have been a stretch for me anyway. It varys a lot.

Score your Diet.
The 'Score your Diet' calulator asked how many servings a week I eat of certain foods. Such as vegetables, cheese, pork, and candy.
I scored the highest for vegetables, 66; Which was in the green. And the next highest for cheese, -9;which was red. I also scored well in fruits and whole grains which are both green. I scored -1 for both eggs and candy, which is red.  I scored the lowest for environmental health, which was -15. I could improve this by trying to each more organic vegetables, since I do eat so many. And also try and cut down on eating cheese.

Summary
First of all, I completely missed that Dr. V said choose ONE CSPI activity.... I did all three... My bad. But I deleted the first one because I didn't think I did very good on it, and kept the other two.
I thought the two food calculators were fun to take. I liked the 'score your diet' one better because gave me more food group options and gave information about how my actions affect the environments' health, animal welfare, and my own health. I was kind of surprised that only eating around 4 or 5 servings of cheese a week could have such an impact on the environment and drop my over all score so much. But it gives me motivation to try and cut back a little!

Ecological Footprint

I completed the "EarthDay foorprint Quiz" Quiz. I answered questions that pertained to my normaly habbits such as how much meat do I eat, how often do I ride the bus, and how much trash do you think you generate compared to the typical American. My findings were that it would take 3.9 planet Earths to provide enough resrources for me! It also takes 17.4 global acres of the Earths productive area which is 18.2 TONS of carbon dioxide. I was shocked by my results for this quiz. I knew I wasn't doing everything I could to live 'green', but i was surprised to learn that my habbits can make that big of an impact. I think everyone should take this quiz at some point just so they can become aware of how many resources we use and how much carbon dioxide just one person can produce. This makes me want to start taking the bus more often, and also when I'm not living in a rental house to be sure that I have energy efficient appliances in my home. Eating more locally grown produce could be something that I could start doing now to help improve my ecological footprint.

Introductory Post

Welcome to my Maggie's Environmental Lifestyle page! I'm a new community health major, and I'm not completely sure what I want to do with my major when I graduate. I have worked with children for a long time, and am interested in nutricion, so I could see doing some kind of combination of the two.


This is my first class that is environment related, and I'm already finding it really interesting. Blogging isn't coming too easily for me, but I'm working at it!

My blog will cover a variety of topics; listed below:

*Advocacy project
*Eye-openers

*Eco-Chic Lifestyle Change

*Read 'N' Seed

*Share and Voice



Each blog posted after this one, will be under one these topics.

My group members are listed below:

http://maggiesenvironmentallifestyle.blogspot.com/

http://jordannesjungle.blogspot.com/

http://karlyskaringhabitat.blogspot.com/

http://www.haileyshealthyenvironment.blogspot.com/

You can subscribe to my blog by clicking the subscibe gadget in my gadget column. If you'd like to follow my blog you can click "Follow this Blog" in the gadget section. If you'd like to see all the blogs I'm following and my complete porfile click on "See Complete Profile."

Blogged for the Welcome Linky Party hosted by http://ecochicwithamy.blogspot.com/

Thanks for checking out my blog!

Maggie@Maggie's Environmental Style