Harvesting Shampoo

We had a few friends over for some board games on Thursday and the conversation somehow made a detour into the topic of "harvesting" bottles of shampoo when staying at hotels. While this definitely qualifies as a very Chinese thing to do, I also pointed out that this wasn't very eco-friendly either. These mini bottles of shampoo are almost more plastic than shampoo, and collecting them means you end up throwing out way more plastic. I argued that not only should we not be harvesting them, we shouldn't even be using them -- just bring some shampoo from home.

If you don't want to travel with your Costco sized bottles of Shampoo, the best alternative is to fill one of these mini bottles with shampoo from home and just carry that around instead.

The most unfortunate thing about the recent decision by airlines to charge for checked bags is the spate of news articles discussing how to pack light, with an emphasis on disposable items. Today's San Jose Mercury News' Travel section's front page had the following tips which made me groan:

• For overnight trips, use half-sandwich size baggies to pack squirts of soap, shampoo, etc. and toss them when done.
• Just bring the basics and a small allowance to buy inexpensive things at your destination. I assume if you couldn't bring it with you, you're not taking it home with you either, so that's more trash generated.

Kung-Fu Panda

...is awesome. Absolutely hilarious and 100% entertaining. If you haven't seen it yet, you've got to go watch it as soon as possible. 5/5.

Oh, and a couple notes:

• Shifu's name actually translates to "master", which I found endlessly amusing the first time I heard it...
• Oogway's name translates to tortoise, which I didn't realize until after the movie when C told me.

Green Change #2

Hmmm... I kind of skipped over May, didn't I? Well, this'll have to be a double header then. After noticing the strange recycling practices at Whole Foods, I sent them an email asking them what the deal was and actually got a response back. They do recycle, but apparently shoppers just do not understand the difference between compostable trash, recyclable trash and everything else. Since things just got mixed up in the different bins anyway, they've resorted to sorting the trash themselves in the back and will be getting rid of most of the different trash cans in favor of a generic one. So they still get points for recycling, but I think it's a shame that they're not taking the opportunity to educate their shoppers.

Which leads to this month's change: recycling. I've always tried to recycle as much as possible, but it turns out that recycling is a tricky business. Exactly what's recyclable and how things should be sorted varies from town to town, but it looks like Los Altos has some fairly simple rules. Things I didn't know until I started doing some research:

• Polystyrene (e.g. styrofoam packing blocks (but not styrofoam packing peanuts) and take-out containers) can be recycled!
• Clean aluminium foil and pie pans can be recycled!
• Oil filters can be recycled! This matters since I change my motorcycle's oil and oil filters myself.
• It's important not to contaminate what you want to recycle. For example, no oily pizza boxes and rinsing food and beverage containers. I sort of knew this before, but am usually too lazy to clean containers before throwing them out.

The flip side of recycling is to just generate less trash. The one thing I find myself throwing out on an almost daily basis is junk mail, and I've been trying to eliminate that as much as possible. One of the best services I've found to do this is Catalog Choice, which seems to be doing a pretty good job of slowing the flow of junk into my mailbox.

We've also switched to getting milk from the Strauss Family Creamery. Not only does it taste great, but they use glass bottles that can be returned to them for re-use.

Finally, C's doing her bit as well, as she's started composting a few weeks ago, and seems to be having quite a bit of fun doing it too.

So the goal here is to reduce the amount of garbage I produce, and recycle as much as possible.

Jeff On Tour

Got an IM from Jeff today letting me know that his band Thief Thief is going on tour and will be in Oakland on July 29. Woot!