Author Archives: ConcepcMacarthu

16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

by ConcepcMacarthu Posted on December 3, 2016

Making your bathroom more water- and energy-efficient might not seem sexy, but it can make a big difference in your home’s utilitybills and environmental impact. These are somebig and small ways to make your bathroom more eco-friendly.

When we’re talking about making any room more eco-friendly, there are really two things going on:

  1. The things in the room.
  2. Your habits in the room.

The list below looks atboth ways to improve efficiency in the bathroom and good habits you can adopt to conserve water and energy when you’re bathing or using thetoilet. Some are quick and easy fixes while othersrequire a time or cash investment.Have a look through the list and see which options are the best fit for your home and budget!

16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

1.Stop theleaks. Running toilets and leaky faucets are more than just an annoyance. In fact, when you add up all of the little water wasters like these across the U.S., it adds up to over 1 trillion gallons of water per year. If you have a leak or suspect one, get a plumber in as soon as you can to repair it or take a stab at repairing it yourself.

Related: 20 Ways to Conserve Water in Your Home

2. Go low flow. This is an affordable way to make your bathroom more eco-friendly that almost anyone can do. Installing a low flow faucet on the bathroom sink or your showerhead is incredibly easy. Really, it is. I’ve done it, and if I can do it,I’m betting that you can, too.

3. Go dual flush.If you’ve got the budget,this is a big water saver. Dual flush toilets use around half the water to flush liquid waste compared to standard toilets. If getting a new toilet is not in your price range, you can buy kits like this one to convert a regular toilet to dual flush.

4. Go old school. If you want a really low-tech solution to reduce the water your toilet uses, put a small plastic bottlefull of water into the tank, so it won’t fill withas much water. Back in the 90s, some people put bricks into their tanks to displace some of the water. Do not do this! A brick erodes over time and will mess up your toilet.

5.Skip abath.Unless you take very long showers (16 minutes or more), a bath uses far more water to get you clean than a shower.Take showers instead of baths to rack up the water savings! This will also save energy, since you bathe in hot water. Reducing hot water usage is a double whammy, saving you water and energy.

6. Skip a shower.Showers use less water than baths, but afive minute shower still uses about 12.5 gallons of water. Sure, if youwent for a run or worked in the garden, you probably need a shower. But if you just hung out watching TV or even worked in an office all day, do you really need a daily shower? Even skipping one shower a week makes a difference!

7. Get an efficient water heater. Whether you’re taking showers or baths,you’re taxing your home’s hot water heater. Heating water accounts forabout 20 percent of your home’s energy costs, so getting a better heateris a great way to make your bathroom (and kitchen and laundry room) more eco-friendly. Consumer Reports has a great guide to the best water heaters. If you can swing it, it looks like a tankless is the best bet from an energy-conservation perspective. Tank water heaters store hot water, meaning they’re constantly running to keep the water hot. A tankless heater only turns on when you turn on the hot water tap.

8. Turn down the water heater. It only takes a couple of hours to reduce the temperature on your water heater, and this fix is free! You don’t need it at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Turn it down to 120 to save money and energy in the bathroom. The video above shows you how to adjust the temperature on your home’s water heater.

9. Try the shower bucket. Whether you have a tank or tankless water heater, it takes a few minutes for your shower to get hot. Rather than let this water go down the drain, you can collect it in a bucket and use it to water house plants. You can also use the shower bucket when you’re dripping faucets during a winter freeze. Drip the tub faucet instead of a sink, and stick that bucket underneath.

10. Ditch the PVC shower curtain liner. Vinyl shower curtain liners are no good for the planet or for your home’sair quality. PVC liners offgas harmful volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that are bad news for indoor air quality and your health. Unfortunately, PVC shower curtains are not recyclable. The best thing that you can do is toss the old one and replace it with a non-PVC alternative. Companies like Ty even make non-toxic shower curtain liners that you can recycle.

12. Turn off the tap. When you’re brushing your teeth or washing your hands, you don’t need water running while you scrub. A sink faucet uses 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Turn it off until you really need that water to rinse.

13. Stop with the anti-bacterial soap. Anti-bacterial soap is not necessary, and when it rinses down the drain it is an environmental nightmare. It’s no more effective than regular ol’ soap, and there’s even evidence that it weakens heart and muscle function. No, thank you!

Related: 6 Reasons to Stop Using Antibacterial Soap

14. Choose LEDs. Just like anywhere else in the house, efficient light bulbs add up to big energy savings over time. LED bulbs are a bit of an investment up front, but they last up to50 times longer than incandescents. And unlike CFL bulbs, they don’t contain mercury.

15. Get recycled toilet paper. Do we really need to cut down new trees to wipe our bottoms? No, we don’t. While you’re at it, try to use less toilet paper in general.It still takes energy and water to create a roll of recycled TP.

16. Chooseorganic towels. Next time you have to replace your bath towels, choose organic cotton. Conventional cotton is one of the most water-intensive and polluting crops on the planet. Don’t go out and replace your perfectly good old towels with organic ones, though. The lowest-impact choice you can make is to buy nothing.But when your old towels are starting to fall apart, go organic.

Do you have any tips or tricks you use to save water or energy in the bathroom? Tell us in the comments!

Related:
20 Ways to Conserve Water in Your Home
6 Reasons to Stop Using Antibacterial Soap
14 Tips for Using Less Heat this Season

Image Credits: All images via Thinkstock.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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16 Ways to Make Your Bathroom More Eco-Friendly

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These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

by ConcepcMacarthu Posted on November 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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Like labor unions everywhere, the local Plumbers & Pipefitters union in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley—a historically Democratic bastion due to the influence of labor—endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in September 2015 and urged its members to vote for her. But unlike in years past, when Roland “Butch” Taylor briefed about 200 members on the union’s support of Clinton and the prospective benefits of a Clinton presidency in May, the meeting didn’t go well. “I got a lot of boos,” he recalls. “I got a lot of chatter back. And out of the group, only one person came up and asked me for a T-shirt.”

“Right then and there, I knew something was wrong,” says Taylor, who retired a few months later. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe it will change as the campaign moves forward.'”

As the results on election night show, it didn’t change. Clinton fell well short of polls and expectations in the Rust Belt, losing two key swing states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, and two that were thought to be safe bets, Michigan and Wisconsin. Working-class white voters, including many union members, banded together into a pro-Donald Trump force that the strategists in Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters didn’t see coming until it was too late.

But local Democrats did. And they tried to warn the Clinton campaign.

In May, after thousands of Democrats had switched parties to vote for Trump in the primary, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras circulated a memo cautioning that Trump was making headway in his Rust Belt region and urging the Clinton campaign to take the threat seriously. The memo focused largely on the issue of trade, arguing that because Democratic politicians in Ohio regularly denounce the North American Free Trade Agreement and free trade generally, Trump’s anti-trade message was familiar and its appeal powerful. If the Clinton team didn’t find a way to counter it, Betras warned, she would lose a lot of votes she was counting on.

Betras sent the memo to Aaron Pickrell, an adviser to Clinton’s Ohio campaign team; David Pepper, the chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party; Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat who represents northeast Ohio; and union leaders in the region.

To counter Trump’s populist appeal, Betras urged Clinton to go vigorously after blue-collar workers by promising to bring back jobs. The key, Betras argued, was to have this message delivered not by politicians but by local blue-collar families in radio and television ads across the region. “The messages can’t be about job retraining,” he wrote. “These folks have heard it a million times and, frankly, they think it’s complete and total bullshit.” Instead, he argued, the ads should “focus on the reinvigoration of American manufacturing, and I don’t mean real high-tech stuff because they’ve heard that a million times before and they aren’t buying it.”

Betras wrote:

Talk about policies that will incentivize companies to repatriate manufacturing jobs. Talk about infrastructure—digging ditches, paving roads, building buildings and producing the materials needed to do it all. The workers we’re talking about don’t want to run computers, they want to run back hoes, dig ditches, sling concrete block. They’re not embarrassed about the fact that they get their hands dirty doing backbreaking work. They love it and they want to be respected and honored for it. And they’ll react positively if they believe HRC will give them and their kids the opportunity to break their backs for another ten or twenty or thirty years. Somewhere along the line we forgot that not everyone wants to be white collar, we stopped recognizing the intrinsic value of hard work.

Clinton did revoke her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal, supported unions and higher wages, and talked about an economy that would work for all people. While Trump spoke in broad strokes, her website boasted detailed economic plans, including one to bring back manufacturing. But it was clear from Bernie Sanders’ primary victories in Wisconsin and Michigan that she was lagging with the white working class. Like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney four years ago, she was the candidate who made millions by giving speeches to Wall Street banks. (It certainly didn’t help that when pieces of those speech transcripts were released in the WikiLeaks hacks, the sentence that stood out most was: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” Trump used that line at his campaign rallies to claim, falsely, that Clinton was going to open the borders completely.)

“Somewhere in all of this, we forgot that we’re the party of the working class,” says Betras, trying to explain Clinton’s loss. He believes the campaign did try to reach out to the blue-collar families of the Rust Belt, but that the attempts never reached the pitch and fervor they needed. “I did like her message of ‘Stronger Together,’ but that doesn’t get anyone a job, does it?”

The Ohio Democratic Party shared Betras’ memo with Clinton’s Ohio campaign team, according to state party spokeswoman Kirstin Alvanitakis. In an email to Mother Jones, Alvanitakis wrote that “Chairman Betras’s memo was a helpful reminder that Democrats should not neglect working-class voters and the Clinton campaign should acknowledge the very real struggles working families are facing in Ohio.”

She added, “The Ohio Democratic Party was the first state party in the nation to pass a resolution against fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and our leaders—including Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Tim Ryan, Rep. Marcy Kaptur and more—acutely understand the economic pressure facing working-class families because of terrible trade deals and big banks and corporate special interests run amok. The fact is that the typical Ohio household had a higher income three decades ago than it has had in the past few years.”

Betras believes strongly that economic populism was to thank for Trump’s Rust Belt victories, saying, “It was people who want a job and want to be able to work and want a job, and they would accept an imperfect messenger because at least he was saying that.” But of course there was more to Trump’s message. Some African American residents of Youngstown, the largest city in Mahoning County, have long believed that Trump’s appeal in the region had more to do with racial resentment than with economic populism—that Trump’s racially charged rhetoric united white voters against others who they believed were taking their jobs, their culture, and their country. (On Tuesday night, Clinton won Mahoning County by a hair thanks to backing in minority-majority Youngstown but lost the mostly white surrounding counties of the Mahoning Valley.) As a local African American labor organizer told Mother Jones this summer, “This whole racist rhetoric plays well with some people here.”

Like Betras, Taylor doesn’t believe his peers and neighbors who supported Trump are racist. But he understands how Trump’s talk about immigration appealed to people in the Rust Belt. A few years ago, his union was working on a billion-dollar natural gas processing plant, and the workers noticed that the bulk of the work was being done by Spanish-speaking laborers who arrived each morning on buses. “It brought a lot of resentment to the area because they’d never seen it before,” Taylor says. “People see that and then they go tell everybody else, and social media, the way it is, it just runs wild.” He believes Trump benefited when the community saw immigrants “taking jobs that Americans think they should be doing.”

When went to Youngstown in June and met Taylor, jovial and smartly dressed in a suit, he believed his peers would see through Trump’s demagoguery on trade and manufacturing and reject him. “We also are citizens of this country concerned about how he’ll react, whether it’s a nuclear war, God forbid, to racist comments, to deporting immigrants,” he said. “These are core beliefs that as citizens of this country we don’t stand for.”

In the aftermath of the election, even as Taylor looks backs and sees the writing on the wall, he sounds shaken by what the country—and specifically white-working class voters in the Rust Belt—allowed to happen. He acknowledges that the Clintons were “wrapped so close to NAFTA” (which Bill Clinton approved as president) and that Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees from big banks looked bad. “I see where people would have resentment,” he says.

But then, sounding close to tears, he adds, “She’s the most qualified person ever to run for the position, and I agree, she would have done a great job if given the opportunity. But she did not—she had the opportunity to win. She did not win.”

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These Rust Belt Democrats Saw the Trump Wave Coming

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Friday Hummingbird Blogging – 13 March 2015

by ConcepcMacarthu Posted on March 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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My physical collapse this week prevented me from taking any new cat pictures, and today I have full day of workups in preparation for stage 2 of chemo. However, I did snap a new picture of our hummingbird babies yesterday. They seem to be growing nicely.

In the meantime, if you need a cat fix, my sister recommends this Daily Mail article about a human-cat translation device. Spoiler alert: it didn’t go well.

Link:

Friday Hummingbird Blogging – 13 March 2015

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