Author Archives: Ilaria3pl

An Eco-Do: Getting Your ’Do Done at a Green Salon

by Ilaria3pl Posted on April 4, 2018

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Treating yourself to a cut and color feels luxurious and, sometimes, essential. The confidence boost that comes with a new ’do is priceless, and the blissful head-massage-meets-shampoo-services is icing on the cake.

Salons are bursting with styling tools, hair clippings, dyes and various other beauty products that need recycling, reuse or proper disposal. Considering our personal eco-friendly behavior is one thing, but larger-scale businesses like salons deal with a green dilemma, too. Efficient recycling, waste management and green actions are a common concern in the industry.

The salon industry in North America generates more than 400,000 pounds of waste every day.

How long will your hair dryer live if you use it, say, every other day? In salons, electronics like these are used much more frequently. The amount of electronics, shampoos and other environmental pollutants salons churn through is staggering.

Until recently, most salons were unsure of what to do with their excess.

Salons Go Sustainable

Green Circle Salons was born in 2009. The innovative company is focused on creating sustainable salons in North America, primarily through a green certification for salons that meet their recycling and waste-reduction standards.

Their efforts have diverted nearly 3 million pounds of waste from landfills so far, and they’re still going strong. Green Circle Salons are committed to recycling and reusing electronics, paper and plastic products, color by-product, aerosol cans, foils, and hair clippings. Green Circle collects these items from certified salons on a weekly basis, recycling and disposing of materials appropriately.

The company also encourages salons to cut down on water use, reduce energy with LED lights, and invest in organic tea and coffee for clients. Certified salons often implement water-saving faucets and eco-friendly cleaning products, too.

Instead of rinsing hazardous chemicals down the drain, they are sent to chemical waste plants. Foil, plastic and paper products are dutifully recycled, and collected hair clippings are used to make ultra-absorbent brooms to clean up oil spills.

In green salons, those hair clippings go to good use. Photo: Adobe Stock

Where Can I Find a Certified Salon?

Though the company is based in Canada, Green Circle Salons has certified thousands of green salons across North America.

Green Circle certified salons are a win-win — both stylists and clients can feel comfortable knowing they are supporting a sustainable business.

Any salon in North America can join the movement. It’s as simple as giving them a quick call or filling out their short online form. Once you’ve undergone a staff orientation, Green Circle Salons will send you everything you need to take eco-friendly initiatives at your salons. Recycling bins, bin labels and promotional materials will arrive on your doorstep in no time.

Becoming Green Circle certified does wonders for salons. Green-minded clients (like Earth911 readers) come running when it’s time for their next service.

The company has an online directory of certified salons, so you can easily find a green stylist in your area.

Convert Your Favorite Salon

If you notice your community is lacking in green salons, you don’t have to give up haircuts and let your locks grow to your knees.

Green Circle Salons trains teams of ambassadors to help get the word out about their green certification. With the public’s growing interest in sustainability, a business lacking an environmental impact plan is hopeless. It’s important for behind-the-times salons to learn about the benefits of becoming Green Circle certified.

Becoming an ambassador is simple. Anyone is eligible to sign up for the program on the website, go through a training session, and begin backing the company’s mission. They’ll arm you with the tools needed to motivate your favorite salons to go green, build revenue and gain eco-minded clients.

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An Eco-Do: Getting Your ’Do Done at a Green Salon

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

by Ilaria3pl Posted on November 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Andrew Sullivan cogitates today on the seemingly endless outpouring of outrage over relatively small lapses in decent behavior:

I wonder also if our digital life hasn’t made all this far worse. When you sit in a room with a laptop and write about other people and their flaws, and you don’t have to look them in the eyes, you lose all incentive for manners.

You want to make a point. You may be full to the brim with righteous indignation or shock or anger. It is only human nature to flame at abstractions, just as the awkwardness of physical interaction is one of the few things constraining our rhetorical excess. When you combine this easy anonymity with the mass impulses of a Twitterstorm, and you can see why manners have evaporated and civil conversations turned into culture war.

I’m as guilty of this as many….

Why yes! Yes you are, Andrew.

On a more serious note, I actually disagree with his diagnosis of the problem, which has become so common as to be nearly conventional wisdom these days. Here’s why: I have not, personally, ever noticed that human beings tend to rein in their worst impulses when they’re face to face with other human beings. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Most often, they don’t. Arguments with real people end up with red faces and lots of shouting constantly. I just flatly don’t believe that the real problem with internet discourse is the fact that you’re not usually directly addressing the object of your scorn.1

So what is the problem? I think it’s mostly one of visibility. In the past, the kinds of lapses that provoke internet pile-ons mostly stayed local. There just wasn’t a mechanism for the wider world to find out about them, so most of us never even heard about them. It became a big deal within the confines of a town or a university campus or whatnot, but that was it.

Occasionally, these things broke out, and the wider world did find out about them. But even then, there was a limit to how the world could respond. You could organize a protest, but that’s a lot of work. You could go to a city council meeting and complain. You could write a letter to the editor. But given the limitations of technology, it was fairly rare for something to break out and become a true feeding frenzy.

Needless to say, that’s no longer the case. In fact, we have just the opposite problem: things can become feeding frenzies even if no one really wants them to be. That’s because they can go viral with no central organization at all. Each individual who tweets or blogs or Facebooks their outrage thinks of this as a purely personal response. Just a quick way to kill a few idle minutes. But put them all together, and you have tens of thousands of people simultaneously responding in a way that seems like a huge pile-on. And that in turn triggers the more mainstream media to cover these things as if they were genuinely big deals.

The funny thing is that in a lot of cases, they aren’t. If, say, 10,000 people are outraged over Shirtgate, that’s nothing. Seriously. Given the ubiquity of modern social media, 10,000 people getting mad about something is actually a sign that almost nobody cares.

The problem is that our lizard brains haven’t caught up to this. We still think that 10,000 outraged people is a lot, and 30 or 40 years ago it would have been. What’s more, it almost certainly would have represented a far greater number of people who actually cared. Today, though, it’s so easy to express outrage that 10,000 people is a pretty small number—and most likely represents nearly everyone who actually gives a damn.

We need to recalibrate our cultural baselines for the social media era. People can respond so quickly and easily to minor events that the resulting feeding frenzies can seem far more important than anyone ever intended them to be. A snarky/nasty tweet, after all, is the work of a few seconds. A few thousand of them represent a grand total of a few hours of work. The end result may seem like an unbelievable avalanche of contempt and derision to the target of the attack, but in real terms, it represents virtually nothing.

The culture wars are not nastier because people on the internet don’t have to face their adversaries. They’re nastier because even minor blowups seem huge. But that’s just Econ 101. When the cost of expressing outrage goes down, the amount of outrage expressed goes up. That doesn’t mean there’s more outrage. It just means outrage is a lot more visible than it used to be.

1I’ll concede that this is potentially a problem with a very specific subset of professional troll. Even there, however, I’d note that the real world has plenty of rough equivalents, from Code Pink to the Westboro Baptist Church lunatics.

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No, the Culture Wars Haven’t Heated Up. It Just Seems Like They Have.

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Antarctic moss a charming but chilling sign of warming

by Ilaria3pl Posted on August 30, 2013

Antarctic moss a charming but chilling sign of warming

By

Peter Convey, British Antarctic SurveyThe world’s southernmost moss bank began growing around 1860.

A fleecy clump of moss growing on the Antarctic Peninsula might not seem like much of a sight to behold, but it’s a sign of a climate in flux.

The patch of Polytrichum moss, sampled in 2008 by scientists at Alexander Island’s Lazarev Bay, either did not exist or was slumbering beneath ice when the peninsula was first spotted by Russian sailors in 1820.

But now it is flourishing on ice-free rock — the world’s southernmost such moss bank.

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world, with temperatures rising by one degree Fahrenheit every decade since 1950 — although that rate of warming has recently slowed. As the peninsula warms, and as its ice thaws and rainfall and snowfall becomes more common, soil organisms and simple plants are seizing on new growing opportunities.

The Lazarev Bay moss bank is being exposed to life-giving sunlight during the warmer months, when a blanket of winter snow melts away from its surface. It began growing 150 years ago, mushrooming at 1/20th of an inch during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to results of the scientists’ radiocarbon analysis, which were published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

“The oldest organic matter at the bottom of the core had a most-likely date of around 1860 AD,” lead researcher Jessica Royles of the British Antarctic Survey told Grist.

Starting in the mid-1950s, the bank really took off, growing at four times that rate until the 1970s, when the rate tapered off slightly, perhaps as moisture conditions changed. From the paper:

[Antarctic Peninsula] growth rates and microbial productivity have risen rapidly since the 1960s, consistent with temperature changes, although recently they may have stalled. The recent increase in terrestrial plant growth rates and soil microbial activity are unprecedented in the last 150 years and are consistent with climate change.

Future changes in terrestrial biota are likely to track projected temperature increases closely and will fundamentally change the ecology and appearance of the Antarctic Peninsula.

So get your cruise tickets for the Antarctic now — the landscape might soon start to look a lot less Antarctic-like.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Antarctic moss a charming but chilling sign of warming

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