Read 'n' Seed #2

This week I read Chapters 1-3 of Do One Green Thing; Saving the Earth Through Simple, Everyday Choices, pages 1-52.

The water bottle I
bought to replace my
use of disposable
water bottles.

Chapter one was titled "Drinking Water".  I have always known that disposable plastic water bottles weren't good for the environment, but I didn't really know how bad they were, or that the water in them isn't always better than your tap water.  This chapter gave a few fun facts about what would happen if every American stopped buying water in disposable bottles.  My favorite of the facts was, "We'd save the nonrenewable fossil fuels that are used in the plastic, which equals seventeen million barrels of oil annually - enough for fuel one million U.S. cars for a year.  Adding in the energy used for pumping, processing, transporting, and refrigerating bottled water, Americans would save fifty-four million barrels of oil, the same as running three million cars for a year." (p. 30).  After reading this chapter and hearing how much Dr. V hates disposable water bottles I was curious to hear more about their impact on the environment.  I found this "Use-and-Toss Plastic Bottle Facts" article and found it very interesting and helpful.  Since reading this chapter I have gone out and bought a reusable water bottle, I'm no longer contributing to significant amounts of waste created from disposable plastic bottles.

Chapter two was about produce.  It talked about buying locally and organic.  Something that I really like about this book is each chapter has a "Chose it or Lose it" section.  I found this chapter's "Chose it or Lose it" to be very helpful in guiding me towards what I should be trying to buy organic and what I can buy normally.  Some things the book says you should buy organic are apples, carrots, celery, and grapes.  These are the things I spend most of my produce money on, which sort of freaked me out, knowing I will probably need to start spending more money on produce.  The reasoning behind buying these things organic things is because the pesticides that are used to grow them can be bad for your health.

Chapter three was titled, "Fish".  I rarely eat fish, and never buy it, so I thought this chapter would be pretty useless to me, but they did have a "Chose it or Lose it" section that talked about which fish are better for your health, which I will base my choices off of when I go out to eat.  I was surprised to find that smaller fish are better for you.  This is because they, "eat low on the food chain, are shorter-lived, and thus collect fewer toxins in their fat than do big, long-lived predators such as swordfish" (p. 36).  At the end of the chapter the author provides us with a website where you can look up which locally caught fish are better for you to eat at that time.  This will be helpful for me because most of the time when I go to Red Lobster or something I tend to chose the locally caught fish.  that website is www.ewg.org/node/8151 (p.52).