Probably one of the more unsustainable things that I do is own pets. From cat food to cat litter, our cats are almost as bad for the environment as a kid! So I try to ameliorate that effect when I can. One of the ways is to keep them indoors; free roaming domestic cats have a devastating effect on the songbird population. Another way is to avoid clay cat litter. The sodium bentonite (clay) isn’t a by-product of some other process; it’s strip mined specifically for the purpose of clumping when cats pee on it. What an incredible waste! Unfortunately, this is what most cat litter is made of.

Even Ollie likes it.

We tried a couple different kinds of “natural” cat litters and weren’t completely satisfied with any of them. Then I read this post on the Apartment Therapy blog. And they were right: World’s Best Cat Litter clumps but smells a little like a barn, while Nature’s Miracle smells like pine but doesn’t clump. Together, they’re perfect. (Maybe the companies should merge…) They’re both made of corn, which is a factory-farmed crop worrisome in its own right, but it’s definitely a step up from clay. And I think it’s the best option for us—at least until I teach my cats to use to use the toilet.

I’m embarrassed to say that when we opened the lid to our worm bin this week, dozens of fruit flies flew out.

The enemy

The culprit was probably a melon from my fruit salad last week. (The seeds from the cantaloupe are the only things still recognizable in the compost, except for those darn cabbage leaves.) Not only did they attract fruit flies, but they made the compost too moist. Note to self: a balanced diet includes fruit and vegetables—for worms as well as humans.

So after we buried our food scraps this week, we piled on tons of shredded newspaper. It’ll absorb the water and (hopefully) prevent the flies from getting down to the food. We also put a small bowl of vinegar on top of the lid. We’ll see if that does them in. Flies are notoriously hard to get out of worm bins.

In any case, I think we’ll be harvesting the compost next weekend. The worms are eating everything so quickly that we’re having a hard time keeping up with them, and their waste to bedding ratio is out of whack. I think we’ll transfer most of them to a fresh bin, piled high with newspaper and food.

We’ll leave a few worms behind to put the finishing touches on the compost, but we won’t feed them anymore. As long as we keep the whole thing far away from the new bin, that should starve out the flies. I hope. I’ll keep you posted.

We all already know that bottled water is bad. It’s expensive–more expensive per gallon than gas. It’s polluting–a waste of gas to transport all those heavy plastic bottles. And, it turns out, it’s not any better for you than tap water. While towns have to report the results of water quality tests annually, most bottled water manufacturers don’t even post that information on their web sites. The Government Accountability Office recently concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency does a better job regulating tap water than the Food and Drug Administration does bottled water.

Half full or half empty?

Okay, okay, that’s established. My big question: Should I filter my tap water? I had a Brita pitcher when I first moved to Boston. Then I moved to an apartment with a filter in the door of the fridge (terribly inefficient, by the way) and dumped the Brita. When we moved into our current apartment, we switched to straight tap water, and I felt kind of ridiculous for having wasted so much money on filters over the years.

But the New York Times recently published an article about how spikes in pesticide levels in tap water aren’t being accurately reported. And when I looked up water filters on Consumer Reports (my bible), they specifically used Boston as an example of tests showing lead levels of 45 times the legal limit. Since lead is usually picked up from the pipes leading to and inside your house, that won’t show up on the city’s annual report.

On the other hand, there are no children in our house and neither of us are planning on becoming pregant. Those are the two groups that are actually affected by such small levels of contaminants (like with mercury in fish). So we don’t really need to worry, right? And having a recurring expense for something we don’t actually need (and making it into a habit that’s hard to break) is just silly.

On the other other hand, it’s kind of freaky to think that I could be drinking heavy metals and E.coli. I might just test our tap water to see if a filter’s necessary. Consumer Reports listed a few options, including state-certified labs and an over-the-counter kit. What do you think?

Among all the environmental ideals I fall short of (and it’s a loooong list: eating dairy products, taking the bus when I could walk, watching TV, using a clothes dryer, flying, etc.), there’s one thing that stands out from the rest—takeout.

Mmm...tostada pizza.

Not even just takeout, but delivery. I know, I know, it’s horrible in so many ways: the extra packaging; the gas wasted to bring it to us; the non-local, non-organic ingredients…. Almost anything we make at home would be better. But we still do it at least once a week. Either I’m tutoring late, we haven’t gone shopping, or we don’t have the energy to figure out what to make with all the random stuff in our fridge.

I’m not a big cook (that’s Jason), and when it’s hot, it seems even harder than usual to get up the gumption. I think it takes more creativity to make cool meals than hot ones: you need more fresh food, there’s more chopping, and you don’t even want to heat the kitchen with food you’ve prepared ahead of time. 

This is at the top of our list of bad habits, whether the goal is limiting our environmental impact, saving money, or losing weight. We’ll periodically renew our commitment to cutting back on takeout (or cutting it out entirely), but always get lazy.

This week’s been especially bad, since we spent last weekend in Maine. We did a good job cooking while we were up there—by necessity—so that evens things out, right? Right? Anyway, I vow not to order takeout for at least the next week.

What’s your biggest environmental sin?

We were eating at Stone Hearth Pizza tonight, and I noticed a box on the menu that said their takeout containers were made of corn plastic rather than regular plastic or styrofoam. This started a debate about whether corn plastic was actually any better than regular plastic. Okay, maybe not as much a debate as Sharon telling me that I was just being contrarian. But the Ask Umbra column on Grist talked about this issue just last week, so it was at the top of my mind. Smithsonian magazine had a good article on the subject a few years ago, too.

I think corn plastic is just greenwashing, because, while it can technically be composted, only a tiny tiny percentage of it actually will be. Most of it will end up in landfills, where, without any oxygen, it won’t break down any more than other trash.

Not only that, but it won’t break down in my worm bin or in your backyard compost, either. It needs temperatures of 150 degrees Fahrenheit, which is only reached at large commercial composting facilities.

Here in Cambridge, we can take it to the Department of Public Works or Whole Foods for composting, but I doubt most towns have such options. So even most of the people who would compost it, can’t. It’s just misleading.

And while #7 plastics (the catchall “other” category that this falls into) are accepted by Cambridge for recycling, corn plastic in particular may not actually get recycled, because there’s not a large market for it. For that reason, most towns don’t even accept it in recycling bins.

Of course, we all agree that petroleum is not a good option, but neither is industrial corn farming. And at least regular plastic can reliably be recycled. So I think until municipal composting becomes commonplace, corn plastic just seems pointless.